Victory Point - Ed Darack [100]
Although tasked with undertaking one of the key roles in Whalers—that of driving deep into the Chowkay as the final piece of the op’s master plan—Marines of Fox Company hadn’t yet operated in the Sawtalo Sar region. Upon arriving at their forward operating base at Laghman province’s Mehtar Lam, the Fox Marines immediately embarked on missions targeting an extremist operating in the area, a man who called himself Pashtun. Pashtun had been responsible for killing two of 3/3’s Marines in May of 2005, and had proved an elusive enemy. Led by the stalwart Captain Kelly Grissom, who first served as an enlisted combat engineer before graduating magna cum laude from North Carolina State and commissioning as a second lieutenant as an infantry officer, individual platoons of Fox embarked on grueling multiday operations that brought them deep into the Hindu Kush, and drove Marines to their physical breaking points.
Not just surviving the gravity-fighting ordeals, but growing increasingly stronger, the grunts of Fox Company quickly acclimatized to their new environment. Rotating the company’s three platoons in a regular pattern—an outside-the-wire mission tracking Pashtun, then a rest cycle, then a stint at base security before embarking on another foray into the heights—Grissom drove his Marines to hone their mountain-fighting skills and prepare their lungs and legs for the high altitude and steep terrain. By August, the grunts of Fox were ready for the combination of heat, steep earth, and seemingly endless days of hauling their 80- to 110-pound combat loads in chafing packs encased in suffocating body armor in the Chowkay.
Faced with determining just what size force he should send into Whalers, Grissom looked to base a maneuver element around a single platoon, reinforcing them with 81 mm mortars. And the platoon Grissom chose for the critical role in Whalers was Fox-3. Commanded by twenty-three-year-old Second Lieutenant J. J. “Konnie” Konstant, Fox-3 had seen its share of foot-pounding, back-galling movements into the cruel Hindu Kush. During one such operation, the platoon had actually pushed into Nuristan, through the Alingar Valley, where they took mortar fire from a series of caves. Charging ahead, sensing that Pashtun must be close because of the intensity of the attack, Konnie radioed Grissom, pleading for clearance to assault the cave complex. But Fox-3 had pushed outside of ⅔’s area of operation; and their patrol fell on 28 June—when all available air assets had been put on standby for the rescue of the SEALs, so Fox-3 returned to base. A high school basketball star from the south side of Chicago who attended St. Ambrose University as a business and finance major on an athletic scholarship, Konnie seemed to have his entire life planned in his very early twenties. Then, like so many in the current crop of young Marines, he woke on the morning of September 11, 2001, to the infamous al-Qaeda attacks, attacks planned in the very mountainous part of the globe through which he would lead troops in 2005. He shelved his plans to become a businessman and aimed for USMC infantry.
Konnie, along with Fox-3’s fear-inspiring thirty-two-year-old platoon sergeant, Lee Crisp III, a staff sergeant from Laurel, Mississippi, aggressively challenged every one of