Victory Point - Ed Darack [101]
“We’ll tell you when we get there. Now keep movin’, and keep lovin’ life,” was the inevitable answer from either Crisp or Konnie. Konnie saw Crisp as the ideal hard-ass, unfaltering in his projection of rigidity and toughness, and Crisp fondly regarded Konnie, whose cool, cigarette-smoking manner and calm drawl reminded him of John Wayne, as a “crazy-ass motherfucker.” Grissom, who on more than one occasion pulled both Konnie and Crisp aside to discuss what the captain felt to be their overextending of Fox-3’s grunts, ultimately viewed the duo as uncannily in phase with his own outlook on leadership through fire.
“I really don’t think you can go in with just a single platoon reinforced, Grissom,” Donnellan told Kelly during the latter part of the Whalers planning process. Based on the after-action report of Jesse Chizmadia’s brief mission into the Chowkay, Grissom surmised that the terrain would likely pose the toughest challenges to the grunts of Fox-3 and that the threat of enemy contact in the local villages seemed small. “You really should strongly consider taking two platoons,” Donnellan insisted, knowing that while Shah would most likely retreat to Chichal for a fight, as that was the village in which he had the strongest ties, he and his men could lash out anywhere in the four valleys surrounding Sawtalo Sar. Grissom agreed, ultimately planning to take a second platoon—Fox-1—and attach a full 81 mm mortar section (four 81 mm mortar tubes and full crew) and a sniper team, in addition to forty-five Afghan National Army soldiers.
Konnie, looking to learn as much as possible about this part of the Hindu Kush that he and his Marines had never before ventured into, sought the most recent after-action reports from operations in the Sawtalo Sar area both to glean general insight into the region and to learn Shah’s tactics. The report he thought to be most relevant, of course, had been that of the Navy SEAL Marcus Luttrell. Konnie studied the two-and-a-half-page after-action and attempted to visualize the team’s final moments. Shortly after Luttrell’s team had been soft-compromised by a couple of local goat herders, Shah and his men had opened up on them. The SEALs moved into the gulch below them, attempting to establish comms with friendly forces. But Shah’s group, which Luttrell estimated to number between twenty and thirty, killed all but the corpsman, then landed an RPG round next to Luttrell, knocking him behind a rock. Attending to his own extensive wounds after regaining consciousness, Luttrell evaded the ACM fighters by hiding deep in the recesses of the gulch, even submerging himself at one point in a pool of water as Shah and his men passed just feet by him. Konnie, like others in the battalion, also studied the footage from the two Shah videos, noting the extensive amount of gear now in the hands of the extremist and his group. While most of the stolen gear showed up on the video, Lieutenant Konstant, after reviewing the recon team’s equipment manifest, wondered what had happened to the sniper rifle. Just like the night-vision equipment, the M4s, the spotting scopes, the laser rangefinders, and the grenade launchers, he had to assume that Shah and his men had in their possession, and would possibly use, the powerful, long-range sniper rifle against the Marines of ⅔ in any engagement during Whalers.
But just as Shah had “adopted” the SEALs’ equipment, the Marines would adapt their operational tactics and gear roster to determine if Shah and his men had American forces in the sights of any of those M4s, grenade launchers, or even the sniper rifle as well as their own weaponry. “You need the ICOMs. That is how they communicate,” a confidant known as “Cousin-O” informed Rob Scott during the planning of Whalers. “If the terps can listen to the conversations of Shah and his men, you’ll know exactly what is about