Victory Point - Ed Darack [104]
The night before their departure, on the eleventh, after arriving at Jalalabad Airfield from their forward operating base at Mehtar Lam by convoy, Konnie and Grissom discussed the upcoming op, a Marlboro dangling from the mouth of each during the conversation. “In a way, sir, I want there to be continuous contact with the enemy. That’ll keep all of us on our toes—no one will ever get complacent,” Konnie said. “Them constantly trying to kill us in the end will keep us from getting killed.”
“Be careful what you wish for, there, Lieutenant,” the stocky captain began with a laugh. “Don’t get me wrong. I see what you mean. Just watch what you wish for.” The two hadn’t spent much time together before that evening’s cigarette break. To that point, Konnie had regarded Grissom primarily as the boss who rode his ass for running the Fox-3 Marines too hard; Grissom saw Konnie not so much as overly enthused or zealous, but just ultradriven, albeit in a very controlled manner, someone who might need to be reined in from time to time.
In the big picture, Grissom just wanted to ensure that the young lieutenant and the acerbic Crisp operated aggressively, yet in a balanced way, to ensure combat-readiness. He wanted to storm onto Objective-4 as quickly as possible, but knew that he’d be walking a delicate line. “Based on Westerfield’s work—he’s really gotten into the mind of this Shah guy, he knows the rat lines, the hideouts, the tactics, pretty much everything relevant—we know that when Shah sees Marines in the Korangal and Shuryek, and then in the Narang, he’ll head down the Chowkay. And once he sees us, he’ll make a run back into the Korangal. It’s unlikely that he’ll engage us, not when he can hightail it back to more familiar ground in the Korangal,” Grissom explained to Konnie. “I just hope that he doesn’t get a jump on us moving into the Chowkay and escape. That’s why I want to really move—move fast. I’m really gonna tap you and Crisp to keep things together up there.” Grissom again pondered the balance of speed versus efficacy for Fox-3. The heat, even in the middle of the night, would remain in the nineties, the terrain would present backbreaking obstacles, and a host of other variables—⅔’s higher command, supplies, weather, not to mention Shah and his army—would undoubtedly present confounding hurdles as well. The only solution, in the minds of both Grissom and Konnie, was to embrace the struggle ahead, to love the challenge of leadership under adversity. And having familiarized themselves with the land, the conditions, and most importantly, Shah and his army through Westerfield’s briefs and Red Wings’ after-action reports, Grissom and Konnie knew that adversity could reach extreme levels.
At 7:00 P.M. on the twelfth, as the last of the sun’s glowing orange rays split into the sky above the peaks to the west of Jalalabad and the temperature clung to low triple digits, the Fox Marines gathered for a brief on their upcoming mission. With platoons of Echo and Golf already deeply entrenched in the valleys surrounding Sawtalo Sar, Kelly Grissom disclosed part of the what, but not specifically the where or the how long of the upcoming op. “We’re going to start