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By Root 1456 0

glowed eerily under the wan light, the rock faces so coarse that even the moon’s muted light cast harsh shadows off bare slabs, boulders, and cobbles. They couldn’t be certain if they walked on the trail itself, or if their route simply meandered near the pathway—and they certainly wouldn’t use lights, of any kind, to help them stay on track. Konnie, traveling with his platoon’s First Squad at the lead end of the movement, at first used a small compass and a GPS unit for guidance, but then resorted to raw tactile navigation, relying on the soles of his boots and the strain in his legs against gravity to “feel” his way into the heights of the Chowkay. As Grissom had said in his talk just a few hours prior, “Just keep walking—up.” Guided by the deep recess of the valley itself, the grunts closed on their destination, by doing just that.

The glow of dawn’s approach revealed the landscape the Marines had known only as tightly packed contour lines on their maps as some of the steepest, most daunting topography any of them had ever witnessed. Never stopping for more than five minutes at a time, the grunts inhaled their water throughout the grueling nighttime haul, their legs burning under the struggle to inch ever higher over smooth boulders, around narrow ledges, over tree stumps, and sometimes along terraced hillsides. By sunup, just a few hours into the mission, many had killed half their three-day supply. As soon as Crisp’s eyes detected the light of dawn, his skin felt the first inrush of the heat he knew would soon wallop the grunts like a tsunami. By the time the sun rose above Cheshane Tupay to their northeast—a mountain so steep that many of the grunts couldn’t see its summit because their helmets bunched into the tops of their backpacks as they tried to look up—the heat had topped 110 degrees.

“Fucking donkeys!” Lieutenant Stuart Geise, Fox-1’s commander, blared to one of the lance corporals in his platoon midmorning on the thirteenth from his disembarking point near Amrey, when a call came over the radio from Grissom on the status of their movement.

“You guys movin’ yet?” Grissom asked, staring at ever-steepening terrain above him.

“Fuckin’ donkeys!” Geise roared aloud, then jumped on the radio in response to Grissom’s request. “We’re moving, but it’s the damn donkeys.” He paused. “They’re . . . delaying us.” They’re fuckin’ donkeys! he screamed in his head.

“All right already. You need to push hard, Geise,” Grissom barked, peeved at the delay.

“Those donkeys, you got ’em loaded up, right? They moving with you guys?”

“No, sir!” The fuckin’ donkeys are fuckin’ fuckin’ each other, the exasperated lieutenant bellowed in his head, not able to state the case over the radio—then explained it in more sanitized terms.

“What? Each other?” the bewildered captain asked.

“Yeah. They’re mounting up on one another. And some committed suicide—they just jumped off the cliffs! It’s a circus. None of us can control these—” Little bastards, he thought. Fuckin’ jumpin’ off cliffs! Loaded with our chow and water. Runnin’ around! “—donkeys!” Geise responded.

But Ben Middendorf already had the solution; he’d ordered his Marines to unload the supplies off the backs of the donkeys, then divvy up the cargo among the grunts, “spread-loading” the gear. With their four-legged logistical means no longer an option, Ben got on the line with battalion’s assistant logistics officer, Lieutenant Hal Everheart, and let him know that the element would need resupply by CDS drop—and due to the heat, they might start needing those drops soon. “Get all the gear and supplies off the donkeys and spread load everything. Your packs are gonna weigh a ton, but we can’t have you delayed any longer. Just get moving!” Middendorf ordered his Marines.

“Damn, Lieutenant, the hell with those bad guys, it’s this valley and this heat that’s gonna do us all in,” Crisp said to Konnie during a noon rest outside a tiny village under the looming Cheshane Ghar ridgeline. “Ain’t neva’ been so hot in my life!”

“It’s just gonna keep getting more fun. I can’t wait for