Victory Point - Ed Darack [107]
“Commander Konstant!” Jimmy the translator approached Konnie with a shy local villager in tow. “The man is confused about you and the Marines. He thinks that you may be the Russians.”
“The Russians?” Konnie responded, taken aback for a moment. Then the lieutenant realized just how deep into the valley that Fox-3 had penetrated, so deep that they’d run into a villager who probably hadn’t seen an outsider since the Soviet occupation, decades earlier. “Jimmy”—Konstant turned toward the villager—“tell him that in fact we are the Russians—and that it is 1987, and we’re about to defeat the Americans in the Cold War.” Jimmy translated as ordered, then the villager stared blankly at Jimmy and Konnie, and after a brief moment of silence, the Marines threw on their packs and continued higher. “Come on, comrades,” Konnie quipped, “onward for Mother Russia.”
By midafternoon, the grunts had put approximately four kilometers—and thousands of feet of elevation—to their rear. While the high sun drove the air temperature into the 120s at ground level, the men found themselves surrounded not only by walls of shattered rock and house-size boulders, but by lush green; with altitude came dense tracts of ferns and large cedars. As they entered the hottest part of the August day, however, they had to fight not just to keep moving, but to keep from collapsing. Crisp, himself struggling in the dangerously torrid conditions, kept a hawk’s eye on every one of the Marines in the platoon. Drenched in sweat from the inside out, dehydrated, burning with pain where their pack straps dug into their shoulders, their heads throbbing inside the ovenlike Kevlar helmets, their eyes stinging with sweat pouring off their foreheads, they’d reached their limits.
“Okay, Marines. We’re done,” Konnie proclaimed, himself feeling shredded by the toughest feat of endurance he’d ever undertaken—and fighting not to show it. Just as the Marines had reached what he and Grissom felt to be the outer edge of combat effectiveness, the lieutenant spied a perch on which they could put down—at least for a few hours, maybe all night. “We’re staying here until further notice,” he stated. “Here” was a point on a hillside about a half kilometer west of the Amrey Creek bed, a few hundred feet shy of eight thousand feet in elevation. “We just went nearly a mile—” The Fox-3 Marines shot Konnie a look; to them, “nearly a mile” had felt like fifty. “—a mile up. Pretty much five thousand feet vertical in the last eighteen hours. Good job, Marines,” the lieutenant finished in his typical, understated tone.
The patrol base, exactly two kilometers to the southwest of Cheshane Tupay’s summit, while just shy of Phase Line White, stood in as good a position as the platoon could hope to have, despite being surrounded by high ground from which Shah and his men could attack, Konnie had chosen a location that stood back from the high terrain as much as possible. Additionally, the patrol base lay at the eastern base of a small hill, to which the lieutenant sent the snipers and half of First Squad, to provide overwatch of the encampment and to keep the location secured, and it was an ideal helicopter landing zone, should the grunts need a medevac. Konnie, relying on tried-and-true tactics he learned at the Basic School and at Infantry Officers’ Course, set a perimeter defense around the patrol base, established a casualty collection point behind some large boulders, then set himself at the east end of the camp facing Cheshane Tupay, what he felt to be the most probable location from which Shah would launch an ambush.
“Nobody does anything but keep an eye out for the enemy,” Konnie instructed. “Nobody takes their eyes off the surrounding terrain. Nobody sleeps, nobody eats,” he finished, with a glaring Crisp at his side. Grissom and Pigeon established a command