Victory Point - Ed Darack [108]
As Fox Company battled the elements and the terrain to reach their position, the platoons of Echo in the Korangal and the Shuryek pushed southward, and Golf moved up the Narang. Donnellan and the Jump CP moved along the north ridge of Sawtalo Sar, intending to link up with Second and Third platoons in the Korangal Valley, and meet with locals and leaders in a number of the valley’s villages. Everything had been timed and choreographed perfectly so that Shah and his small army would fall right into ⅔’s hands—but just where would the showdown happen? That, nobody knew. ICOM chatter, intercepted by Golf Company’s interpreters in the Narang, indicated that some of the extremist’s force was on the run out of the Korangal and had tried to move into the Narang—until they spied the grunts, and turned around. Blocked in the Shuryek as well, Shah’s force had to move toward the Chowkay, but coalesced in strength as they did so. Intel revealed that Shah had elements of his force located at different villages throughout the upper Korangal, and that once he was on the run, he was merging these elements into a force of between sixty and eighty fighters, all moving toward the grunts of Fox Company.
Stymied by the intractable donkeys, but determined to position his mortars to ensure that Fox-3 was safely within the weapons’ umbrella of indirect fire, Middendorf led his mortar team, along with Fox-1 and the Afghan soldiers, into the upper Chowkay during the very worst of the day’s heat. Each Marine carried at least one mortar round, twenty bottles of water, six MREs, and his own weapons and ammunition; without the donkeys, they also carried the four 81 mm mortar tubes, each weighing a total of over 93 pounds (able to be broken into three components, the gun tube weighs 35 pounds, the mount 27 pounds, the base plate 29 pounds, and the sighting unit weighs 3 pounds). Thus many grunts carried over 130 pounds of gear—on a movement with temperatures in the deep, bare-rock valley of over 120 degrees.
By nine o’clock that evening, as the last of twilight faded, Middendorf set up a patrol base within a draw on the steep western face of the Chowkay Valley. Despite the heat, the terrain, and the weight on their backs, his grunts had traveled over two kilometers, covering an incredible 3,500 vertical feet. But their movement, like Fox-3’s, didn’t come easy. Some Marines were suffering from acute dehydration, which required corpsmen to rehydrate them not with bottles of water, but with IVs. Others bent over, vomiting, during the hellacious march. But perched at their night’s camp, high on the slope above the Amrey Creek bed, Middendorf’s all-important mortar tubes stood at the ready to support Fox-3; at just two and a half kilometers north of the mortar team, they sat well within the effective range of the weapons.
“Sir!” Jimmy the translator ran to Konnie’s position at the Fox-3 patrol base around seven in the evening. “Sir, Ahmad Shah and his men are looking for you. We have heard them talking over their ICOMs!”
“What are they saying, Jimmy?” Konnie asked.
“They have a lot of fighters. I don’t know how many. But a lot. And they are looking for the Marines. They are coming into the Chowkay Valley!” Kelly Grissom, who had also been apprised of the ICOM chatter, wondered if an attack was imminent, or if the messages had been sent solely to get intercepted, for psychological purposes. Every last grunt continued to stand watch that evening, glaring at the landscape as the shadows of dusk swept across the Chowkay. At nine o’clock, with the grunts not having had a wink of sleep in over thirty hours, Grissom moved the patrol base from 100 percent on watch to 50 percent, thereby mandating