Victory Point - Ed Darack [109]
The pitch-darkness of the night drove home the insularity of the Fox company’s situation. Amrey village, the closest point with vehicle access, was hours and hours away by foot. Medevac support was iffy at best. And Middendorf’s 81s were their sole organic indirect fire support assets, while close air support was as much as a full hour away. Knowing as well that they were surrounded by Shah’s force, the Marines of Fox Company dug in for one of the longest nights of their lives.
Back at the mortar team’s position, the intermittent beeps of Middendorf’s radios split the otherwise silent night. With all four mortar tubes ready to fire at a moment’s notice, the lieutenant knew that the Marines were ready to push through the very worst of Shah’s onslaught. Although confident, the lieutenant also knew that the Marines of Fox Company were very, very alone in the austere high Chowkay that night; but they would forge ahead in the operation with the utmost focus, undeterred by the heat, dehydration, lack of water and food, and pure exhaustion, but even the slightest mistake could avalanche into disaster.
10
ARMAGEDDON, DENIED
After eighteen hours of movement, the Marines of Fox-3 were completely wasted. “Eighteen hours straight,” a lance corporal muttered on the morning of the fourteenth, gazing at the shattered rock at his feet, “all that pain, to get to . . . to this place.” The young Marine craned his neck and squinted at a distant ridge to the east, but could see nothing more than an outline of the jagged buttress under the blinding light of the rising sun. He shook his head and leaned back against a tree stump, not wanting to think about anything but a few more hours of sleep.
Just over two kilometers due south of Fox-3’s camp, Middendorf’s mortar section, accompanied by Fox-1 and the Afghan soldiers, had been on the move since five-fifteen that morning, well before the sun crested the eastern peaks. The temperature slammed the grunts—even during the predawn hours—and conditions would only worsen with each passing hour. The Marines and Afghan soldiers arduously trekked up the Chowkay, pushing ever higher under their crushing loads. Some felt like they were teetering at the very edge of sanity as the movement taxed them to the very limit of their strength. But the mortar tubes needed—absolutely needed—to be kept well within range of Fox-3, even if higher command, based on up-to-the-minute intel, ordered Third Platoon to keep moving even farther north. The Marines, isolated in the Chowkay that August day, could count solely on one another, as they strained into the heat and heights, each grunt resolving to keep the chain that was Fox Company uniformly strong.
As the sun launched into the heights that morning, drowning the eastern Afghan mountains in life-sapping heat, Staff Sergeant Crisp stared hard at his Marines, feeling in his gut that something wasn’t right, that the stillness of the morning would soon be shattered by a vicious enemy. It wasn’t that he knew something that the others didn’t; he just had an instinct. And the thought of any of his Marines not being absolutely prepared for any eventuality made his blood boil. Complacency kills, complacency kills! he thought. Don’t ever fucking forget it. Complacency kills! “You hear me?” he roared a moment later. “I said get ya gear on NOW!” The staff sergeant glared at those Marines who’d removed their flak jackets and Kevlar helmets. Konnie seconded Crisp’s motion, albeit less vociferously.
“No. Let them rest—without their flaks and Kevlars,” Captain Grissom ordered as he approached Crisp and Konnie. The captain was determined to afford the Marines every possible comfort in order to rejuvenate their enervated bodies; he knew that in just a few hours they’d be embarking on yet another grueling march, higher and deeper into the strange and forlorn mountains on their journey toward Objective- 4. “Just got off the hook with battalion. We’re moving again at twelve hundred and I want half the Marines resting at any one time while