Victory Point - Ed Darack [123]
“Pop smoke!” Pigeon ordered. Two Marines each yanked the pins out of purple smoke grenades and tossed them onto a drop zone Pigeon had designated.
“Hope they kick that shit out at just the right moment,” Konnie mumbled under his breath.
“Here it comes.” Pigeon craned his neck back as the Hercules swooped overhead. On board the craft, the loadmasters watched six large crates careen on rollers out of the open cargo hold and into space, drogue chutes deploying just seconds later. Banking hard after the drop, the Hercules disappeared behind a high ridge, leaving only the supply crates, swaying below their green chutes, in the sky above the Marines. The men were always on guard during CDS drops, since the heavy cargo could easily squash an unknowing grunt, but the parachutes’ trajectory quickly showed there to be no danger of a crushing death. In fact, the drop missed the area completely.
“Off. Way off. It’ll take two fuckin’ days to recover that stuff,” Konnie muttered in a pissed-off tone. “Guess we’re stayin’ red for now.”
Just over a kilometer to the southeast of Fox-3’s camp, Ben Middendorf, having decided to co-locate his mortar team with Fox-3 after conferring with Grissom, began moving toward Hill 2510. Not wanting to cover the same ground that Fox-3 had traversed during their push up the Chowkay for fear of walking into an ambush, the lieutenant felt it best to move by way of the terrain to their west. But Middendorf and his Marines were also red on supplies; the one-kilometer movement, down the steep ground to the Amrey Creek bed, then back up even steeper slopes on the base of Hill 2510—portaging the heavy mortar tubes—further weakened the already-enervated grunts. Arriving at dusk at an isolated village not shown on any maps, Middendorf noticed the chilling sight of a white flag waving above one of the village buildings—a sign of solidarity with the Taliban. Under the dying glow of twilight, the Marines greeted the standoffish villagers, then bedded down for a few hours just outside the tiny enclave—maintaining very tight security.
While Middendorf and the mortar team were closing on the village on the slopes of Hill 2510 that evening, Pigeon worked with another C-130 on a second CDS resupply attempt. This time, through a number of low passes, the trajectories of which he computed with his map and his instincts, the FAC guided all six loads perfectly on target, one by one. “Pigeon,” Konnie commented, “you just continue to dominate awesomeness.” Completely green on supplies, Fox-3 would be able to fully stock Dorf’s mortar team—once they arrived. The next morning, with Fox-1 and the Afghan soldiers still providing security for them, the mortar team broke camp before dawn and pushed north toward Fox-3 and their much-needed food, water, and ammunition. Middendorf first led his team to the top of Hill 2510, to get a commanding view of the route ahead for the grunts. Scanning the distance, the lieutenant noticed two men watching the Marines—no weapons, no ICOMs, just two men observing them. Unsure if they belonged to Shah’s cell, if they had been employed by the terrorist as lookouts, or if they were just villagers walking the area’s trails, Middendorf decided to press onward. With the mortar team weak from exhaustion, dehydration, and now near starvation, he split the team in two to move by leapfrogging, keeping two mortars always ready to fire as the grunts with the other two tubes pushed northward. By noon, the Marines had drunk every drop of their water and their corpsmen had administered their last rehydration IV. With their destination just a half kilometer away, a lance corporal collapsed in the heat.
“Unless you get up and fuckin’ walk,” Middendorf acerbically began, “you will die.” Each Marine in the team had deteriorated to a level Middendorf had never before seen; they stared at the lieutenant vacuously from sunken eyes—many having bent over with jabbing