Victory Point - Ed Darack [135]
“Copy!” came Shelton’s response.
“Fire Alpha Oscar 3303! Fire Alpha Oscar 3303!” The lieutenant commanded his Marines to unleash what he’d planned to be a crushing barrage from all tubes simultaneously at the target, three times total.
“Roger.” Each of the four gun teams adjusted the elevation and deflection of their mortar tube, snapped a C-shaped charge onto the neck of a round just above its fins, then dropped it into the tube. Thunk- thunk-thunk-thunk followed by a stentorian crack! crack! crack! crack! Four 81 mm mortar rounds accelerated away from the team’s position at hundreds of meters per second, hurling in unison toward their apogees, then sailed down toward the same mark. But before the parabolic arcs of those first rounds had crested, the team had four more en route—then four more after that. Whump whump whump whump! Seconds later, Alpha Oscar 3303 erupted in a mass of concussive fireballs, the mortars completely laying waste to the enemy position.
But more of those positions remained, and the mortar team’s barrage left them with just seven 81 mm rounds. Not knowing if Pigeon had aircraft inbound—and conscious of the necessity of deconflicting his mortar fire with flight paths—Middendorf again tore across the open field of fire to get line of sight with Grissom and Pigeon. A quick back-and-forth revealed that airpower hadn’t yet arrived. But then another of Shah’s positions opened up—more mortars, RPGs, and machine-gun fire rained down, loosed by roughly fifteen extremists. Middendorf dove back toward his team. But the new enemy position wasn’t one on the list of the lieutenant’s predesignated grids.
Unknown to Middendorf, Corporal Joshua Plunk, working in an uncovered position with rounds splitting through the air around him, already had the group of fifteen in the crosshairs of gun number four’s sight. Carefully adjusting the deflection for a “direct lay” mortar attack by keeping the crosshairs squarely on the group as he leveled the gun, the corporal then grabbed the mortar team’s “Vector” laser rangefinder. 1,775, the red digital readout flashed after Plunk depressed a small button on the top of the precision optic. Plunk laughed at the irony of the range—the year the Marine Corps was born—and pulled out his “whiz wheel,” a circular plastic “mechanical computer” used to determine gun elevation and round charge based on a target’s range. As Shah’s men belched out machine-gun and mortar fire from their position, Plunk grasped one of the team’s last rounds and hung it over the flared mouth of the gun, then with a flick of his wrist, sank the mortar into the guts of the tube. Crack! Then he sank another. Crack! Seconds later, as Plunk pressed his head into the coarse ground to keep well below the enemy’s low-flying rounds, his two mortars plowed into the mountain. Whump! Whump! The last of the tracers from the position fizzled into the night as Plunk’s two rounds impacted dead on target.
With the mortar team’s four-gun barrage and Plunk’s direct lay onto the fifteen-man position, the Marines gained decisive control of the battle, shredding the two most concentrated of Shah’s strongholds. With those machine guns pinning Konnie down now silenced, the lieutenant grabbed his flak, Kevlar helmet, and ten more magazines of rounds, and Pigeon continued to work to get close air support on station.
But still, some of Shah’s men remained. At the Marines’ most lonely position in the Chowkay that night, an observation post stood up on some high ground to the west of the main force, seven Marines—two snipers and members of the platoon’s Second Squad, led by Corporal Chris Smith—had been on the receiving end of an intense barrage of machine-gun and RPG fire from a position just over two hundred meters away. Taking well-aimed shots at the attackers’ muzzle flashes in the night, Lance Corporal Mark Perna heard so many rounds impacting throughout the small position—but without the enemy scoring any hits—that he likened the moment to running through a summer