Victory Point - Ed Darack [138]
But, as Rob Scott summarized that morning to Grissom, small pockets of Shah’s paid force lived on, and sought to inflict as much destruction on ⅔ as possible—through ambushes, possibly suicidal in nature. Shah had ordered his remaining men to fight to the death in a sort of ad hoc jihad, to engage the Marines wherever they could as ⅔ egressed from the high valleys surrounding Sawtalo Sar.
Fox-3 prepared to break camp well before dusk on the seventeenth of August in anticipation of a final CDS resupply drop and a strong push to move back to Amrey village. Once at Amrey, Whiskey Company’s Humvees would transport them to the mouth of the Chowkay, where they’d head back to their forward operating base at Mehtar Lam. Having gotten no sleep after the Star Wars firefight, the Marines just wanted to get moving that morning—the sooner they made headway down the valley, the sooner they’d finally get some sleep.
“Work your magic again, Pigeon,” Konnie said as he heard the first wavering drone of an approaching C-130. “We can’t be wasting time and energy chasing all over the place for off-target CDS drops.”
Using the technique he’d devised a couple of days earlier, the FAC controlled the C-130 for the resupply drop just as he’d control an A-10 dropping a laser-guided bomb—he’d make the drop call, and instead of having all containers dropped at once, he’d have the Hercules crew make a number of runs, “clearing-hot” just one package during each pass. Once again, Konnie and the other Marines of Fox-3 stood in awe of the Hornet aviator’s almost uncanny ability to integrate air platforms with the ground element—be those air-assets attack aircraft dropping deadly munitions on enemy targets or cargo birds delivering much-needed supplies to friendly positions.
But while their supply problem of just a few days prior had been scarcity, after the big parachuted containers swooshed into the drop zone that morning, the Fox-3 Marines realized that they’d been resupplied with enough food, water, and ammunition to last them another full week. And since speed ranked as the highest priority at that point in Whalers, portaging all those additional supplies would only serve to slow the already-beleaguered Marines, further exposing them to the few of Shah’s determined men who remained. “We should just take what we need, and then have the engineers blow this stuff,” Grissom thought out loud. But after conferring with the engineers, who told him that they didn’t have enough demo to blow the overflow items to a point at which they’d be worthless to the enemy, the captain gave the command to spread-load the gear—days-upon-days’ worth of food and machine-gun rounds.
But the mortar rounds would see a different fate. As Fox-3 worked to distribute the overload items, distant explosions rang out. Lieutenant Geise contacted Grissom: “Sir, they’re trying to adjust fires to your position, but they’re off by eight hundred meters!” Middendorf immediately had his team prep the gun tubes for a powerful barrage—using the excess mortars just delivered by the Hercules.
“Commander Grissom! Commander Grissom!” Jimmy the terp sprinted toward the captain. “They’re shooting at us!”
“Thanks, Jimmy, but I don’t need you to interpret explosions for me—just Pashto.”
“No, sir. Yes—” the flustered Jimmy began. “I know that you can hear the booms, but I am hearing them talk about trying to find you, they can’t see where we are at.”
“Hold tight, Jimmy. We’re in the process of taking