Victory Point - Ed Darack [140]
With so many exhausted, battle-weary troops moving through such extreme terrain in the summer heat, the environment was destined to claim a victim. “Marine down!” one of the grunts yelled in the middle of the afternoon as a lance corporal slipped off a cliff edge and landed on his back after falling over thirty feet—his pack absorbing much of the force of the fall. With sharp jabbing pains in his spine, the Marine nevertheless continued to press on—but after an hour he couldn’t take any more. A corpsman who took a look at his condition surmised that he’d probably fractured a vertebra. The Dustoffs once again jumped into action, pulling him off to Bagram, where doctors determined that indeed, he had broken his back.
The southward movement proved to be the most difficult yet for the Fox Marines during Whalers. By early in the evening on the seventeenth, exhaustion and heat-induced dehydration actually caused many of the grunts to begin hallucinating. Even the stalwart Crisp felt as if his feet were shredding and joints grinding during the push. And despite moving toward the opening of the Chowkay, the Marines didn’t descend in altitude much as they pushed along the high ridge. By four o’clock in the morning of the eighteenth, as an AC-130 gunship orbited overhead scanning the area for enemy activity, the grunts bedded down for a few hours.
“We’re never gonna make it outta here, man!” Konnie overheard one of his Marines breaking down as the column moved into a steep draw above Amrey village, their conduit between the high ridge they’d traversed and their extract point. “Nobody knows where we’re goin’—no sleep in days—hot as hell itself, even at night!”
“We’re making it out of here just fine. So shut the fuck up,” Konnie said. “We know right where we’re going.”
“Roger . . . sir.” In fact, during the brief rest early that morning, Grissom scouted ahead, locating a direct line into Amrey and the extract point—a very direct line. Often sliding down rock slabs and clinging to tree limbs as they choked on dust and the heat of the day, the grunts walked and skidded down a steep draw, funneling them into Amrey. But as their rate of descent picked up, so did the ICOM chatter. By the time they reached the extract point—just before noon—the ICOMs were blaring constantly with enemy voices trying to coordinate yet another attack. And when the grunts stepped off the steep slope of the rocky draw onto the level ground of the village, they couldn’t find a soul: the town was deserted, an ominous sign.
“We made it,” Grissom stated to Crisp and Konstant. “Whiskey’s highbacks and hardbacks will be here shortly.”
“We got a lot of awards to write up,” Konnie remarked as he gazed at the completely spent grunts—too exhausted even to express relief. Out of water, they sliced off the tops of their water bottles and scooped water from muddy puddles left from recent rainfall, then collapsed against their backpacks. The sheer physical challenges posed by the Chowkay and the grip of combat would leave indelible marks on every one of them.
“We ain’t out yet,” Crisp remarked to the resting grunts. “Stay alert. Don’t get yo’ asses killed!”
“Sir.” Jimmy approached Konnie. “Now they’re saying that they want to organize the people of the villages below Amrey to fight you. They are going to a mosque in the lower valley to announce it to everyone.”
“Great. Just what I wanted to hear, Jimmy.”
Just then a convoy of Whiskey Company’s Humvees rolled up to the village. Fox-3 and half of Middendorf’s mortar team were loaded into five highbacks, with Whiskey’s command element in the lead vehicle. As the sound of engines faded, Konnie and Grissom spotted two enemy, each with an AK-47 and one with an ICOM, on a ridgeline high above them. Both officers immediately fired, causing the two to flee. Regardless of their exhaustion, the brief encounter reminded all the Marines to stay alert. As that first convoy rolled out of the village, every one of the grunts kept