Victory Point - Ed Darack [143]
The entire company consolidated in the village of Chowkay on the shores of the Kunar River, just outside of the valley’s opening. By night-fall, they were en route back to JAF in large 7-Tons. So utterly drained from the previous days’ intense travails, most nodded off, even if for just seconds at a time—a rare minute’s worth of actual sleep seeming like a full night along the bumpy, rutted road. Soon, however, the jolts and jars of the dirt road gave way to the smooth hum of asphalt, and the convoy was motoring onto the Jalalabad Bridge, crossing the Kunar River when . . . put-sheeew! The hiss of an incoming RPG round shocked the grunts awake. The night lit up above them with the grenade’s explosion, sending shrapnel into the large troop carrier. Crisp, his hand hit with burning metal, stood up—to have a PK machine-gun round drive into the side of his helmet, throwing him onto the floor of the 7-Ton. The Marines once again returned fire—at a small house from which the small attack had burst forth—silencing what would be the very last of their aggressors during Whalers.
His “bell rung” from taking a round that missed punching through his Kevlar and instantly killing him by only an inch, Crisp wiped the blood from his right hand, and asked, “Anybody hit . . . besides me?” Staff Sergeant Kevin Walker had also been mildly injured on his hand by flying shrapnel. “You, too, Boyd?” Crisp glared at Lance Corporal Boyd, already hit once in the mouth by a bullet earlier in the day. “Where’d they get you this time?”
“My mouth,” Boyd responded.
“No. I said where’d you get hit this time. Your ass already got shot in the mouth earlier.”
“My mouth,” Boyd replied.
Crisp leaned into the lance corporal—and started laughing hysterically at the sight of the lance corporal’s bleeding lips. “Man, they shot you twice in the mouth in the same day!” Boyd laughed along with the staff sergeant—at a wound that would heal with little if any scarring. “I tell you what, probably did your ass some good. You kinda ugly anyway, so you should be happy you had your face rearranged!” Crisp joked.
Earlier in the day, however, in the Korangal Valley, the remnants of Shah’s cell inflicted a harsh and unforgettable blow to the battalion. In the afternoon hours of the eighteenth, as Echo Company’s Second Platoon pushed out of the Korangal, a group of the cell’s men covertly set up positions above a transect of the valley about two kilometers south of its juncture with the Pech. Corporal Salvatore Cirencione, a fire-team leader in the platoon’s Third Squad, felt an ominous chill run down his spine as he spotted two young girls playing in the middle of the dirt road—completely by themselves; he couldn’t see anyone else. Then he noticed a freshly stacked pile of rocks on the side of the dirt road, and thought he eyed another about twenty-five meters in front of him . . .
Justin Bradley, who was at an overwatch position with Echo-1’s First Squad on the steep terrain above the mouth of the Korangal, kept a close eye on the slopes looming over that spot, figuring that if an ambush were to occur, it would go down at dusk, when the combination of still-bright sky and shadowed valley gave the enemy the advantage of confusing lighting, a common tactic in the region. But Shah’s men, spotting Echo-2 passing directly beneath them from their perches about two kilometers to the south of Bradley and First Squad, didn’t wait for dusk. The breezy afternoon was shattered by the roar of the most intense ambush Bradley had ever heard just as Cirencione locked his eyes onto the second set of stacked rocks—they were ambush marks. At the focus of the ambush, twenty-two-year-old Lance Corporal Phillip George, from Pasadena, Texas, also a fire-team leader in the platoon’s Third Squad, immediately locked onto the points of origin of the fire—detecting the puffs of dust kicked up by muzzle blasts. Sending rounds directly back at the attackers, George immediately got his fire team’s eyes on the attackers’ positions from the