Victory Point - Ed Darack [23]
The Island Warriors—⅔’s nickname referencing the location of their home station (since the early summer of 1971) of Marine Corps Base Hawaii at Oahu’s Kaneohe Bay—would enter an active combat zone again as a battalion during their deployment in support of Operation Enduring Freedom VI, about four and a half years after the initial 2001 U.S. invasion of Afghanistan. Led at the time by Lieutenant Colonel Andrew MacMannis, the Marines of ⅔ learned in 2004 that they would journey to the eastern Afghan provinces of Laghman, Nangarhar, and Kunar in the late spring of 2005 and continue the fight that their sister battalion—the Third Battalion of the Third Marine Regiment—would be waging from the fall of 2004 until ⅔’s arrival seven months later. The battalion, composed of seasoned war fighters as well as fresh-faced “boot” Marines, undertook a vigorous long-term training package to fully ready themselves for combat in the mountains of the three provinces, including drills at their home base and a live-fire exercise at the Puhakuloa Training Area on Hawaii’s Big Island. Their predeployment workup would culminate, however, at two bases in California, the Marine Air Ground Combat Center at Twentynine Palms and a base that would prove critical for acclimatizing ⅔’s Marines to the rigors of mountain combat, the Marine Corps Mountain Warfare Training Center, located in a remote nook of California’s eastern Sierra Nevada Mountains with an adjunct training area in the mountains outside of Hawthorne, Nevada.
Marines often zealously proclaim that they “take the fight to the enemy” like no other military service branch—of any country. Capable of sending self-sufficient combat units to any location on the globe, the U.S. Marine Corps codified the very essence of their expeditionary warfare tactics into a doctrinal approach known to all Marines by five letters: MAGTF—an acronym for Marine Air-Ground Task Force, the rubric defining the modern USMC war-fighting construct that integrates all of their elements of combat power—from aircraft, to heavy artillery, to mortars, to logistical support, to tanks, everything—around Marine infantry.
Explained simply, a MAGTF (pronounced Mag-Taff) defines how Marines fight in their “organic” state: synergistically “force-multiplied” by Marine aviators above (usually very close above), heavy artillery batteries in the rear, tanks flanking them, and a host of other elements in direct support, a battalion—or larger unit—of infantry Marines can thunder onto an enemy position with devastating power. The physical embodiments of the MAGTF concept come in three primary forms, each based on infantry unit size: the Marine Expeditionary Unit, or MEU; the Marine Expeditionary Brigade, or MEB; and the MEF, the Marine Expeditionary Force. The largest of the three, the MEF typically has at least a division—and sometimes more—of Marines composing the infantry component. The MEB has as its infantry core a regiment (three battalions) of Marines, and the MEU is built around a single battalion. MAGTFs, each of which is made of four elements, a Command Element, a Logistics Combat Element, an Aviation Combat Element, and of course, the Ground Combat Element (the grunts themselves) can, however, be stood up in other sizes, too, for a variety