Victory Point - Ed Darack [37]
And while 3/3 continued their run of successes throughout the spring of 2005—killing, capturing, and forcing the surrender of numerous insurgent leaders and their henchmen—other, lower-level operators who aspired to regional and global Islamic extremist notoriety sought to fill the voids. Mortar, rocket, and IED attacks (most inaccurate and ineffective, but menacing nonetheless) grew in frequency in the spring throughout the Pech Valley region, undertaken by a few of what intel revealed to be small-time operators based out of the Korangal Valley area. Having been apprised by 3/3’s intel officer of a series of target individuals through both HUMINT and signals intelligence (SIGINT), Drew Priddy set out to develop another operation of the Spurs model in which 3/3 would work with Navy SOF to capture or kill the insurgents responsible for the recent “spring thaw” attacks and henceforth work to further stabilize the Korangal, the hypocenter of insurgent and terrorist activity in the Kunar province.
In developing the mission’s foundation, Priddy contacted Navy SOF (NAVSOF), known in RC-East as Task Force Blue, aka the SEALs and their direct, organic support—in this case members of SEAL Team 10 and their attached units. With the successes 3/3 had attained by working with NAVSOF in Spurs and Mavericks in mind, Priddy felt confident that he and TF Blue’s chief planner could formulate an op that would clear the Korangal of the identified targets and stabilize the region with Marine presence, interdicting other budding extremist elements from establishing new toeholds there. Priddy’s Task Force Blue equivalent, Lieutenant Commander Erik Kristensen—who hadn’t yet worked with Priddy but who coincidentally graduated with him in the same Naval Academy class in 1995—seized the opportunity to work with 3/3, and he and Priddy, communicating by phone and secure e-mail, immediately began to build a ‘shell’ of an operation that at that point had the tentative working name of Stars, after the Dallas Stars professional hockey team. The two planned Stars in the same vein as Spurs and Mavericks: share intel, vet a specific target list, kick off with NAVSOF “shaping” the objective through reconnaissance and surveillance; then, as Marines conduct a wide cordon of the area of interest, a SEAL direct-action team takes down those targets that NAVSOF has positively identified in the first phase of the mission. NAVSOF then exfils, and Marines continue “presence operations,” undertaking humanitarian assistance and MEDCAP missions.
On 14 May, ⅔’s advanced echelon (ADVON) arrived in Afghanistan; one hundred strong, the ADVON preceded the arrival of the battalion’s main element by just a few weeks. And as the newly on-deck Marines jumped into the faraway world of eastern Afghanistan, Cooling, MacMannis, and Donahue agreed that having Marines of ⅔ participate in Stars would help transition them from training to real-world combat operations in one clean sweep—and keep with MacMannis’ desire to maintain a consistent op tempo for the region during the turnover period. Furthermore, the Marines knew that during the spring thaw, fresh fighters would begin flowing into the region from Pakistan through the porous border, necessitating an even more vigilant presence. They would unleash Stars in early June of 2005, just as the main element of ⅔ would begin rolling into Afghanistan.
But in late May, the ongoing intel feed that drove the Stars concept and defined its specifics fell off the map—just disappeared. “The ISR [intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance] in the Korangal is just unmatched, just amazing,