• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1380 0

of the globe. Days later, they launched into Afghanistan on Air Force C-17s and C-130s from Ganci (Manus) Air Base in the northern lowlands of Kyrgyzstan, en route to Bagram Air Base, just north of Kabul. From Bagram, the battalion dispersed throughout their Maryland-size, three-province area of operation as the Marines of 3/3 prepared to come home. With battalion headquarters located at Jalalabad Airfield (JAF) in Nangarhar province, all but one platoon of Echo Company established themselves at Camp Wright in the Kunar’s provincial capital of Asadabad; Fox Company went to Laghman province’s Mehtar Lam forward operating base; and Battalion Command based Golf Company just down the road from their JAF COC at the Jalalabad Provincial Reconstruction Team base (J-Bad PRT). Based on Cooling’s advice, MacMannis had Weapons Company train and deploy as a standard infantry company; known in-country as Whiskey Company, they co-located with Headquarters and Services Company at the Battalion COC at Jalalabad Airfield. And placed far in the hinterlands of the Kunar’s Hindu Kush, at the head of the Pech Valley at the storied village of Nangalam, First Platoon of Echo Company (Echo-1) took up residence at what the battalion would come to know as the “edge of the empire,” a lonely, frequently rocketed and mortared outpost at the end of a long, rutted dirt road, a firebase named Camp Blessing.

The Marines of Camp Blessing would prove vital to the successes of the battalion’s forthcoming operations, in a number of ways. The first of ⅔’s Marines arrived at Blessing in mid-May as part of the ADVON: Second Lieutenant Patrick Kinser—Echo-1’s platoon commander—and his radio operator, Lance Corporal Corey Diss. Just hours after arriving at the outpost, Kinser and Diss embarked on their first combat operation in Afghanistan, a patrol with Marines of 3/3 led by Second Lieutenant Rick Posselt, a close personal friend of Kinser’s from the Basic School as well as Infantry Officers’ Course. Kinser immediately felt at home in the austere terrain, having trained as a mountain leader at the Mountain Warfare Training Center and having proven time and again to have a never-ending reserve of stamina on the grueling training grounds in the mountains of California and western Nevada during the battalion’s predeployment workup.

The patrol, composed of 3/3 Marines, ASF, and Kinser and Diss, pushed outside of Blessing’s wire at dawn on 20 May and traveled through the dusty streets of Nangalam, past houses of stone and mud and across donkey-plowed fields. Breathing the pure, dense air of a Hindu Kush morning, Kinser felt that he’d stepped into his true element as he made eye contact with the locals he knew only from books, magazine articles, and lectures prior to arriving at this enclave “forgotten by time.” As the patrol pushed down the deeply incised Pech Valley, the roar of the Pech River gave Kinser an intuitive understanding of the raw natural power of the magnificent landscape, inspiring in the young lieutenant an insatiable appetite to press farther into the cavernous valleys and onto the chiseled peaks and ridges that surrounded him.

The Marines and ASF wasted no time during their patrol, covering eight klicks (kilometers) in just a few hours under the rising sun—a sun that warmed the landscape in a way that Kinser had never experienced before, showering the terrain with crisp yet enervating heat. “Wow, sir, you ever seen any place like this?” Diss asked Kinser during one of the patrol’s few rests.

“Hell no,” the tall, chiseled-featured, and guttural-voiced lieutenant who resembled a young Clint Eastwood replied as he shot glances at the scene before them—an abandoned home, a solitary tree clinging to a vertical rock face, a boulder the size of a school bus perched at the edge of an overhanging cliff. “And you, Diss?” he asked his RO with a half-cocked grin.

“Well, sir . . .” The lanky lance corporal scanned around and thought for a second. “I’m from the middle of the San Luis Valley in southern Colorado. We got high peaks all around us there, sir, some