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By Root 1406 0

of their eastern Afghan mission from the very moment their boots hit the deck of RC-East, the Marines of ⅔’s main element proved both eager and indefatigably capable as they attacked every task—from the minuscule to the battalion-scale—with determined resolve. Focused on their ultimate goal of ensuring successful Afghan national parliamentary elections on 18 September and then continuing to stabilize the region after that historic event, the Marines took no task lightly, from mission planning, to splicing wires in broken radios, to drinking enough water during long movements through the mountains to remain combat capable, to ensuring that bottles of that water made their way to the respective bases—even as extremists intensified their campaign of terror throughout the spring.

Nestled in the shadows of Sawtalo Sar and its sibling peaks, Camp Blessing was the clear focus of the extremists during that spring-thaw campaign. Kinser and the other “Blessing Marines” picked up quickly on the bad guys’ standard tactics—improvised explosive-device strikes on convoys near the firebase and 82 mm mortar and 107 mm rocket attacks, launched typically three or four days on either side of a full moon from well-concealed locations just behind the high ridges to the east of the camp. Terrorists used one spot in particular enough for it to earn the name Rocket Ridge, which lay in a direct line between the rooftop lookout of the base’s COC and the summit of Sawtalo Sar. Providing the Marines of the firebase with a tremendous tactical advantage, however, the Afghan Security Forces personnel manned four observation posts surrounding Blessing. Hailing from throughout the slopes and valley floors surrounding Nangalam, the ASF proved themselves vital to the Marines for their knowledge of the area and its people—people good, bad, on the fence, trustworthy, and sneaky. The Afghan fighters, whom many of the Blessing Marines would come to regard as family by the end of their deployment, reflected the sentiments of the villagers throughout the Pech Valley region: they hated the attacks, the shrieks of the rockets, the out-of-nowhere deafening crack of impacting 82 mm mortar rounds, the IED strikes, the threats to their families, the indiscriminate ambushes, the terror. From the abhorrent slaughter of the people of the Pech in the late seventies by the Afghan Communists, to the intentional targeting of civilians of the area by the Soviets, to the infighting of the early nineties, to the Taliban, and now the “leftovers” of all those past influences, the ASF just wanted an end to it all, to close the book on the decades of war, to go back to their homes and small mountain pastures and live out their lives in peace. The ASF members would come to view the Marines’ presence as a chance to finally lay down their Kalashnikovs and RPGs and go home; and for that, they would fight side by side with the grunts, with bloodlust, vehemence, and incalculable loyalty.

The day after the short-lived firefight against the snipers in the Shuryek Valley, Kinser greeted a fellow infantry officer at Blessing’s front gate whose magnetically sincere midwestern charm, devotion to the COIN fight, and independent- and quick-mindedness would, as a complement to Kinser’s leadership style, yield payoffs to ⅔’s mission far greater than even the insightful Rob Scott—who masterminded placing the two together at the remote base—could have imagined: First Lieutenant Matt Bartels. Bartels, a standout high school football player from Bloomington, Minnesota, fought his way from near death at the clutches of viral meningitis and, once recovered, set his sights on becoming a Marine Corps infantry officer. Having proven himself a uniquely independent yet utterly trustworthy and competent platoon leader during ⅔’s deployment as the Battalion Landing Team of the Thirty-first Marine Expeditionary Unit, Bartels was chosen to lead a fifteen-man experimental Marine Corps antiterror augmentation force that would work with the Navy’s SEAL Team 3 as part of Joint Task Force 510 interdicting the al-Qaeda-connected