Victory Point - Ed Darack [53]
Camp Blessing, which had once been a school, then a medical clinic in the nineties before the Taliban commandeered the small group of buildings (which they used as a command center as well as for rape, torture, and execution of the locals), was taken over by U.S. special operations forces early in the war. Marines of 2/8 spent some time at the camp—named in honor of Jay Blessing, a Special Forces soldier killed by an IED strike near the base in 2002—as did some from 3/6, who fended off a number of direct attacks by insurgents, including one assault where militants overran one of the observation posts and nearly breached the camp’s main perimeter. But 3/6 had only spent a few months at Blessing, operating the firebase with Special Forces, as 2/8 had done. 3/3 would be the first battalion to occupy Blessing for their full deployment, operating it as a Marine-only camp. MacMannis and Scott looked to have a single commander run the base with a single platoon of Marines deployed there for the duration of ⅔’s tour, another recommendation of Cooling’s, who had cycled base commanders through “tours” of Blessing. Handing over command to Bartels was 3/3’s First Lieutenant Justin Belman, who, through his and his Marines’ outreach to the locals of the Nangalam area, laid the foundation for the personality-driven leadership successes of Kinser and Bartels—successes emblematic of the classic admixture of unconventional war-fighting styles historically recognized as unique to the United States Marine Corps.
Bartels wasted no time jumping into his role as commander of the base that jutted farther into the enemy than any other in Afghanistan, lying just a few miles from the frontier with Pakistan, smack on the prime insurgent corridor between Kunar and Nuristan. In total, 98 of ⅔’s Marines would live at Camp Blessing—Kinser’s platoon with attachments, and Marines attached directly to the firebase: heavy-weapons operators, light machine gunners, straight-leg 0311 infantrymen, cooks, Navy Corpsmen, and communications specialists. In addition to the 98 Marines, 114 ASF fighters, and 5 interpreters, or “terps,” lived at Blessing, and nearly 50 local workers came and went each day from Nangalam and surrounding villages. Studding Blessing’s concertina-razor-wire perimeter, a hodgepodge of captured Taliban and insurgent weapons systems, many of which dated back to the Soviet era, stood ready to be manned by ASF during attacks: DShK 12.7 mm heavy machine guns, ZPU-1 antiaircraft guns pointed at the surrounding ridges, recoilless rifles, RPG-7s, PK medium machine guns, 82mm mortar tubes, even 107 mm rocket launchers. Of course, the Marines defended the wire with their own tried-and-true armaments as well as more recent additions to the Marine Corps inventory: M2 .50-caliber machine guns, M240 light machine guns, SMAW and AT4 shoulder-launched rockets, MK19 40mm automatic grenade launchers, and even the Javeline shoulder-launched missile. Lobbing football-size rounds, the 120 mm mortar tubes (on loan from the Army) gave outside-the-wire Marines shockingly effective indirect fire support during their missions. Based at Blessing, Marine mortarmen could move the “120 tubes” by Humvee throughout the region, ensuring that any patrol was just a radio-transmitted call for fire away from lighting up an enemy position “out of nowhere” with blazing efficacy.
The morning after Bartels’s midnight arrival at Blessing (he came by way of convoy, operating blacked out to avoid IED strikes), the twenty-five-year-old lieutenant emerged from the concrete COC to a spring Hindu Kush morning. Climbing onto a rooftop lookout, he immediately thanked Rob Scott in his