Victory Point - Ed Darack [56]
5. Exfiltration (exfil): Depending on enemy activity, the Marines stay for as little as one week or as long as three or more weeks, then walk out to the Pech Valley Road, where convoys of Humvees will return them to Camp Blessing or Camp Wright at Asadabad, then continue to push regular patrols out of Camp Blessing to reinforce ties the Marines made with the locals during Red Wings.
Wood also developed a comprehensive indirect fires plan—able to be used throughout all phases of Red Wings: based in part on “Doghouse 10,” two 105 mm howitzers of the Army’s Task Force “Gun Devil,” located at Camp Wright at Asadabad. The guns, utilizing RAP rounds (rocket-assisted projectile rounds) could reach just far enough to accurately hit targets on the summit of Sawtalo Sar and the upper Korangal Valley. Wood, born and raised thinking, living, dreaming, and acting MAGTF and the synergy of combined arms, detailed a number of specific locations throughout each NAI for a call for fire to aid friendly forces—be those forces the initial reconnaissance and surveillance team, the SEAL direct-action team, Kinser and his Marines, the Golf Company outer cordon element, or either of the blocking positions—so that any of those friendlies could direct the psychologically and physically overwhelming high-explosive rounds onto any number of predetermined targets should the fight go in the wrong direction.
The OpsO would also carefully integrate close air support into the Red Wings plan, ensuring that both fixed- and rotary-wing CAS assets would be available to ground forces, should they need them. Wood tapped Casmer “Pigeon” Ratkowiak, ⅔’s air officer, to outline the specifics of the air side of Red Wings, although unlike the combined-arms assault they practiced back in Twentynine Palms, close air support would be included as an on-call asset only, like the howitzers of Doghouse. The reserved and complex Ratkowiak, a Marine F/A-18D Hornet aviator with nine hundred hours in the cockpit who was also trained as a forward air controller, would ensure that Army AH-64s would be ready as rotary-wing attack assets, that Air Force A-10 Thunderbolt II “Warthogs” would be able to provide fixed-wing CAS, that Air Force C-130s would be ready to parachute-drop CDS (containerized delivery system) packs for resupply of food, water, ammo, and other vital matériel, and that Task Force Sabre’s transport and air ambulance Chinooks and Blackhawks were prepped for their roles as well. Pigeon was also ready to both advise and to deconflict with conventional aviation assets any SOF air platforms, such as the TF-Brown’s MH-47s and the devastating Air Force Special Operations AC-130 gunships.
Communication, one of the central pillars of tactical operations, would prove particularly critical for Red Wings. With input from Kinser based on his experiences throughout the greater Pech region, the OpsO thought it best for ground units to use the “Cadillac” of commo gear, the PRC-117, as the lieutenant noted that other radios, particularly the PRC-148 MBITR (Multi-Band Inter/Intra Tactical Radio—pronounced “Em-Biter”) tended to hit “blackout” points and often couldn’t generate enough power to “bounce” a signal out of the region’s deep valleys. While it was not typically used for Marine Corps combat operations, the lieutenant also had experience with the Iridium satellite phone (which he and other Marines of Blessing used to call home from base) and noted that it was prone to peculiar blackout points as well, only working semireliably in Blessing from one small courtyard near the base’s COC. Powerful, capable of using a broad spectrum of networks including satellite communication (SATCOM), and able to encrypt both data and voice transmissions, the 117 virtually never failed. Those who carried the 117, however, knew it as a beast—big, heavy, and a power drain, requiring the portaging of a number of heavy lithium batteries along with