• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1340 0

going there.” Kinser immediately drafted a detailed op order, submitted it to Wood, and gathered his twenty best Marines. At one o’clock in the morning on the twenty-ninth, Wood gave Kinser the go-ahead: “Move your ass, Kinser. Get up into the Korangal, establish a patrol base, then I’ll push you out as needed.” Wood felt a dire urgency to save the lives of any surviving members of the recon team, knowing that the convoluted command structure, long mission-approval processes, and individual-unit egos at the planning levels would just continue to delay the rescue operation. With Kinser, Eggers, and crew located at an ideal spot from which to pounce onto a position anywhere throughout the Sawtalo Sar massif to vector onto the position(s) of the missing personnel, the survivors might not be so abandoned after all.

Under pitch darkness, the force of thirty-seven slipped outside Camp Blessing’s wire and moved quickly down the Pech Road on foot. Every one of the group carried enough MREs and bottled water to last at least three days; while nights were often cold, particularly after heavy thunderstorms, the temperatures of the summer days would reach well in excess of 115 degrees, so each carried as much water as possible. The group, which included some of the best of the Blessing Marines—Doc Anaya, fully laden with extra supplies to aid those they searched for; mortarmen with two 60 mm mortar tubes and rounds; SAW gunners; M240G light machine gunners; and Corporal Joe Roy, Eggers’s spotter from Team Ronin—moved quickly along the shores of the treacherous Pech River, entering the mouth of the Korangal Valley after just two and a half hours of stiff walking. Also moving with Kinser and crew were “Hamchuck” and “Henrietta,” Blessing’s two loyal “Afghan war dogs”—local strays, trained by a SOF direct-action team temporarily stationed at Blessing before ⅔’s arrival—that the team lowered in specially made harnesses when they fastrope-inserted on hard-hit raids, using the dogs to help flush out bad guys. Kinser planned to use the two well-behaved canines to locate the as-yet-unidentified lost personnel. In addition, the friendly Hamchuck and Henrietta proved great companions to the grunts. The group set up a camp near the village of Kandagal, at the mouth of the Korangal, and awaited Wood’s order to move into action.

Unknown to the Marines, only one of the four recon-team SEALs had lived through Shah’s ambush. And hours after the last of the attackers’ rounds had been loosed from their weapons, he barely clung to life. With all his teammates dead, suffering from multiple penetration injuries throughout his body and massive blood loss, Marcus Luttrell fought off almost certain death as he regained consciousness. Deep in the bowels of the northeast gulch, his position on the declivitous slope provided him with one glimmer of hope: the people of the Shuryek Valley, into which the gulch fed, had traditionally been at odds with villagers of the Korangal Valley, particularly those of Chichal, bumping heads over grazing-land boundaries. And while not overly friendly to American forces, people on the Shuryek side of Sawtalo Sar hadn’t proved nearly as supportive of anticoalition militia forces as those of the Korangal. Furthermore, Luttrell had roughly just one mile of downhill travel in order to reach one of the Shuryek’s largest villages, Salar Ban. Best of all, relations between American forces and people not only of the Shuryek Valley, but throughout the greater Pech region, had very recently taken a quantum leap forward—a quantum leap that had been launched eight miles to the northwest of Luttrell’s position, at Camp Blessing.

The change began during 3/3’s Afghan tour and quickly accelerated toward the end of the Third Battalion’s deployment with First Lieutenant Justin Bellman and his Blessing Marines’ outreach to the locals of Nangalam and beyond. When ⅔ arrived, Matt Bartels—the keenly perceptive, gregarious, and ever-welcoming twenty-five-year-old first lieutenant whom Rob Scott had hand-selected to run the show at “the tip of