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By Root 1340 0

seen a total of four Americans during their ambush, but counted only three bodies in the aftermath of the attack, and knew the only possible egress route off that part of the mountain struck through Salar Ban. Capturing a survivor, whom the terrorist could use in a videotaped beheading spectacle, would make Shah’s cavalcade of death and destruction complete. Through intimidation of villagers in Salar Ban, Shah learned of Gulab and the injured American he harbored, and immediately came to the shepherd’s door. But the reserved Gulab refused to turn over the SEAL. Had Luttrell descended into Chichal or any other of the Korangal Valley’s villages, he would almost assuredly have been handed over to the terrorist. But the SEAL had made his way from the heights of Sawtalo Sar onto the mountain’s Shuryek Valley flank, and Shah had just a few men in his band; violence against Gulab almost certainly would incite the entire village of Salar Ban to take up arms against the wannabe Taliban commander, and Shah knew it. After threatening the lives of Gulab and his family, Shah departed, having come just feet from Luttrell; only an earthen wall separated the two.

As the SEALs interrogated Shina at their COC in Asadabad—and Luttrell continued to cling to life—the Task Force Red Rangers finalized their plan to move onto Sawtalo Sar to recover those in the downed Chinook and locate the survivors of the SDVT SEAL recon team. With air unavailable for inserts throughout the area in the wake of the MH-47 shoot-down, the soldiers drafted a plan where they would move onto the objective area by foot, starting from a point west of Camp Wright along the road connecting Jalalabad with Asadabad. Rob and Tom scrutinized the Rangers’ plans. The soldiers had done a “route recon” assessment of their intended movement onto Sawtalo Sar using 1:50,000-scale map sheets of the region, and determined that they could reach the crash site, roughly ten miles in a straight line from their starting point, within twelve hours; thus, they planned to have individual Rangers carry less than one full day’s worth of food and water, keeping light to move fast, with the intention of resupplying via CDS drops [Containerized Delivery System—pallets of food, water, and other supplies dropped from the rear of high-flying C-130s] once at the crash site.

With raised eyebrows, the two Marines openly questioned what they felt to be an unrealistically low approximation of the time the Rangers would need to traverse the incredibly steep and rugged terrain, particularly when factoring in the temperatures the area experienced at the height of summer. “These guys are used to short, helicopter-inserted hard-hit ops, which they’re great at,” Rob Scott explained to a representative at SOCCENT. “But as far as we have seen, they haven’t done many—if any—long-distance movements through the mountains out here. Their plan just isn’t realistic.” But the advice of the Marines—to man-pack at least seventy-two hours’ worth of food and water and to take a closer look at the densely packed contour lines on the section of the map representing the ground they would follow—fell on deaf ears. Commanders in Tampa, Florida, approved the mission, and approximately one hundred special operations soldiers, including members of Task Force Red Rangers and various ODAs, embarked on their journey.

Two days later, after soldier after soldier went down with heat-and-dehydration-related afflictions necessitating a number of emergency CDS drops, less than a third of the original force staggered onto the crash site. The daytime-high temperatures deep in the convection-oven-like dark rock valleys just west of Asadabad rocketed past 120 degrees, sapping the troops’ energy and depleting their water. Meanwhile, Kinser, Eggers, the Marines, and the ASF along with Hamchuck and Henrietta, waited at Kandagal, while Tom Wood awaited approval for ⅔’s portion of the recovery effort. With the crash site secured, the restriction on helicopter flights into the region was lifted, and the grisly job of recovering the bodies began.