Victory Point - Ed Darack [87]
By 1 July, with no sign of Dietz, Murphy, or Axelson, and with Luttrell clinging to life under the care of Gulab (just four miles to the southeast of Kinser and Eggers’s location), ⅔ was approved to move. With Eggers and Joe Roy bounding ahead to establish well-concealed overwatch positions, Kinser led the larger group of Marines and ASF (flanked by Hamchuck and Henrietta) south into the depths of the Korangal Valley. With the larger group armed with light machine guns and mortars, they could provide immediate fire support to Eggers and Roy—who, in turn, kept a sharp lookout for any ambush Shah may have put in place. Of course, both units maintained solid comms with each other, as well as with Camp Blessing, the battalion COC at JAF, and Wood at Asadabad.
Having been passed a series of grids of the possible locations of the recon SEAL team, Tom Wood contacted Kinser and had him race into action. Kinser grabbed three Marines, and with Hamchuck and Henrietta, they bounded south two miles to the village of Taleban (no relation to Mullah Omar’s group, the Taliban) and up one thousand feet from there in a matter of hours. “Nothing, sir. Not a damn thing. Not even a broken branch,” the lieutenant reported.
“Here’s another grid. Keep going.” Wood knew that he could keep the tireless lieutenant racing throughout the entire mountain—just not in the vicinity of Salar Ban, as mandated by Red Wings II’s command. For days, the Marines combed the entire Korangal Valley, searching, climbing, descending, linking up with other platoons of Echo, thrashing their feet, enduring biting-cold monsoonal rainfall at night and blistering, humid heat during the day—without success. Golf Company, too, raced throughout the eastern and southern aspects of the Shuryek Valley, but also discovered nothing. Finally, with help from Shina, a SOF team made it to Gulab’s house and brought Luttrell back to safety on 3 July. A day later, the Rangers discovered the bodies of Murphy and Dietz, lying next to each other deep in the chasm of the northeast gulch. Axelson, who had separated from the others of the recon team, possibly to find an open area to establish comms with the MBITR during the height of the ambush, was found almost a week later, on 10 July, with the help of cadaver dogs helicoptered onto the mountain’s slopes.
The American military threw a tremendous amount of assets at the search-and-recovery effort. Air Force Special Operations AC-130 gunships lit up the mountain at night with their onboard 105 mm howitzer, miniguns, and 40 mm Bofors guns; A-10s tore up ridgelines both day and night with their 30 mm cannons, and commanders back at MacDill watched it all, fed imagery from MQ-1 Predator UAVs circling high above the Hindu Kush. Closer to the disaster site, a forward command post was established on Sawtalo Sar’s summit, a post that included four different unit leaders, including Lieutenant Colonel MacMannis; all of them, however, fell under the control of commanders back in Florida. Far removed from the SOF information flow, Kinser, Eggers, and the other Marines wondered what the aircraft had been targeting—or if the barrages were just called in for SEAD prep.
Early in the second week of July, the lieutenant was ordered to link up with SOF near the crest of Sawtalo Sar’s north ridge, above the village of Chichal. Once on scene, he directly spied one of the targets of a recent drop. Below him, at the outskirts of the village, a home on the edge of a cliff smoldered in ruin. A few hours earlier, based on time-sensitive intel indicating that Shah and his men had been hiding at the house, a B-52 from an altitude of forty-five thousand feet had released three GBU-38 five-hundred-pound GPS-guided JDAMs. “We did an off-site BDA [battle damage assessment, “off-site” meaning that nobody had