Victory Point - Ed Darack [89]
The two groups of Shah’s men meet shortly after two o’clock in the afternoon, chanting “Alla-u Akhbar!” as they rifle through the SEALs’ gear. The videographer shooting footage for the distributed video can be seen holding his camera and chanting “Alla-u Akhbar! Alla-u Akhbar!” repeatedly, then the camera zooms to a wide-angle, clear shot of Shah, holding his PK and one of the SEALs’ backpacks, with the steep, sunlit northeast gulch in the background. At 2:15, Shah, one of his men, and both videographers walk back up the gulch, where the time then jumps to 2:38. Under now-overcast skies, one of Shah’s men can be seen rummaging through one of the SEALs’ gear racks on a well-worn trail striking through greener, higher ground as the second videographer steps into the frame. Plucking hand grenades, magazines filled with 5.56 mm rounds, a strobe, and then a map and a compass, he exclaims in Pashto, “Look, an American compass! God is the greatest!” He then finds a pen and shouts at the camera held by the second videographer, “Look, an American pen! God is the greatest!” The man then runs its ink across his left palm, and with a look of australopithecine wonder, proclaims, “And it writes! God is the greatest!” The translated diatribe gives lucid insight into the depths of humanity from which extremists such as Shah cull their underlings.
At 2:40:50, Shah receives a transmission on his ICOM from his second team requesting more rounds for their weapons. As the sky turns darker, a deep boom of thunder echoes throughout the ridges and valleys of Sawtalo Sar, apparently signaling Shah and his men to seek shelter from the impending storm. The footage ends with Shah throwing his PK over his shoulder at 2:43, then moving to head down the trail, possibly to search for Luttrell.
In the distributed video, the producers included a clip of a standard, conventional “ring flight” of Task Force Sabre CH-47 Chinooks (clearly conventional Chinooks, as they lack refueling probes) heading up the Pech River Valley with Apache escorts, included possibly to intimate the upcoming MH-47 shoot-down. However, since both videographers traveled with Shah after the linkup, and since his RPG gunner can’t be seen in the video after the entire crew pillages the SEALs’ bodies, the man who downed the MH-47 probably returned to the summit of the mountain with one or two of Shah’s men (and no videographer), and possibly under orders from the terrorist leader, waited for the rescue helicopters with the intention of shooting one down. More likely, however, the RPG gunner and the others in the cell went to the SEAL insert site to find other gear, gear that the recon team may have cached (such as the fastrope), and then just chanced upon the Task Force Brown Chinooks attempting to insert the SEAL rescue team. Had Shah reasoned that a rescue attempt by helicopter was imminent, he assuredly would have sent at least one of his videographers with the RPG gunner to capture the fiery downing for his propaganda campaign. In the end, however, Shah and his crew really just hit a dark, disastrously spectacular streak of luck. With a total of nineteen servicemen killed in a matter of hours, 28 June 2005 went into the history books as not only the greatest single-day loss of American life in Afghanistan since the beginning of the war nearly four years prior, but the greatest disaster for the 160th, Navy Special Operations Forces, and all of USSOCOM since the command’s founding in 1987.
Shah instantly rocketed into the stratosphere of global terrorist infamy, boosted there not only by the Web posting of his As-Sahab Media video (which never circulated very broadly), but by embarrassingly flawed global media accounts of the tragedy. News outlets