• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1413 0

off to Guantánamo Bay as an active Taliban fighter; he was also someone Westerfield believed could be supporting Shah’s operations. With a lack of activity around Camp Blessing during the recovery effort on Sawtalo Sar, Matt deliberately chose the Fourth of July to pay a visit to the house, located northeast of Nangalam in the Waigal Valley, the corridor linking the Kunar’s Pech Valley with Nuristan, and check for any ACM fire-works. He passed the request to Rob Scott, who approved it, provided he stay outside the wire no more than twelve hours. Arriving during midmorning of the Fourth with a small contingent of Marines, including Justin Bradley, and ten ASF, Matt, speaking through Sultan, bluntly asked the man if he’d been hiding any weapons—mortars, rockets, RPGs, machine guns, rounds, etc. Responding with a resounding no, the Afghan invited Matt, Sultan, and Justin into his home, and offered them tea. As Bradley spoke with the onetime Taliban supporter, the sly Matt counted off the length of interior walls with his footsteps. Asking to be excused to speak with the waiting members of the ASF, the lieutenant then counted off the length of the home’s exterior. When the numbers didn’t add up, Matt produced a wad of cash, telling the man that if he put a hole in the wall before him, and sunshine came through, he’d give him the money. The Afghan began sweating profusely and took a step backward. “Bradley,” Matt said, motioning to the stocky corporal, “can you—”

“I’d be delighted, sir.” The Montanan stood in front of the rock wall, and with a stiff kick knocked a hole big enough for him to stick his head through. “No sunlight, sir. Got a match?” Matt gave him a momentarily stunned look, then realized the joke. “Just kidding,” Bradley said. “I know it’s the Fourth of July and all, sir.”

Inside the wall, illuminated by the corporal’s small flashlight, stacks upon stacks of 107 mm rockets—the type that Camp Blessing had been receiving for the past month—stood in dusty waiting. Bradley and Marines of his squad knocked man-size holes in the house’s other false walls, finding a total of two hundred Chinese-made 107 mm rockets, two hundred 82 mm mortar rounds (another favorite munition of Shah’s for attacking Camp Blessing), mortar tubes and base plates, RPG launchers, RPG rounds, AK-47s, PK machine guns, boxes upon boxes of ammunition—literally tons of munitions, requiring four convoys to remove and transport to Blessing (Matt would designate much of it to be used by the ASF for camp defense). Enough weapons had been removed to keep an operation like Shah’s running for years. Bartels, knowing full well that ACM supporters rarely kept all their weapons in one location, returned to another of the man’s properties, a small store, the dimensions of which the lieutenant again determined didn’t add up. This time around, however, Matt had with him a Marine Corps combat engineer, who recommended against Bradley kicking any holes in walls housing old, potentially unstable explosives. With everyone a good distance back, the engineer set off a small charge of C4, leveling half of the store and revealing another ton of rockets and mortars. In the days following, the now-exposed ACM supporter had his grandchildren haul five truckloads of dangerous munitions to Camp Blessing. “He’s had enough of you. He’s decided that you can have it all,” one of the grandkids told Matt.

“Sorry, took longer than twelve hours, sir,” Bartels informed Rob Scott.

“Not a problem, Bartels. You did good there at ‘the edge of the empire. ’ That’s by far the biggest ACM cache yet. That makes you the cache king, Lieutenant.”

Matt laughed, but Rob’s pronouncement would hold true to the very end of the deployment, as the 4 July find remained the single largest the battalion uncovered during their entire tour. But it wasn’t the last for the Blessing Marines, who would uncover a total of thirty-four stores of weapons during their seven months in-country.

Although Shah had been deprived of a massive store of weapons, his exploits brought him assets far more valuable—notoriety