Victory Point - Ed Darack [98]
“What’s with those dogs?” Donnellan asked. “In that boxing ring?”
Kinser recounted the “Special Forces dogs” story. “We have boxing matches, every Friday—so long as we’re not getting attacked, that is. If you stay long enough you’ll get to see the 107 mm rockets land just short of the perimeter. Pretty exciting, sir!”
As much as he wanted to remain at the “tip of the spear,” however, Donnellan left the unorthodox fire base a few hours later, having noted a few suggestions for changes.
“Work with Tom Wood to get an op together. Get a full suite of concepts—conventional schemes of maneuver,” Donnellan instructed Captain Matt Tracy, with whom he’d arrived in Afghanistan on the same flight. “We’re not gonna get him through any high-speed, sexy, helo-inserted raid in the middle of the night.”
“Roger,” responded Tracy, who personally likened ⅔’s situation after Red Wings to a third-quarter 20-0 enemy advantage . . . and after the IED hit to a fourth-quarter, 30-0 near shutout. Tracy, who came in to work with Tom Wood as the assistant to the OpsO, had just finished the nine-month-long Expeditionary Warfighting School, or EWS, in Quantico, Virginia. Designed to prepare USMC infantry officers at captain level for combat operation planning and development, the course work had covered a compendium of skills, from maneuver strategy to fire support, to deconfliction, to a comprehensive knowledge of the Marine Corps Planning Process, a regimented methodology of formulating combat operations rooted in traditional conventional-maneuver war fighting. Central to this process is the development of multiple “courses of action,” so that the command staff has a pool from which to choose the very best course, or the capacity to construct one with the best aspects from the pool. Tracy developed two and Wood devised one. And while the battalion would ultimately choose Wood’s, Tracy had shown that he possessed both an uncanny instinct for tactical planning and a quick-firing mind that was ideal for tracking the complexities of an ever-developing combat operation; this led to his designation by the battalion as the fire-support coordinator for the upcoming op, a crucial role requiring the interface of the key elements of artillery, mortar, and close air-support fire with ground-troop maneuver. He also came up with the name of the operation: Whalers, after the New England Whalers hockey team.
“We’re gonna squeeze him out—slowly, and force him into contact right where we want him,” Wood began his brief of Whalers to Donnellan. The OpsO swept his hands over a map of the Sawtalo Sar region, up the throats of the valleys that radiated about the peak like gnarled pinwheel blades. “We know from intel that his egress route will likely be here, down the Chowkay Valley, or possibly the Narang.” Wood paused for a moment. “So we insert troops simultaneously into the Korangal and the Shuryek, pushing Shah and his men south toward either the Narang or the Chowkay as our guys march up the valleys. Twelve hours after the first Marines head into the Korangal and Shuryek, we insert troops up into the Narang, blocking his route there; and twelve hours after that, we send grunts up the Chowkay, and literally force him into a fight somewhere in the high Korangal, where he’s completely surrounded on all sides.”
“When was the last time American troops went up the Chowkay?” Donnellan asked.
“To my knowledge—” The OpsO abruptly stopped. “I don’t know of any patrols or missions into the Chowkay,” Wood continued to ponder. “But that doesn’t mean we haven’t made forays up there, at some time, that I just don’t know about.”
“As we develop the specifics of this operation, we’ll need to send a patrol up there, to probe the valley, to see how the locals react—maybe even harvest some intel.” Donnellan believed that a mission not so much of reconnaissance but of “feeling