Victory Point - Ed Darack [99]
On the evening of 30 July, with the battalion leadership’s eyes focused on the second week of August as the kickoff for Whalers, First Lieutenant Jesse “Chiz” Chizmadia, commander of Whiskey Company’s First Platoon, ventured into the Chowkay with sixteen of his Marines along with an equal-size force from Whiskey-3. Anxious and unsure about what they’d find, or even if other outside forces had gone into the Chowkay since the start of the war, Jesse knew that the Soviets had tried to penetrate deep into the chasm that Alexander the Great had passed by during his march up the Kunar Valley. He’d also heard the reports of those Soviets—entire armored columns, in fact—who were never seen or heard from again, earning the Chowkay the name “Valley of Death.”
Narrow, dizzyingly steep in places, and violently washed out along much of its route, the road into the Chowkay made the worst of the Pech Road seem like a superhighway. Slowly edging up the road, which was etched onto the face of a cliff with a four-hundred-foot sheer drop, the Marines finally reached a point through which their Humvees could no longer pass. Jesse and his Marines dismounted and continued on foot. After two and a half days, they’d seen no sign of enemy activity, or that of any outsider, at least since the Soviets. They returned to JAF with stories and photographs and reported that the locals seemed friendly, even offering watermelon at one village.
With Chizmadia’s mission successfully completed, the battalion finalized Whalers’ specifics. On the night of 7 August, platoons of Echo Company would simultaneously enter the Korangal and Shuryek valleys from the Pech River Valley on the north side of Sawtalo Sar. Twelve hours later, Marines of Golf Company would enter the Narang Valley on the mountain’s south side, and twelve hours after that, Marines of Fox Company would push into the Chowkay, one valley west of the Narang. Wood, Donnellan, Westerfield, and Rob Scott felt that the final showdown between the Marines and Shah’s small but growing army would take place in the upper Korangal, possibly by Chichal, once the extremist determined that all of his escape routes had been blocked, as Fox and Echo met at the planned rendezvous point at the tiny village of Qalaygal, about five kilometers to the southeast of Chichal at the very upper reaches of the Korangal. Jim Donnellan and Tom Wood would head downrange with other key battalion staff and a large contingent of Afghan National Army soldiers, participating in the operation on the north side of Sawtalo Sar. Matt Tracy would perform his roles at A-Bad, and accompanying Matt would be twenty-seven-year-old Captain Zach Rashman, a Marine CH-53D heavy-lift helicopter pilot working with ⅔ as a forward air controller. But while Rashman would pride himself on the large amount of time he spent in the field over the course of the battalion’s deployment, during Whalers, the FAC would spend his time entrenched in a concrete room with Tracy, maintaining constant contact with all aircraft in the area of operations. Rob Scott would remain at JAF, maintaining continuous communication between Marine commanders, Task Force Devil, and CJTF-76. During Whalers, Rob would continue doing what he did best—and had been doing since he checked into the battalion—keeping the ⅔ machine rolling forward toward their mission goal, which for Whalers was to “disrupt ACM activity, providing stability and security in support of the upcoming September elections.”
Wood and other senior ⅔ staff would lean on time-tested USMC tactics and techniques, literally taking pages from the Small Wars Manual in their development of Whalers. Indigenous forces would not just accompany Donnellan and his staff during the op, but travel in trace of all units, learning and honing their combat skills under the guidance of the Marines in the vein of O’Bannon during the Barbary Wars of 1805. All communication would be tightly integrated—tested and retested— with redundant backup, before Whalers kicked off. Although aerial