by Ed Darack
Long before Westerfield would include in-country intel gleaned by ⅔ in his workflow, the intel officer had been vexed by one particular individual whose name he’d seen on numerous classified reports. Westerfield didn’t know where he was from, or what organizations he’d been aligned or was now aligned with. He didn’t even know if he’d planned or taken part in any large insurgent operations—almost certainly he hadn’t, just some small ambushes. Faceless to Westerfield, the insurgent could easily be overlooked, seeming, at that point in early June of 2005, to be just a two-bit operator. But what tugged at Westerfield’s attention wasn’t what this small-timer had done, or what the intel officer thought he was capable of doing, but what Westerfield surmised the insurgent aspired to be.
“Why go after old real estate?” he asked Tom Wood during an intel briefing one early June afternoon. “We already know who the HVTs and MVTs [High and Medium Value Targets] are. And more importantly, they know that we know who they are. I’m sure of it. We need to identify the hungry ones, the ones at the bottom who want to claw their way up to fill any real or perceived insurgent power vacuums. They’re the guys who’ll cause us the biggest problems. They’ll do anything. He’ll do anything.” Westerfield used an “investment” metaphor to define his strategy. “We should buy low. Get in at the bottom before he has a chance of proving himself of medium or high value,” he said with a sarcastic grin, vowing to uncover everything about the target—a target about which he, at that time, knew little. But that little included the target’s name: Ahmad Shah. While ⅔ would have some of the world’s most advanced SIGINT and imagery intel (IMINT) made available to them by Task Force Devil, Westerfield knew that the only way to glean positive, actionable intelligence on Shah would be through time-tested, boots-on-the-ground HUMINT work. He needed a solid lead . . .
The 720 Marines and their attachments of ⅔’s main element began departing Hawaii on the first of June 2005, leaving behind the breezy, cloud-dotted summer skies of Oahu and the friends and family who had come to see them roar away on chartered jumbo jets bound for the other side of the globe. Days later, they launched into Afghanistan on Air Force C-17s and C-130s from Ganci (Manus) Air Base in the northern lowlands of Kyrgyzstan, en route to Bagram Air Base, just north of Kabul. From Bagram, the battalion dispersed throughout their Maryland-size, three-province area of operation as the Marines of 3/3 prepared to come home. With battalion headquarters located at Jalalabad Airfield (JAF) in Nangarhar province, all but one platoon of Echo Company established themselves at Camp Wright in the Kunar’s provincial capital of Asadabad; Fox Company went to Laghman province’s Mehtar Lam forward operating base; and Battalion Command based Golf Company just down the road from their JAF COC at the Jalalabad Provincial Reconstruction Team base (J-Bad PRT). Based on Cooling’s advice, MacMannis had Weapons Company train and deploy as a standard infantry company; known in-country as Whiskey Company, they co-located with Headquarters and Services Company at the Battalion COC at Jalalabad Airfield. And placed far in the hinterlands of the Kunar’s Hindu Kush, at the head of the Pech Valley at the storied village of Nangalam, First Platoon of Echo Company (Echo-1) took up residence at what the battalion would come to know as the “edge of the empire,” a lonely, frequently rocketed and mortared outpost at the end of a long, rutted dirt road, a firebase named Camp Blessing.
The Marines of Camp Blessing would prove vital to the successes of the battalion’s forthcoming operations, in a number of ways. The first of ⅔’s Marines arrived at Blessing in mid-May as part of the ADVON: Second Lieutenant Patrick Kinser—Echo-1’s platoon commander—and his radio operator, Lance Corporal Corey Diss. Just hours after arriving at the outpost, Kinser and Diss embarked on their first combat operation in Afghanistan, a patrol with Marines of 3/3 led by Second Lieutenant Rick Posselt, a close personal friend of Kinser’s from the Basic School as well as Infantry Officers’ Course. Kinser immediately felt at home in the austere terrain, having trained as a mountain leader at the Mountain Warfare Training Center and having proven time and again to have a never-ending reserve of stamina on the grueling training grounds in the mountains of California and western Nevada during the battalion’s predeployment workup.
The patrol, composed of 3/3 Marines, ASF, and Kinser and Diss, pushed outside of Blessing’s wire at dawn on 20 May and traveled through the dusty streets of Nangalam, past houses of stone and mud and across donkey-plowed fields. Breathing the pure, dense air of a Hindu Kush morning, Kinser felt that he’d stepped into his true element as he made eye contact with the locals he knew only from books, magazine articles, and lectures prior to arriving at this enclave “forgotten by time.” As the patrol pushed down the deeply incised Pech Valley, the roar of the Pech River gave Kinser an intuitive understanding of the raw natural power of the magnificent landscape, inspiring in the young lieutenant an insatiable appetite to press farther into the cavernous valleys and onto the chiseled peaks and ridges that surrounded him.
The Marines and ASF wasted no time during their patrol, covering eight klicks (kilometers) in just a few hours under the rising sun—a sun that warmed the landscape in a way that Kinser had never experienced before, showering the terrain with crisp yet enervating heat. “Wow, sir, you ever seen any place like this?” Diss asked Kinser during one of the patrol’s few rests.
“Hell no,” the tall, chiseled-featured, and guttural-voiced lieutenant who resembled a young Clint Eastwood replied as he shot glances at the scene before them—an abandoned home, a solitary tree clinging to a vertical rock face, a boulder the size of a school bus perched at the edge of an overhanging cliff. “And you, Diss?” he asked his RO with a half-cocked grin.
“Well, sir . . .” The lanky lance corporal scanned around and thought for a second. “I’m from the middle of the San Luis Valley in southern Colorado. We got high peaks all around us there, sir, some of them over fourteen thousand feet. It’s a huge, beautiful valley, sir. Really different than any other place in Colorado. Cool in the summer, cold like Alaska in the winter. But, sir, nothing—I mean nothing—like this. Both places have mountains, but this place—it’s like—it’s like Mars or something, sir.”
The patrol pushed past a steep, triangular incline of shattered rock that doglegged in front of the opening of a shadowed valley. “Korangal,” Posselt announced, motioning with a nod. Lieutenant Kinser stopped in his tracks, firmly gripping his M16A4 at his side, and stared into the throat of what he had come to know as one of the most deadly corners of the War on Terror.
“Korangal.” The lieutenant nodded and shot a quick glance to Diss, who was equally taken by the ominous sight. “Hope to spend some time up there,” Kinser remarked with an almost lustful grin. The patrol broke off the Pech three klicks farther east of the Korangal’s opening, at the village of Matin, where the group entered the Shuryek Valley. The terrain now steeper and the trails narrower, Kinser bounded up the west side of the valley, his swelling enthusiasm for the terrain far overwhelming any burning in his leg muscles. Diss, as he would do throughout the entire deployment, kept up with him.
“Glad I was born and raised at seven thousand feet in Colorado, sir. Not sure I could keep up if I was born in Florida or something.” Crack! “Wha? . . .”
“Contact!” Posselt bellowed. Crack!
“Single shots. Sniper fire,” Kinser calmly surmised as he raised his M16 from behind the cover of a large boulder and scanned the vaulting terrain with his ACOG (Advanced Combat Optical Gunsight, a sight that projects a bright view of the subject with clear ranging tick marks projected in red, mounted to most of the battalion’s M16s). “Ever been shot at before, Diss?” he asked. Diss shook his head. “Me neither. Not sure I like it too much, but I’m really gonna love shootin’ back as soon as we find these fuckers.”
“There it is, that small house up there!” Posselt yelled.
“Got it.” Kinser located the house, built of and surrounded by stones, naturally camouflaging it. “Can’t see anyone up there, though.”
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br /> “ASF caught a glimpse. They’re hiding in there,” Posselt stated. “We’ll direct-lay some 60s.”
“That’ll let ’em know we got their position,” Kinser said, beginning to laugh.
The first 60 mm mortar, fired by direct laying, where the mortarmen hand-elevates the tube (with the bottom of the launcher placed on the ground with no base plate), landed just short of the building. Whump! The explosion echoed throughout the valley. The second shot hit dead-on.
“Hey, Diss. We’re officially in the war now. Congratulations,” the lieutenant proudly announced as he stood atop the rock Diss crouched behind, scanning the area.
“Thanks, SIR!”
The patrol closed on the house and discovered two men, huddling inside—and one Chinese rip-off version of a Soviet Dragunov 7.62 mm sniper rifle. Just hours after moving into their new home, twenty-four-year-old Second Lieutenant Patrick Edward Kinser of Jonesville, Virginia, and nineteen-year-old Lance Corporal Corey Diss of Center, Colorado, became the first Marines of ⅔ deployed as a battalion to directly engage an enemy in over thirty-five years.
“I think I’m gonna like it here in the Hindu Kush,” Kinser said with a big grin.
“I’m just gonna make sure to keep the radios working, sir,” Diss replied.
As Scott Westerfield delved into the work of unmasking Shah and other targets on his list in early June, Tom Wood set about developing a plan to eliminate those targets. He contacted Erik Kristensen, and the two worked up a model based on Stars to restabilize and bolster security in the Korangal Valley area that used NAVSOF for the first two phases of the mission. But while the SEALs of Team 10 and their associated SEAL Delivery Vehicle Team (SDVT—SEALs who would tactically support Team 10) were eager to join with ⅔ for the mission, the new CJSOTF-A commander put a halt to the notion. No longer would the Marines be able to assume de facto tactical control of their entire missions through intel sharing and detailed planning of each phase of an operation that would then have SEALs and Marines working side-by-side “for the op,” and not for one another. Rather, the mission would be required to adhere to a “supported/supporting” flip-flop command and control structure: NAVSOF would assume command of the operation for the opening phases (with Marines supporting them—on the Marines’ own operation ); once the SEALs and SDVT personnel departed, the Marines would take control and theoretically be “supported” by SOF, but supported only in that they would have access to certain special operations assets that typically wouldn’t be deployed in service of conventional forces.
The order blindsided Wood; he viewed the construct as a blatant and unbelievable smack in the face of the basic command and control rules to which his institutional Marine Corps DNA governed him to adhere. The order—founded on USSOCOM doctrine (and issued through that doctrine’s strict interpretation)—roared down the pike directly from CJSOTF-A, and ⅔ would have to live with it. But the op had to proceed. SIGINT and HUMINT hits trickled in; nothing ground-breaking, but Westerfield was steadfastly working hard with his Marines to zero in on Shah; more importantly, the intel officer and his chief, Staff Sergeant Chuck Atherton, were developing a feel for the target’s movements, enabling Wood to sketch a general plan of attack against the insurgents and terrorists, allowing the Marines to further the stabilization work that 3/3 had begun, but that had been disrupted.
Wood—who first became a Marine as an enlisted grunt before working through a university degree to become an infantry officer—redoubled his efforts and hatched a plan that would use conventional forces exclusively: Marines would hit the ground from the very beginning of the op, with later phases merging local Afghan National Army soldiers into the mission. Like the initial Stars model (the concept of which had already been approved by Colonel Donahue by early June), a small reconnaissance and surveillance team would monitor the target cell’s suspected area of interest from a clandestine location, shaping the op through their continuous feed of information about the target area. Once the team positively identified the target(s), the main force would insert by helicopter—at night for maximum surprise—both cordoning the area and, with the help of the reconnaissance and surveillance team, taking down the cell. Later phases would have Marines maintaining security and presence by undertaking humanitarian and MEDCAP work.
For the opening phases of the op, Tom looked to use Ronin, one of four scout/sniper teams that composed the Battalion’s Scout/Sniper Platoon (part of Headquarters and Services Company). Ronin was led by thirty-three-year-old Sergeant Keith Eggers, an unassuming Californian who had not only completed both the grueling summer and winter Mountain Leader Courses at the Mountain Warfare Training Center (courses with student attrition rates upward of 50 percent in which select Marines train to lead units through mountainous and cold-weather environments), but had been a mountain leader instructor at the base during the nineties, making him ideally suited for the Kunar’s terrain. Almost superhumanly athletic, Keith regularly carried over 120 pounds of gear—including encrypted radios, MREs and water, an M4 carbine, an M9 9 mm sidearm, a rangefinder and scope, and the M40A3 7.62 mm bolt-action USMC sniper rifle—throughout the Hindu Kush, leading his team for miles at a time, often covering thousands of feet of altitude gain in single movements. Tom’s plan would have Eggers lead a team of six (a standard sniper team “plussed up” with two additional Marines for added security) deep into the Korangal Valley region to surveil Ahmad Shah’s suspected safe houses, positively identify Shah, any of his underlings, and his exact location, then pass word to the COC for the op to press ahead. A company-size force of Marines would then insert by helicopter, cordoning Shah’s safe house(s) and either kill or capture the target and his men. As the helicopters inserted the grunts, two other companies of Marines would form “blocking positions,” inserting either by foot or by convoy, denying the enemy an escape route.
The success of his draft plan hinged on one pivotal asset, however: helicopter support. While Keith and his small team could penetrate the region at night undiscovered, a company was simply too large to move through that area and not be seen or heard—they had to insert with blazing speed by air. Had ⅔ been part of a MAGTF, the air issue wouldn’t have been a problem, but the Marines didn’t own any helicopters in-country as part of a joint task force. Wood set out to get “buy-in” from Task Force Sabre, the large Army conventional aviation element that fell under CJTF-76 in command. Sabre had both UH-60 Blackhawks and the massive, double-rotored CH-47 Chinooks, renowned by helicopter pilots throughout the world as one of, if not the best high-altitude helicopter ever made; Sabre’s Chinooks would fit the bill perfectly. ⅔ could get the Stars-based op done without dangerously compromising command and control, using all conventional assets. Or so Wood thought.
Sabre was stretched thin; they served as aviation support for not just RC-East, but all of Afghanistan, meaning ⅔ would have to compete with other units throughout the entire country for their help. Furthermore, Wood realized that depending on the final target zone, troops might have to insert via fastrope if trees prohibited the aircraft from touching down—but Sabre’s Chinooks would first have to be upfitted to accommodate fastropes. The major deal breaker with Sabre, however, came with the time and date of the op—Wood foresaw a possible late June launch date, possibly the twenty-eighth or twenty-ninth, which would keep in the spirit of the op tempo MacMannis had ordered, but would give Westerfield enough time to harvest and process the necessary intel to feed to Wood in order to finalize a detailed mission plan. Inserting covertly at night meant the aircraft would have to operate completely blacked out, with the pilots flying “on goggles”—night-vision gear that uses passive sensors to amplify any ambient light, primarily from moon-reflected sunlight. But while the Chinook pilots themselves were more than willing and capable of low-ambient-light ops, their guidelines stated that they could only fly with at least 25 percent lunar illumination. In late June of 2005, however, the moon wouldn’t rise above the high mountains of the Hindu Kush until well past
midnight—and once it was above the ridgelines, lunar illumination would fall just short of the requisite 25 percent. Sabre’s Chinooks were out for such a late-June launch date.
That left Wood with two alternatives. The first would have him plan the operation with the direct-action and associated cordon phase going down during daylight hours, using Sabre. But based on Priddy’s earlier counseling on the ISR of the Korangal, Tom knew that the insurgent and terrorist cells would know immediately that an operation was imminent as Marines who would form the operation’s blocking positions would almost certainly tip off the innumerable “eyes” of the hills throughout the region as the grunts readied to move. Most Afghans in Kunar’s mountains run their lives with the sun—up at dawn, to sleep just after dusk—a nighttime insert would best position the Marines for surprise, leaving Wood with just one option: Task Force Brown, the in-country designation of the Special Operations Air Regiment (Airborne), or 160th SOAR(A)—the “Night Stalkers.”
One of the most secretive of USSOCOM’s units, the 160th hails from Army SOF and primarily supports direct-action hard-hit units—inserting special operations personnel for shockingly fast counterterror and other surgical-strike operations—often by fastrope, which their helicopters have special modifications to quickly deploy. The aviators of the 160th aren’t just capable of low-illum missions, they fly, with rare exception, only at night, seeing the world before them through the most advanced visualization equipment available. In Afghanistan, TF-Brown flew the MH-47D and MH-47E Chinooks, comprehensively modified conventional CH-47 Chinooks (hence the M designation) giving the craft higher speeds (faster than even attack helicopters), extended range, and heavier armaments and more robust onboard defense systems, among a number of other attributes. Wood saw TF-Brown as the vital cornerstone for his mission concept’s success. But the 160th fell under SOF rules, and therefore, by doctrine, the Night Stalkers couldn’t theoretically support ⅔. But Wood felt that CJSOTF-A could make a reasonable exception, as he wasn’t seeking to control a ground SOF element, but an aviation support unit. The operations officer, fiercely devoted to the young enlisted “trigger puller” Marines who would carry out his plans, had to formulate a mission that was tactically rock solid from a command and control perspective, but one where the Marines who would undertake the actual operation would have the best available chances of success and survivability. The OpsO would have to scrap his plan for a conventional-forces-only operation and begin anew with a plan that utilized TF-Brown—but to what extent would he be forced to compromise the rigid command and control structure he knew to be vital to get support from the 160th? As the days ticked away and the intel on Shah trickled in, he would find his answer.