by Ed Darack
“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 out” the valley, although risky, was necessary.
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 resupply drops might be available from high-flying C-130s, the grunts would portage their gear deep into hidden corners of the region on their own backs and on the backs of scrawny local mules. The plan of action tightly integrated all available indirect fire assets, from 81 mm mortars, to Doghouse’s 105 mm howitzers, to close air support assets including AH-64 Apaches and A-10s—planned just as they had during the predeployment training exercises they’d done at Twentynine Palms. This would be no surgical, highly specialized strike triggered by technology-dependent SIGINT hits; instead, Whalers would unfurl on the land, progressing upward step by thrusting step, funneling the enemy through the Hindu Kush’s labyrinthine topography into the Marines’ grasp to crush Shah and his force.
Although tasked with undertaking one of the key roles in Whalers—that of driving deep into the Chowkay as the final piece of the op’s master plan—Marines of Fox Company hadn’t yet operated in the Sawtalo Sar region. Upon arriving at their forward operating base at Laghman province’s Mehtar Lam, the Fox Marines immediately embarked on missions targeting an extremist operating in the area, a man who called himself Pashtun. Pashtun had been responsible for killing two of 3/3’s Marines in May of 2005, and had proved an elusive enemy. Led by the stalwart Captain Kelly Grissom, who first served as an enlisted combat engineer before graduating magna cum laude from North Carolina State and commissioning as a second lieutenant as an infantry officer, individual platoons of Fox embarked on grueling multiday operations that brought them deep into the Hindu Kush, and drove Marines to their physical breaking points.
Not just surviving the gravity-fighting ordeals, but growing increasingly stronger, the grunts of Fox Company quickly acclimatized to their new environment. Rotating the company’s three platoons in a regular pattern—an outside-the-wire mission tracking Pashtun, then a rest cycle, then a stint at base security before embarking on another foray into the heights—Grissom drove his Marines to hone their mountain-fighting skills and prepare their lungs and legs for the high altitude and steep terrain. By August, the grunts of Fox were ready for the combination of heat, steep earth, and seemingly endless days of hauling their 80- to 110-pound combat loads in chafing packs encased in suffocating body armor in the Chowkay.
Faced with determining just what size force he should send into Whalers, Grissom looked to base a maneuver element around a single platoon, reinforcing them with 81 mm mortars. And the platoon Grissom chose for the critical role in Whalers was Fox-3. Commanded by twenty-three-year-old Second Lieutenant J. J. “Konnie” Konstant, Fox-3 had seen its share of foot-pounding, back-galling movements into the cruel Hindu Kush. During one such operation, the platoon had actually pushed into Nuristan, through the Alingar Valley, where they took mortar fire from a series of caves. Charging ahead, sensing that Pashtun must be close because of the intens
ity of the attack, Konnie radioed Grissom, pleading for clearance to assault the cave complex. But Fox-3 had pushed outside of ⅔’s area of operation; and their patrol fell on 28 June—when all available air assets had been put on standby for the rescue of the SEALs, so Fox-3 returned to base. A high school basketball star from the south side of Chicago who attended St. Ambrose University as a business and finance major on an athletic scholarship, Konnie seemed to have his entire life planned in his very early twenties. Then, like so many in the current crop of young Marines, he woke on the morning of September 11, 2001, to the infamous al-Qaeda attacks, attacks planned in the very mountainous part of the globe through which he would lead troops in 2005. He shelved his plans to become a businessman and aimed for USMC infantry.
Konnie, along with Fox-3’s fear-inspiring thirty-two-year-old platoon sergeant, Lee Crisp III, a staff sergeant from Laurel, Mississippi, aggressively challenged every one of the grunts of his platoon, both physically and mentally. “Where we going and when we goin’ to get there?” was a question often uttered by Konnie’s Marines early in their deployment during long foot-mobile ops.
“We’ll tell you when we get there. Now keep movin’, and keep lovin’ life,” was the inevitable answer from either Crisp or Konnie. Konnie saw Crisp as the ideal hard-ass, unfaltering in his projection of rigidity and toughness, and Crisp fondly regarded Konnie, whose cool, cigarette-smoking manner and calm drawl reminded him of John Wayne, as a “crazy-ass motherfucker.” Grissom, who on more than one occasion pulled both Konnie and Crisp aside to discuss what the captain felt to be their overextending of Fox-3’s grunts, ultimately viewed the duo as uncannily in phase with his own outlook on leadership through fire.
“I really don’t think you can go in with just a single platoon reinforced, Grissom,” Donnellan told Kelly during the latter part of the Whalers planning process. Based on the after-action report of Jesse Chizmadia’s brief mission into the Chowkay, Grissom surmised that the terrain would likely pose the toughest challenges to the grunts of Fox-3 and that the threat of enemy contact in the local villages seemed small. “You really should strongly consider taking two platoons,” Donnellan insisted, knowing that while Shah would most likely retreat to Chichal for a fight, as that was the village in which he had the strongest ties, he and his men could lash out anywhere in the four valleys surrounding Sawtalo Sar. Grissom agreed, ultimately planning to take a second platoon—Fox-1—and attach a full 81 mm mortar section (four 81 mm mortar tubes and full crew) and a sniper team, in addition to forty-five Afghan National Army soldiers.
Konnie, looking to learn as much as possible about this part of the Hindu Kush that he and his Marines had never before ventured into, sought the most recent after-action reports from operations in the Sawtalo Sar area both to glean general insight into the region and to learn Shah’s tactics. The report he thought to be most relevant, of course, had been that of the Navy SEAL Marcus Luttrell. Konnie studied the two-and-a-half-page after-action and attempted to visualize the team’s final moments. Shortly after Luttrell’s team had been soft-compromised by a couple of local goat herders, Shah and his men had opened up on them. The SEALs moved into the gulch below them, attempting to establish comms with friendly forces. But Shah’s group, which Luttrell estimated to number between twenty and thirty, killed all but the corpsman, then landed an RPG round next to Luttrell, knocking him behind a rock. Attending to his own extensive wounds after regaining consciousness, Luttrell evaded the ACM fighters by hiding deep in the recesses of the gulch, even submerging himself at one point in a pool of water as Shah and his men passed just feet by him. Konnie, like others in the battalion, also studied the footage from the two Shah videos, noting the extensive amount of gear now in the hands of the extremist and his group. While most of the stolen gear showed up on the video, Lieutenant Konstant, after reviewing the recon team’s equipment manifest, wondered what had happened to the sniper rifle. Just like the night-vision equipment, the M4s, the spotting scopes, the laser rangefinders, and the grenade launchers, he had to assume that Shah and his men had in their possession, and would possibly use, the powerful, long-range sniper rifle against the Marines of ⅔ in any engagement during Whalers.
But just as Shah had “adopted” the SEALs’ equipment, the Marines would adapt their operational tactics and gear roster to determine if Shah and his men had American forces in the sights of any of those M4s, grenade launchers, or even the sniper rifle as well as their own weaponry. “You need the ICOMs. That is how they communicate,” a confidant known as “Cousin-O” informed Rob Scott during the planning of Whalers. “If the terps can listen to the conversations of Shah and his men, you’ll know exactly what is about to happen.” Cousin-O, who’d been imprisoned by the Soviets in western Afghanistan in the eighties, then escaped after killing two of his prison guards to flee to the United States by way of Iran and Germany, ultimately worked for the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California, before directly aiding American forces inside Afghanistan. But the standard military-gear acquisition process could take months, leaving the Marines without a potentially critical piece of gear. “Don’t worry. Just get me the money and I’ll get someone to go into Peshawar and buy the ICOMs for you there. I’ll have them for you in just a few days,” Cousin-O confidently reassured Rob. In his typical fashion, Rob got Cousin-O the cash, reminding himself that it was his job to keep the battalion progressing forward in its mission, however unorthodox the means.
9
WHALERS UNLEASHED
Deep into the night of 7 August, with brilliant starlight hanging in the sky above the Hindu Kush, Echo Company’s First Platoon slipped into the Shuryek, and Second and Third platoons entered the Korangal. Twelve hours later, the operation was declared a victory—without a shot fired, or a single sighting of Shah or any of his men. “CJTF-76 decided that we’ve met the end state of the op,” Rob Scott incredulously reported to Tom Wood. “Over before it even began.” With the operative words of Whalers’ objective being “disruption of ACM activity,” senior CJTF-76 staff, to whom Wood had briefed the mission just days earlier, decided that the mere presence of coalition forces in such numbers in the Korangal and Shuryek had constituted sufficient “disruption.”
“Sounds to me like they’re nervous. Gun-shy after Red Wings,” Wood opined about CJTF-76’s stance. “We came. We didn’t really see anything. They figured we conquered—just because we went in there. Now we’re out.”
Rob Scott, wedged squarely between keeping ⅔’s mission objectives on track and the in-country higher command’s restrictions, once again set about developing a work-around solution. After consulting with Wood and Donnellan, he had ⅔’s operational fix: as CJTF-76 continuously monitored ⅔’s progress, Task Force Devil would control the battalion’s movements by phase line, meaning that individual units—Fox Company in the Chowkay, Golf in the Narang, etc.—could only move to a predetermined latitude within a given time span, with approval required to continue beyond each line. The operation also had a concrete time limit as a result of the upcoming elections: Whalers needed to be completed by the nineteenth of August. While the parameters restricted the fluidity of the op in what would certainly prove to be an evolving battle, at least the grunts of ⅔ would have their second crack at Whalers.
CJTF-76 command, however, worried about another dramatic helicopter shoot-down, held strong reservations about the op. The only air assets, other than close air support and high-flying C-130s for cargo drops, they’d grant the battalion were Air Ambulance medevac birds, absolutely crucial for the long-distance movements ⅔’s Marines would be undertaking. CJTF-76 mandated, however, that if medevac missions were to be flown, then the battalion would follow every textbook procedure to the last written letter. ⅔ Command knew that if so much as a single enemy round came anywhere near an American aviation asset in the post-Chinook-shootdown operational atmosphere, then air assets, other than close air support, would be almost impossible to procure in the Kunar for any subse
quent operations. Whalers would prove decisive not only in the battalion’s fight to break the enemy’s back before the elections, but in allowing ⅔ to continue to conduct operations for the remainder of their deployment.
Nearing midnight on 11 August, Second and Third platoons of Echo Company with attached Afghan National Army soldiers swarmed into the Korangal as First Platoon, under Kinser, pushed into the Shuryek with their contingent of ANA. Donnellan, Tom Wood, and Scott Westerfield—the “Jump CP” (a term referencing a forward command post consisting of the battalion commander and some, but not all, of his staff, and in Donnellan’s case during Whalers, two squads of Marines)—accompanied by fifteen Afghan troops, some in senior leadership roles, headed toward the base of Sawtalo Sar’s north ridge. Matt Tracy stood ready at A-Bad to coordinate indirect fire assets with the array of individual units participating in the op, and of course, Rob Scott held the fort at the JAF COC. Keeping the battalion sustained with food, water, ammunition, and other supplies, Captain Jeremy Whitlock, the battalion’s logistics officer, would keep hours as long as Rob’s as Whalers, a truly “distributed op,” marched forward.
At roughly noon on the twelfth, twelve hours after Echo’s troops entered Sawtalo Sar’s northern valleys, Golf Company’s contingent stormed into the Narang, including First Platoon, under Kyle Corcoran, and Second Platoon, under Lieutenant Clif Kennedy, and a platoon of ANA. Grissom, ever conscious of the importance of his Marines’ role in plugging Shah’s final outlet, pored over intel, maps, and after-actions throughout the day. Sleep-deprived but never fatigued, Grissom churned the variables of the tactical calculus lying before him as the Marines of Fox Company rested and prepared to enter the Chowkay. Having studied Chizmadia’s after-action, the captain knew that the locals had been receptive to the Marines during their probing mission—but he also knew that one foray into a remote valley couldn’t come close to determining the true character of the populace, or the threat level they posed. Grissom couldn’t discount even the slightest risk, as just a small handful of well-placed fighters with PK machine guns and RPGs could ruin the day.