Victory Point (25 page)

Two days later, after soldier after soldier went down with heat-and-dehydration-related afflictions necessitating a number of emergency CDS drops, less than a third of the original force staggered onto the crash site. The daytime-high temperatures deep in the convection-oven-like dark rock valleys just west of Asadabad rocketed past 120 degrees, sapping the troops’ energy and depleting their water. Meanwhile, Kinser, Eggers, the Marines, and the ASF along with Hamchuck and Henrietta, waited at Kandagal, while Tom Wood awaited approval for ⅔’s portion of the recovery effort. With the crash site secured, the restriction on helicopter flights into the region was lifted, and the grisly job of recovering the bodies began. Finding the fastrope wrapped around the rear rotor assembly, and with the stench of burned flesh and jet fuel hanging low in the air, the recovery team quickly determined that all had died instantly, the pilots’ hands still clutching the controls of the big Chinook.

By 1 July, with no sign of Dietz, Murphy, or Axelson, and with Luttrell clinging to life under the care of Gulab (just four miles to the southeast of Kinser and Eggers’s location), ⅔ was approved to move. With Eggers and Joe Roy bounding ahead to establish well-concealed overwatch positions, Kinser led the larger group of Marines and ASF (flanked by Hamchuck and Henrietta) south into the depths of the Korangal Valley. With the larger group armed with light machine guns and mortars, they could provide immediate fire support to Eggers and Roy—who, in turn, kept a sharp lookout for any ambush Shah may have put in place. Of course, both units maintained solid comms with each other, as well as with Camp Blessing, the battalion COC at JAF, and Wood at Asadabad.

Having been passed a series of grids of the possible locations of the recon SEAL team, Tom Wood contacted Kinser and had him race into action. Kinser grabbed three Marines, and with Hamchuck and Henrietta, they bounded south two miles to the village of Taleban (no relation to Mullah Omar’s group, the
Taliban
) and up one thousand feet from there in a matter of hours. “Nothing, sir. Not a damn thing. Not even a broken branch,” the lieutenant reported.

“Here’s another grid. Keep going.” Wood knew that he could keep the tireless lieutenant racing throughout the entire mountain—just not in the vicinity of Salar Ban, as mandated by
Red Wings II
’s command. For days, the Marines combed the entire Korangal Valley, searching, climbing, descending, linking up with other platoons of Echo, thrashing their feet, enduring biting-cold monsoonal rainfall at night and blistering, humid heat during the day—without success. Golf Company, too, raced throughout the eastern and southern aspects of the Shuryek Valley, but also discovered nothing. Finally, with help from Shina, a SOF team made it to Gulab’s house and brought Luttrell back to safety on 3 July. A day later, the Rangers discovered the bodies of Murphy and Dietz, lying next to each other deep in the chasm of the northeast gulch. Axelson, who had separated from the others of the recon team, possibly to find an open area to establish comms with the MBITR during the height of the ambush, was found almost a week later, on 10 July, with the help of cadaver dogs helicoptered onto the mountain’s slopes.

The American military threw a tremendous amount of assets at the search-and-recovery effort. Air Force Special Operations AC-130 gunships lit up the mountain at night with their onboard 105 mm howitzer, miniguns, and 40 mm Bofors guns; A-10s tore up ridgelines both day and night with their 30 mm cannons, and commanders back at MacDill watched it all, fed imagery from MQ-1 Predator UAVs circling high above the Hindu Kush. Closer to the disaster site, a forward command post was established on Sawtalo Sar’s summit, a post that included four different unit leaders, including Lieutenant Colonel MacMannis; all of them, however, fell under the control of commanders back in Florida. Far removed from the SOF information flow, Kinser, Eggers, and the other Marines wondered what the aircraft had been targeting—or if the barrages were just called in for SEAD prep.

Early in the second week of July, the lieutenant was ordered to link up with SOF near the crest of Sawtalo Sar’s north ridge, above the village of Chichal. Once on scene, he directly spied one of the targets of a recent drop. Below him, at the outskirts of the village, a home on the edge of a cliff smoldered in ruin. A few hours earlier, based on time-sensitive intel indicating that Shah and his men had been hiding at the house, a B-52 from an altitude of forty-five thousand feet had released three GBU-38 five-hundred-pound GPS-guided JDAMs. “We did an off-site BDA [battle damage assessment, “off-site” meaning that nobody had actually physically inspected the damage, just observed it from afar],” one of the Ranger lieutenants told Kinser. “We have twenty enemy KIA [killed in action] and nineteen of their local supporters, for a total of thirty-nine.”

Kinser shook his head in acknowledgment, then requested permission from Wood to do his own,
on-site
BDA, after Task Force Brown Chinooks pulled the beleaguered special operations soldiers off the mountain. He found a slew of dead farm animals and nine dead civilians, but nothing to indicate that any of Shah’s men had been there; although he did find evidence, in the form of written notes, that illegal RPGs and PK machine guns had been kept and sold at the house. The lieutenant stared at the destruction before him, the stench of rotting flesh wafting around him, and shook his head at what he felt to be rank overreaction—and once again, very, very questionable intel.

In fact, Shah and his men had been nowhere near Chichal, or anywhere else on Sawtalo Sar by the first of July, having fled into Pakistan days before the GBU-38s careened into the stone walls of the home. The terrorist, looking to propagandize his way up the ladder of global extremism, clearly looked to follow in the publicity-through-powerfully-shocking-imagery vein of the 1993 extremist attack of U.S. Army Rangers in Somalia, where dead U.S. servicemen were videotaped being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu. During the ambush of the four SEALs, Shah had with him not one, but two videographers. Once in the Peshawar region of Pakistan, most likely at the Shamshatoo camp, Shah edited and distributed footage of one tape, but essentially shelved the second tape he had in his possession, although a few copies slipped into the hands of U.S. intelligence (he possibly withheld the second tape because his image could clearly be seen on certain sequences). The distributed video, with the al-Qaeda-linked “As-Sahab Media” logo superimposed on the lower right side of the clip, shows a shot of the early-afternoon firefight after a computer-animated introduction depicting the destruction of the United States of America and a graphic of Koranic verse. As the videographer descends into the densely treed northeast gulch, the sounds of a heated firefight resonate in the background audio. Three of Shah’s men, but not Shah himself, then approach the bodies of the fallen SEALs in a clip apparently spliced onto the first part of the footage. The clip shows Shah’s execrable henchmen stealing the boots and wristwatches off the dead Americans. The final portion of the ambush video shows the gear that Shah was able to pillage from the recon team, including four helmets; three M4s; stacks of magazines and M203 40 mm grenade rounds; spotting scopes, including a high-power Leupold scope; laser rangefinders; night-vision gear; the MBITR; binoculars; and fragmentation, smoke, and incendiary grenades. Shah even got the team’s Panasonic Toughbook laptop, which can be seen to have taken a round to its upper screen. The video then shows a technician pulling the hard drive from the Toughbook, installing it into another machine, and booting the drive. He then downloads maps of the U.S. embassy in Kabul as well as a U.S. military paper on the ACM’s tactics, techniques, and procedures, one among a host of sensitive information kept on the computer.

The second video shows Shah himself descending into the gulch with two of his men (in addition to the videographer). The audio pops with loud 7.62 rounds rifling downrange from AK-47s, then rattles with short, controlled bursts of automatic 5.56 mm rounds sent back by the SEALs. The terrorist, clad in traditional Pashtun clothes, including a Pakol hat, is carrying his PK machine gun and speaking into his ICOM radio, and one of the two men at his side is clearly a designated RPG gunner—undoubtedly the man who would shoot down the MH- 47 a few hours after the footage of their descent was shot (the second video included time code, and showed a time of 1:57:02 in the afternoon of the twenty-eighth at the beginning of the sequence, hours before the launch of the QRF). Apparently, Shah ordered one videographer to accompany each team of three men—essentially two fire teams—coordinated by Shah through his ICOM. The sounds of the firefight end literally seconds after the start of the clip—the last of the SEALs M4 shots can be heard ringing out at 1:59:25 P.M. on the video.

The two groups of Shah’s men meet shortly after two o’clock in the afternoon, chanting
“Alla-u Akhbar!”
as they rifle through the SEALs’ gear. The videographer shooting footage for the distributed video can be seen holding his camera and chanting
“Alla-u Akhbar! Alla-u Akhbar!”
repeatedly, then the camera zooms to a wide-angle, clear shot of Shah, holding his PK and one of the SEALs’ backpacks, with the steep, sunlit northeast gulch in the background. At 2:15, Shah, one of his men, and both videographers walk back up the gulch, where the time then jumps to 2:38. Under now-overcast skies, one of Shah’s men can be seen rummaging through one of the SEALs’ gear racks on a well-worn trail striking through greener, higher ground as the second videographer steps into the frame. Plucking hand grenades, magazines filled with 5.56 mm rounds, a strobe, and then a map and a compass, he exclaims in Pashto, “Look, an American compass! God is the greatest!” He then finds a pen and shouts at the camera held by the second videographer, “Look, an American pen! God is the greatest!” The man then runs its ink across his left palm, and with a look of australopithecine wonder, proclaims, “And it writes! God is the greatest!” The translated diatribe gives lucid insight into the depths of humanity from which extremists such as Shah cull their underlings.

At 2:40:50, Shah receives a transmission on his ICOM from his second team requesting more rounds for their weapons. As the sky turns darker, a deep boom of thunder echoes throughout the ridges and valleys of Sawtalo Sar, apparently signaling Shah and his men to seek shelter from the impending storm. The footage ends with Shah throwing his PK over his shoulder at 2:43, then moving to head down the trail, possibly to search for Luttrell.

In the distributed video, the producers included a clip of a standard, conventional “ring flight” of Task Force Sabre CH-47 Chinooks (clearly conventional Chinooks, as they lack refueling probes) heading up the Pech River Valley with Apache escorts, included possibly to intimate the upcoming MH-47 shoot-down. However, since both videographers traveled with Shah after the linkup, and since his RPG gunner can’t be seen in the video after the entire crew pillages the SEALs’ bodies, the man who downed the MH-47 probably returned to the summit of the mountain with one or two of Shah’s men (and no videographer), and possibly under orders from the terrorist leader, waited for the rescue helicopters with the intention of shooting one down. More likely, however, the RPG gunner and the others in the cell went to the SEAL insert site to find other gear, gear that the recon team may have cached (such as the fastrope), and then just chanced upon the Task Force Brown Chinooks attempting to insert the SEAL rescue team. Had Shah reasoned that a rescue attempt by helicopter was imminent, he assuredly would have sent at least one of his videographers with the RPG gunner to capture the fiery downing for his propaganda campaign. In the end, however, Shah and his crew really just hit a dark, disastrously spectacular streak of luck. With a total of nineteen servicemen killed in a matter of hours, 28 June 2005 went into the history books as not only the greatest single-day loss of American life in Afghanistan since the beginning of the war nearly four years prior, but the greatest disaster for the 160th, Navy Special Operations Forces, and all of USSOCOM since the command’s founding in 1987.

Shah instantly rocketed into the stratosphere of global terrorist infamy, boosted there not only by the Web posting of his As-Sahab Media video (which never circulated very broadly), but by embarrassingly flawed global media accounts of the tragedy. News outlets printed, televised, and broadcast a host of errors, from the actual name of the operation, calling it “
Operation Redwing
” or “
Operation Red Wing
” to calling Shah “one of Osama bin Laden’s chief lieutenants” or a “top Taliban commander,” to claiming that Shah commanded an army of hundreds or even thousands of Taliban fighters (both videos, later analyzed and authenticated by U.S. military intelligence, showed eight, including Shah himself; furthermore, extremist “commanders” typically lie and exaggerate about how many fighters they command, often multiplying by tens, even hundreds). Media reports also initially claimed that the MH-47 had been shot down by an SA-7 shoulder-launched, heat-seeking, surface-to-air missile, and after being struck by the warhead, the Chinook lumbered through the air for a good mile before setting down on a cliff edge, which crumbled beneath the craft, sending the MH-47 plunging to its destruction. Even a relative neophyte like Shah was able to leverage the error-laden media coverage to his benefit, claiming, after learning of American forces rescuing Luttrell and discovering the bodies of Murphy and Dietz, that he had the fourth member of the team (Axelson) in hiding with him, and would behead the SEAL in a videotaped spectacle. The global media even got the Gulab story wrong, never mentioning Shina, Matt Bartels, or Camp Blessing, and claiming that Gulab himself walked to American forces—at Asadabad.

In the days following the rescue of Luttrell, Marines of Golf Company’s First Platoon, under the command of First Lieutenant Kyle Corcoran, entered Salar Ban and made a brief visit with Gulab as part of the company’s sweep up the Shuryek. The villager seemed to be doing well, but was terribly worried about retaliation from Shah, and had asked to be moved to Asadabad with his family, but was unable to get a response from any Americans at Asadabad’s Camp Wright. In mid-July, as
Red Wings II
wound down, Gulab showed up at Camp Blessing; he met with Matt Bartels and discussed Shina’s harsh treatment at the hands of SOF interrogators, then revealed that while Shina was given money and a number of valuable items as payment for aiding in Luttrell’s rescue, he had received nothing. Gulab also told Matt of a number of death threats against him and his family, and showed him a list, left with a death threat on his doorstep, of the Taliban’s most wanted dead. Number one was George W. Bush; number two, the commander of Camp Blessing; number three, Afghan President Hamid Karzai. Matt, laughing at the list—but not at the death threats against Gulab and his family—immediately got on the line with Rob Scott, who pushed a request all the way up the channels to CJTF-76. Within weeks, Gulab had a job and house in Asadabad, and received a reward for helping save Marcus Luttrell.