Victory Point: Operations Red Wings and Whalers - the Marine Corps' Battle for Freedom in Afghanistan

304 Pages·2009·2.08 MB·English

by  Ed Darack

Table of Contents

Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
PREFACE

Chapter 1 - WELCOME TO AFGHANISTAN
Chapter 2 - THE BATTALION
Chapter 3 - SYNERGY OF SUCCESS
Chapter 4 - INTO THE HINDU KUSH
Chapter 5 - RED WINGS TAKES FLIGHT
Chapter 6 - AMBUSH
Chapter 7 - STORM OF CHAOS
Chapter 8 - REDOUBLED EFFORTS
Chapter 9 - WHALERS UNLEASHED
Chapter 10 - ARMAGEDDON, DENIED
Chapter 11 - ONE RIDGE DISTANT, A WORLD APART
Chapter 12 - STAR WARS
Chapter 13 - KINETIC EXFIL
Chapter 14 - VICTORY POINT

AFTERWORD
Acknowledgements
APPENDIX I - PRIMARY WEAPON SYSTEMS
APPENDIX II - INTERVIEWEES
REFERENCES
INDEX
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Copyright © 2009 by Ed Darack

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Darack, Ed.
Victory point : operations Red Wings and Whalers : the Marine Corps’ battle for freedom in
Afghanistan / Ed Darack.
p. cm.
Includes index.
eISBN : 978-1-10103248-0
1. Operation Red Wings, 2005. 2. Operation Whalers, 2005. 3. Afghan War, 2001—Commando
operations. 4. Afghan War, 2001—Search and rescue operations. 5. United States. Marine
Corps—Afghanistan. 6. United States. Navy. SEALs. I. Title.

DS371.4123.O66D37 2009
958.104’7—dc22
2008047659
http://us.penguingroup.com
To the Marines of ⅔—and the entire Fleet.
Past, present, and future.
PREFACE
Afghanistan. The name alone evokes visions of adventure and exploration in
uncharted mountains, mystery and intrigue in a land traversed by history’s
crossroads, and above all, war in the breathless heights. A landlocked country,
Afghanistan lies in a zone of cultural transition and geographic upheaval. From
empty swaths of sun-beaten desert on its southwestern border with Iran,
Afghanistan’s landscape vaults into ice-hewn mountains in its northeast,
encompassing a broad spectrum of climates and topographies between the two
extremes.
Culturally, Afghanistan reveals itself to be a patchwork of humanity, a medley
of tribes organized loosely within a variety of ethnic groups. Political boundaries
are arbitrary to people in most areas of Afghanistan; what delineates regional
boundaries here are ridgelines and valleys, with villages stitched together by
meandering trails beaten into the sides of airy slopes.
And while most all of Afghanistan—both its people and landscapes—
epitomizes the notion of ruggedness, the eastern Kunar province, that rarely
visited and little-known pocket of the infamous Hindu Kush, can arguably claim
the title as the most austere, the least tamed. The first bullets of the insurgency
that would burgeon into the anti-Soviet resistance were fired here in the late
seventies. Osama bin Laden was known to operate terrorist training camps in the
Kunar and likely ordered the September 11, 2001, attacks against the United
States in this province. And into the summer of 2005, the most fearsome of
Islamic fundamentalist fighters operated in the Kunar.
At the core of this restive province stands a massif cloaked to the outside
world by the very brutal landscape of which it is part, a mountain called Sawtalo
Sar. The peak, one of the highest in this cloud-raked landscape, lies in the Pech
River Valley region of the Kunar, just west of the frontier town of Asadabad. A
number of valleys radiate from and around Sawtalo Sar, valleys such as the
Korangal, the Shuryek, the Narang, and the Chowkay. Deeply recessed into the
high landscape, the villages, pasturelands, and interconnecting ridges and
zigzagging trails of these valleys would become the home of some of the most
dedicated, well-trained, and fervent Islamic fighters remaining along the
Afghan-Pakistan border—and, for that matter, the world.