Victory Point Read Free Page A

projects and missions, often keeping on task for eighteen hours per day—for endless days on end. Their toils habituated them to the terrain, the climate, the ways of the locals, and the tactics of the enemy. They were now tougher, harder, and sharper than they ever could be back in the rear, regardless of training. But nothing could have prepared them for the ordeals they now faced. This was as real as it could get; for many, this was beyond real—something they never could have imagined they’d face. “Af- fuckin’ - ghanistan,” a lance corporal gasped as he rubbed his numb, bloody feet and pressed his body into a fading sliver of shade. “This is as far away from home as any of us can get.”
    “And we’re about to go deeper into this shit,” another in his fire team added.
    Their training, acclimatization, and acquired knowledge aside, the grunts of Fox-3 that August morning could only describe the merciless swath of land on which they rested as a chunk of a faraway world, smashed onto the opposite side of the planet from their home at idyllic Kaneohe Bay, occupied by people of another time. Ironically, as the Marines pondered not what they knew of this part of Afghanistan, but how little they actually understood it, they not only stood at the bow of history’s unfolding, they were forging that history.
     
     
     
    Few locations puzzle and frustrate historians, geographers, war fighters—anyone with an interest in this crossroads of humanity—more than the mysterious tract of the planet we know as Afghanistan. The country’s tortuous border circumscribes a complex aggregation of land best described as raw, austere, even forbidding and deadly. A part of either Central or South Asia (depending which geographer you consult), Afghanistan abuts land—and only land—on every point of the compass, with Iran defining its western border, Pakistan its southern and eastern boundaries, and the countries of Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and even China hemming the landlocked country on its northern reaches.
    As with most regions of the globe defined by extremes, understanding Afghanistan’s multifaceted cultures and complex history requires learning about the land beneath the feet of those who created its history. A river striking through an otherwise parched countryside creates an agricultural corridor in which villages develop; a pass bisecting a redoubt of high mountains defines a trade route; and of course, steep, frigid peaks block passage into and out of a province or even an entire neighboring country. While jagged mountains dominate Afghanistan’s landscape, broad stretches of low, windswept desert define its extreme southern reaches, and the fertile plains of the Amu Darya River (formerly known as the Oxus River), Afghanistan’s lowest point at 846 feet above sea level, mark the country’s northern border with Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan.

    Afghanistan political map
    But who can even mention or just think of Afghanistan without picturing soaring, seemingly unscalable mountains? More pointedly, who can muse about this region without envisioning that fabled arc of hidden peaks that rules the country’s northeast, a place that has piqued the imaginations of countless would-be explorers and adventurers for centuries—the Hindu Kush? The northwestern extension of what geographers know as the Greater Himalayan Complex, the mountains of the Hindu Kush pierce the crystalline skies above Afghanistan’s northeastern provinces and adjacent borderlands of Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas and Northwest Frontier Province, casting long, dark shadows onto the valleys over which they loom. Thrust miles above sea level through the same geologic processes as their world-famous cousins to the southeast, the Himalaya proper (capped by the 29,035-foot-high Mount Everest), the highest point of the Hindu Kush, the infamous Tirich Mir, lies just ten miles inside Pakistan’s border from Afghanistan.