Victory Point Read Free Page B

Second in height to the 25,289-foot-high Tirich Mir, the mountain known as Noshaq lies squarely on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, at 24,580-feet Afghanistan’s highest point and the fifty-second loftiest spot of land on the planet. Although Noshaq stands as one of the world’s highest peaks, the snow- and ice-plastered mountain, like most of the Hindu Kush, remains cloaked in obscurity. Climbing expeditions rarely tread Noshaq’s cold slopes because of logistical difficulties in this extremely remote part of the world, not to mention the problems posed by the “leftovers” of years of warfare, most notably, Soviet land mines that pepper the landscape on the approach routes to the peak.
    One hundred and twenty miles to the southwest of Noshaq, and over three vertical miles closer to sea level, the Marines of Fox-3 gazed at the pocket of the Hindu Kush that was theirs on the morning of 14 August 2005. Earthquakes shock the Hindu Kush, one of the planet’s youngest and most geologically active ranges, more frequently than virtually any other belt of mountains on the planet, as the chunk of earth known as the Indo-Australian tectonic plate inexorably presses northward into the Eurasian plate, a process that gave birth to the crescent-shaped Himalayan chain and its western anchor, the Hindu Kush, and continues to push these mountains ever higher. Far into their objective, the grunts experienced the results of this geologic collision firsthand: jagged ridgelines, painfully steep gullies, immense boulders dotting the landscape, treacherously loose rock under every footstep, mountain faces scarred by innumerable slides and avalanches, and virtually no flat ground or even gentle slopes anywhere. A classic example of a young and fast-growing mountain range, the Hindu Kush resembles the temperament of a feral animal: brusque and savage.
    Not to be outdone in severity by the rough-hewn land below, the sky overarching the Hindu Kush presents similarly ferocious elements. Afghanistan lies under a global subtropical belt of predominant high pressure, engendering clear, dry air, and hence arid land below. Fox-3 rested that morning at a latitude just south of that of Tehran, Iran, and just north of that of Baghdad, Iraq, on a roughly equal latitude to that of the Marine Corps base in California’s Mojave Desert near the town of Twentynine Palms. Other deserts underlying this wide climatological band ringing the earth include the Sahara, Saudi Arabia’s Rub ‘al-Khali (the Empty Quarter), the Thar, and the Sonoran of North America, which lies to the east of the Mojave. The Hindu Kush’s combination of high mountains and dry air has made for one of the least hospitable places in the world, with bitter-cold winters that see temperatures plunging below minus-fifteen degrees Fahrenheit, and summers where heat rockets to over one hundred and twenty, as Fox-3 would be experiencing just a few hours after their rest. The area’s steep-walled valleys, like the Chowkay, with their large tracts of exposed rock, make life downright hellish for those venturing into these enclaves in the summer, as this rock re-radiates the sun’s intense energy, turning these valleys into immense convection ovens. Between the extremes of the Hindu Kush’s winter and summer months lie ephemeral spans of transition: spring lasts just a few weeks, witnessing crushing torrents of snowmelt during this annual stretch of rapid warming, and autumn brings precipitous drops in both daily highs and nighttime lows, as well as the arrival of snowfall. Yet another factor adding to the severity of ⅔’s mountainous area of operation hails from the northern Indian Ocean, a thousand miles distant: moisture forced landward from the southwest summer monsoon. While the Hindu Kush is located on the far northwestern periphery of the monsoon’s realm of influence, roving thunderheads frequently unleash torrents of pound-ing rain onto its mountains and valleys during the summer,