On August 6, 2011, a US Army CH-47D Chinook helicopter approached a landing zone in Afghanistan forty miles southwest of Kabul. The helicopter, call sign Extortion 17, was on a mission to reinforce American and coalition special operations troops. It would never return. Insurgents fired at the Chinook, severed one of its rear rotor blades, and brought it crashing to the ground. All thirty-eight onboard perished instantly in the single greatest moment of sacrifice for Americans in the war in Afghanistan.

Those killed were some of the United States’ most highly trained and battle-honed commandos, including fifteen men from the Gold Squadron of the Naval Special Warfare Development Group, known popularly as SEAL Team 6, which had raided a Pakistan compound and killed Osama bin Laden just three months earlier.

The downing of Extortion 17 spurred a number of conspiracy theories, such as the idea that the shootdown was revenge for bin Laden’s death. In The Final Mission of Extortion 17, Ed Darack debunks this theory and others and uncovers the truth behind this mysterious tragedy. His account of the brave pilots, crew, and passengers of Extortion 17 and the events of that fateful day is interwoven into a rich, complex narrative that also discusses modern joint combat operations, the history of the Afghan war to that date, US helicopter use in Afghanistan, and the new and evolving military technologies and tactics being developed to mitigate such tragedies now and in the future.

In late June 2005, media sources recounted the tragic story of nineteen U.S. special operations personnel who died at the hands of insurgent/terrorist leader Ahmad Shah-and the lone survivor of Shah’s ambush-deep in the Hindu Kush Mountains of Afghanistan. The harrowing events of Operation Red Wings marked an important-yet widely misreported-chapter in the Global War on Terror, the full details of which the public burned to learn.
Victory Point reveals the complete, as-yet untold, story of Operation Red Wings (often mis-referenced as “Operation Redwing”), and the follow-on mission, Operation Whalers. Together, these two U.S. Marine Corps operations (that in the case of Red Wings utilized Navy SEALs for its opening phase) unfurl not as a mission gone terribly wrong, but of a complex and difficult campaign that ultimately saw the demise of Ahmad Shah and his small army of barbarous fighters.
Due to the valor, courage, and commitment of the 2nd Battalion of the 3rd Marine Regiment in the summer of 2005, Afghanistan was able to hold free elections that Fall. Here is the inspiring true account of heroism, duty, and brotherhood between Marines fighting the War on Terror.