Like I stated earlier if you want the real accounts of operation red wings go read Victory Point: Operations Red Wings and Whalers - The Marine Corps' Battle for Freedom in Afghanistan.
Operation Red Wings was conceived by the 2nd Battalion of the 3rd Marine Regiment (2/3) of the U.S. Marine Corps based on an operational model developed by 2/3's sister battalion, the 3rd Battalion of the 3rd Marine Regiment (3/3) which had preceded the 2nd Battalion in their combat deployment. It utilized special operations forces (SOF) units and assets, including members of the U.S. Navy SEALs.
When the 2nd Battalion of the 3rd Marine Regiment (2/3) took the Stars model and developed the specifics of it, 2/3's operations officer, Major Thomas Wood, instructed an assistant operations officer, 1st Lieutenant Lance Seiffert, to compose a list of hockey team names.
2/3's battalion staff immediately began planning Operation Red Wings as soon as they arrived in Afghanistan. Lieutenant Colonel Andrew MacMannis, 2/3's battalion commander, and his staff, wanted to maintain the operational tempo set by 3/3. 2/3's Operations Officer, Major Thomas Wood, began planning Red Wings off the Stars base, which was a five phase operation. During this time, 2/3's Intelligence Officer, Captain Scott Westerfield, focused further on learning about Ahmad Shah. His overall intelligence picture of Shah took a substantial leap when 2nd Lieutenant Regan Turner, a platoon commander with 2/3's "Whiskey Company" – a Weapons Company augmented to function like an infantry line company, gathered a wealth of human intelligence about Shah during a patrol, including his full name: Ahmad Shah Dara-I-nur (Ahmad Shah of the Valley of the Enlightened ones); his birthplace, the Kuz Kunar District of Nangarhar Province; his primary alias: Ismael; his chief allegiance: Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who was based out of the Shamshatoo Refugee Camp near Peshawar, Pakistan; his team's size: fifty to one hundred fighters; and his aspirations: to impede the upcoming elections and attempt to aid a resurgent Taliban in the region. Although Shah was a relatively unknown entity in the region, he apparently held regional aspirations and possibly had the assistance of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. 2nd Lieutenant Turner also gathered a number of photographs of Shah.
Further intelligence, including human intelligence and signals intelligence indicated that Shah based his insurgent / terrorist operations out of some small structures outside of the village of Chichal, high on the slopes of Sawtalo Sar mountain in the upper Korangal Valley, approximately 20 miles to the west of Kunar's provincial capital, Asadabad. Using imagery Intelligence, taken from a UAV on June 17, 2005, Westerfield identified likely structures used for housing his team, IED making, and overwatch of the area below, for IED strikes. The intelligence staff identified four Named Areas of Interest, or NAIs containing specific structures in which Shah might be using.
These Named Areas of Interest and specific buildings were determined by analyzing and processing a number of instances of a variety of intelligence, including signals intelligence, human Intelligence, and imagery Intelligence. Westerfield and his staff determined that Shah and his men had been responsible for approximately 11 incidents against American, Coalition, and Government of Afghanistan entities, including IED strikes and small arms ambushes. They determined that Shah and his men would be occupying the area of Chichal in late June, a time of low lunar illumination. The operation would require a helicopter insert of forces to cordon the area and search for Shah and his men, and they sought to conduct this operation at night, after positive identification of Shah by a Marine Corps Scout / Sniper team, which would walk into the area under cover of darkness some nights before.
As has been the case with certain other military operations, important aspects of Red Wings have been widely misrepresented. I'll address these here, roughly in chronological order.
Before I get into the details, I want to pass along a paraphrased quote that a number of U.S. Marine Corps commanders (mostly senior field grade and general grade, but some junior field grade and company grade--as well as a large number of enlisted, of all ranks and billets) have stated to me during media embed projects with their unit(s): U.S. Marines want the full story of what they do to always be told to the public, accurately, be that story good, bad, or somewhere in between--meaning that they want it told without exaggeration, omission, or fabrication.
JUNE 2007: RELEASE OF THE BOOK LONE SURVIVOR
In early June of 2007, the Washington Post published this article. In the same week, the book Lone Survivor: The Eyewitness Account of Operation Redwing and the Lost Heroes of Seal Team 10 was released. Marcus Luttrell was listed as the author, with Patrick Robinson listed as a contributor. I read the article in the Washington Post with great interest, and was stunned by the omission of Marine Corps involvement, the misstatement of the name of the operation, the exaggerated enemy numbers, the outright fabrication that "U.S. intelligence officials believed [Ahmad] Shah was close to Osama bin Laden," and among other items, the account that Lieutenant Michael Murphy, the leader of the four man Naval Special Operations reconnaissance and surveillance team of which Luttrell was a member, put up to vote whether to kill unarmed civilians who soft compromised them. No "vote" was ever mentioned in Luttrell's after action report.
I immediately ordered Lone Survivor, thinking that the book would provide much more detail than the Post article did. I also contacted all of the members of 2/3 who played roles in Red Wings, asking them if they'd been contacted about providing after action reports or interviews for Lone Survivor. None had. I read the book, thinking that I could possibly use information in it as source material for VICTORY POINT. Information in Lone Survivor, however strayed so substantially from Luttrell's after action report, and so much general information in it was so inaccurate that I could not use it as a source. For instance, the book describes "hundreds" of Taliban, when in Luttrell's after action report, he stated 20 to 35. While analysis of intelligence later revealed a number somewhere in the range of 8 to 10, the Navy used a number more in line with Luttrell's original after action on the official Medal of Honor citation for Lieutenant Murphy: "BETWEEN 30 AND 40 ENEMY FIGHTERS....
One of the greatest factual problems with Lone Survivor is the omission of the role the Marines of 2/3 played, and how NAVSOF elements actually fit into the operation. Instead of illustrating that this was a multi-phase Marine Corps operation where NAVSOF was to play roles in the opening phases (mandated as such by CJSOTF-A in order for 2/3 to get low-illumination helicopter support), Robinson ignored Marine Corps involvement altogether, and drafted a narrative that Red Wings (what he mistakenly called Redwing) was a special operation mission targeting one of Osama bin Laden's top lieutenants. He mentions Marines in the area only in passing, stating that they'd been victims of IED (improvised explosive device) strikes.
