by Doug Stanton
“I have no idea.”
Marcha knew that soon Cal would walk around the house looking for things that usually he had no trouble finding, like his life insurance policy. He’d grow short-tempered, and he’d talk about what would happen to her and the boys if he didn’t come home, if he got killed on this deployment. She never liked having this conversation, and her refusal always led to a fight, usually a bad one.
Cal kissed her and went into the garage and started packing, pulling stuff off of the metal storage shelves—his sleeping bag, his CamelBak for drinking water, his headlamp. He was worried how their sons were going to take the day’s attack. Their oldest was living in Mississippi and working at a job he liked. He was going to be fine. Luke, the middle child and a high school junior, kept his feelings inside, like Cal did. Jake, the youngest, a sophomore, was easygoing. He wanted to be an actor or a comedian. Cal and Marcha worried about him the least.
So when Jake walked through the door after school and Cal saw the quizzical, sad look on his face, he knew that this leave-taking was going to be hard. He knew that Jake had spent the day at school hearing about the attacks in New York, and that he’d imagined the worst for his dad.
“Are you leaving, Dad?”
“Yeah, I am.”
Jake nodded and kept walking down the hall to his room.
Cal started to follow him, but stopped. He’d leave him alone for now.
He imagined Jake in his room in front of his Nintendo. He was pretty sure he wouldn’t be playing a war game, where your bullets rarely ran out and a wound to the chest was just a momentary inconvenience. The boy had had enough of war, with his dad gone almost half his life. How in the world, Cal wondered, can a man love his family and want to go to war at the same time?
President George W. Bush appeared on TV the next day, September 12, and declared war on Al Qaeda. Over the next twenty-four hours, a military response began to emerge. Tommy Franks proposed to Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld and President Bush that America invade Afghanistan with 60,000 troops. He explained that such a massive migration would take six months.
Donald Rumsfeld hated the plan. “I want men on the ground now!” he said.
In response, CIA director George Tenet proposed sending in CIA operators with Special Forces soldiers. At Special Operations Command, this alternate plan was refined and sent back up the chain to Rumsfeld. At Fort Campbell, Mitchell and Spencer followed the developments closely—in the news and in the battalion hallways. Dean, still in his hotel in Tahiti, felt cut off. He was spending a good part of each day on the phone trying to book a flight back to the States. On September 14, he and Kelly finally arrived back in Clarksville. When he took her to a team picnic to meet everyone, his battalion commander walked up and shook her hand and said, “Welcome to Special Forces. Your husband will be leaving soon.”
Several days later, for the first time in American history, President Bush approved a plan using Special Forces as the lead element in the war in Afghanistan.
The plan involved using massive American airpower—cruise missiles and laser-guided bombs—to blast the Taliban out of the country. U.S. Special Forces on the ground would spot targets, build alliances among the locals, and whip them into fighting shape. The Afghan Northern Alliance—Massoud’s old fighting force of several tribes led by different warlords—would make up the bulk of the ground power. The CIA would grease the wheels, many of them unturned in years, with money and intel, and help the SF soldiers link up with the Afghans.
General Franks had spent part of the week holed up in a room at the Sheraton Hotel in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, convincing the country’s president to let the United States base its troops in the former Soviet Republic. Beset by Islamic terrorists of their own called the IMU, the Uzbekis had not been an easy sell, but Franks had succeeded.
On September 18, to a packed White House cabinet room, President Bush announced: “The war starts today.”
Naturally, the plan was classified, top secret.
Mitchell, Spencer, and Dean started arriving at work at 4 a.m. and stayed until midnight. Birthday parties, anniversaries, normal life were canceled. Nothing mattered except the war—getting ready for the war, planning to survive the war, and coming home alive. All the men believed Fifth Group could be deployed at any hour. Nobody went anywhere—the mall, the dentist, the movies—without leaving a cell phone number with the staff person in charge. Teams went to the firing range and shot thousands of rounds of ammo at pop-up targets. They practiced patrolling, ambushes, winter survival techniques. They marched, lifted weights, and, in the absence of real intel (they were told CIA analysts at Langley were working on it), read anything they could find about Afghanistan on the Internet. They cleaned weapons, took inventory of broken equipment, and made lists of the necessary gear.
They needed a lot, so much so that it was embarrassing. Their group commander, forty-five-year-old Colonel John Mulholland, had taken charge of the soldiers just two months earlier, after a staff posting in Washington, D.C., and a stint as a student at the National War College. He was working around the clock to meet the needs of his men. Tall, massively built, with the intense, pinched gaze of someone who did not suffer fools, Mulholland had served during the 1980s under General Lambert as a Special Forces lieutenant in Latin America, and he’d worked as a Delta Force operator in the mid-1990s. He assured each team that they could have whatever new equipment they needed. After much cajoling and pressuring on his part and Lambert’s, the Pentagon had agreed to pull out the golden credit card.
There was no time to requisition supplies the old-fashioned way, so new methods were created. Sergeant Dave Betz and his staff called camping stores like REI and Campmor and bought all the socks and tents they had on the shelves—literally everything in stock. Same with the clothes, and when the dealers ran out—as they did with a particular black fleece jacket everyone wanted—the guys called North Face headquarters and bought direct. There were soldiers perusing back issues of Shotgun News magazine and ordering pistol holsters and ammo magazines for AK-47s. They bought CamelBak water hydration systems, thermoses, water filters, tan winter boots made by a company called Rocky’s, duffel bags, Iridium satellite phones, generators, tool kits, compressors, electric conversion kits to convert 12-volt DC to 110-volt AC, camp stoves, fuel, and headlamps. Staff guys carried new radios and laptops and PDAs into team rooms, gizmos the men had never seen before. The guys liked the lightweight Garmin Etrex GPSs—the military GPS being heavy and the size of a writing tablet—and couldn’t purchase enough, ordering them all over the country, three hundred to four hundred at a time. A supply sergeant would e-mail a supplier, “I want all your GPSs. Hold them.” And they bought batteries. One of Betz’s men personally drove over to an enormous store near Fort Campbell called Batteries Plus, bought every double-A they had, and drove off with them in the trunk of his car. As he departed, the sales clerks stared slack-jawed at their empty racks.
Everything not in car trunks and backseats was shipped overnight by FedEx, the delivery trucks pulling up to a gray two-story building that resembled a grain elevator balanced atop a warehouse. The place was called the Isolation Facility, or ISOFAC. There, the equipment was stacked along walls on aluminum pallets—“palletized”—and each bunch was covered with a waterproof material nicknamed an elephant rubber. The covering was meant to protect the gear during the long plane journey to a place called Karshi-Khanabad, in Uzbekistan, a staging base, also top secret. Everybody called it K2.
On September 18, Lieutenant Colonel Bowers announced: “I need a man for a secret mission.”
Stepping forward was a seasoned master sergeant from New Hampshire named John Bolduc, nicknamed “the Skeletor,” after the He-Man comic book superhero. Shy, quiet, thin as a whip, Bolduc held the record for finishing a grueling eighteen-mile rucksack march required to pass Special Forces selection in just three hours. It took most people eight to cover the distance. At the time, Bolduc had actually had to wake up the guys in
the lead van; they hadn’t expected anybody to show up until dawn. They thought Bolduc was kidding when he told them he was done. Bolduc was not a kidder.
At Fort Campbell, the master sergeant’s men would follow him anywhere, even off the edge. He would emerge from the woods during the team’s “fun runs,” sprint off a high rock ledge, and drop fifty feet to the quarry water below, still pedaling in the air, looking over his shoulder to make sure his team was following him. If they were, he knew he was doing a good job.
The irony, given his dedication, was that Bolduc had recently put in for retirement after eighteen years in the Army. In fact, he’d received some of the official paperwork on September 11. His fellow soldiers tried to talk him out of leaving, but he would have none of it.
“I only have one reason for retiring, “he told them then. “I have a teenage daughter who doesn’t know me and I don’t know her.” Bolduc had added up the years to discover he’d spent half of his daughter’s life away from home, deployed to godforsaken snatches of sand; winning, but losing, too.
Still, he was torn. He’d jumped into Panama as a Ranger in the takedown of Noriega, but this was the big time. As a soldier, you lived for wars like this.
As he stood before Bowers’s desk, the battalion commander asked Bolduc, “Are you retired yet?”
“No, sir, not yet.” For once, the Army’s glacial pace of dealing with paperwork had opened the door instead of closing it.
“Are you ready for a mission?”
“I am.”
“I can’t tell you where you’re going. But plan as if you’re going into combat.”
“When do I leave?”
“Tonight.”
Several hours later, Bolduc was standing on the airstrip at Fort Campbell, clutching a rucksack loaded with Claymore mines, hand grenades, radios, and ammo magazines. Most intriguing was the getup he’d been instructed to wear during the mission. The disguise, consisting of paisley bell-bottom pants, a blue nylon shirt, and a funky slouch hat, was designed to make him look like an American hipster on parade in a former satellite of the Soviet Union. But after trying on the clothes, he decided that what he really looked like was a seventies porn star—and he stashed the duds in a closet at home. He now stood nervously on the tarmac in Levi’s, flannel shirt, and hiking boots, waiting for his adventure to begin. A white Citation jet with no tail numbers swooped down out of the sky, rolled to a quick stop, and picked him up.
Twenty-four hours later, Bolduc was in Uzbekistan, at K2, a desolate piece of real estate oozing chemical waste, misery, and the rank bloom of failure. The Russians had used the place to stage their failed ten-year war in Afghanistan against the likes of Massoud and his men, the fabled mujahideen fighters. The Russians had gotten their heads handed to them, losing 50,000 men in the war. Historians credited their defeat as one of the causes of the collapse of the Soviet Union, one final and fatal proxy battle between the United States and the USSR in the Cold War.
Bolduc’s job was to help redesign this flat, muddy ground as the new secret home for a group of soldiers determined not to repeat the Soviets’ mistakes, a place from which the entire fury of America’s military could be unleashed on the Taliban. Bolduc had never done anything like this in his life—he wasn’t an engineer—but he fully intended to try. This was the Special Forces’ way: You improvised like mad.
The CIA was doing its part, too. On September 19, paramilitary officer Gary Schroen loaded three cardboard boxes, each packed with $3 million in hundred-dollar bills, into an unmarked Suburban, and headed off to see his boss, Cofer Black, at CIA Headquarters in Langley, Virginia. The money was meant to bribe the Afghan warlords that the Special Forces troops were to work with—rough, mercurial characters with names like Abdul Rashid Dostum, Atta Mohammed Noor, and Mohammed Mohaqeq. For the past decade or more, they had fought each other for control of their country. Schroen would be flying to Afghanistan with the money that day, aiming to convince them to work together to kick the Taliban’s ass. He was doubtful of the outcome. You can’t buy an Afghan’s loyalty, he thought, but you sure can try to rent it.
Cofer Black was very specific about another aspect of Schroen’s mission. Writing later about the conversation, Schroen would recount Black saying, “I have discussed this with the President,” he said, “and he is in full agreement. You are to convince the Northern Alliance to work with us to accept U.S. military forces…. But beyond that, your mission is to exert all efforts to find Osama bin Laden and his senior lieutenants and to kill them.
“I don’t want bin Laden and his thugs captured,” Black explained. “I want them dead. Alive and in prison here in the United States, they’ll become a symbol, a rallying point for other terrorists.”
And then Black shocked Schroen: “I want to see photos of their heads on pikes. I want bin Laden’s head shipped in a box filled with dry ice.
“I want to able to show bin Laden’s head to the President. I promised him I would do that. Have I made myself clear?”
Schroen believed that he understood the mission.
The following day, Cal Spencer got the call. As the CIA built up alliances with different Afghan tribes, the Air Force would conduct its air war. Spencer’s team, the Pentagon had decided, would provide combat search and rescue (CSAR) for bomber pilots who’d been shot down by the Taliban. During the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the United States had supplied Stinger missiles to the anti-Soviet mujahideen fighters. After the Soviets’ retreat, the Taliban had emerged from the ranks of these highly trained soldiers. The United States had turned a blind eye to the radical religious beliefs of some of its favored mujahideen, and now it would pay the price. The extremists had become terrorists, anxious to use the Stinger missiles against U.S. soldiers.
CSAR was a heady mission, and Spencer had spent years training for it as a young sergeant at Nellis Air Force Base in Las Vegas. He and his team would be working behind enemy lines on a thin wire of support. If anything went wrong, they were on their own. They welcomed the challenge, but there was one problem: their team didn’t have a captain. A week earlier, Captain Mitch Nelson had been kicked upstairs to Fifth Group Headquarters, promoted out of the job he loved, following the team’s return from a training mission.
Nelson, thirty-two, the son of a Kansas rancher, was miserable in his new staff position. He hated office work, but if he expected to move up in rank, he had to punch his ticket and slay the beast that was administrative paper shuffling. The worst part was that one of his best friends, Dean, still had a year of team time left (each captain got two years), and now Dean for sure was going to get into the fight while Nelson would be wielding staplers and paperclips.
Nelson wanted in, too. He spoke Russian; he’d recently been in Uzbekistan with Spencer and the rest of the team. He was itching for this.
He paid a visit to Lieutenant Colonel Bowers’s office.
“Sir,” he said. “I need to be back on my team.”
Bowers looked at him and said, flatly, “No.”
Like the other men he had served with on the team, Nelson was stubborn and independent, and he had chafed under Bowers’s command. He figured that his request was denied because the lieutenant colonel did not like him. In fact, when it came time to select the teams for the CSAR mission, Bowers had nominated another group of men in his battalion. Spencer’s team had gotten the CSAR mission only because other teams had recommended them so strongly to Colonel Mulholland. Bowers had grudgingly obliged.
Feeling the urgency of the moment, Spencer and Master Sergeant Essex also appealed to Bowers on Nelson’s behalf: “We really need him,” they said. Bowers, either convinced or resigned, gave Nelson his job back.
“You’ve got six hours to leave,” Bowers told the two men. They had an airplane inbound that very minute to take them to K2, in Uzbekistan.
Essex had no idea where Nelson was, and it was his job to make the trains run on time. He called Nelson on his cell phone, getting the voice mail. The young captain a
nd his wife were in Nashville at an obstetrician’s office. His wife was expecting a baby in two months, and Nelson, an excited father-to-be, had turned the phone off before going in to the appointment.
“Hey, man!” Essex yelled into the phone. “You need to get back here, like right away!”
Essex was unsure of how to proceed over a nonsecure phone line, so he said, “Because we’re…leaving…now!”
He hoped like hell Nelson would make it back to the team room in time.
He need not have worried. Several hours after it was ordered, the mission was canceled. There was no explanation for the change in plans (and there never would be). The team was ordered not to travel more than an hour’s distance from the post. Deflated and dismayed, the men stood down. They could conquer any enemy but one: the men who pulled the levers at the Pentagon. For now, all they could do was wait.
But not for long. On October 4, they got the call for real: The mission was on. As before, no explanation was given.
Before they left, Major General Lambert flew down from Fort Bragg to address the crowd. Digging into the pocket of his crisp camouflage pants, he removed a piece of jewelry. Most of the soldiers had only heard of this special item: the gold ring of war. A chipped ruby blinked back at them as Lambert held it aloft.
“This ring has been through hell and back,” said Lambert, “worn on the hands of men who are dead or retired, men whose work won’t be talked about for years, if ever.”
Lambert knew the ring’s history well. Back in 1989, as a young commanding officer, he’d asked one of his sergeants to take part in something called the Expert Infantryman’s Badge Test: Five days of running, shooting, and shitting in the woods.
Lambert had asked the sergeant to take the test as a show of his leadership among the men under his command, and the man had passed, but just barely. Lambert, impressed that the sergeant hadn’t quit, had given the guy his own Expert Infantryman’s Badge, which he’d had displayed in a frame on his office wall.