Horse Soldiers

by Doug Stanton

  McGee slowed the helo and brought it to a hover atop the landing zone. The rotors’ blast scoured the ground and sent up boiling clouds of dust that engulfed the craft. Nelson could barely see his hand in front of his face. It was hard to breathe. Up in the cockpit, McGee couldn’t see the ground. He had been told in a preflight brief that the HLZ was made of small stones and that visibility should be clear. He was twenty feet aboveground in a brownout and the radar was useless.

  From their position on the ground, Mohaqeq and his men could barely see the helo through the dust storm.

  On the helo’s rear ramp, a machine gunner stood fanning the gun barrel back and forth, ready to fire at the first sight of any muzzle flashes coming from the edge of the landing zone. Two more gunners stood in the side doors, also ready to fire.

  Mohaqeq watched as the helo hovered overhead for what seemed long seconds. Then, without warning, it rose straight in the sky as if drawn on a counterweight. And then it was gone.

  The fierce Afghan fighter Ali Sarwar, one of Mohaqeq’s commanders also crouched at the edge of the berm, heard the ferocious machine roar up the river. His heart sank.

  After flying about a quarter mile, McGee turned the helicopter for another approach. The first one had been a feint meant to draw enemy fire.

  McGee’s training had taught him that the worst thing that could happen was getting shot at on the ground while soldiers were running off carrying hundreds of pounds of gear. It was far better to be attacked while in a hover, with the engines powered up, when escape would be easiest.

  As he hovered again over the HLZ, McGee listened as a door gunner leaned out and talked him down over the intercom. The gunner could barely see through the dust. If the helo landed cock-eyed, if one or two of the four balloon tires touched down before the others, the craft could roll.

  “Ten feet, five, here comes the ground,” said the gunner.

  And then the helo hit with a hard bounce.

  “Go!” yelled Spencer. Sam Diller went first, kicking his duffel off ramp. Then came Milo, followed by the others. On their way out, they each grabbed something—sacks of grain, duffels, assorted bags of gear, and carted these off the craft.

  As they left, the ramp gunner pulled each man close and yelled in his ear, “Good luck!”

  Spencer and medic Scott Black searched the helicopter one last time for anything left behind, then they jumped off.

  Spencer thought the drop would be farther and he landed with a whumpf, the ground coming up too quickly. It had only been two feet.

  He stumbled and went down in a crouch, instinctively pointing his rifle at the dark ahead of him.

  Helicopter crew member Will Ferguson stood on the ramp and watched as the soldiers formed a defensive perimeter, the twelve guys lining up in a crescent shape with Captain Nelson at the apex.

  The helo lifted, and Ferguson stepped back from the ramp, and the men slid from his sight. He’d been on the ground less than a minute. The helo turned, heading back to K2.

  On the ground, as the dust cleared, the silence was eerie. Spencer could hear his own breathing and smell the dry, cold night.

  The enormity of where he was—in the desert, several hours before dawn, with eleven other guys upon whom his life now depended—hit him hard. Spencer imagined that at the end of his gun barrel, days and weeks ahead, lay his home. And now all he had to do was get up and start fighting.

  And that’s when he saw a strange shape…then two of them, now three…trundling toward him across the landing zone. And these shapes were now standing up and elongating into men, dressed in what looked like long cloaks with gun barrels sticking out of the flowing cloth.

  They turned on flashlights and started making what sounded like burbling noises—gibberish to Spencer’s ears. He and his team froze.

  Spencer found the gibberish otherworldly. Then it dawned on him that it sounded like the language spoken by the “Sand People” in Star Wars.

  Spencer was fluent in Arabic and some Russian. He knew that this must be Dari, a dialect of Persian, Afghanistan’s native tongue. No one back at Fort Campbell had ever thrown a book of Dari verbs and nouns at the team and said, “Here, you might need these someday.”

  This lacuna reminded Spencer that he had prepared for this mission by acknowledging that, by and large, he was unprepared. If he was going to survive, it would be by his wits.

  “I’m in the land of the Sand People,” he joked.

  And then he felt a tap on his shoulder.

  He wheeled around, wide-eyed. Standing before him was one of the Northern Alliance soldiers. He couldn’t believe he’d let the guy sneak up on him.

  The Sand Man was looking down at him, pointing excitedly at the rucksack on Spencer’s back.

  I’ll carry that for you, he seemed to be saying, and he reached and tried lifting the ruck. And Spencer had to say, “No, that’s okay. I got it.”

  But the man wouldn’t take no for an answer and he kept tugging until Spencer stood and said, forcefully, “I can carry it.”

  The guy shrugged and walked away.

  Spencer looked around, relaxed a little. The rest of the team stood up. Back at K2, they’d learned that a CIA welcoming party would greet them. So where were they?

  And then out of the dark stepped several larger figures, and as they got closer, Spencer recognized one of the guys as someone he’d met back at K2.

  The guy held out his hand.

  “I’m J.J.,” he said. “Welcome to Afghanistan.” J.J. introduced Spencer and the rest to Dave Olson and Mike Spann.

  “Damn glad to be here,” said Spencer, relieved.

  For their part, the CIA officers were equally glad to see American faces on Afghan soil.

  Like his colleagues, Mike Spann was anxious to start fighting the Taliban. He was worried about whether or not he would survive the combat, but he’d made peace with the possibility that he might not. He was lately spending his rare free time at the Alamo by writing to his new wife of four months, in Virginia, missing her terribly.

  Their marriage had capped a passionate romance, during which Spann’s old life had come apart and a new one had replaced it.

  A year and a half earlier, in April 2000, as Spann was undergoing his CIA training at the Farm, he and his first wife, Katherine, had separated. And several months later, at a Fourth of July picnic held for CIA employees, he fell in love with a fellow student.

  Her name was Shannon, and she was someone who, like Mike, thought she’d get a fresh start in life by training to be a spy. A few months earlier she’d been dean of students at a Catholic university in California, riding out the shock waves of a failed marriage, alternately mystified and embarrassed by its collapse. Her marriage’s end went against every grain of her born-again Christian sensibility. And then one day she picked up The Economist and saw an ad for employment in the CIA. Do you have what it takes? the ad asked. Of course I have what it takes, Shannon thought. Why not? And now here she was standing next to Mike at the barbecue. He was obviously nervous, but quite a treat on the eyes. His nickname at the Farm was “Silent Mike,” and boy, she thought, he was living up to the name. It seemed to take him forever to even say hello.

  And then, when he did open his mouth to ask her out, scared, she said no. She couldn’t believe it. She felt like clamping her hand over her mouth and running away. What had she just done? She hadn’t been on a date since her divorce, and that’d been three years ago! In fact, she was feeling lately that she’d be celibate forever. An old maid with a Browning 9mm pistol in her garter, the spy no one loved. I blew it, she thought. So when Mike asked her out again, she was relieved and said yes.

  In December 2000, several things happened, some of them messy, the kind of loose ends Mike was not used to contending with. Shannon would later say that getting pregnant earlier that fall was not the normal way for a Christian woman to build a family, but she felt that they “did the best they could at the time.” That month, she and Mike finished the traini
ng program, and his separation from Katherine was made legal. At the same time, Katherine discovered that she had cancer and refused to sign the divorce agreement.

  Mike hired a lawyer and sought custody of the two girls. He showed up at the lawyer’s office with a bruised face—he’d smacked it on a parachute strap during a training jump—and his lawyer, a man named Walter Von Klemper, could only shake his head. Some men seemed made to live at home, while others made the world their home. But how in hell was he going to convince the court that his rough-and-ready client should have custody of the kids? He sensed that Mike saw the world in absolutes, in black and white—but Mike was also the man you wanted at your back in a fight. He was the kind of father who drove his grade-school daughters to their bus stop, even though the stop was a half block down the street. He was a bit of a worrier, a bit of a softie. The court awarded him legal custody of the girls.

  A few months later, in June, Shannon and Mike’s son was born. A few days after that, they got married. Finally, the ship seemed to have righted itself amid the whirlwind of divorce and newfound careers.

  And then 9/11 happened. A few days after the attack, Mike sat down at his computer at home in Virginia, trying to convey to his mother, Gail, and his father, Johnny Spann Sr., a prosperous realtor back in Winfield, what was on his mind. He couldn’t tell them anything of what he was about to do or where he was about to go. He had already learned from CIA headquarters that a team of eight paramilitary officers was heading to Tashkent, Uzbekistan, to organize the U.S. military’s entry into Afghanistan. Shannon used the computer to do the household bills, but Mike had customized the desktop screen to display the U.S. Marine Corps motto, Semper Fi—Always Faithful. He got right to the point: “What everyone needs to understand,” he told his parents, “is that these people hate you. They hate you because you are an American.

  “The U.S. lost the war in Vietnam because of lack of support at home. When you fight wars, people get killed. Americans should keep flying their flags, supporting their government, and writing their Congressmen. God Bless America.”

  On the day he left for Afghanistan, Mike posed with the kids for a picture in the front yard outside their house, a trim, white clapboard colonial with black shutters. Wearing jeans, a black shirt, and tennis shoes, Mike smiled, looking like a man about to clean and organize his garage rather than a covert operator going to war. He held his young son tightly in his arms, the baby gazing at some vanishing point off camera. His older daughter, nine, was dressed in shorts, a striped shirt, and white anklet socks and tennis shoes, while her sister, four, stood with her hands clasped behind her back, smiling. The past few weeks had been incredibly busy, filled with last-minute demands. Mike was worried that he could die on this mission and he’d recently filed a new will with the courthouse in Alexandria. He worried now how Shannon would carry on in the aftermath if the unspeakable happened.

  “It seems I can never find the words to fully tell you how much I sincerely love you,” he had written. “The simple fact is, there are no words worthy enough for you. You certainly are God’s gift to a hardened and broken-down heart when I needed it most.”

  He confided to a fellow officer that he had a special request about Shannon. “I don’t mean to sound dramatic,” he explained, “I’m sure this will be a piece of cake. But if anything should happen to me, I want you to be the one to tell Shannon. I don’t want her to hear it from someone she doesn’t know.”

  Around the time that he stood now at the landing zone with Nelson and his team, Shannon, back in Virginia, was curled up in a chair, nursing the flu, pen and paper in hand, and writing to him in a journal. “I can’t wait until we’re all together,” she began. “The house is quiet, and so I’m here speaking to my favorite person.”

  Mike had called her from Afghanistan and announced he himself was keeping a journal. There were things he was thinking about, he told her, that he wanted to be sure to remember when he got home. Shannon had decided to begin her own recollections: “I miss you so much,” she went on, “especially in the evenings.” She explained that one of the girls “had to do a little homework for school, a picture of a tree, and we were supposed to decorate it as a family tree, and so we made leaves and printed out pictures of all of our faces, and it made me so happy to see all of our family on one page. I can’t wait until we’re all together.

  “Now I shall go to bed a lucky girl, and dwell on these things and the happiness of belonging to you, and in the hope of your safe return to me.”

  A few minutes after landing, Spencer and the team were walking down a narrow path. Leading the way were the Northern Alliance soldiers. They walked with a steady, assured gait in the dark, even under the burden of the heavy bags of horse feed and numerous extra bags of gear that had come off the helicopter.

  Bringing up the rear, Captain Mitch Nelson could hear the vodka bottles clinking. He hoped none of them broke before he could present them to Dostum.

  “Where’s the General?” he asked a man walking beside him. Nelson spoke in Russian. Nelson guessed that some of the fighters had learned the language during the Soviet occupation.

  The man told him that the general was not in camp. He said he was expected soon. In the morning.

  Nelson let the subject drop, seeming satisfied. He was disappointed that Dostum had not been there to greet them. It was important to appear upbeat, determined, focused. Everything he did, the way he ate, the way he talked, the questions he asked, would be scrutinized by the locals. He looked at the dozen Afghan men accompanying him and he didn’t trust one of them. But he knew his success depended on working with them.

  He wondered how General Dostum would receive him. Back at K2, Colonel Mulholland had raised the specter that Dostum might even kidnap the entire team and hold them for ransom to the highest bidder. As team captain, Nelson had the job of getting inside Dostum’s head and predicting what he would do even before Dostum himself knew. He had to convince the warlord that the Americans were here to fight and win. The truth was, without Dostum, they’d be annihilated by the larger Taliban army.

  With him, they had a chance.

  They had walked about 300 yards when Nelson saw a mud fort silhouetted against the sky. He halted. Somehow, he’d been expecting a longer night’s march. He was sweaty and tired of lugging his ruck, but it occurred to him that maybe he and his men were walking straight into a trap, an ambush.

  It was possible that J.J. had been taken hostage by the Afghans now accompanying them. They could walk inside, where they’d be attacked.

  “What’s the name of this place?” he asked J.J.

  “The Alamo.”

  Not necessarily a reassuring name for a refuge. J.J. explained that the fort would serve as the team’s safe house. J.J. seemed at ease. Nothing seemed wrong about the situation.

  The fort looked like something out of the American Old West. A crescent moon painted its walls dim silver. Each of the walls was made of smooth mud. They measured about 200 feet long and stood 8 feet high. Five wooden doors were spaced along the front. In the middle stood a wooden gate, wide enough for a team of oxen and a wagon—or a tank—to roll through. A hitching post for horses stood outside the gate. The individual wooden doors were short, maybe only five feet high.

  The Northern Alliance soldiers stooped and filed inside first.

  Nelson and the rest of the team stared at the small entrance, their guns slung across their chests, fingers curled around triggers.

  Nelson went in next. Behind him, the tall guys on the team like Spencer and Milo had to struggle through by inching with their overstuffed rucksacks in the narrow opening.

  Once inside, Nelson scanned the 200-foot-wide courtyard. Off to one side was a large, freshly dug hole with dirt piled on one side, about six feet high. A shovel was stuck up in the dirt. Nelson figured this was a water well the Afghans were digging.

  Along the right side of the courtyard, several rooms had been built out from the exterior wall. It was impossibl
e to tell how old the place was; fortresses like this one had been constructed in the nineteenth century as British garrisons or as defensive outposts manned by rebelling Afghans. The place smelled old, dry, dusty. Scattered around were plastic five-gallon water jugs and several black nylon bags, filled with gear belonging to the CIA team.

  News of the Americans’ arrival spread in camp and soon some fifty Afghans had stepped from the shadows and stood in front of Nelson and the team. Some wore bandoliers of heavy ammo draped over their shoulders. Nelson thought he’d never seen a rougher bunch of fighters. The guys with the bandoliers looked like they’d stepped out of battle alongside Pancho Villa.

  Some were barefoot, others wore sandals, men’s dress shoes, or tennis shoes with no laces. The youngest fighter was in his late teens; the oldest was a man in his fifties. Their chapped faces were crowned with colorful scarves, brilliant as peonies, wrapped tight on their heads. Their beards were wild and thick.

  Nelson said a few words of welcome, speaking in English as one of the CIA guys, Dave Olson, translated into Dari. The language was filled with explosive sounds, lots of hard consonants like “chuh!” and “juh-zay!” rising and falling in intensity, like someone chipping excitedly at soft stone.

  Nelson told them that he and his soldiers had come to attack the Taliban and that they would supply anything needed to do this job. “This is your war,” Nelson told them. “We are here to help you fight it.”

  The Afghans listened, smiling. They seemed neither to believe Nelson nor disbelieve him. It was like talking to the sky: you knew it was there, but not that it was listening. When Nelson was done, the men drifted away to small depressions in the dirt of the courtyard where they slept uncovered in the cold.

  J.J. led them across the courtyard and down the long front wall to their rooms. There were two, one for gear storage and another for sleeping.

  The rooms had been swept and neatened. The ceilings were low—only about six feet—and the men had to stoop as they walked around inside. The rooms smelled of dung and animal hair. Nelson turned on his headlamp and saw that the sleeping room had been a horse stable. Crisp, woven carpets had been laid on the flat mud floor. Large, pastel-colored seat cushions had been spread around. Nelson was moved by the precise care with which the place had been made ready.