Horse Soldiers

by Doug Stanton

  Dostum’s eyes widened. Spencer looked over at Nelson as if to say, This is how you do it.

  “Very good,” said Dostum. “Excellent.”

  He set the bottle down next to him, and regarded the two Americans carefully.

  He held up one finger. “But what I really need,” he said, “is bombs.”

  “Sir,” Nelson said, “we have all kinds of bombs. “I got more bombs than you could ever want.”

  “We will need them all,” he said. He let the matter hang in the air. He sat back. He had a way of looking straight into Nelson’s eyes that was unsettling. “And what will you need to drop these bombs?” he asked.

  “Well,” said Nelson, “first off, we need to see the enemy. We need to get up close. Real close.”

  Dostum considered this. “I can take you to my mountain headquarters,” he said. He had just returned from there. The windswept outpost was located six miles up the valley. And there was much Taliban activity in the area. He reached beside him and produced a rolled-up tube. He snapped it flat on the carpet.

  It was a topographical map—the biggest map of Afghanistan Nelson had ever seen. It measured maybe six feet long, creased and tattooed by pencil stub and slashes of ink, smudged with sweat and the ash of cookfires, and crawling with hundreds of arrows marking Taliban positions across the paper’s soiled grain.

  Dostum said he had carried this map for the past month during the fighting at Safid Kotah, which was three and half miles to the northeast, over the mountain ridge now brightening in harsh morning sun.

  Nelson’s own map was small, practically worthless in comparison. It was at least twenty years old, with tiny blurred print, written in Russian. In fact, it had been the map used by the Russians during their occupation. And it had been the only map available to the Americans back at K2.

  Nelson had thought this was not a good omen, to be carrying a map of the defeated.

  Dostum scooped up a handful of pistachios and chewed busily, lost in thought, staring at the map. He jabbed at the paper and started speaking rapidly.

  The key to controlling the country, he explained, meant taking Kabul. The key to Kabul was taking Mazar.

  Nelson and Spencer nodded in agreement.

  The key to Mazar, Dostum continued, was taking the Darya Suf River Valley. And if they took Mazar, the north would fall. All six provinces. Without question.

  Next would come Kabul. And with the north in control, you could take Kandahar in the south. In this way, you could capture the country.

  Dostum sat back and studied Nelson and Spencer. He next laid a broad thumb near the village of Chapchal. It lay eight miles north of their camp, a wind-scoured, sun-struck place of five hundred souls moving through dusty streets and squat mud huts, nestled in a rolling sea of burnt hills.

  “The Taliban are now here,” he said, circling the village with his thumb. The Taliban had retreated to this place after their defeat at Safid Kotah. A few roads, little better than goat paths, spidered from the village—a red dot on the general’s map.

  Nelson pointed to another village, Dehi, about two miles north of them, also up the valley. Nelson asked if Dehi was safe.

  Dostum smiled. “But of course. I have captured it last week.” After a fierce skirmish with the Taliban, he had ridden through the village, stopped outside the houses while still astride his horse, and announced to the men inside that they should fight for him. That he would pay them for this. That they had nothing to fear from him. That they should fear only the Taliban.

  “Let me tell you a story,” Dostum said to Nelson. “When I heard of the attacks in the United States, my heart broke.”

  He had been living in an apartment in the village of Cobaki, north of Chapchal, about twelve miles from where he and Nelson now sat. From this makeshift headquarters, he could look out with binoculars and see the Taliban front lines just one and a half miles away. He shook his head. That’s how far north his front line had once extended. He had lost all that ground in the fighting since then, in about two months.

  He had been in his apartment listening to the radio when news of the attacks in America broke in. He called an old friend and fellow Afghan, a man named Zalmay Khalilzad, who just happened to be the Unites States’ ambassador to Afghanistan, living in Washington.

  “Zalmay,” he said, “tell the American friends that as far as they have hard enemies, they should know that they have hard friends, too. And that they are us.”

  And then he hung up and went back to fighting the Taliban. But for the next five weeks, the enemy had beaten him back down the valley, mile by mile.

  “We are now here,” he said. He dragged his thumb south along the Darya Suf River, where the current churned over car-sized boulders and trilled in silver braids, and stopped near Dehi.

  “I want to move today to my mountain headquarters overlooking Chapchal. From there, we will bomb the Taliban. Once the bombing starts, they will break.” Then he announced quite unexpectedly, “We will leave immediately.”

  Nelson asked how he was so sure of his plan.

  “The Taliban are like slaves,” he said. “They are slaves because they are forced to fight. They threaten to kill a soldier’s family if he does not fight.”

  He explained that many Afghans in the Taliban army, which numbered as high as 50,000, were farmers, teachers, shopkeepers. Men conscripted into service. Men who fought because they were scared. The foreign Taliban, on the other hand, the Pakistanis, the Saudis, the Chechens, even the Chinese, they were fierce men. Ferocious fighters. They had infested the country from radical madrassahs in Pakistan. They were often joined by bin Laden’s Al Qaeda army. Bin Laden’s men pulled out grenades and blew themselves up rather than be captured. They called themselves the 055 Brigade, a crack squad of 500 to 600 storm troopers. They were not accepted by the Taliban ranks, who considered them “foreigners.” In camp, they did not mix; each group kept to itself. They did not fight for Afghanistan. They fought to convert the world to Islam. The Taliban fought to change Afghanistan.

  “When we capture the Afghan Taliban,” said Dostum, “they switch sides and they start fighting for us. And we let them live.

  “As for the Arab Taliban,” he went on, “the foreigners, they prefer death. You can’t capture them. You must kill them. They never give up.”

  Recently, one of Dostum’s spies living in Mazar-i-Sharif had contacted him by satellite phone, telling him that he could see more Taliban soldiers in the streets gathering in Toyota trucks; they were shouldering battered AK-47s, shotguns, RPGs, PK machine guns, machetes, sticks and swords, obviously getting ready to fight.

  Dostum had given away some fifteen satellite phones to spies across the north, from Herat in the west to Konduz in the east. They were handsomely paying off. The spy was speaking to him at great risk. Taliban soldiers had shown up at his house and told him, “You’re coming with us.” To save his life, he had joined with the religious fighters.

  Now, after several months of being forced to battle Dostum, he was getting his revenge. The spy told Dostum that hundreds of men were loading into T-55 tanks and a similar Russian-made fighting vehicle called a BMP (“Bimpy,” for short).

  He could hear the snort of their diesel engines tearing out of the gates of the city, heading down the rutted road to a place called the Gap, a notch in the mountain wall that separated Mazar from the country’s interior.

  The Taliban were pouring through the Gap, headed toward Dostum here in this valley. Thousands of fighters. Coming at them like a storm.

  “There is a bounty on your heads,” he went on. “One hundred thousand dollars for your body. Fifty thousand for your empty uniform.” Dostum said this flatly, without emotion, as if testing a response.

  Nelson wondered why Dostum was suddenly telling him this ominous news. Was he suggesting he owed Dostum a favor for not ransoming them to the Taliban?

  Nelson and Spencer were shocked by the general’s bloodlust and eagerness. (In fact, Dostum had warne
d his men: “You will guard the Americans. If you fail, you will be killed.”) It had been Nelson and Spencer’s experience training some armies in Middle Eastern countries that the soldiers were loath to start fighting. They had half-expected Dostum to explain a hundred reasons why his men weren’t ready. (In this way, he’d prolong America’s presence and subsist on foreign aid.)

  Spencer leaned over to Nelson. “Jesus,” he said, “this guy’s ready to roll. He wants to win.”

  “We will leave now,” Dostum insisted. “I will take you to my mountain headquarters.”

  “What do you think?” said Nelson.

  “I think you should go,” said Spencer.

  “It’s risky.”

  “I know it is.”

  “We just got here.”

  “Hell, it isn’t anything you can’t figure out.”

  Nelson turned to Dostum. “Can I take my men?”

  Dostum nodded.

  “All of them, everybody,” Nelson insisted, “we’re all going with you?”

  Dostum shook his head again. “No, no, there are not enough horses.”

  “Unless we all go,” Nelson told Spencer, “we’re not leaving.”

  He turned to Dostum. “How far a ride is it, General?”

  Dostum said it would take several hours.

  “We can split the team,” said Spencer.

  “We got radios?”

  “Barely enough. But we got radios.”

  “You think he’s up to something?” asked Nelson.

  “Hard to say.”

  “How many men can I take?”

  “Six,” said Dostum. “You can take six.”

  “Horses are hard to come by in this country, aren’t they?” Nelson said.

  Dostum didn’t understand.

  Nelson looked over at the horses standing patiently at the fort’s entrance. They were shaggy and thin-legged, and short. Roan, white, and gray. In this country, Nelson knew, a man measured his wealth in horses. Each one might cost about a year’s wages, one hundred dollars. These were horses descended from the beasts Genghis Khan had ridden out of Uzbekistan, and from farther north, Mongolia. Deep-chested, short-legged animals built for mountain walking.

  Nelson counted about fifty in the string, roughly one for each man in camp. He guessed that they had ridden them from home to war.

  “When would we leave?” Nelson asked.

  At this, Dostum stood up quickly. “In fifteen minutes!”

  Before Nelson could stop him, the delighted general had barked orders to his men bent at various tasks in the camp. They dropped what they were doing, walked to their horses, and began saddling them.

  Within several minutes they were seated atop the mounts and ready to ride out.

  Nelson yelled to the team’s Alpha cell, composed of Sam Diller, Vern Michaels, Bill Bennett, Sean Coffers, and Patrick Remington: “You better get out here!”

  The men stepped from their quarters. They quickly gathered around the berm.

  “Pack your shit.”

  “We’re leaving?” asked Diller.

  “We’re going to the front lines.”

  The five men hurried to their rucksacks in the gear room and pawed through clothing, food, ammo, and water, winnowing an essential load to stuff in their green daypacks. They came lugging them back to the center of the courtyard.

  They stood stone-faced with their rifles slung on their shoulders, pistols strapped to their legs by means of wide, black elastic bands. They looked around the courtyard at the Afghans gazing back at them. They wore black watch caps pulled down over greasy, stringy hair. A few had tucked Afghan scarves around their collars. Nobody wore a helmet. Helmets were bulky and heavy. For this same reason, nobody had on body armor, either—those forty-pound Kevlar vests.

  “How are we getting there?” asked Diller.

  “Horses.”

  “Horses?”

  “Yeah, we’re riding there.”

  As they spoke, Dostum, across the courtyard, swung into his saddle.

  The men turned to watch him.

  The general sat atop his white stallion, a red pom-pom braided in the coarse ivory hair at its forehead. He carried a soft green blanket and a red carpet lashed to the back of the saddle.

  Lined up beside him were a dozen of his men. Their horses stamped the ground, raising and dropping their heads like hammers. They were stallions, all of them.

  “He’s fixing to leave without us,” said Nelson. “We better goddamn hurry up.”

  Dostum touched his stallion’s flanks with his boots, rode over to Nelson, and stopped.

  He looked off to the distant mountains, then turned back and to Nelson. “I cannot guarantee your safety in Dehi,” he said. “There are people there who are not happy about your arrival.”

  So said the voice of God:

  In a different time, in the year 1418 in the Muslim calendar, John Walker Lindh pushed through the glass front doors of the Mill Valley mosque into the night. On his right, a parking lot, eucalyptus trees. A few cars parked inside under the sulfurous glow of sodium lights. High chain link topped with concertina wire. Light traffic on a street in a part of town filled with modest homes, discount stores, and auto parts. Beyond that, the wavelike roar of interstate traffic headed south to L.A. or north along the coast. He kicked off on his mountain bike a new man, headed home.

  It was at least a hard hour’s ride. When he pulled up in front of his parents’ house in San Anselmo, he went inside without saying so much as a word. Went directly upstairs to the bathroom. Reached in and turned on the shower. Undressed. It was September 27, 1997, in the year of the Christian Lord, the god his father worshipped. His mother said she was a Buddhist. He and his father were two continents drifting apart. It was a Saturday, a day he would not forget. He was sixteen.

  Back at the mosque, he had stood before the meager huddle of supplicants gathered on the prayer rugs. His friend Nana. Brown faces in the crowd. Men, all. Pakistanis, Arabs, mostly Indonesians. Pilgrims in a land of pilgrims. John Walker Lindh among them, lost.

  He had impressed Nana with his studiousness. When Nana told John that he believed music “with a beat” was impure, John agreed. When Nana said he didn’t use a fork because Muhammad did not use a fork, John ate with his hands.

  The study group at the mosque debated the Sunna, which are writings by Muhammad’s contemporaries describing what Muhammad said and did. Lindh eagerly adopted the teachings of Abd al-Wahhab, an eighteenth-century Islamic cleric who believed Islam needed to return to a strict interpretation of the Koran. After study, Lindh and five other teenagers played putt-putt golf at a local amusement park. In his white, flowing robe, his pale face topped with a cotton skullcap, he looked lonely. When they played basketball, he stood watching from the sidelines because he didn’t think it fitting to remove his robe in public.

  More than anything on earth, he wanted to learn Arabic so he could teach English-speakers about Islam. He wanted to translate the Koran from Arabic into English.

  At the mosque he had stood and said Shahada, the declaration of his conversion: “I declare that there is no god except God, and I declare that Muhammad is the messenger of God.”

  Very good, Lindh was told. You are Muslim now.

  Go home. You must shower. Cleanse yourself. When you step from the water, a new man will be in your footsteps.

  So ends the voice of God.

  Before Nelson could protest Dostum leaving without them, the warlord spurred his horse. Nelson watched as Dostum and his men clattered through the fort gate. Once they were outside its walls, they let out a whoop and Nelson listened to the hooves pound; and then silence.

  An Afghan soldier came walking up the courtyard leading six horses.

  Nelson tried to put Dostum’s warning from his mind. Concentrate. He’s messing with you. “Who’s ridden before?” Nelson asked the team.

  Only Vern Michaels and Bill Bennett raised their hands. “At summer camp,” they said. “When we were kids.
”

  The U.S. Army did not offer “Horsemanship 101” as a matter of course. It did run a program called “Dusty Trails” in the Colorado Rockies, but this taught soldiers how to use packmules in mountain environments. No one in Washington, D.C., had imagined that modern American soldiers would be riding horses to war.

  Nelson tried picking out the handsomest, tallest one from the string. It had a sugar-white star whorled on its brown forehead. Its rough-haired legs were knobby at the knees and tapered thin as cypress roots at the ankle. The hooves were cracked, unshod, the color of dishwater. In height, it resembled an overlarge pony, the kind children ride at county fairs in a sawdust circle. The man leading the horses said its name was Suman. He gave Nelson the reins.

  The horse was so short that Nelson could walk right up and look directly in its eyes. He tried figuring out the pedigree. Maybe Arabian bred with quarter horse and a mystery animal that shrunk it one third the size of a normal horse, at least normal by any standard Nelson was used to. Two months earlier, back at home on leave, he’d ridden out across his father’s property in Kansas on a big, chestnut quarter horse on a warm summer day, miles of tall wheat whispering against the horse’s legs as they passed. He could turn in the saddle and look back to his parents’ house where his wife, Jean, waited. She was pregnant with their first child.

  He worried about Jean having the baby without him while he was gone. Most people didn’t think soldiers cared about that kind of thing. But Nelson did. He had sat through endless sonograms and well-baby checkups. Before being deployed, Spencer’s wife, Marcha, had volunteered to be Jeans’s labor coach and he’d been relieved. Looking in this horse’s eyes, which seemed to contain all the misery and the patience for misery in the world, he knew the future for him had narrowed to include just a thin slice of staying alive through the next day. The wives, though, they had the rest of their lives to worry about if anything should happen to the men.

  He tried swinging his boot up in the stirrup and found it was too high. The stirrups were hammered iron rings and they hung down from the saddle on short pieces of leather. There was no way to lengthen them.