by Doug Stanton
He remembered that the Afghans mounted by swinging up in the saddle. He put his left hand on the stained blanket that formed the saddle seat. It smelled rancid. The saddle was made of three boards hinged together, covered by goatskin. He reached up with his right hand to the back and grabbed the edge of the stout board underneath the blanket, jabbed his right toe as best he could in the stirrup, and kicked up and swung down. He landed with a groan.
The saddle was tiny, made for a much smaller man. Nelson saw that the average Afghan weighed about 140 pounds. No one on his team weighed less than 200. On the saddle, there was no pommel horn to grab onto for balance. He gripped the horse’s mane with one hand and held the reins with the other. He lifted a boot and jammed it into a stirrup, then jammed the other boot in. Just the toes caught the edges. He was sitting with his knees practically bent up to his ears.
He knew he looked funny. He wondered how in God’s name he was ever going to ride this horse.
“Listen up,” Nelson croaked, “here’s how you make this thing go.” He heeled the horse in the ribs and it walked a few steps. “And here’s how you turn,” he said, pulling a rein and drawing the narrow muzzle around. “And here’s how you stop.” He pulled back on the reins and sat looking at the guys. “Got it?”
The guys on the team just nodded.
“Now, if your horse runs off,” he went on, “and your boot gets stuck in these stirrups and you get thrown, you’ll get dragged. And you’ll die.
“If that happens,” he announced, “you gotta shoot the horse. Just reach out and shoot it in the head.”
The guys were now watching him like he’d lost his mind.
“I’m not kidding,” he said. “You don’t want to get dragged over this rough ground.”
Several Afghan soldiers walked up to help the men get on their horses. The Afghans held the reins with their left hand and reached over with their right to steady the stirrup so the soldier could slip his boot inside. The horses started moving in counterclockwise circles, forcing the riders to keep up with one boot in the stirrup and the other hopscotching in the dirt. About every third hop, the guy would try to jump up and swing over the saddle. After several minutes, everybody had managed to scramble up.
Spencer walked up to Nelson sitting on his horse. He thought Nelson must be terribly uncomfortable. The young captain looked wedged into the small saddle.
“I’m keeping the Bravo cell here,” Spencer explained. He was holding behind Pat Essex, Charles Jones, Scott Black, Ben Milo, and Fred Falls. They would run the logistics end of Nelson’s journey.
“I’ve got an air drop scheduled for tonight,” Spencer said. “Medical equipment. I’m requesting blankets for Dostum.”
Nelson nodded.
“Man,” Spencer said, “you look funny on that horse.”
Nelson didn’t say anything.
“We’ll keep in hourly contact,” said Spencer.
“I’ll be on the PRC,” said Nelson. This was the interteam handheld radio. “Vern will have the commo package running back to K2.”
“Mitch?”
“Yeah?”
“Good luck.”
“Luck won’t have much to do with it.”
“I know.”
Nelson kicked his horse in the flanks.
“Cho!” he said, remembering what the Afghans had shouted when they’d ridden away. The word meant “Giddy-up” in Dari.
“Cho! Cho!”
The horse lurched and started toward the front gate. Soon the five riders were lined up behind him. Looking out the gate, Nelson could see Dostum’s trail, a narrow, churned-up path heading north.
He shouted over his shoulder, “You’d better keep up!”
They spurred their horses, and the men rode out the gate.
PART THREE
DANGER CLOSE
Chapchal, Afghanistan
October 20, 2001
Najeeb Quarishy cursed the Taliban tanks and trucks he saw racing from Mazar-i-Sharif, headed south to attack Nelson and his men.
For seven years, during the Taliban’s rule in the city, he had lived in daily fear of being arrested and beaten.
At age twenty-one, pudgy, witty, and easy to laugh, Najeeb ran a successful language school on the second floor of a dilapidated office building in downtown Mazar. He had two hundred students who trudged up the stairs at all hours to learn English. The Taliban were in constant threat of shutting the place down. They did not want anyone to learn English, the language of infidels.
One day Najeeb got into a fight on a street corner with a Taliban policeman, a member of a unit known as the “Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice.” Najeeb had refused to grow a beard and he didn’t keep his hair cut short. The policeman attacked Najeeb with a riding crop, beating him on the head and shoulders, asking him why he was not a good Muslim.
Najeeb snapped. He hit the Taliban policeman and kept hitting, and he found to his surprise that the man was nothing but a coward who ran away from his roundhouse blows.
Afterward, Najeeb stood on the street, shaking, unable to believe what he had just done. He believed he had just signed his own death warrant. He knew that if he was tortured by the Taliban, he would not walk for a year. His neighbor had been arrested and beaten about his genitals. The man was now paralyzed.
Najeeb ran to his father’s house. The terrified man begged him to travel quickly to Pakistan and hide from the Taliban. Najeeb deeply respected his father, who made a comfortable living for his family by importing radios and kitchen appliances for the few Afghans who could afford these luxuries. He also dabbled in real estate. His pedigree as a former mujahideen fighter during the long war with the Soviets also gave Najeeb’s family cachet among Mazar’s citizens. None of that mattered, though, under the Taliban. So Najeeb left the city. He stayed away for several months and then crept back, unnoticed. Since that time, four years ago, he’d been living a life under siege, but still refused to close his language school.
The past month, hearing the news of the attacks in America, he felt a strange kind of joy and sadness. He knew that the Americans would be coming for the Taliban. That night, he crept to his rooftop and erected the makeshift satellite dish he’d bought on the black market. It was made of flattened Pepsi cans that had been duct-taped together to form an elephantine dish and fitted with parts cannibalized from other defunct rigs.
Najeeb sat up through the night watching the reports of events unfolding in America. Each morning he had to disassemble the dish and hide it from the Taliban under a tarp. He was filled with a bitterness that he did not like.
Suffering had forced Najeeb to become philosophical at a young age. He knew that if he held terrible thoughts in his heart, he would not have a bright future. If you try to avenge something, he reasoned, it cannot end well.
The funny thing, he thought, was no one ever asked the Taliban why they were so cruel. Why were they hurting people and killing them? They thought the only way to live was by their own beliefs. They did not respect village elders, who traditionally had held leadership positions among the people, fixing land disputes and arguments between neighbors. He couldn’t help himself—he wanted to kill them all.
Nelson hadn’t ridden far when he saw the dust cloud of Dostum’s posse up ahead. Maybe a half mile away. Dostum was keeping ahead of him, out of range. He didn’t know why. He worried about losing the trail and pushed hard to catch Dostum. As they rode, they hadn’t seen a soul, so far.
They passed empty settlements that had been decimated by the Taliban. Whole families wiped out, the men and boys dragged away, into the army. The water wells poisoned. The shells of houses standing amid mounds of broken mud wherever the Taliban had driven their tanks up and inserted the cannons through the windows and fired.
Soon they came to a crossroads. Nelson lifted his hand and brought the men to a halt. He turned. Riding up behind them were ten Afghan soldiers, Dostum’s men, who had left the fort after them. Their secur
ity detail. Trailing them were two mules straining under the load of the team’s rucksacks. Two more mules carried bottles filled with water. The bottles hung from wood frames around the withers of the mules. Each mule carried several dozen. The bottles made a dull music against the damp hide of the animals as they trudged.
The Afghans passed him on the trail and cut back in and kept riding without stopping. They took the west road to the left and storms of dust that Nelson and his men rode through. Soon the Americans had lifted their scarves around their mouths and sat breathing through the machine-oil smell of the tightly loomed fabric. Some of the Afghan riders tucked a corner of a scarf in their mouths and sucked on them, and as they rode, the scarves darkened downward from their chins. After several more miles they approached the village of Dehi. Nelson halted the team.
“Everybody look sharp. Dostum says we may not be welcome here.”
The men were nervous and wanted to know what they would do once they rode into town.
“Just be ready,” said Nelson. “Everybody lock and load. And if you have to shoot, make sure it’s for a very good reason. And for God’s sake, don’t shoot women or children.”
They saw the first gaggle of people standing at the edge of the village, watching them come on. Men with leathery faces hunched in brown blankets. Others in dark suit coats standing with hands clasped behind their backs, as if waiting for the doors to open to some invisible building in front of them.
The main street was dark as ash. Along its edge, rocks the size of fists. A low hump of gray mountains stood in the distance.
Storefronts lined the streets but Nelson thought, God knows what they are selling. Hitching posts out front but no horses. The store roofs were low-slung and rested on poplar logs stripped of bark and dug by hand into the hard ground. The walkway along the stores was raw planking that ran underfoot, and under the roofs swung the skinned sides of beef and sheep twirling slowly like music-box figures. From somewhere, a back alley, a cook’s smoky fire.
They kept riding. They were in two columns about ninety feet apart. Nelson laid his M-4 across the saddle with the barrel pointing at the crowd. He kept one hand on it and waved with the other. At their passing, the villagers parted and reached out filthy hands as the legs of the men brushed past and they swarmed to refill the emptiness behind them. There was no sign of Dostum anywhere.
“These people came to see a parade,” said Nelson. “So let’s give ’em one.”
Now there were at least two hundred armed men on each side of the road. Some of the men wore makeshift uniforms, camo pants and shirts of varying pedigrees from who knew how many different countries. They carried battered AK-47 and RPG tubes. They were an army of castoffs, soldiering in hand-me-downs. The army the United States had forgotten after the Soviet pullout in 1989, once they were no longer needed to fight the Cold War by proxy. We’re going to need you now, thought Nelson.
Some other men in the crowd were working worry beads between calloused forefinger and broad thumb as they recited prayers under their breaths. More men were walking toward them holding hands. They weren’t gay, Nelson knew that. In public, men and women were forbidden to touch. But men could easily show this manner of affection. Nelson thought that they really should just keep moving. He figured the villagers had heard the helicopters land in the night and they’d come out to meet the Americans. Either that, or Dostum had ridden through town and announced the Americans were on their way.
Nelson called out to the team, “Everybody keep a finger on the trigger.”
Without warning, the security detail ahead pulled up and stopped.
Everybody on the team halted, tensed. Diller put his hand on his sidearm in the holster on his leg. Others did the same.
“What’s going on?” Diller asked.
“I don’t know.” Nelson said he’d ask. He spoke in Russian and one of the riders in the security detail answered that they needed to stop for supplies.
Supplies? That sounded dubious. The last place Nelson wanted to be was stuck in the street while the Afghans went inside a store, maybe never to return.
The Afghans dismounted and stepped up into the store and went inside. Nelson could hear them talking excitedly to an unseen storekeeper.
The villagers pressed around the legs of the horses, looking up at Nelson and the men.
“Grip and grin,” he told them. He had a few phases he knew from some pages of Xeroxed material he’d studied back at K2.
He put his hand over his heart and said, “Salaam alaikum!”
The villagers looked back and smiled and said the same.
“Chedor hastee?” said Nelson. How are you?
“Namse-chase?” he said. What is your name?
He kept scanning the crowd and the front door of the store. Up ahead, on the left side of the street, there stood an outpost, like a guard shack, built up on one of the roofs. He kept looking at that, too. Still no sign of Dostum.
He’d gone through about all of his phrases, telling the villagers his name (not his real one), and asking if they liked candy and telling them that he was fine, thanks, when the Afghans emerged from the store hauling bags of horse feed over their shoulders and carrying even more water in five-gallon plastic jugs. We must be fixing to be gone a long time, thought Nelson, if we need that much water.
The Afghans loaded these items onto the mules, who stood with their knees locked under the weight, trembling. One of the mules would not stand still and the Afghans beat it with a leather crop fitted into an ornate brass handle. Nelson—and he could tell the guys on the team felt the same way—wanted to say something about beating the animal, but he didn’t. His job was to be there and not be there.
“You ready?” he called to the Afghans in Russian.
They ignored him, but the question seemed to register because they swung onto their horses and reined them into the middle of the street and started riding.
Nelson rode up to them and pointed to a side street between two squat mud homes. Blue and green tarps rested on tree branches at the street’s edge. A woman in a blue burkha sat holding a child. Beggars, mother and child. The father probably killed by the Taliban, or hauled off to fight for them. It was like passing by two sundials churning the sun. A silence without end.
Nelson cut ahead and took the alley between the two houses. He wanted to get off the main drag and ride hard through the backstreets and pick up Dostum’s trail. They came out at the other end of town; before them lay more open ground, dark rock piled in jumbled moraines along the valley walls.
Nelson pulled up his horse. The other riders stopped. “Where is the general?” Nelson asked.
The Afghans pointed out across the open ground and then up into the mountains to their left, across the river. It was another four-hour ride, they said. Nelson looked up. The time was about noon. They had maybe six hours of daylight.
Nelson realized that he had to admire what Dostum had done: he’d led him and the team through town as a show of force against the Taliban. Nelson guessed the intended message was, Here are the Americans. And they’re not afraid of you. And they are with me. That they hadn’t been killed was just a bonus for Dostum.
They struck out across the open ground. Wearing his bulky daypack, his load-bearing vest stuffed with ammo clips and grenades and bulging over his stomach, Diller found it was hard to move around much. He could already imagine the formation of saddle sores. In usual Diller fashion, he decided he would ignore the discomfort.
They crossed the cold Darya Suf, the horses plunging in and pulling out the other side wet up to their chests and the men’s pants dark up to the knees. The Americans rocked and groaned in the saddles. Diller could feel the bleeding start under him. They rode across a ceramic-hard plain and crossed another braid in the river and came out clopping on the other side and started to climb a mountain. Or a part of it, a shoulder, hunched 6,000 feet high on the thin bank of the river.
They cut in on a trail carved in the rock and started up.
The horses put their heads down and didn’t lift them. They rode for fifteen minutes headed across the mountain on the trail and then at the trail’s end they came to a little cul-de-sac where the horse had to hitch up in its step and turn and bear the rider forward as they struck back across the mountain. Climbing and climbing higher. On one side, to Bill Bennett’s right, stood sheer mountain wall, cascading plates of rock frozen in place. To his left, a 1,000-foot drop. He reached his left hand out and underneath was the airiness of the valley floor, the river twisting below like green wax string. The trail was two feet wide. How in hell does this horse know not to step off? The animal ground out each step, the cannon bones in the legs driving like small fenceposts on the ground. Ram. Ram. Ram.
They rode up the last bit of the hill and the horses strained beneath them and stood on flat ground.
Nelson looked out from the saddle and beheld a landscape stretching as far as he could see on either side. Miles of hills, tinted red. The air was filled with an ocher dust swirled up in winds rising miles away. The dust that now settled on him had flown from far away, Nelson guessed, and he looked at the shellacked faces of the men. They sat like monuments in the saddle, stiff and thirsty, barely moving.
Dostum was still nowhere in sight.
From Kabul, John Walker Lindh flew by helicopter to Konduz. Ancient trade post. Squalor. Thin-lipped boys with sores bearing silver salvers, of smoldering incense through the streets. The smoke meant to keep the djinn away, evil spirits that steal men’s souls. In the parks, the deranged. Men babbling in tongues. Out of their minds and with no hospital to hold them, wandering freely in their robes striped with excrement. Men thought to be speaking truths, the sagacity of shamans. Seers. Standing in a park and shouting under a noon sun as others went about their work around them.
From Konduz, Lindh got on a bus. The dirt road north swinging and swaying out over the plain as if constructed in a delirium. At one point the road had been straight. Then came the war, and the planting of land mines. A car, a truck, a tank grinding down the thoroughfare would veer around the presence of a mine or the threat of its presence and by this way the road veered like a river seeking least resistance. The road led him to the desolate village of Chichkeh.