Horse Soldiers

by Doug Stanton

  The village, or what was left of it after the Taliban’s siege, lay along the Amu Darya River. He got off the bus dressed in flowing shalwar kameez and his cotton skullcap, a dark rind of beard around his doughy face. What am I to do? You are to walk to that hill and sit. Here is a rifle. A grenade. Lindh trudged up the hill.

  Facing him, the jagged escarpments of the mountains of Tajikistan across the river, rising 10,000 feet. Snow in the valleys. Bright sun. The ground gritty under his soft palms as he sat in his trench. And waited.

  Waited for the invasion of the hordes. The infidels. Dostum’s men. They were to come from the north. Enemies of Afghanistan. Enemies of Islam. Drinkers, fornicators. There is no God but God and Allah is his name.

  It was September 6, 2001.

  So spoke the voice of God.

  Nelson sat on the horse and saw that down below the hill there were three trenches. In front of the trenches, facing north, earth had been piled to make protective berms. The trenches were about thirty feet long and five feet deep. A man could stand in them up to his waist. He could lean forward over the berm and rest his rifle on the packed earth and fire. Nelson saw that they were soundly made fighting positions.

  At the top of the hill he discovered three caves. Dostum emerged from one of them, the largest. He stepped toward Nelson and with a sweep of his arms said, “Welcome to the mountain headquarters!”

  Behind the hilltop, the rest of the team dismounted from their horses. They slid down from the saddles and stood in their tracks, unmoving, as if frozen in place. Many of the men found they couldn’t walk, and some were bent over as if catching their breath. All except Nelson. The ride had invigorated him. Diller could feel the blood seeping through the seat of his pants. The saddle had rubbed the skin clean away. Nelson called out a few good-natured comments about who looked funny now and the guys ignored him. They placed their hands at their backs and attempted to stand up straight. As they did, they stifled groans so as not to raise suspicion among the Afghans that they were not good horsemen. The ruse, of course, failed miserably. Diller saw that a few of Dostum’s men were sniggering at them. Diller looked over at his horse and promptly named it “Dumb Ass.”

  “Well, Dumb Ass,” he said, “I’m going over to get my ruck off the mules and when I come back, I hope you’re dead.”

  He hobbled over to help the Afghans unburden the exhausted pack animals. Each of them had carried in excess of 300 pounds, maybe more, when the usual load might’ve been 100. I would not want to be a mule in Afghanistan, thought Diller. I would not want to be an Afghan, either.

  Under the direction of Dostum’s men, he and the team hauled their rucks across the hill to a cave next to Dostum’s. Like his, the opening was set into the side of the mountain, the rockface rising another several hundred feet into a promontory. Diller thought it was not smart to be setting up quarters below such high ground, until he saw the face of an armed Afghan peeking over the edge and looking down at him. He toted the ruck inside and dropped it on the cave floor. The accommodations were more than he expected. The cave had a funny odor, like stacked fur in a dry cleaner’s shop. Warm. Humid. He could stand up in the middle of the cave with about four feet of headroom. From wall to wall it measured about twenty-five feet. He looked at the walls more closely. They were covered in a strange substance. Diller reached out and stroked the rough, furry surface.

  The fur was actually horse dung, maybe mule, too, he figured. For insulation. The blanket of shit was dry as toast and flaked only slightly to the touch. How the Afghans had ever managed to affix it up there and make it stick, Diller couldn’t guess. But he found it a marvel of engineering. As he walked around unpacking his gear, he tried not to brush up against the walls.

  Outside, Dostum and Nelson sat cross-legged on a red blanket overlooking the valley. Next to them stood a tall wooden pole with a radio antenna wire fastened to the top. Dostum sat by the radio itself and a bank of portable solar cells that could be broken down and carted by mule. Nelson thought it was a pretty slick setup. Dostum was running this part of the insurgency on solar power. That had to be a first.

  Nelson guessed their elevation was about 8,000 feet and that the far hills across the valley were ten miles away. The hills, like all the hills, looked denuded. The Taliban hadn’t been able to take this high ground from Dostum while he’d been battling them in the south, downriver, at Dehi. This had been hard fighting. Because of the area’s three years of drought, much of the drinking water for his soldiers had to be trucked in and carried to battle on mules. Dostum’s men had even dammed the Darya Suf to make a pool for their horses to drink from.

  At night, he would gather his fighters around a lantern and, unrolling his map, plan the next day’s attack. He spread the soldiers out over several miles, in groups of twos and threes, to wait in ambush. If they were discovered, their small number would not give away the fact that five hundred more men were camped nearby.

  After a day’s fighting, he and his men rode their horses back down rocky trails and picked their way along the river and broke out into a clearing that was their base. They were safe here because the road was nonexistent; there was no way for a tank or Bimpy to reach them. The Taliban would have to walk or ride horses, and he knew they didn’t have horses. An infantry attack in the valley would have been suicidal. Dostum could set up firing positions in the rocks and pick off the enemy as they marched down the river, their long black robes swaying, their guns at the ready. He would have killed them all. Now Dostum was going to use this high ground to bomb them.

  He despised most of all a tall, bearded Taliban commander named Mullah Faisal, the man who now occupied his former headquarters at the fortress in Mazar. Faisal commanded the Taliban’s 18th Corps, some 10,000 soldiers, a feared man with a perpetually pinched gaze and an inscrutable smile.

  Next in command was Mullah Razzak, whose 3,000 to 5,000 soldiers of the Taliban Fifth Corps controlled the Darya Suf and the adjacent Balkh Valley, where they were also battling Atta’s men. Razzak was joined in the Balkh by the fearsome, one-legged Mullah Dadullah (he’d lost the leg fighting the Soviets and wore a wooden peg as a prosthesis). These three commanders were supported by several dozen subcommanders spread across the country.

  Dostum pointed across the valley and said, “There they are. Taliban soldiers.” These were Mullah Razzak’s men.

  Nelson raised his set of binos and cranked down the focus with his forefinger and steadied himself for a clear picture. The binoculars were heavy and rubber-coated and powerful, but still Nelson couldn’t sight any enemy fighters in the distance. He didn’t want to say so. It was like hunting deer or catching fish. Part of your standing in camp meant how well you could spot game. You looked for what shouldn’t ordinarily be there.

  He lowered the glasses. “I’m sorry, General, but I don’t see what you’re looking at.”

  Dostum pointed to a far outcropping on one of the distant ridges. My God, that’s miles away, Nelson thought. Does he think we can bomb that from here?

  “Okay, I see it,” said Nelson, bringing the dark spot into focus.

  “That is the Taliban’s position,” said Dostum. “One of their bunkers. I know, because I have been fighting them.” He asked Nelson, “Can you bomb it?”

  “Well, sir, like I said, we can bomb it. But I need to get closer. I can’t accurately target it from here.”

  “No,” said Dostum. “You cannot get closer. I cannot let you get killed. Five hundred of my men can be killed before even one of you is scratched.”

  “I know that, I understand that, but you have to understand I can’t call in bombs from this distance. I’ve got to fix the bunker on a map and call that coordinate to the pilot.”

  Dostum’s aide, Chari, was translating. Nelson wondered if he was getting it all correctly.

  Nelson didn’t like haggling with Dostum about how to do his job. He wanted to ask him why he’d left them in the lurch back at Dehi. But something stopped him. A feeling he had.
That he had passed a test by getting to the mountain headquarters and there was no sense in asking for the test’s reason. To do so might signal that he was uncomfortable with accomplishing the unknown.

  He thought maybe this argument about dropping bombs was another test. Dostum’s men bowed and curtsied to the general’s every move and it was clear that he was the bull of the woods in these parts. Nelson could see how this arrangement would work: Dostum would be in charge and Nelson would make him believe that this was true.

  “All right,” he said, “we can drop bombs. I’ll set it up.”

  Dostum smiled. This made him very happy.

  In fact, Dostum was relieved. He had his doubts about the Americans’ abilities. He had never seen their bombs. They were reported to fly where you told them to go. By themselves. Like iron birds. This technology had not existed in his long war with the Soviets and then with his fellow Afghans—otherwise, of course, he would have used it. He was hoping the Americans would surprise him again, as they had last night when they landed so expertly on the small dirt pad in complete darkness. Dostum had thought it was most incredible to fly helicopters at night with no lights. Unbelievable.

  Nelson asked, “And you’re sure these are Taliban, right?”

  It was Nelson’s responsibility not to drop anything on anybody unless the target was clearly defined as an enemy position. Those were Nelson’s rules of engagement.

  Otherwise, various warlords could use the Americans and their “wonder bombs” to take out rival factions. Hell, at this distance, Nelson couldn’t be sure exactly what he was looking at, but he was determined to find out. The fact that the bunker was so far north, in Taliban-held ground, was one indication it wasn’t owned by Mohaqeq or General Atta, Dostum’s archrival.

  But Nelson wanted more. “You’re sure they’re Taliban?”

  Frustrated, Dostum picked up a handheld radio, a Motorola walkie-talkie.

  “Come in, come in, come in,” he said, speaking rapidly in Dari. “This is General Dostum.”

  The small speaker popped to life. Dostum had raised the Taliban on the radio.

  Nelson heard shouts and chatter, none of it sounding friendly.

  “I am here with the Americans,” Dostum said, “and they have come to kill you. What do you think of that?”

  The radio roared even louder, as if that were possible. Dostum smiled. “See?” he said to Nelson. “They are listening to me.

  “Tell me,” said Dostum, speaking back into the radio. “What is your position?”

  This was unbelievable to Nelson, that Dostum would ask such a question and that he seemed so sure to expect an answer.

  Nelson heard the Taliban talk even more rapidly.

  Dostum turned to Nelson and explained that yes, in fact, the bunker they were looking at was the Taliban’s. No doubt about it.

  And then it dawned on Nelson that the Taliban had no idea what was coming. He had a sickening feeling, elation and fear. That he might get ahead of himself if he got too confident in the fight.

  The Taliban believed they were invulnerable. This in itself was an incredible discovery. At the moment, he was possibly the only guy on the planet who understood it. Like Dostum, they had never seen what a relatively inexpensive GPS mounted inside a $20,000 bomb could do. The places it could fly.

  He realized they had never fought a war like this one.

  Dostum signed off by saying, “Thank you, that is all.”

  He told Nelson that he talked to the Taliban all the time. Some of his men had brothers or cousins in their army, he said, either by choice or conscription. And sometimes these men came to him and asked, “Sir, could we not attack a certain place so strongly today?” “Why?” Dostum would ask. “Because my brother is there. He is a good man. I do not want him killed.” And if Dostum could afford it, if the position could be determined to be of some minor importance, Dostum would hold the attack. That was the way war worked, Dostum said. Everything was possible. Forestalling death was a negotiation.

  He explained that the Taliban had called him on his Motorola after the attacks in the United States. “The Americans will be coming,” they told Dostum. “Who will you fight for?”

  Dostum had laughed. To his mind, the Taliban were fools, ninnies—on top of that, they were boring men. They did not drink. They hated women. They were a social nightmare.

  He described how a few weeks earlier he’d even met with some of them in person to discuss the future. Was he worried about being killed? Not really. He knew he was worth more to them alive than dead. In him, they had a known quantity with which to negotiate: a man who would make deals.

  If they killed him, who knew who might take his place? Perhaps a man like Usted Atta, who would show no mercy at a critical juncture, a man who was as unbending as a teacher’s ruler.

  “You are a Muslim,” the Taliban scolded him. “Don’t work with the infidels.” They explained that Osama bin Laden himself had proclaimed jihad against the Americans.

  Dostum squared himself and looked the Taliban leader in the eye. He told them, “Your jihad is useless. Don’t come to me with your talk of jihad.” He practically spit out the words.

  He grew angrier: “Even the Muslims hate you. You have committed a crime against humanity that is unforgivable.”

  He asked the Taliban soldiers how many women they had stoned. “Hundreds? Thousands?” he yelled.

  He wanted the Taliban to feel some sense of shame. But he could see they did not.

  “Here is what I am going to do,” he told them. “I am going to do a ‘hometown thing.’ Pack up your things. Pack your trucks. Leave the north, leave Mazar-i-Sharif. Go back to where you came from. Don’t come face-to-face with me again. Don’t bother me.

  “That,” he said, “is what I will do for you.”

  He went on: “But if you stay and fight, I will kill you. I will hunt you and kill you.”

  The Taliban had been flummoxed by Dostum’s bravado. They didn’t know what to think. The man did not seem to fear them at all.

  The wind whipped dust devils up and down the hill that went spinning into the valley and vanished with a visual pop in the air. Nelson knew it was a fearsome thing he was about to do. He stood at the edge of the trench with his hands on his hips looking at the valley and the Taliban positions beyond. He jumped down into the trench and landed waist-deep in the narrow slit. The Taliban were on the other side of the river. The river ran north and south, but at this particular place it took a bend to the left, or west, so that the Taliban were actually on its north side. Ahead he could see the village of Beshcam about three miles away, several dozen mud houses, no people. And beyond that another village, a tiny brown flare on the horizon through the optics of the binoculars.

  At the sound of the approaching Taliban tanks, the villagers of these various places had scattered into the hills, hiding. Even farther north was Chapchal. If Nelson could push the Taliban north and reach Chapchal, then they could take Baluch. From there, the Taliban would have to fall back up the river, to Shulgareh. In this way, they could drive the Taliban north to Mazar-i-Sharif, forty miles upstream.

  They would start with Beshcam.

  One of Dostum’s men stepped forward and spread a blanket on the trench berm and Nelson turned and said “Tashakur” (thank you) and leaned forward with his elbows on the blanket, still looking at the country through the binoculars.

  He let out a breath and waited for the image to settle and focus before his eyes. A collection of eight Taliban pickups loomed up in the water-clear depths of the binoculars, looking as if they were only a quarter mile away. Close enough to see the battered black doors. The blink of the windshields like dusty mirrors. Toyota Hiluxes. In the cramped beds of each, several dozen Taliban soldiers were sitting along the rails with their robed knees touching in the middle. Rifles over their shoulders. His first clear sight of them. He fiddled with the focus wheel to sharpen the image. Their turbans black as crows’ wings.

  “We’ll have
to get closer,” he said, hoping the older man would relent.

  Dostum cut him off. “We will bomb from here.”

  Nelson shrugged. So be it. He had to give it a try.

  He reached down his shirtfront, pulled up the GPS hanging by a lanyard on his neck, and read the pixelated numbers in the gray window of the device. These were the latitude and longitude coordinates that marked his position. He had to shield the small window with his hand to read them in the sun. He read them twice to make sure he was not making a mistake.

  He wrote the numbers down in a green, hardback notebook he kept in an oversized pocket on his shirtsleeve and circled them to keep them separate from the rest of the numbers he would be writing down. He did not want to mistakenly give them to the pilot, who might confuse his position with the enemy’s.

  Nelson asked Dostum to unroll the huge map, and the anxious warlord did so.

  “We are here,” Nelson said, pointing at their ridgetop on the paper, one of thousands of elevation lines on the map. He reached into his rucksack, lifted his range finder to his eyes like a mariner’s spyglass, and shot the distance to the pickups. He read the numbers in the scope’s reticule and marked them down: they were eight kilometers, or about five miles, away.

  Nelson looked down at the map and counted the grid squares from his ridgetop until he’d marched out eight squares with his finger (each grid square equaling one kilometer) and found the Taliban’s approximate position on the far hill.

  He set the range finder in the dirt beside him and looked up at the position across the valley with the naked eye. Yellow sun. The far hills looking sheared as if by tiny, incessant jaws. The Taliban were dug into the hillside and their trucks were parked below the bunker about 100 yards off. A small path led up from the hill and into the mouth of the bunker. The doorway was framed up by thick timbers with a heavy piece of wood overhead as its lintel. Nelson studied the scene. He wanted to absorb the raw image of it. When he felt he had done so, he looked down at the map and translated the image onto the elevation lines fanned on the paper. He did this several times, looking back and forth between map and hill until he felt he’d found the position on the paper that corresponded to the features of rock and slope across the valley. He now had a fix on the Taliban’s position.