Horse Soldiers

by Doug Stanton

  He wrote the position’s grid coordinates in the notebook and scribbled “Enemy CP” (Command Post) beside them. These were the numbers that he would radio up to the B-52 overhead.

  He looked up, squinting. There it was, the jet, miles above, barely visible. It looked like the silver nub on the screen of a child’s Etch A Sketch scoring a wide oval in the sky, about twenty miles long and ten miles across. The pilots called this the plane’s “race track.” The plane was waiting up there. All Nelson had to do was pick up the radio and relay the numbers.

  He hoped by God that he didn’t screw it up.

  The satellite radio was heavy and boxy like a home stereo receiver, powered by a green battery about the size of a half-gallon ice cream carton. A cable snaked from the radio across the dirt to a black, spindly contraption that communications officer Vern Michaels had erected as Nelson plotted the Taliban position. This was the radio’s satellite antenna. It was shaped like a small, charred Christmas tree. Michaels had set it in the dirt and carefully pointed the crown at the sky in the direction of government satellites circling overhead.

  Nelson keyed the mike and identified himself as “Tiger 02,” his call sign. The pilot came back acknowledging himself as “Buick 82,” and said he was cleared to drop.

  Nelson read off the coordinates and the pilot repeated them back. Up in the cockpit, the pilot reached over with a gloved hand to a console and typed in the numbers.

  He then pressed “send.”

  The coordinates circled backward in the plane through the skeleton of circuits and entered the bomb bay, where they dropped into the bomb and came to rest in the GPS, which was about the size of a paperback novel, strapped inside the bomb near the tail.

  The bomb awoke. It was now armed.

  The pilot announced, “Pickle, pickle, pickle”—the traditional announcement of bombs away—then pushed another button on the console and the bomb fell from the belly of the plane and started flying to the ground.

  “Thirty seconds,” radioed the pilot.

  “Roger. Thirty seconds.”

  As the bomb fell, the GPS monitored its position and checked this against its destination. As the bomb rocked and hummed in the slipstream, the GPS sent signals to the tail fins, which feathered the breeze and ruddered the projectile on course.

  “Twenty seconds,” said the pilot.

  The bomb was 12 feet long and filled with about 1,200 pounds of explosives. It was tapered at its green nose to a sharp point and could fly fifteen miles from drop point to target. It was called a JDAM, short for joint direct attack munition, but it was known informally among the Americans as a “smart bomb,” as opposed to the “dumb bombs” dropped by the millions over Europe and Japan during World War II.

  “Ten seconds,” said the pilot.

  Several weeks earlier, Nelson reflected, he’d been sitting in his car at the Wendy’s drive-through at Fort Campbell waiting for his order. O Lord God, do not let me miss.

  Nothing was moving upon the far hills. None of the men in the trench was moving. They were silent. They stared at the Taliban position.

  And then: the mushroom cloud.

  They saw the explosion before they heard it, and then came the boom.

  It came rolling up the hill and over them on the ridgetop like a train, and kept going and receded behind them and faded.

  The violence was fearsome. Scary. Nelson had called in air strikes before, but never on people. Always in practice.

  He scanned the Taliban position with the binoculars, anxious to see the damage done.

  As the smoke cleared, he saw that something had gone wrong. He scanned the hill again. The bomb had missed the bunker. By a lot. Maybe a mile, maybe more. It had landed between them and the target.

  He wondered if Dostum realized the mistake. He was about to explain what had happened when he noticed that one of the general’s most trusted aides, a man named Fakir, was moving up and down the line of Afghan troops slapping high-fives. The men with him were laughing. Dostum himself was grinning.

  For the moment, Nelson decided that he’d keep his disappointment to himself.

  As he was thinking this, the second bomb hit.

  This explosion was even bigger and Nelson saw that this one, too, had fallen short.

  The Taliban were filing out of the bunker and looking around—up at the sky and across the desert—unsure of where the big noises were coming from. After a short while, they went back inside. Dostum’s men continued laughing at the sight.

  Nelson was sure he’d figured the coordinates right. Maybe the B-52’s crew had plugged them in wrong…. He got on the radio and told the pilot to correct for elevation.

  The pilot dropped again. This third bomb hit closer. Nelson figured it had fallen about 600 feet from the bunker—two football fields away. He was going to have to do a whole lot better than this.

  At the sound of this closer explosion, and with the air still thick with smoke, the Taliban poured out of the bunker—maybe a hundred men or more. They came running out in a crouch with their weapons at the ready, as if under infantry attack.

  As soon as they saw the smoking crater, they stopped. If they saw the B-52 overhead, they didn’t seem to connect its presence with the sudden appearance of the ten-foot-deep crater at their feet. Nelson felt like he’d traveled back in time. Here he was riding a horse loaded with sophisticated electronic gear and ordering bombs to be dropped from planes that were flown from Diego Garcia, 2,800 miles away, in the Indian Ocean. As the men on the team would later say, this was like the Flintstones were meeting the Jetsons.

  The Taliban stood puzzled at the crater’s edge. And then a few of them started walking around inside the smoking hole, shaking their heads, as if to divine its origin. Nelson was getting madder by the minute. He might as well have been standing on Mars and phoning the war in. They didn’t know he was even there.

  He decided he would recalibrate the drop. Before he could reach the pilot, however, two more bombs exploded. These were even farther off target and landed two miles or more from the bunker. Nelson barked into the radio that the pilot should hang fire.

  He turned to Dostum ready to apologize. He wanted to say, That’s not who I am, I am capable of more. But he knew this would starkly draw their relationship and make Nelson into a man looking for approval. It would shift an unspoken balance in Dostum’s favor.

  Fakir saw the disappointment in Nelson’s face. “Don’t worry,” he said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You have made explosions come from the sky. The Taliban are afraid!”

  Dostum was speaking happily into his radio with the enemy: “I warned you that I had the Americans here! How do you like me now?”

  Nelson saw his opening. “Well, I can do a whole better than that.”

  Dostum wanted to know how.

  “Get me closer to those sonofabitches.”

  Dostum wondered what choice he had. He knew he himself didn’t know anything about dropping bombs. The young man seemed serious. He liked his aggressiveness. He was tireless, like himself.

  He announced that he would take him to the Taliban.

  That night, before turning in to bed (they maintained guard duty two hours on, two hours off), Nelson looked down the hill behind him where the Afghans were standing beside their horses and removing the saddles. They reached into bags and lifted out what looked like iron nails, measuring at least two feet in length, and as they lifted them in the dusk they looked like men in miniature handling the tools of giants. They dropped the nails on the ground with a thud and bent and grabbed them with both hands and righted them with the point sticking into the dirt. They hitched their smocks at the knee and raised a foot to stomp on the blunt end. They then tested the nails by trying to jiggle them back and forth.

  They unspooled long leather leads and ran one end through the horses’ bridles and tied the other ends around the mushroomed heads of iron. The horses began walking in circles around these new centers
as the riders rummaged in their meager kits, which looked to Nelson like colorful piles of rags, containing some food—bread, nuts, dried meat—and maybe an extra blouse and a spare shoe. Walking back to the horses, they snapped open feed bags sewn from UN flour sacks and dropped in handfuls of oats and corn, lifted the sacks up around the horses’ muzzles, and reached up and tucked the straps over the ears and stood back as the horses chewed hungrily, making a muted, wet music inside the steaming burlap.

  The riders walked up to a campfire and sat on their haunches, eating and staring at the flames. The air smelled cold. The stars drifted up from the horizon as if loosed from a zoo and swarmed the dark above them. When they were done, the riders stood and brushed the breadcrumbs from their smocks and walked down to their horses, talking quietly. They threw their blankets over the animals’ withers and patted their heads and said goodnight. They walked up the hill to their cave and went inside, and Nelson could hear them talking low as they lay down shoulder to jowl uncovered in the cold night. When he realized that they had given their blankets to their horses, Nelson believed that if he fought with the same selflessness, none of them could be beaten. And that he would live.

  They turned out of the camp at midmorning and rode down the hill with the sun hot on their backs and the horses rolling beneath them along the path. Then the riding got hard, the path rocky. They climbed several thousand feet across the face of the mountain and descended again. Going where there was little sign of a trail. Where no truck or tank had ever been.

  As Dostum rode, Nelson heard him on his satellite phone talking to congressmen back in the United States, politicians in Pakistan and Russia. One of the men he talked to was a hearty character named General Habib Bullah, who at that moment was fighting in the Taliban army. Habib had, in fact, forty men under his command and was dug in in a trench in Chapchal, the village Dostum and Nelson were now trying to take.

  A former general in the Afghan army (the anti-Soviet army), Habib had been imprisoned after the Taliban took power in 1996. His family urged his release by promising that Habib would join the Taliban army. Reluctantly, Habib agreed. What else was there to do? Habib had rented his skills as a soldier for his freedom.

  He loathed the Taliban. He was one of the select few Dostum had given a phone to in order to communicate secretly about their movements. Mendicants, zealots, misfits, revolutionaries, much of the Taliban army had dropped through so many hoops and wickets to finally find themselves resting at the bottom of the Taliban trench that their provenance was a lesson in Middle East geopolitics.

  Their reasons for coming ranged from the absurd to the sublime. One soldier fled his native Iraq to avoid embarrassment after being accused of having a “small penis.” He felt fighting jihad would make him seem a man in his neighbors’ eyes. He was sorely disappointed in the hard work this entailed. “The Taliban is fucked up, I’m serious,” he would say after his capture in late 2001. “They pray like twenty times a day. That’s too hard for me.”

  A soldier from China, a Uighur, part of a politically oppressed minority in that country, had found it easy to travel to Afghanistan. There were practically no immigration rules. He was shocked when the United States started bombing in October. He had come to Afghanistan in order escape oppression in China—he thought that if the Americans knew he was there, they would stop. Didn’t they know that the Chinese government would take a woman pregnant with a girl and open her up and throw the baby in the street? He called himself a “normal” Muslim, a man who wanted to live as one and be free of such homicidal horrors.

  Another soldier had come from the United Kingdom to attend the military training camp called Al Farooq. “I am a Muslim and Afghanistan is a Muslim state. I belong there.” He had been in trouble with police back home and thought that by moving to Afghanistan, he could start a new life. Near the end of his training, when he learned that the camp was funded in part by Osama bin Laden, he told himself, “I will finish anyway. I am almost graduated.” He was afraid that if he didn’t, people would say that “I wasn’t a man and I couldn’t handle the training.”

  As he rode, Dostum talked to journalists, too, from around the world. They wanted to know if he had American soldiers with him. “No, of course not!” he lied. “I have only some humanitarian aid workers. They are here helping me hand out ‘lead’ to the Taliban.”

  Lead?

  “Yes, lead! It is in short supply here.” The joke either confused or mystified the reporters. Dostum thought it was hilarious.

  The outpost at Cobaki sat about two miles from the mountain headquarters, but because of the terrain, they rode at least five miles along a crenellated maze of switchbacks, dead ends, precipices. Nelson trusted that Dostum would lead them safely. He knew he was breaking rule number one, which was: Trust no one. He and Diller, Jones, Bennett, Coffers, and Michaels kept their hands near their weapons.

  As they rode, the Americans struggled with their horsemenship. At times they could be downright comical. At one point later in the campaign, Fred Falls’s horse, an irascible stallion, leaped off the trail without warning, ignoring the switchbacks, and started running down the mountain face. Falls would later remember leaning back in the saddle because he had seen an actor in the movie The Man from Snowy River do the same thing—and survive just such a ride.

  Falls’s head was bouncing up and down on the horse’s butt while his hiking boots were flailing up around its ears. He was yelling at the top of his lungs, “I don’t want to die!”

  At the bottom of the run, the horse spied an eight-foot-wide ravine; Falls saw it, too, and yanked on the reins. The horse leaped and was airborne, sailing downhill, making a perfect landing, and galloping to the bottom. Falls pulled the reins and the horse began making a circle, as if Falls were on a merry-go-round, the horse going faster and faster then finally slowing, until it stopped and began grazing a few sparse stalks of grass.

  Falls sat up, amazed that he had survived. He had covered so much ground so quickly with his shortcut that it took General Dostum and Nelson ten minutes to reach him.

  When they did, Dostum rode up, gazing at Falls. He said something quietly in Dari as he passed and rode on without stopping.

  “What’d he say?” Falls asked a translator.

  “He said, ‘Truly, you are the finest horseman he has ever seen.’”

  “Tell the General thank you,” said Falls.

  After a four hours’ ride, they arrived at the austere, windswept outpost, altitude 4,800 feet.

  In the distance, tucked on top of a hill, stood about forty mud houses. The window openings dark and empty. No people about. No animals. The village looked like something recently excavated from the earth. Through the binoculars, the edges of the buildings were sharp and straight and the walls smooth. Flat roofs. The dust was rising and coloring the air amber as the morning drafts roared up from the valley floor. Nelson set to work preparing the bomb strike on Beshcam.

  The Taliban had dug a trench line into a hill near the village, which was about two miles off. Nelson saw a collection of brownish-looking pickups that the Taliban had camouflaged that color, he would later learn, by pouring gasoline over the body and then adding shovelfuls of dirt and mixing the two in a thick paste. Water was in precious supply.

  Nelson glassed the country and saw several Taliban tanks, Russian models called T-52s, parked on a hill behind the trenches. The tanks could fire a six-inch shell, at five to seven rounds a minute, just over a mile. Over rough ground, the 45-ton behemoths could travel 35 mph; on roads, they could speed at 50 mph. They would be a formidable opponent for men attacking them on horses.

  Nelson also spotted several Bimpies. They were designed to protect infantry during an assault, armed with a 100mm gun, a 30mm cannon, and three machine guns bristling from the blunt metal bow. Like tanks, their reach was far—they could hurl fragmenting shells up to two and half miles.

  And there were several ZSU-23s—called “Zeuses” by the Americans—which, with their tu
rrets sprouting four 23mm cannons, were normally used as antiaircraft weapons. The Taliban had learned to back these up a hillside so that the uplifted barrels were tipped horizontal to the ground and could be fired, at a demonic rate of 4,000 rounds a minute, creating a furious wall of lead in the air. It was through this wall that men and charging horses would try to ride.

  Nelson wanted Dostum’s men to attack immediately. Dostum had other ideas. He suggested they wait until later in the afternoon. The sun would set at 6 p.m., he said. They would launch the assault at two.

  Nelson wanted to know why.

  “Because there will only be four hours of daylight left once we are upon them.”

  Nelson didn’t understand.

  “This means they will not have time to regroup and counterattack.” Dostum’s men would fight them as darkness fell and use the night as cover for their outgunned men.

  Nelson called in his first aircraft. Because he was about two miles from the Taliban position (the day before he’d been at least five), he felt he could be more accurate in his plotting.

  When the first bomb exploded, he was sure of it.

  The hit had been direct. The Taliban pickups disappeared in a cloud of smoke. Twisted steel and body parts littered the blackened ground. He set up the next strike. This time he took out several of the Bimpies. After that, he went after the tanks. He was setting up targets and knocking them down.