by Doug Stanton
“How many men do you have?” he asked Dostum.
Dostum said he had three divisions led by Commanders Ahmed Lal, Kamal, and Ahmed Khan. Fifteen hundred men on horses and an equal number on foot.
“What about the horses?” Nelson asked. “How will they react when bombs start dropping?”
“They will not be nervous,” Dostum said.
“Why?”
“Because they will know that these are American bombs.”
Nelson thought that over. Dostum appeared serious. And then the warlord smiled wryly and slapped him on the back.
That morning, he had sent the first men from the area—300 of them—up the cliffside trail, to the top of the gorge, onto the north side of the river.
The riders had come to the top, turned right, and ridden through a draw or valley screened from the Taliban by a tall hill. They were able to secretly position themselves near the middle of the plain. The Taliban knew Dostum’s men had come out to the battlefield, but they didn’t know their location.
Through the binoculars, Nelson looked east across the valley and saw the horsemen all carrying weapons, AKs and RPG tubes, glittering belts of ammo wrapped around their shoulders. They milled about the plain, their horses picketed nearby chewing ravenously at the grass. Nelson thought back to fifteen years earlier when he’d been commissioned as an officer in a ceremony on the Shiloh Civil War battlefield in Tennessee. He’d studied the cavalry tactics of Jeb Stuart and John Mosby, whose “Mosby’s Raiders” had ridden circles around Union troops in lightning attacks. Now he sat ringside to the first cavalry charge of the twenty-first century.
Dostum was yelling in Uzbek; the radio buzzed with anxious voices. Half the men had mounted their horses and ridden them in a line a quarter-mile long on the back side of the hill. They were still hidden from the Taliban. It took at least a half hour for all the horsemen to align themselves properly, about 150 of them. They sat on their horses lifting their calloused, scarred hands to their mouths and speaking into their walkie-talkies, with more men joining the line and then being told to ride out and wait behind the screening hill to form the second wave. It was thrilling.
“Charge!” Dostum shouted into his radio.
At this, the men bolted. They shot up in their saddles climbing the back side of the hill and crested it and let out a yell and then dropped down and disappeared, at least from the Taliban soldiers’ view. Nelson could watch all of it from the side, in profile. Dostum was beside him nervously muttering and speaking into the radio and ordering further corrections in the flying mass of thunderous horses and shouting men.
There was about a mile of ground between them and the Taliban line, a helluva distance to cover, Nelson thought, without getting shot. What he saw as he looked at the plain was a series of seven bare ridges, between 50 and 100 feet high, with about 200 yards of bare ground separating most of them, calm water between tall waves. As they rode, the horsemen continued rising up and down the hills, appearing and disappearing. When they got about halfway across the field, the Taliban guns opened up.
The noise was deafening, shells and bullets whistling over the ground at head height. Men would be riding in the saddle and then suddenly fly backward as if yanked and tumble to the ground and lie motionless as more horses approached from behind and leaped over them, charging toward the firing line. Sometimes a wounded man got up and limped away or held out a hand and swung up into the saddle of a fighter smashing past at full gallop. The riders leaned out over the stretched necks of the horses, firing as they ran, the long, dark reins clamped in their teeth.
The last four ridges comprised a half-mile stretch of the battlefield, with maybe as much as 1,000 feet of open ground between some of the ridges. The Taliban tanks sat squat and black, belching thick yarns of smoke on the last ridge.
Nelson could see the Taliban raising and lowering the tanks’ barrels, trying to adjust the fire. It was hard, often impossible, as the horsemen swarmed toward them. They were moving fast, growing larger and larger, from the Taliban point of view, as they approached.
As they reached the second to last ridge, the riders halted and jumped down from their horses. They threw the reins on the ground, stood on them, lifted their rifles, and began firing methodically at the Taliban line. Some of them were frightened and sprayed the line at full auto. Others shouldered RPGs and fired. Smoke trails whizzed over the open ground as the flying grenades exploded among the Taliban.
As they did this, the second wave of horsemen advanced under the covering fire. They were riding hard from behind and overtook the men on the ground and blew past, shouting, galloping straight at the Taliban line. The standing fighters swung back into their saddles and beat their horses to catch up, and the two waves joined in one line as they drew near, within shouting distance of the Taliban.
Standing near Dostum, Fakir was listening to his radio, tuned to the Taliban frequency. He could hear them yelling, “We can’t resist. We have to move!”
As the horsemen charged, many of the Taliban stood up and looked behind them and then at the horsemen, and they threw down their weapons and started running, their black smocks flapping, the men slipping on rocks in their cracked dress shoes, falling and rising quickly as the horsemen thudded behind them.
The horsemen leaned from the saddle to reach out and club them with their rifles and dismounted to finish them with knives. Or shot them in the back, the Taliban throwing their arms wide, turbans unraveling, as they fell face-first in the hard orange dirt.
The fight raged as the light failed, the moon coming up. Just before dark, Nelson spotted a Bimpy and a tank still untouched. They had crept over the edge of the hill where they’d been hiding in reserve. Now they were raising hell, their turrets sweeping the field, firing in measured booms. Nelson and Dostum had been trying to raise the commanders on the field to tell them to attack the vehicles. Either the commanders couldn’t hear the radio transmission amid the din of gunfire or things were too chaotic for them to organize an attack, but they didn’t respond.
In the meantime, Nelson managed to talk a pilot overhead onto the two targets.
Watching Nelson at work, Ali Sarwar, one of Dostum’s commanders, was fascinated by the bomb strikes. He saw Nelson speak on his radio and then scribble numbers in a notebook. Overhead, high up, there were jets circling. They dropped bombs after he scribbled down the numbers. It also appeared to Ali that the back end of one large plane would open and four smaller jets would come out and then start flying around and bombing the Taliban.
Fakir, too, was confused by the sight. Thinking back to the attacks several weeks earlier in the United States, and the way those planes had been rammed into buildings, he wondered if the big plane was being hijacked.
He asked General Dostum on his radio. “Sir, I see something I do not like. Smaller planes are chasing a big plane. What is happening?” Dostum was not exactly sure how aerial refuelings worked, either. It didn’t seem likely there was something wrong, but he asked Nelson, “Fakir sees little planes chasing a big one. Is there a problem?”
“The small planes you see are jets,” Nelson said, “and they’re being refueled by the larger one, which is a fuel tanker. Everything’s fine.” He was surprised by the innocence of the question.
Now, as the pilot seemed ready to drop on the tank and the Bimpy, he told Nelson over the radio, “Dude, I’m sorry, but I am bingo.”
“Bingo? You’re kidding me.”
“No, I’m sorry.”
The pilot had reached that point in his fuel consumption where he had just enough left in the tank to return to base.
“But we’re close. You gotta drop, man, I’m begging you.”
“Sir, I am out. Bingo.”
And the bomber peeled off its race track and headed back to base. He would be arriving just before sunrise, out in the Indian Ocean, on Diego Garcia.
Nelson was furious. He watched in dismay as Dostum’s men wheeled and, looking over their shoulder at the charg
ing Bimpy and tank, hunched down in the saddle and kicked their horses and beat them with whips to make them move faster as they abandoned the enemy line they had swarmed and captured.
They rode back over the plain through dead bodies and parts of bodies, heads setting upright in the dirt as if the men had been buried up to the neck. The faces slack and impassive as the horses’ hooves passed, inches away. The dead eyes brimming with the sudden flare of sunset.
But Nelson realized: We can win. An idea hit him. If we can coordinate air support, we can beat these guys and kill the armor they bring up out of reserve once we’ve kicked their ass.
He knew that the tank and Bimpy hadn’t been in the Taliban line when the charge began. They had driven to the battlefield from the west. That’s when he had his second realization: I’ve got to split the team again. I’ve got to send somebody north so they can blow up these tanks before they get to us. He would have to send a man farther behind Taliban lines, someone who could spot the tanks and who had the skills to precisely call in bombs. That man was Sam Diller.
He got on the radio and called Spencer back at the Alamo. “Come on up,” he said. “I’m sending Diller downrange.”
Nelson and Dostum rode back to the outpost at Cobaki. Men limped into camp bloody and exhausted. The badly wounded in need of medical care were carried down the cliffside wrapped in blankets as provisional stretchers. There was a steady stream of them moving down the trail in the night, screaming and moaning, accompanied by the rattle of the men’s gear and the occasional snort of a horse coming up behind them in the dark, passing down the trail, and moving on.
At the foot of the trail, the stretcher bearers turned left, or south, and picked their way downstream along the river, the sound of the rushing water covering their movement. They had a long way to go, several miles, until they appeared at the gates of the Alamo, where they burst in and laid the stretchers in the courtyard, blankets now slick with blood.
At the Cobaki outpost, Dostum told Nelson that he wanted to send his men across the gorge again the following day. He realized they could use the bombers as a new kind of artillery fire. They would have to time the bomb strikes perfectly so that the horsemen started their charge just after the bombs landed.
Dostum also said he had made a decision. “I want you to come with me,” he told Nelson.
“Tomorrow,” he said, “we will go to the battlefield together.”
As Nelson brought the fight to the Taliban, Pat Essex and Cal Spencer were running the logistics train at the Alamo. It was boring work, though neither man would admit as much, but the log train was no less important for Nelson and Dostum than to be with them on the front line.
Essex pumped water to be sent out into the field, using a hand pump and filling five-gallon water cans. He would pump for thirty minutes, then somebody else would take over.
Scott Black, the medic, was busy treating the maladies of the local villagers in Dehi, while Spencer retrieved the supply drops that came in. Black’s trips into Dehi were a simple and perhaps obvious subterfuge. As he examined the teeth of the local children and listened to the heartbeats of their parents through his stethoscope, he would ask questions. “Are there any Al Qaeda in the area? Taliban? Who are the good guys and the bad?”
Black and Spencer both noticed that the locals seemed to genuinely like them. The Americans made educated attempts to speak the local language, which endeared them. The team took pains to look away whenever a woman passed by, even though she might be dressed in a full-length burkha, her face hovering unseen behind a piece of latticed gauze. They were trying to become the Other without going native. The truth was, the people in the village saw the Taliban as the invader, even though many of them were Afghan citizens. Black was part of the insurgency trying to overthrow the Taliban.
Getting supplies air-dropped to Nelson and Dostum was proving more complicated. The first drops had thundered in from planes flying at 20,000 feet, and Spencer screamed and yelled in his e-mails to headquarters that you couldn’t drop from that height, but the pilots kept saying, “We hear there are SAMs [surface-to-air missiles] on the ground, so that’s our hard deck, twenty thousand feet.” The bundles had come whistling down and hit with a god-awful whoompf—if anyone was around to hear them: they often missed their mark by a half mile. Spencer worried that one would land on a house. He imagined it would flatten the modest mud structures.
He and Essex approached the drop zones at the scheduled hour, usually to see the bundles miss their mark or explode on impact. It was then a mad race—sometimes in minefields—to collect the scattered water jugs, boxes of MREs, and sundries before the locals arrived. The locals would shoot at each other with their AKs as they stripped the crates bare, making off with rice, MREs, horse feed, and bandages. They even dragged away the aluminum crates and used them as roofs for their houses.
The pilots had finally conceded and agreed to drop the bundles from 800 feet, once it was clear the SAM threat was minimal. Not surprisingly, the drops’ accuracy went up as the planes came down. Of course, bundles being kicked out the door at that height took less time to land, making for an even crazier dash for Spencer and Essex to gather everything before the locals rushed in. What they missed they had to buy back on the black market. Sleeping bags went for $10, cooking stoves for $15.
Spencer and Essex could have strangled the Air Force guys back in Turkey who were assembling the bundles. There was no rhyme or reason as to how they packed things. The boxes weren’t marked or they were poorly marked. Occasionally, radically different items were mashed into the same boxes—some piece of equipment might be stuffed in a carton filled with MREs. Spencer and Essex nearly gave such a box away to the locals. It contained computer cables.
Once, at a drop near the Amu Darya River, Spencer rushed to where the bundle had fallen and spied what he thought were containers full of gasoline and said to himself, “That would be cool. That’s something we could use. And we could give some to the locals. They sure do need gas.”
An Afghan man unscrewed one of the containers and sniffed, a dumbfounded look on his face. He smelled again and said, “Water?”
He stared at Spencer and then motioned to the river. “You want water? We have the river!”
Spencer just turned away, thinking, Nope. I can’t explain this one.
Sometimes, bundles hit the ground and vanished as if by magic. Without a trace. Once they couldn’t find a bundle containing mail from home. Spencer and the team knocked on doors and asked if anyone had mail for the Americans. The men held out dollars, American dollars, and kept going from door to door. They came upon an Afghan man driving a donkey cart along a rutted path who was wearing a chemical warfare jumpsuit complete with gas mask and hood. He was also toting a black tool crate with “ODA 595,” Spencer’s team number, painted on the back. It was packed with twelve sets of camo clothing for the team. They never found the mail.
As Nelson and Dostum maneuvered across the mountains, Essex spent mornings around the cookfire heating water for tea and chewing warm, freshly made nan, one of the team’s few comforts as they adapted to the harsh conditions. Like the Northern Alliance soldiers, their beards grew coarse and foul, their hair stringy. They raked it with cheap black pocket combs and brushed their teeth using their fingers. Ben Milo, the B-team weapons specialist, had brought in three bars of soap stuffed in an old gym sock for the entire deployment and he apportioned them sparingly. He took what he called “ho” baths, washing his armpits and privates. All of the men began to reek.
A rustic existence, yes, but they had trained for this. The men used a provisional shitter in the courtyard, although with its door torn off by the wind, they might as well have been shitting in the open air. Not the Afghans. They crapped everywhere, wherever they felt like it. Their knee-length smocks allowed them to squat at will and do their business. Essex didn’t comment on the habits of the Afghans. As a guerrilla soldier, he’d been taught to let things be as they were. He wasn’t there to
change how anyone relieved himself.
Hour by hour, Dostum sent couriers from his position, riders who galloped up in the dirt yard to inform everyone what was going on. Essex was having trouble arranging for supplies to get to Nelson. He needed horses to carry the gear.
Normally, a healthy animal would cost $300, but when Essex attempted any sort of haggling in Dehi, he found the price had gone to $1,000. Still, Essex wondered, what choice did he have? His guys had to get their beans and bullets. He figured he would buy twenty horses for the team to ride and to transport supplies. But soon there weren’t any for sale. Whatever animals were left behind had been snapped up by Afghans riding them into battle.
Making matters worse, Essex was apprised of a command decision at K2 to force two Air Force personnel onto the team. Sergeants Mick Winehouse, twenty-eight, and thirty-three-year-old Sonny Tatum had been trained to call in aircraft on bomb targets, a job they did expertly. Essex learned they were being added because Nelson and the team weren’t hitting targets, or at least enough of them. Essex was short on horses, and now he would have to find two more for these guys! He was livid.
And insulted. Didn’t the higher-ups understand the Afghan way of war? They were winning. Nelson didn’t have to blow up everything he aimed at. He had to make the Taliban believe he could smash any target, in any place. And this he was doing quite well.
Nevertheless, Essex would live with the decision. And he looked on the bright side. Tatum and Winehouse were bringing something called a SOFLAM, short for special operations laser marker. Nelson’s team hadn’t brought the bulky piece of equipment along because they’d figured to travel light.
Targeting a Taliban tank or truck was easier with the SOFLAM than the method Nelson was using. The device controlled laser-guided bombs—munitions right out of science fiction—and was packed into a green metal box about two feet square and six inches high. Attached to it, by means of a long cable, was a trigger grip. The box rested on a tripod and you stood behind it looking through a scope mounted on its top, inside which were crosshairs. You trained the crosshairs on your target and pulled the trigger.