Horse Soldiers

by Doug Stanton

  “Uh, Roger that.”

  As they headed into the night, Gibson felt like they were getting beaten to death by the vibrations. They had at least three hours of flight time ahead of them.

  After an hour, base called back, wondering how they were making out.

  “Like I told you,” Gibson said, his voice rattling from the violent movement of the aircraft. “We ran into a damn mountain. But I think we’re going to be fine.”

  But an hour from the Uzebekistan border, one of the crew looked down through an open door and saw a flash. They were flying about 800 feet above the ground. The flash was followed by a burst of light in the clouds behind the escort helicopter that had been trailing them during the mission.

  They were under attack by antiaircraft fire.

  Gibson saw another flash on the ground.

  Any moment, he expected the helicopter’s defense measures to kick in. These consisted of pods of metallic chaff secreted around the outside of the aircraft, set to go off when in proximity to an incoming missile. The release of the chaff was accompanied by the automatic popping of bright flares on the sides of the craft. These looked like exploding fireworks. The idea was that the heat and mass of these objects would draw incoming heat-seeking missiles away from the helicopter. And that was how the procedure generally worked, just fine.

  The right gunner reported seeing another flash as a missile climbed from the ground and exploded, but not close enough to set off the flares and chaff on Gibson’s helo.

  Another pilot, Jerry Edwards, who was flying the trailing helicopter, was not so lucky. His helo popped its flares and chaff, and illuminated the night sky around it, bathing the aircraft with bright light. Both helos were now clearly visible from the ground. They’d been spotted. Almost immediately, more missiles exploded around them. The pilots put both craft into a serious climb. The excitement was so intense that everyone on Gibson’s helo forgot that it was supposed to be shaking itself apart. About half an hour later, they landed safely back at K2.

  After shutting down the aircraft, Gibson returned to his cot in the abandoned aircraft hangar, eager for sleep. It was nearly dawn. Life as a Nightstalker had assumed the predictable rhythm of intense periods of boredom punctuated by sheer terror. Fly all night, deliver supplies or people to different parts of the country, come back to base, debrief, fall asleep. Wake at one or two in the afternoon, make a big pot of coffee, and wander out back to the “veranda,” which the Nightstalkers had constructed out of sandbags and wooden packing crates, and outfitted with a barbecue grill. The sandbags kept the prop and rotor blast from hitting the pilots as they sat waking up in their robes and flip-flops while the rest of camp was already at work. Someone had even planted a small lawn around the decking, which they kept green with the cook’s dishwater. They lined the lawn with handpainted rocks and somebody stuck in a sign announcing that it was the recent recipient of the “Uzbekistan Yard of the Month” award.

  Jerry Edwards had begun keeping a journal, writing down snippets about life in the air. On one of his recent missions they’d actually “blown a hole” through the fog with the Chinook’s massive rotors and created a tunnel through which a C-130 fuel tanker was able to safely pass and land. It was wild stuff like that that you had trouble explaining to folks back home.

  Edwards worried that he wasn’t good enough yet as a pilot to keep up with the rest of the crews, the kind of obsessive attention to perfection that, in fact, made Edwards an A-1 Nightstalker, one of the top 5 percent of all helo pilots in the U.S. Army.

  Sometimes, after coming back from a mission, he couldn’t sleep and walked around the camp trying to wind down. One night he found a cobra in one of the Port-A-Potties that dotted the camp. He dashed backward out the door, slamming it behind him. Returning to his cot in the hangar, he opened his sleeping bag to find two pit vipers inside.

  He missed his wife. He wondered where in hell all the “goodbye sex” had gone. Each man got ten minutes a week to make what the Army called a “comfort call.” He queued up outside the crude booth with its ancient rotary phone to wait his turn. The line was long but Edwards was determined to make his call.

  After an hour of waiting, he was next in line, hunched against the chill in his flight jacket. The guy inside was exceeding his ten-minute allotment and clearly not caring. Edwards knocked on the door and said, “Hey, man, we got people out here who need to make a call!”

  The guy, an Air Force officer, ignored him.

  Edwards saw that there were only enlisted guys in the line. The Air Force dude was pulling rank. Edwards outranked them all. This dickweed needed to be taught a lesson.

  After fifteen minutes when the man still hadn’t hung up, Edwards yelled, “Get off the phone for everyone’s sake!”

  The door flew open and the guy started asking Edwards who did he think he was, and what was so important, and so on, and Edwards just stood there, bone-tired. What mattered now was talking to his wife. He pushed past and said, “You’re all wrong, pal.”

  It was 10 p.m. back in Fort Campbell. His wife answered, and after a couple of long yawns, he figured he was waking her up. He could hear his three-year-old daughter babbling in the background.

  After the expected small talk, in which Edwards reminded his wife that he needed toothpaste and Handi Wipes sent in his next care package, his wife said, “Jerry, I’m pregnant.”

  Edwards was stunned. “Are you sure?”

  “I’ve taken three tests.”

  And then his daughter got on the phone. “Are you at work, Daddy?”

  Edwards, still reeling from his wife’s news, sputtered, “Yes, sweetie, I’m at work.”

  “Can you come home from work?”

  “No, not now.”

  “I’m going to see Santa.”

  Edwards was suddenly sad he wouldn’t be seeing Santa with his daughter.

  “I love you, Daddy!” she cried. “I miss you so much!”

  Then she handed the phone to her mother. “That’s great news,” said Edwards. “Really great. I’m going to be a father again. Wow.”

  He could barely feel his feet touching the ground.

  He and Diane talked a few more minutes and, looking at his watch, after exactly ten minutes, Edwards said he had to go. He hung up.

  He walked back to the hangar in a daze. Man. I’m going to have a baby. It was nearly dawn. The guys inside were watching American Pie and laughing their asses off.

  We have to make it out of here alive, he thought.

  The following morning, October 24, Sam Diller left the Cobaki outpost. What he and Nelson had planned the night before was audacious.

  Diller, along with medic Bill Bennett, and weapons sergeant Sean Coffers, planned to ride twenty miles west into the mountains and set themselves on a high vantage point overlooking the Taliban’s flank. With them were about thirty Afghan soldiers, Dostum’s men. They would commence bombing the tanks and soldiers rushing down the valley to reinforce the army fighting Nelson.

  The key to Diller’s survival was stealth. And speed. They would be deep in Taliban territory. Diller hoped to be resupplied with food and ammo, but that was doubtful. The Air Force demanded twenty-hour scheduling notice on drops, and he knew he’d be unable to schedule that far in advance. They’d have to live off the land. There’d be no hope of quick rescue.

  He swung up into the saddle and looked at the mountains and then at Nelson.

  “This has got risk to it,” he said.

  “I know that.”

  “If it goes bad,” Diller said, “you won’t be hearing from me again.”

  “I’ll be seeing you again.”

  Diller had an eight-hour ride ahead. He turned his horse and his men, trailed by several mules hauling their rucksacks. They began riding across the camp and soon disappeared down the hill. Nelson waved and watched them go.

  As Diller rode away, Spencer and Black, at the Alamo, rode to Nelson at Cobaki on borrowed horses. This was a social visit, of sorts. E
ach man wanted to leave the confines of the base camp and survey the battlefield at large. Black had packed his medical gear and Spencer was carrying a radio, in case they were able to stay at the Cobaki outpost and run the logistics base from there. Borrowing the horses had been difficult. There was none to spare among the Afghans, and only Dostum’s intercession on the Americans’ behalf had landed them in the saddle of two tired mountain ponies.

  The ride was exhilarating, at first. It seemed to Spencer that every few steps his horse would turn and look at him and say, “You’re sure a big bastard. Why don’t you get off and walk?”

  Spencer believed the horse was actually huffing and puffing, as if to be melodramatic. The stirrups were short and Spencer’s knees were practically in his chest. The horse ambled along the rocky path. Spencer’s back started to ache. He was wearing his load-bearing vest crammed with ammo, grenades, water. It weighed about forty pounds. His M-4, which weighed another seven pounds, was slung across his chest.

  By the time he got back to Cobaki, his legs were numb. He couldn’t move. He sat on the horse, petrified, afraid to get off. He didn’t want anyone kidding him about being an old man. At forty, he was one of the oldest guys on the team.

  Black asked him what was wrong.

  “Look,” said Spencer, out of the corner of his mouth, “I can’t get off this horse.”

  Black thought he was joking. Then he saw Spencer wince.

  “I can’t lift my legs. My back is fried. Can you take my foot out of the stirrup?”

  Black pulled Spencer’s right hiking boot from the iron ring and lifted his leg over the horse’s rump. Spencer stood gingerly on the foot.

  He still had his left foot in the other stirrup. He gripped the saddle and pulled the boot away from the ring and set that foot down, too. Black could hear him gasp.

  Spencer stood with his arms over the saddle, catching his breath.

  “You’re going to have to help me walk, too,” he said.

  “Are you serious?”

  Spencer put his right arm over Black’s shoulder and they walked a short ways to a corner of the camp. Spencer let out a groan.

  Black lowered him to the ground. He put a pillow under his legs and then one under his back. He handed Spencer a pill from his medical kit.

  “Take this. You should be asleep in about thirty minutes.”

  Spencer woke the next morning after ten hours of deep sleep. He felt a little better. In fact, he had a herniated disc. But he’d be damned if he would be sidelined by the injury. He struggled to his feet and got to work in the camp.

  Diller discovered the horses they were riding didn’t mind bullets whizzing overhead, but they hated the boom of Taliban artillery and the roar of American bombs. They bucked and reared when either happened. He found that riding a horse uphill was less bone-jarring than riding it down. He found that a tired horse will kneel and roll over and refuse to move, with a blank, faraway look in its eye. Diller would stand there, hands on hips, feeling sorry for it. The Afghans did not feel sorry. They walked up and beat the animals with stiff whips until the animals rose silently and trudged on. Diller discovered that he was capable of living on nothing but fear, the taste of it tucked like a thin wire at the back of his throat.

  By the third day of riding the battlefield, he was nearly out of food and low on ammo. They were moving and bombing and moving on quickly. He had begun to feel like a ghost in the mountain.

  They blew a Taliban ammo dump that caterwauled in the air for twenty minutes after the air strike. They saddled up and kept riding. They were picking their way across the spine of the Alma Tak Mountains, through draws and around hills, always nervous they’d be spotted by the Taliban. On this third day, Diller realized they’d ridden beyond the range of any hope for quick reinforcement or rescue. They were true outliers now, men on their own. Diller hunched in his saddle against the cold and spurred the horse on.

  They were covering ground so quickly it was difficult for him to schedule supply drops. Diller didn’t know where he might be in the next hour. (He would be supplied only twice during the ten days’ fighting in the mountains.) He cut rations among the men to one MRE a day. They were in a race to cover ground before exhaustion overcame them all.

  He was carrying 300 rounds of .556 ammo, his M-4 rifle fitted with a nightscope, four grenades, a 9mm pistol, an extra clip for the pistol, a team radio and 5 pounds of extra batteries, a satellite radio, three MREs in their beige vinyl pouches, a pack of six extra MREs stuffed in his pack for emergency, an extra pair of white cotton socks, and a sleeping bag. His mission: destroy Taliban trucks, tanks, and artillery, and, in lieu of actual targets, “bomb dirt”—simply make explosions fall from the sky—for psychological effect. If he couldn’t kill them, he would scare them shitless.

  He was doing a good job. Word was coming back over the radio net that the Taliban in Mazar believed some kind of monster now lived in the valley. That monster was Diller. He was intercepting frantic radio calls speculating on the whereabouts of soldiers who had left Mazar and not returned. The women left behind, their wives, believed they had been eaten by a giant. In the city, when the cold wind knifed from the south, these women could hear a low, dark rumble come up from the valley, the sound of Diller’s bombs.

  The rocky mountain paths they rode along were laden with mines. Moving down the trail was painstaking work. Through the years, some of the mines had been laid by the Afghans and others by the Taliban. Diller would watch as his scouts stopped to tilt their heads and bend down on hands and knees and peer sideways at the earth. Then they would poke around in the dirt and lift the mines from their hiding place, disarm them, blow the dust away, and tuck them in their saddlebags. Goddamn but these people are tough. They give new meaning to the word “recycle.”

  By the end of the first week, Diller’s clothes were hanging off his frame and he felt like he was sleepwalking in them. He had entered a hyper-aware zone where he felt nothing missed his attention. He was getting by on two hours of sleep a night. He wore his boonie cap pulled down over his hollowed eyes, his face smeared with dirt, a few sparse hairs sprouting above his lip. He couldn’t grow a beard to save himself, and the mustache—that was a joke. Screw it. He figured he had ways of gaining rapport and the respect of these guys, and that was by being the meanest sonofabitch on the mountain. At night, by the reddish glare of his safety light, he read the tattered copy of Sun Tzu’s Art of War he kept in his shirt pocket. The Afghans couldn’t read and they wondered at him as he sat cross-legged on a rock, looking at a page, rubbing his chin, the stub of a pencil gripped between his scarred fingers.

  All warfare is based on deception…

  When [you are] near, make it appear that you are far away…

  Be swift as the wind, majestic as the forest; in raiding and plundering…move like a thunderbolt.

  He would then close the book and order the camp to its positions for night security. They were living in caves, small dugouts in rock big enough for several men curled in sleeping bags. In the middle of the packed dirt floor, a place for a fire. And above the fire ring, a hole that had been carved out of the rock to ventilate the smoke. The walls of the caves were charred black by years of fires, and the air inside was rich as a smokehouse’s.

  Diller slept by the door. He did this because he feared attack at night by Taliban, who might come creeping up the mountain. And he feared that his Afghan soldiers might turn him in for the $100,000 ransom offered by the Taliban. That was a lot of money, he knew—practically more than double what he made working for the U.S. Army. Each night before bed he set empty water cans with spoons in them outside the cave entrance, which rattled when knocked over, a crude alarm system that he figured might give him several seconds’ warning he was about to be killed. He fully expected to die. He accepted this with a silent bravado that he didn’t talk about with the rest of the team. They already knew. Each day when he left on patrol, he wondered if the Afghans around them had betrayed him. Each moment he
felt the impending prick of a knife at the base of his neck. He figured he’d never hear the rifle shot that killed him.

  After five days of sleeping in two-hour shifts, it was clear nobody was getting enough rest. Diller announced everybody would rack out at night and they’d take their chances with the Taliban, as well as their own Afghan soldiers.

  “Boys,” he announced, “I’m going on patrol every day, me and six Afghans, and they haven’t killed me yet. Everybody now gets a good night of sleep.”

  Diller slept near the cave door because he figured the guy positioned there would be first to get killed in an attack. It was his idea, so he would take responsibility for it. He lay in his filthy sleeping bag looking up at the vent in the ceiling. He didn’t like it. The hole made a perfect place to pitch a grenade into the cave. He looked at the hole, rolled the problem over in his mind, and decided there was nothing to be done. He replayed firefight scenarios in his head if the camp was attacked.

  He didn’t admire the marksmanship of the Taliban or the Afghans. It seemed they had both attended the same “pray and spray” school of automatic rifle fire, so he figured, given a chance, he’d shoot everybody first and duke it out hand-to-hand. Grappling. As he had trained to do for hours back at Fort Campbell. Diller was a man supremely aware of his limitations, and thereby immensely confident. That, to him, was the key to guerrilla fighting. He was outnumbered and surrounded fifty to one by Taliban soldiers. They had tanks, artillery, and food. He had the element of surprise. And he was traveling light.

  They were spidering north along the mountain ridge at 9,000 feet. Mornings were ashen, damp. Deserted colonies of pale clouds raced past their faces and vanished downwind. Diller left on patrol each day after hot tea and a mouthful of flat bread. With his Afghan guides, he probed the trail ahead, crawled onto crumbling outcroppings, and lay in the rising sun, glassing the valley below. He was looking for targets, new ones. That was the drill. Back at camp, Bennett and Coffers would call in the strikes on the targets Diller had scanned the day before. Haji Habib’s men would then storm the bunkers afterward and make sure everyone was dead. They left no prisoners. They had neither the men nor the means to corral them. And besides, the enemy did not prefer surrender. He could tell when they’d engaged a militant band of Al Qaeda fighters, fresh graduates, he guessed, from the jihad circuit in Pakistan. He watched from a distance as they blew themselves up with grenades. He would see them evaporate in a fountain of mist and then hear the dull pop of the grenades carried up the mountain. He admired them grudgingly.