Horse Soldiers

by Doug Stanton

  But Diller felt he was tougher. As long as he and his men could eat. After a week, Diller was famished. He was so hungry he had lost his appetite. And then he heard a bell. A slow tolling in the fog one morning, and in the gray mist he saw an Afghan man herding his sheep. The ragged animals were wearing bells so the herder would not lose them.

  “Get down there,” he ordered Haji Habib, “and get us a sheep.”

  Haji Habib came back minutes later with bad news. They were not for sale.

  “Whaddya mean? Who else is he going to sell them to?”

  “He eats them. They are for his family.”

  Diller walked down the mountain, about a quarter mile, to deal with the man.

  He offered $50 for three sheep.

  The herder wanted $500 an animal.

  Diller was livid. “Who else you going to sell them to,” he asked again, “at that price?”

  The herder smiled. He had a face like a wrinkled pear. “No one,” he said.

  Diller dug in his bag for money: thousands of dollars in marked bills. So the CIA could follow the trail. Diller had thought it would be months before this money was spent. The nearest, even meager, store was three days’ ride in any direction.

  Haji Habib and his men slit the throats of the sheep and lashed them on the rumps of their horses and spurred up the mountain to the camp. They skinned the animals and laid the hides on the cold ground and scraped the creamy fat into pans that they set sizzling on the fire. The meat was sliced and laid in the grease and fried.

  They ate an entire sheep in one sitting. The rest was packed in rolled cloth with the hope it would keep in the temperate air. They ate the sheep for the next two days.

  Feeling well fed now, Diller set his mind to the final push. Word crackled over the radio that Dostum was planning a battle for November 5.

  In preparation, Dean, back at K2, had finally gotten word he was going in. Usted Atta had agreed to retreat to his stronghold south of Mazar, overlooking the village of Ak Kupruk. The village was about ten miles to the west of the Alamo, overlooking a river called the Darya Balkh. The Taliban had captured Ak Kupruk, and Atta had to retake the town before any Afghan forces could travel north.

  The two rivers, the Darya Balkh and the Darya Suf, converged near a village called Pol-i-Barak.

  Dostum with his 2,500 horsemen, and Atta with his 1,000 fighters, would each fight along a wishbone of the two rivers. Dostum and Nelson would move north along the east side of the wishbone, while Dean and Atta moved north along the west side. From Pol-i-Barak, they’d move north along the Darya Balkh to take the much larger city of Shulgareh.

  At the same time, five hundred fighters commanded by the Hazara warlord Mohaqeq would protect Dostum’s flank in the east. Dostum believed that the town of Shulgareh, in the central Balkh Valley, was key to gaining control of northern Afghanistan. Once Shulgareh fell, Dostum predicted, Mazar would fall, and so would the six northern provinces. All that his forces required to achieve this were sufficient arms, ammunition, and air support.

  From Shulgareh, they’d continue north up the Darya Balkh River Valley to the Tiangi Gap, where the Taliban would likely put up an intense, final fight to stop the attack on the ultimate prize, Mazari-Sharif, twenty miles to the north.

  In the midnight hours of October 28, Air Force staff sergeants Sonny Tatum and Mick Winehouse, whose arrival Pat Essex had earlier dreaded, lifted off from K2 with Nightstalker Greg Gibson piloting the helicopter.

  After a three-hour flight, Gibson spotted the infrared strobe that he supposed marked the landing zone. He set the helo down in an awful dust storm. Swirling out of the dark were suddenly a dozen or so armed men, looking angry, and motioning that they wanted on the bird.

  This was odd, thought Gibson.

  Tatum and Winehouse had already pitched their gear off and jumped down. Gibson watched them scramble into the fray.

  Tatum felt like he had just jumped into a snowdrift; the finely grained sand at his feet was nearly knee-deep. Carrying their 100-pound rucksacks, he and Winehouse had to struggle with each step. The night was bitter cold. The dust burned at the back of his throat.

  Tatum could see only about ten feet ahead in the gloom, even through his night vision goggles. He saw what he thought were Afghan soldiers. They were eagerly waving him in their direction.

  They were dressed in thin jackets and sandals. Tatum wondered how in hell they were keeping warm. He couldn’t understand the language they were speaking—a jumble of tongues. All of the men had guns. Tatum looked around but he didn’t see any horses. He knew that the Americans he was supposed to meet rode horses. But where were they?

  He looked over at Winehouse and they both froze. Something was not right. We’re in the wrong place, Tatum thought. We’re not supposed to be here.

  Back on the Chinook, Gibson looked out and saw an Afghan waving his arms and hurriedly directing his comrades to board the helo. At this same time, Gibson noticed that what he had thought was the infrared strobe was actually a campfire burning at a far edge of the landing zone. It also dawned on Gibson that they were in trouble.

  The soldiers had surrounded the aircraft. They weren’t shouldering their weapons, but Gibson knew that was only a matter of time, maybe in the next few seconds. Clearly, they expected to get on his aircraft. He was damn sure that wasn’t going to happen.

  On the ground, Tatum was looking around frantically, scanning through his goggles, for a white guy. “These guys don’t look like gringos!” he shouted at Winehouse.

  “I know!” answered Winehouse.

  About 300 yards away, behind a screen of trees, Nelson and several members of his team stood watching Tatum and Winehouse wander around in the dark. What the hell was going on? Why had they landed there? Didn’t they know that place was one of Dostum’s prisons, filled with Taliban soldiers?

  Nelson thought the Air Force guys would get cut down any minute. Behind him sat the infrared strobe marking the correct landing zone. The pilot must’ve missed it; must have seen the flickering light of the campfire instead. Now Nelson had a problem on his hands. He and his men had shouldered their weapons and were about to start shooting.

  Back on the helicopter, Gibson yelled to Tatum and Winehouse that they needed to get the hell on board. The two men couldn’t hear him above the roar of the rotors but they’d already reversed tracks and were churning back through the sand to the helo.

  Nelson got on the radio and called Gibson. “Whaddya doing?”

  “Yeah, we’re on the ground,” Gibson said, trying to stay cool. “Uh, we’ll be there in a minute.” Nelson and his men stood down.

  Tatum and Winehouse piled on board, yelling, “There’s no white guys here!” As some of the prisoners tried to clamber up the ramp, the Chinook lifted off. Tatum looked down and saw dozens of angry, forlorn faces. Some of the men were shaking their fists at the rising bird.

  These were Taliban prisoners, local citizens, who were under Dostum’s control. He had captured them earlier in the month before the Americans’ arrival. The prisoners had agreed to quit fighting for the Taliban and in return Dostum had allowed them to keep their weapons. Some of them even had day jobs as laborers and returned each night to the mud-walled jail, where they sat around in the freezing dark, bemoaning their fate, but nonetheless alive. They were out of water, food, and medical supplies.

  When the American helicopter appeared in the night sky, they thought their prayers had been answered. They rushed it because they wanted to be captured by the Americans, whom they were sure would take better care of them.

  A few minutes later, Tatum and Winehouse landed at Nelson’s position. Nelson looked over their gear, shaking his head. They had been instructed to come in with a bare minimum, but each man was toting an enormous rucksack and black nylon kit bags containing miscellaneous items. It was too much gear for them to carry themselves and there weren’t enough horses or mules to do the job.

  “You’ll have to ditch some of that stuff
,” Nelson told them. He said they’d have to fit everything in one rucksack apiece.

  “Did you bring any food or water?” he asked.

  They hadn’t.

  Later, when one of them asked Essex where they might find some water, Essex angrily pointed at a mud puddle and said, “There’s what you’re drinking, just like everybody else.”

  Over the next two days, Winehouse and Tatum set about unpacking (and pumping their own water), and settling into the team. On October 30, a tall, heavy truck with wooden sides rumbled into camp. In the aftermath of Nelson’s bombing, Dostum’s men had taken the village of Chapchal. Next, they would attack Baluch, seven miles farther north. Nelson and his men were moving their landing zone and base upriver, to be closer to Dostum’s advancing troops.

  They loaded their gear into the truck and they climbed a dirt road out of the valley and moved north along the rim. After ten miles, they stopped—below them, about 1,000 feet, lay the site of the new base camp. They loaded the gear onto mules and began the climb down along switchbacks into the valley.

  The river plain was wide and baked hard by sun. Copses of acacia and poplar trees grew in dark green stripes against the mountain wall. They set up camp near the trees. Dostum’s tent was a large white canvas affair, stiff as sailcloth, staked out on the ground with manila rope. A cookfire smoldered nearby, upon which sat tea water murmuring in a kettle. The Americans named the place “Helicopter Landing Zone Burrow.”

  Essex and Nelson and the rest of the team lived in caves overlooking the river plain a half mile distant. From here, the team would divide and ride out to the battle atop the rim of the valley, spreading in a ten-mile-wide crescent.

  Essex, Milo, and Winehouse would ride east and north, to prevent the Taliban from getting around Dostum’s east flank. Dostum and Nelson would form the bottom of the crescent, in the center of the battlefield, with Diller, Bennett, and Coffers stationed on the western point.

  Spencer and his men would switch in and out of the different cells, as the force attacked the approximately 10,000 Taliban troops encamped around Baluch.

  Nelson and Spencer stood at the cave’s entrance and marveled at their situation, which seemed fantastical. They were standing there trying to remove, of all things, their contact lenses from their tired, red eyes. It seemed so odd to Spencer to be doing this while standing in a cave.

  The deployment to Afghanistan had happened so fast that neither of them had gotten the long-delayed laser surgery they wanted to correct their sight. And because they sometimes wore night vision goggles, they couldn’t wear glasses. They were worried about how long they could make the bottles of contact lens solution last.

  If they ran out, they wouldn’t be able to wear the lenses, which meant they wouldn’t be able to see. And not being able to see equaled getting shot.

  Spencer called home from the cave using a satellite phone. He hadn’t spoken to Marcha in three weeks. Spencer was going to try to keep it as simple as possible. There wasn’t enough time to convey the experience of what he’d lived through. Or the absurdity of changing your contact lenses in a cave while fighting a war.

  Back at Fort Campbell, Marcha and their three sons had been living with the assumption that no news from Spencer was good news.

  She was just glad that a white government van hadn’t pulled up in front of the house with news that Cal was dead. Whenever she heard a car go by the house, she froze, and peeked out the window, relieved when it was a neighbor passing by slowly. She dreaded the daily possibility of seeing the van.

  She remembered walking into the high school cafeteria and seeing Cal sitting at the Formica table, dressed in an Army surplus coat, with blond, stringy hair. He looked up and grinned. They didn’t know each other. Marcha said to herself, “I’m going to marry that guy.”

  The bell rang, and Cal got up and went to class. They didn’t speak to each other until two years later, at a Christmas party, during Marcha’s senior year. They fell madly in love.

  Marcha’s parents were nagging her about college. Brunswick, Georgia, was about as boring a place as anyone could imagine. One day, she was driving past the Army recruiter’s office.

  She walked inside and the gentleman behind the desk asked if he could help her. On impulse, she enlisted.

  When she got home, she called Cal. “You’ll never guess what I did.”

  “I dunno, what’d you do?”

  “I joined the Army.”

  “You did what?”

  “I joined the Army.”

  “I didn’t even know you liked the Army.”

  “Well, I guess I do.”

  “What do we do now?” Cal asked.

  “I dunno.”

  And then she hung up.

  Cal rode with her parents to the bus station. She was headed to some Army base in Texas. Watching her leave was the loneliest he’d ever felt in his life.

  After about three weeks, he called her. “Marcha,” he said, “I want you to marry me.”

  “Yes!” she said. “Yes!”

  And then: “But why didn’t you ask me before I joined the Army?”

  They lived in a tiny apartment at Fort Bliss in El Paso while Marcha worked in missile defense systems. After four years, when Marcha’s enlistment was up, she decided to stay home with their children (they had two by now). Cal enlisted as a private, never thinking he’d make a career of it. At the ten-year mark, he was ready to retire. But then he decided to try out for something called Special Forces. A couple of guys in his unit were talking about it. Cal discovered that he loved it. Which was how, fifteen years later, he came to be standing in a cave in Afghanistan, calling Marcha back in the States.

  It was three o’clock in the morning when the phone rang on her bedside table.

  “Hey, whatcha doing?”

  Marcha sat up. “Cal?”

  “Love you.”

  “Oh, honey. I miss you.”

  “So, what are you doing?”

  “Sleeping. You always ask that.”

  The question was a joke between them. Spencer would be deployed in a secret place around the world, and he’d call out of the blue as if he were away on a weekend business trip.

  “Where are you, Cal?”

  “You know I can’t—”

  “What are you doing?”

  “Working, honey.”

  “So, where are you calling from?”

  “Every time, you know I can’t answer that.”

  “I know.”

  It was hard to understand Spencer because of the delay in the satellite link. Marcha kept interrupting him. He sounded like he was talking from underwater, his voice wobbly.

  “Well, are you okay?”

  “Me and the guys are fine. Just fine.”

  “Can I send you anything?”

  “How about some beef jerky?”

  “Beef jerky?”

  As he talked, Spencer was looking at a cliff rising straight up across the river valley. He thought it was a grand sight. It was late evening, dusk, and the river valley was quiet. The grass was brown. There was barely any wind.

  “How are things going with the boys?” Marcha asked.

  “Fine, fine. We’re all fine.”

  “’Bye then. I love you.”

  “Love you, too.”

  And Spencer was gone. The connection seemed to melt and the phone went dead in Marcha’s hands.

  Marcha immediately dialed Sam Diller’s wife, Lisa.

  “Cal just called. I can’t figure out where he is. Did Sam call you?”

  Lisa said he hadn’t. They agreed to keep in touch and share any information. They operated a phone tree, with each wife or girlfriend calling the next name on a list and spreading any news. Word traveled fast at Fort Campbell. Since saying goodbye to the men at the church parking lot, the families had heard nothing.

  By the time Dean and his team were ready to board the helicopters on November 2 for infil, the relentless rain at K2 had turned the camp into a virtua
l swamp of anxious, bickering men. Dean was nervous. He worried about the lack of solid intel on Atta, the shadowy warlord he was about to “befriend.” The intel was so weak that when he asked for information on warlord Atta Mohammed Noor, he received a very grainy fax of Mohammed Atta, a dead man who had flown into the World Trade Center on September 11.

  Personalities and politics were the two key aspects of unconventional warfare. If Dean couldn’t get inside the shoes of Atta and his men, where could he lead them? Dean had ended up going to the CIA Web page and downloading information about Afghanistan from the World Fact Book.

  Did Atta have kids? Yes. Where was his wife? In Iran with the kids. Where was his money coming from? Iran and Pakistan, funneled through the Northern Alliance. What was the weather? Drought. How many troops did Atta have? About 5,000 men, some of whom he had “loaned” to Dostum to fill out the Uzbek’s thinner ranks. They were armed with AKs, RPGs, mortars, and a few tanks. Atta was thirty-eight years old.

  The more Dean read, the more the country’s key warlords seemed to resemble the Mafia. Their people had many family ties and some were employed in both legitimate and criminal businesses. They fought one another within their families, but the families stuck together against other families. Dostum’s associates were reportedly involved in drug trafficking and poppy production. Atta seemed the more peaceful of the two, described as a schoolteacher and de facto governor of Mazar-i-Sharif.

  The team had been briefed about the perils of being captured by the Taliban. “They are going to hang you from the town square upside down and beat you until you die. Then, they’re going to scalp you.”