by Doug Stanton
Everybody had thought, Okay, bad guys. Bad idea to meet them, and then put the thought of capture out of their minds.
The team’s intelligence officer, Sergeant Darrin Clous, set to memorizing all he could about where they were going. He knew they’d be trudging through snow in the mountains, that they might be in-country a year. He memorized Afghanistan’s ethnic tribes and terrain, and briefed the team on everything he knew.
Before boarding, Mitchell and Dean’s team gathered and saluted Colonel Mulholland, who gave the teams one last pep talk. He told them that although they could get into the country tonight, he might not be able to get them out.
Nearing touchdown, Dean heard “One minute out” over his headset. And then he heard they were taking small-arms fire, which alarmed him. But no rounds hit the Chinook. He didn’t know what to make of this information. He later learned it was the Afghans’ way of communicating with each other: “The Americans have arrived.” The Chinook settled down on its wheels and Dean and the team prepared to exit.
They were greeted by a couple dozen Afghans. They helped lift their heavy rucks off the ramp, and trudged with them through the snow a safe distance away. Dean and his team began handing out green Army blankets to the grateful men. So far, so good.
Dean himself was shivering from the ride in. The other bird came down fifteen seconds later, blasting them with snow and wind. Sergeant Brian Lyle’s feet were numb from the cold. He saw four or five of the locals crouched by a tiny fire they fed with small, scrubby bushes that looked like the kind of stuff you’d use in building an electric train diorama. It seemed that some of them were actually sticking their feet into the fire to keep them warm.
Dean couldn’t believe what the Afghan fighters were wearing: long gowns and plastic shower shoes. Dean, red-haired, tall, with pinkish skin, realized that he had to look strange to them, too.
The Afghans began packing 300 to 400 pounds of gear on a string of a dozen burros. What shocked weapons sergeant Brett Walden was that after the Afghans packed the gear, they scrambled on top of the heap, planning to ride the straining animal. Walden felt equally sorry for the horses loaded down with oversized Americans and their ammunition and rucksacks.
The Americans struggled in the thin mountain air to keep up with the thinly dressed locals who—no longer astride the burros—were walking swiftly. They’re smoking us out here, thought medic Jerry Booker. They slipped on ice and laughed nervously as they approached sheer drop-offs, their backs pressed against the rock wall as they inched ahead. Even the burros were slipping with a horrible racket, their hooves pounding the slushy snow. Booker slipped and fell and split his lip on the butt of his M-4 rifle. After six hours of marching up and down ridgelines, Dean and his team entered the base camp of the warlord Atta Mohammed, near the desolate village of Ak Kupruk.
It was about 4 a.m. Atta emerged from a mud house, looking regal, wearing a knee-length blouse, matching cotton pants, a scarf, black leather boots, and a beige Pakol hat.
Atta was stroking his beard, looking overjoyed to see his new American friends. Dean immediately wanted a Pakol hat.
He shook the warlord’s hand, which was strong and papery, darkened by years of sun and war. For a thirty-eight-year-old, he looked like an older man. Dean thought he had warm eyes.
“I’ve heard a lot about you,” Dean said, lying through his teeth.
What he knew about the man would’ve fit on an index card. But he wanted Atta to know that he had the United States’ entire attention.
Atta smiled and, through an interpreter, welcomed him and explained that he had been up all night planning his army’s movements.
He surprised Dean by announcing that he was going to take a nap.
Dean felt the air go out of the moment. A nap? He wanted to sit down and talk about the war.
The warlord bowed slightly and retreated inside his house. Dean shrugged. He ordered everybody to unload their gear and find escape routes in the camp in case of an attack.
After dropping off Dean’s team, the helicopter lifted into the air and pushed about ten miles east to deliver Major Mark Mitchell and Lieutenant Colonel Bowers, and the rest of the command and control element, to Dostum’s base camp.
About 100 yards from the landing zone, Nelson and his communications officer Vern Michaels crouched behind some rocks, waited for the bird to land. They feared being mistaken for unfriendly forces lurking around the landing zone, and Nelson knew that the guys in the helicopters had a habit of shooting at anything that moved. So they stayed hidden as the aircraft lifted away. He could hear the rumble of a small, motorcycle-like engine starting. Nelson wondered what it was.
Through his night vision goggles, Nelson watched as the guys on Mitchell’s team loaded two six-wheeled motorized “buggies” with rucksacks and assorted bags of gear. The vehicles measured about the length of a midsize car. Upon inspection, they looked like big golf carts on steroids.
The green-and-yellow-painted buggies were called Gators, manufactured by the John Deere farm implement company; with their knobby six wheels and rugged frame, they could navigate trails that a truck couldn’t travel along. Max Bowers had thought to bring along the vehicles after reading the reports that Nelson and his men had trouble finding enough horses.
Mitchell was surprised to see that they had essentially landed in Dostum’s base camp, where Nelson and his team had been living. Mitchell could make out the gray smudge of Dostum’s canvas tent, staked down in the hardpan clay. Horses neighed and shifted nervously somewhere nearby.
Bordering Dostum’s tent was a crude mud wall, chest-high; Homer, Mitchell, Bowers, and the rest of the newly arrived team unrolled their sleeping bags at its base.
Mitchell figured it was an hour before sunrise and sleep seemed beside the point. He dozed off, then woke with a start. He’d been asleep several hours. He scrambled out of his sleeping bag. At that moment, Dostum strode out of his tent.
Mitchell marveled at the general’s confident stride. Mitchell had seen only a head shot of the man in a uniform. He tried to match the unflattering descriptions he’d read about Dostum with the smiling picture of hospitality standing before him.
General Dostum reached out and shook Mitchell’s hand and then introduced himself to Bowers.
With his arrival, Bowers was now Dostum’s liaison, taking over for Nelson. About this new arrangement, Nelson was disappointed. He also knew there was nothing that could change it.
Bowers, smiling and sporting a newly grown gray beard, sized up Dostum.
He had prepared for this moment. He’d even brought along a piece of the World Trade Center, a thin candy-bar-size hunk of metal, which he intended to give to Dostum and Atta, in a bid to bind them against their common enemy, Taliban and Al Qaeda soldiers.
“An honor,” said Bowers, firmly shaking Dostum’s hand.
Dostum realized he would miss Nelson’s company. He and the young American had formed a familial bond. He returned Bowers’s compliment.
“What do you want, General? What can we do for you?” Bowers asked.
“I want to get out of this valley. I want to take Mazar.”
“We can do that,” said Bowers. “We can fight.”
Dostum studied the American. He believed him. Many men would die, but they would take the city.
Back at Atta’s base camp in the neighboring Darya Balkh River Valley, west of Nelson’s position, Dean and his team had been led to a low-roofed mud house inside a walled compound. The walls stood eight feet high and measured fifty yards on each side; in one corner stood a latrine whose door was hung with a filthy curtain. Dean watched as some of the soldiers, dressed in thin cotton pants and knee-length smocks, stood in the courtyard center warming themselves around a pale fire. They looked up at him, rubbing their hands, and smiled. Dean waved back, Hey.
Standing there, looking out at the mountains, which he found beautiful, and back at the fire, smelling the woodsmoke and listening to the horses stamp and whinny
in the nearby paddock, Dean felt he had been born so that he might be alive at this moment, in this moment.
“Where is Atta?” he asked his chief warrant officer Stu Mansfield.
“Still asleep.”
“I’m going outside.” He was anxious to get the lay of the land. Dean pushed through the low doorway in the front wall of the compound and walked out onto the rocky ridgetop. The strip of ground was smaller than he imagined walking up to it in the dark, measuring about 200 yards long and 50 yards wide. The compound’s back wall stood against a rockface rising several hundred feet over the entire structure. The remaining three edges dropped steeply away from the tabletop for 1,000 feet or more, it was hard to tell.
To the west lay the village of Ak Kupruk. Dean walked to the edge of the ridge, lifted his binoculars, and tried getting a clear shot of the houses tucked along the blue Darya Balkh River. The river looked cold in the morning light. The village lay quiet. No woodsmoke, no one moving about. He guessed it was about two miles away. He panned the binos up and over to the right about 1,000 yards, and spied a Taliban bunker in the mountainside overlooking the river and the village. That was the kind of target he wanted to hit.
He swung his gaze back to the houses and tried imagining the men and women and children cowered in the cold rooms of their homes while the Taliban lay in wait in hideouts around the village. He hoped that the Taliban had not learned of his arrival.
Atta awoke after an hour’s nap and summoned Dean, Stu Mansfield, and engineer sergeant Brad Highland to a meeting. They walked with the warlord across the courtyard. Atta’s men, some 300 of them garrisoned in the compound, stood up and watched them pass. They turned and started talking excitedly among themselves. They seemed intrigued by the weapons Dean and his men carried, pointing at the long guns, the M-4s; the black, heavy pistols in their nylon holsters; the grenades bulging in their load-bearing vests.
Dean was struck by something akin to deep affection for these men, who were fighting and enduring more than he had ever been asked to endure. He had the urge to walk around and hug all of them, and say, “Don’t worry, we will get you shit, beans, bullets, and bombs, and we will make life better.” He knew this wasn’t your classic tough-guy response to being in combat, but he couldn’t help it.
Atta stopped in front of a mud house next door to the Americans’ new lodging, and motioned them inside. All of the Afghans stooped and removed their shoes.
Dean hesitated. He looked over at Highland, who cracked a smile. Dean was reluctant to remove his boots as cultural habit dictated. Even as a teenager, he’d been embarrassed by the strong odor of his feet. He’d tried powders, shoe inserts—he’d stopped wearing socks, thinking this might stanch the smell. Nothing had helped. The team kidded him mercilessly. Now he worried that he was about to offend Atta with the smell of his feet.
It seemed odd to be considering the diplomatic repercussions of foot odor, but Dean couldn’t help himself. He had lain awake nights in his tent at K2 gaming all the ways he might screw up his command, but the smell of his feet was something he’d forgotten to consider.
Here goes, he thought, and he bent down and slipped off his boots.
The odor filled the doorway immediately. It nearly knocked Highland over. He watched as Atta’s men drew back as if struck by a stiff wind. Dean quickly took a seat next to Atta on a woven rug spread smooth on the dirt floor.
He tried tucking his bare feet in the crook of his knees, a painful lotus position that he found nearly impossible to maintain.
Highland watched as Atta sniffed the air and then turned his gaze to Dean, who looked up sheepishly at the warlord.
Atta gave a blank look, and then began the meeting. It was all Highland could do to avoid breaking out in laughter. (In later meetings, Dean noticed that Atta made a point to wear his own boots to the carpet meetings—a hint, Dean figured, that it would be perfectly fine to do the same. Dean did not remove his boots again.)
A soldier appeared bearing a tray of almonds and steaming cups of tea. Dean looked around the room at pictures of Ahmed Shah Massoud, the famous anti-Taliban fighter who had been assassinated on September 9, hanging on the walls. It seemed years ago that Dean, on his honeymoon, had read the headline announcing that Massoud was dead. In many of the pictures, Atta stood smiling next to the great Lion of the Panjshir.
“I have several thousand troops,” said Atta, speaking through an interpreter. He explained that these men were farmers by day, guerrilla fighters by night, and lived in the surrounding mountains and villages. He had only to call on his radio and they would appear.
Later, Dean would see Atta’s fighters show up carrying AK-47s, and there with them would be their sons, carrying spare magazines. Behind the sons walked even younger sons, carrying nothing. Dean understood that in this kind of fighting, the sons who carried nothing would pick up either a gun or a magazine if the fathers or brothers were killed. The look on the faces of the kids seemed to indicate to Dean that they expected to die.
Atta explained that he had been fighting in this area since he was fourteen years old—first the Soviets, then the Taliban. He said he’d been wounded three times in battle and carried ten pieces of shrapnel in his back. His brothers were all soldiers, still living. His father was a shopkeeper. He said he felt like he’d been telling the world for five years that the Taliban were terrorists, and now that the Americans had arrived, the world was listening. He explained that he had built a network of trusted contacts among the locals, and his soldiers moved themselves and supplies swiftly without much detection by the Taliban. The terrain itself conspired to split and divide and confuse.
Dean explained that he needed his men taken to positions in the mountains where they could watch over enemy bunkers. “I want to bomb the leadership positions,” he said.
Dean knew that the Taliban army was increasingly led by fighters from Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Chechnya. He figured that if he could get rid of them, the locals would defect from the army, because, as Dean had told his team, “Afghans do not like to be occupied by anybody.”
“Do you have a map?” Dean asked.
Atta said he didn’t, which shocked Dean. He reached into a bag and pulled one out, written in English. Atta’s eyes lit up in delight. He took the map, carefully smoothed it open on the carpet, and began narrating in Dari the places he had fought in, the places he still hoped to win.
“I can bring in bombs,” said Dean. “You need to show me the targets—I am not going to just drop bombs anywhere. I don’t want to hurt the population. We are here to liberate the Afghan people.”
Atta told Dean that a village called Lalami, located about five miles west of Ak Kupruk and about ten miles north of where they now sat, had fallen the day before. His men had also attacked Ak Kupruk, but the battle there was still furious. The Taliban had positioned 5,000 troops around the village. So far, his men had captured 800 enemy soldiers and taken 200 more prisoner. They had watched a line of a dozen or more trucks race from the city under cover of darkness, fleeing north, said Atta, to Mazar-i-Sharif.
Atta explained that the Taliban in Ak Kupruk stood in the way of his army’s march to Mazar-i-Sharif.
Dean laid out the battle plan: He and Atta would capture Ak Kupruk and drive the Taliban north up the Darya Balkh River, where they would eventually unite with Dostum’s forces. The combined American and Afghan forces would move up this valley to victory.
“I will need to split my team,” Dean said.
He suggested that Atta stay behind at base camp with chief warrant officer Stu Mansfield, communications sergeant Brian Lyle, engineer Brad Highland, weapons sergeant Mark House, and medic Jerry Booker, who would run a beans and bullet supply train. From this mountaintop vantage point, Atta could direct Dean as he traveled downrange in combat.
Dean would be accompanied by intel sergeant Darrin Clous, medic James Gold, Air Force combat controller Donny Boyle, weapons sergeant Brett Walden, Sergeant Francis McCourt, and communication
s sergeant Evan Colt, and a security detail of approximately fifty of Atta’s soldiers. Their job: bomb Taliban bunkers surrounding Ak Kupruk while Atta’s army attacked the village proper.
Atta smiled. “I will have my men bring up some horses,” he said.
While the meeting between Dean and Atta was going on in the mud house, Brian Lyle and Jerry Booker stood outside the door and watched as some of Atta’s soldiers rode up the mountain from the battle around Ak Kupruk. The soldiers were astride tired horses, trailing a string of burros, the soldiers looking dirty and exhausted, some of them bleeding, their horses breathing raggedly beneath them. The men dismounted and ate a quick cup of boiled beans and drank some water while other men in the camp loaded handfuls of AK ammo and RPG rounds in the saddlebags lashed to the burros. The resupply took half an hour. Then the riders remounted and turned the animals back down the mountain clinking and clanking, descending into the valley and the struggle for Ak Kupruk.
Lyle and Booker dug through their rucksacks, pulled out several cartons of Marlboro cigarettes, and started handing them around as a gesture of friendship to the men in camp. Neither Lyle nor Booker were smokers, but they lit up, too, to be sociable.
Lyle grew light-headed after about three puffs and dreaded the fact that any marching he’d do tomorrow would feel doubly laborious. But then something happened that made the nausea feel worthwhile. Atta’s men started laughing, pleased with the Americans’ generosity, and one of them started yelling, “Commando!” as in “Welcome, commando Dr. Booker!” “Welcome, commando radioman Lyle!”
Their usefulness was soon put to the test when a wounded man stretched out on top of a door was carried into the compound.
This man’s leg was a mess. Booker drew a breath as he leaned in, examining the wound. The guy had stepped on a mine, the kind known as a “toe-popper.” Small, light, and inexpensive, these mines were considered very injurious to an opposing army because they merely wounded the enemy rather than killing them outright. If you blasted a soldier to death, that was that. But a wounded man required several of his comrades to carry and care for him until he reached real medical help. The man before Booker was a perfect example of the strategy—his foot had been peeled back, the jellied flesh dark as a ruby.