Horse Soldiers

by Doug Stanton

  Choffee nodded again.

  “Whatever you do, don’t stop. You hear me?”

  “Yessir!”

  “Don’t stop on me now, you’ll screw me up, and I’ll be pissed.”

  Choffee gunned the engine and in the middle of the current, the buggy began to lift off the river bottom, and Choffee, frightened by the fact that the whole vehicle might tip, decreased the throttle.

  “No!” yelled Spencer. “Damnit, keep going!”

  Choffee hit the gas and the Gator sputtered.

  The rear tailpipe was underwater; when Choffee had slowed, water had flowed into the engine.

  Cal jumped off and started pushing. And then the engine quit.

  Black and Michaels were laughing at him from the bank, “Hey! What happened?”

  “Never mind about that,” yelled Spencer. “Get your ass down here and help!”

  Spencer was out of breath from pushing the buggy, and he was cold, and he had no idea how they were going to budge the vehicle the rest of the way across the river. He was standing waist-deep in freezing water, hands on hips. He just couldn’t believe how cold the river was.

  Just then Michaels yelled out, “Behind you!” He jabbed at the air, toward the opposite riverbank.

  Behind him, Spencer heard the clopping of hooves on the river stones and he turned to see something that took his breath away.

  “My God,” he said. “Look at that.”

  On the far bank, thousands of horses were walking out of the printing press of the night, one after another, looking flat and dimensionless in the dusk. Without stopping, the riders turned the animals and they trotted straight into the river, pushing white collars of foam before them, as Spencer, Choffee, and Black watched them come.

  Spencer called out to Michaels, “Are they ours?”

  Meaning, were these Dostum’s men? Michaels shrugged that he didn’t know.

  There were so many horses, Spencer had a hard time believing they were fighting in the same war. Men on horseback wrapped in red and blue and green scarves (which he remembered were Dostum’s signature colors), propping their rifles on their knees as they rode past where he sat on his dumb machine in the middle of the river. Spencer guessed there were over 4,000 horsemen passing by.

  They looked down at him and said nothing as they neared. Some of them laughed at the buggy. The stallions among them reared and paddled at the air and bared their teeth.

  Several of the men in the line whistled and threw Spencer ropes, which Spencer fastened to the handlebar of the buggy, then the men on horseback kicked the horses and the horses sunk low on their haunches against the strain and began dragging the buggy through the current to the other side.

  Spencer untied the ropes. The men didn’t stop, and the ropes zipped over the handlebar and trailed in the dirt in a jerking motion as the riders coiled them sitting in their saddles and kept riding. Soon the horsemen were gone, riding into some shrinking aperture in the night. It was nearly dark.

  Michaels and Black towed Spencer’s flooded Gator several hundred yards to a two-story mud house along the bank of the river, and they asked the man inside if they could stay while they repaired the Gator. The man silently fed them dinner, boiled goat and rice, and some green onions from his garden, and they ate by the yellow glow of the lamps in the glassless windows of the house. Black had lost twenty pounds in the last two weeks. He hadn’t felt this exhausted since training during Ranger School fifteen years before.

  After dinner, they walked outdoors and flipped on headlamps, and Michaels and Black began taking apart the first Gator’s engine with a screwdriver on the Leatherman tool Michaels wore in a leather holster on his belt. They removed the engine’s head and set it aside to dry and covered the open cylinders with a tent made from a tarp they carried, so the pistons would be protected if it rained.

  They slept on the packed dirt floor in the house wrapped in their poncho liners and were up at dawn, putting the engines back together. They were out of food and they had little water. But Spencer could feel it: Mazar was within reach.

  So said the voice of God:

  He was dressed in a white robe and skullcap as he walked the Irish streets, a mendicant. His father, wishing to spend some time with his teenage son, had taken him to Ireland on vacation. It was the summer of 1998; John Walker Lindh was seventeen. On the street, school children stopped and asked John if he was in some kind of theatrical production. He laughed.

  He and his father passed a butcher shop and a sign advertising pork for sale. As a Muslim, John could not eat this. He stood and good-naturedly posed for a picture. His father snapped away with the camera. His father had once said to John, “I don’t think you’ve really converted to Islam as much as you’ve found it within yourself. You sort of found your inner Muslim.” They laughed about the picture.

  After the vacation, they returned to California. After that, in July 1998, John departed home for Yemen on the Arabian peninsula. He planned to study at the Yemeni Language Center in the ancient city of Sanaa. He stepped from the plane wearing his robe, his cap, and a fierce fringe of beard.

  But in Sanaa, he discovered that some of the students (there were about fifty, from various countries including the United States) were not as serious about a spiritual life as he was. They missed their prayers, they dressed in jeans, not robes. They reportedly imbibed stimulants and worse. The women wore shirts that left their arms exposed. This was annoying and insulting to John. Where were the pure souls to commune with?

  He grew unhappy. He told his classmates that he wanted to be called Suleyman al-Faris. Some of them laughed at him. They answered his request by instead referring to him as “Yusef Islam,” which was the name adopted by the pop singer Cat Stevens, after his conversion to Islam in 1977. John woke his fellow students at dawn so they would not miss their prayers; he prodded them to worship at midnight. He complained about their indecency: “Dear Inhabitants of This Room,” he wrote in a public note, “please abstain from getting naked in front of the window. Our neighbors from the apartment across the street have complained.”

  The school’s director would later call John a “pain in the butt.” After five weeks of study, he withdrew from the school.

  That summer, August 7, 1998, it also happened that Taliban soldiers were marching into Mazar-i-Sharif in Afghanistan. They slaughtered thousands of citizens, principally Hazaras. The streets of the city piled with bodies. As many as 5,000 people lay dead.

  That same day, the U.S. embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, were bombed by members of Al Qaeda. Four men would be convicted for taking part in the attacks. The Nairobi embassy blew up first, killing 213 people, wounding approximately 4,000. Twelve Americans were killed. In Tanzania, a number of minutes later, the embassy there exploded. Eleven people died.

  In Yemen, John Walker Lindh, disquieted by the lack of piety among his fellow students, walked into a different mosque in Sanaa, a place barer, less adorned, more conservative, where he might be taken as seriously as he took himself. He had done some of his study about the Taliban, jihad, and Islam while trolling the Internet at home in California, where ideas about sacrifice and martyrdom were little more than orderly collections of pixels on a computer screen.

  For some men, though, these were ideas worth dying for, ideas expressed by bloodshed.

  By November 2000, Lindh had escaped the liberal atmosphere of his youth and arrived at one of the strictest maddrassahs he could find. Seated on a stool in his teacher’s study, in the dusty village of Bannu, Pakistan, he often refused to discuss his life in California. The following spring, 2001, he wrote home, “I don’t really want to see America again.” Some four months after that, including military training at the terrorist camp Al Farooq, he traveled by foot and taxi into Afghanistan.

  He would later say about the journey: “I went to Afghanistan with the intention of fighting against terrorism, not to support it.” He wanted to help make Islam free from the corruption of w
arlords like Abdul Rashid Dostum and Atta Mohammed Noor.

  By the time he had arrived in Chichkeh in September 2001, he had passed a point of no return. He found himself surrounded by hundreds of men sworn to fight to their deaths in order to defeat infidels. He feared being killed if he showed hesitation in his allegiance to their cause. He feared being accused of being a spy. “There’s a kind of paranoia in Afghanistan about spying,” he later reported. “If I had spoken up for America, I would have stood out.”

  He stayed put.

  Back in the States, as the men passed through Shulgareh and prepared to attack Mazar-i-Sharif, Karla Milo, Ben Milo’s wife, thought she saw her husband on TV. He was riding a horse across an expanse of what looked like prairie in the Dakotas. Does he look okay? Is he getting enough to eat?

  She got close to the TV to study the picture and she couldn’t tell if the man on horseback was Ben. (Milo would later tell her that the person in the picture was not him.)

  She wished he would at least call. She wanted to hear his voice. She promised herself that if he did call, she would not bother him with any of her problems because he would feel guilty about not being with her. And if he was in Afghanistan worrying about her, that meant he wasn’t worrying enough about himself. And that meant that he could get himself killed.

  As a Special Forces soldier, Ben had done only extended training missions overseas, and Karla knew that he’d never fired a bullet in anger or in defense of his own life. She wondered how he would manage. For all of his bluster, Ben was a private man with a loud voice who wouldn’t hurt a flea. After spending fourteen years in the military, Karla realized that this would be her husband’s first brush with death as a soldier. It scared her.

  In the days following the September 11 attacks, the phone had rung constantly, family and friends calling to wonder, “Ben’s gone, isn’t he?” Curious people, these relatives, and she could tell them nothing. Ben wouldn’t even speak about where he was headed.

  In the weeks leading up to his departure, he had spread his clothes all over the house, a real mess. He tore the bedroom and basement apart looking for his will. She also overheard him making phone calls to finalize his funeral arrangements. Her job was to make sure that the kids understood that Dad was leaving, but that he would be coming home as soon as he was done with his “work.”

  That had been almost a month ago. Now Karla had the task of moving the family and all their belongings from their house in Clarksville to less expensive Army housing at Fort Campbell, a split-level town house in a cluttered development called Hammond Heights. The lawns were strewn with tricycles, trampolines, and kids’ plastic playhouses.

  Karla was on her hands and knees in the kitchen, a scrub brush in hand, dripping over a bucket of Spic and Span, when it finally sank in that Ben was really gone. She was suddenly angry that she had to do all this cleaning by herself.

  She rapped the brush on the bucket and scrubbed even harder. “I can’t believe you did this to me!” she muttered. And then she felt stupid. Nobody, she knew, had forced her to marry Ben Milo. She knew she would never tell him about these feelings if and when she talked to him on the phone. She’d save this for later, when he returned, after wisdom had replaced anger.

  Diller rode off Alma Tak Mountain into the valley, headed for Shulgareh. It had been ten days since he’d said goodbye to Nelson at the Cobaki outpost. He’d lost thirty pounds and, except for the feast of sheep, he hadn’t eaten anything except scraps of bread, nuts, raisins, and cheese in three days. He and Bennett and Coffers rode upright in their saddles, solemnly nodding at the passing countryside. The exhausted Afghans sat stonily atop their stumbling horses. It took two days of riding to reach the town. After the first day, the horses had given out.

  Diller’s horse lay down and rolled over on top of him. He didn’t have the heart to beat it back to its feet. He could barely sit any longer in the saddle. He could feel himself bleeding through the seat of his pants. He was glad to walk.

  His legs had been contorted for so long in the ill-fitting saddle and stirrups that the latent arthritis in his ankles flared—a painful souvenir of hundreds of parachute jumps. Diller gripped the reins in one hand and walked upright, stiffly.

  To lighten the mood, Bennett suddenly belted out: “It just keeps getting better and better!” Here they were, living on fried sheep and filtered ditchwater, talking on expensive radios, and calling in GPS-guided bombs on bunkers built of mud and wood scrap, surrounded by Taliban fighters. “It just gets better and better!” Diller chimed in. He cracked a grin and they plodded ahead.

  Several hours later, they stood at the outskirts of Shulgareh beside the tired horses. Diller looked down the crowded main street.

  He held up his hand and the men behind him stopped. “Keep your guns up,” he said. And then they led the horses through town.

  The single main street was lined with thousands of people. They obviously had been awaiting the Americans’ arrival. Some of them clapped—all of them stared. They didn’t seem to know what to make of these pale, filthy Americans riding out of the desert. Diller smelled piss and shit. They had to walk around the sewage flowing in the dirt street.

  They kept moving, looking neither left nor right but scanning both directions with peripheral vision.

  Diller decided he could not walk anymore. He got on the radio and called Nelson.

  “Dude, where are you?” He gave Nelson his position.

  Nelson, traveling north of Diller, was shocked to hear his friend’s voice come over the radio.

  “We are a mile from you—stay there,” said Nelson. “I’m sending somebody down.”

  Diller was standing by the side of the road when he saw a six-wheeled buggy approaching, one of the Gators he’d heard about.

  He smiled when he saw Spencer at the wheel.

  They hugged, and Diller and his men slid on board, and Spencer gunned the buggy.

  After his days spent on horseback, Diller felt strange sitting in a vehicle, watching the road zip past. He had to fight to stay awake.

  In the early predawn hours of November 9, Sergeant Pat Essex had bedded down for the night near Shulgareh when the cell phone of one of the Northern Alliance guards rang. Dostum was calling: he needed Americans to help clear the enemy from the Tiangi Gap, five miles up the road, to the north.

  Essex, along with Milo and Winehouse, grabbed their gear and crammed into a tiny Russian jeep. They were driven through a cold, steady rain to a staging area at the base of the Gap.

  General Dostum was waiting for them with a map spread before him. In their best “pointy talk”—Essex didn’t speak Uzbek and Dostum didn’t speak English—Essex figured out what the general wanted. He asked the Americans to climb up the heights to the top of a mountain ridge, about 4,000 feet above them, overlooking the Tiangi Gap and the Darya Balkh River flowing through it. From there, Essex and Milo’s job would be to bomb Taliban artillery hiding in wait on the north side of the Gap.

  The Tiangi Gap is about a mile-long cut through the mountain ridge that divides the country’s wilds from Mazar and its more civilized metropolis, twenty miles to the north.

  Over the millennia, the Darya Balkh River had carved its bed through the 6,000-foot wall of rock, which runs for several hundred miles east and west. The cut through the mountain wall was a natural choke point. Whoever controlled the heights around the Gap controlled passage through it.

  Essex, Winehouse, and Milo left the warlord and began to make their way up the slick rockface. It was tough going. Their heavy night vision goggles wouldn’t stay on during the bruising ride, and Essex clung to the saddle as his horse navigated the steep switchbacks. Finally, the incline got too steep, and the three men got off their horses and walked them to the top. All the while, they could hear bullets zinging by them—Taliban soldiers shooting wildly in the dark. They worried that the Taliban had already taken the ridgetop. They expected a fight at the top.

  They finally reached the summit at about
3 a.m. and Essex was shocked to find that the Taliban had made no effort to occupy this rocky outlook. This told him that they were in even greater disarray than he had imagined. One of the first rules of war was: Always control the high ground.

  The rain slowed to a drizzle. Ben Milo climbed into his sleeping bag wearing a fleece jacket and long underwear and lay down in one of the rock trenches dug into the mountaintop. Five Afghans, Northern Alliance soldiers who reached the top earlier, had simply wrapped themselves in tattered blankets and trash bags and curled up on the cold ground. Others were making do with cellophane that had been used to wrap the Special Forces’ air-dropped supplies. Milo felt pampered in his expensive cold weather gear.

  He and Essex were concerned they’d wake up and find the Taliban just several hundred feet down the mountainside, on the slope facing Mazar. They spread land mines around the perimeter and sat listening to the tick of the rain and the wet wind moving through the rocks. Even at first light, around six or seven o’clock, Essex couldn’t see anything off the mountain. The mist was too thick. And then around nine the sun appeared and burned away the cover.

  Daylight revealed a landscape that Essex thought resembled Colorado. The cliff face, some 2,000 to 3,000 feet high, dropped straight to the river below, which formed the Tiangi Gap. No grass; a few trees sprinkled like matchsticks in the distance.

  A bomb-cratered road hugged the green, chalky current of the Darya Balkh, and followed it north. In places, the rock walls closed in and the passageway was only as wide as a three-lane road.

  Essex looked down and saw a series of four enemy trenches dug in on the tops of gentle hills. He started calling in the bombs immediately, but it was tough. He would identify a target, a Toyota pickup truck, for example, and the pilot would radio back, “We can’t strike that.”

  “Look, buddy,” said Essex. “That’s a personnel carrier.”

  “Personnel carrier? Well, it looks like a…truck.”