Horse Soldiers

by Doug Stanton

“What is the matter, sir?”

  “Don’t talk! What did you do with your beard? Why have you shaved?”

  Nadir considered his answer carefully, but he could not help himself.

  “My beard!” he yelled. He pointed at his clean-shaven chin. “This is my beard. It is not your beard!”

  The Taliban wrapped Nadir’s wrists with a scarf and hauled him off to a jail in Mazar, where the guard beat him with a rubber hose.

  Nadir yelled at them, “Islam doesn’t depend on only the beard, you know! Islam says, ‘Don’t kill the person. Don’t kill the human. A human is a creature of God.’”

  He was in jail for three days. The Taliban called his father and told him, “We have your son.” Then they arrested Nadir’s father and carted him down to the jail.

  His father tried reasoning with the Taliban.” What is wrong with my son?”

  “He doesn’t have a beard.”

  “He’s young. Besides, it is his choice whether he grows a beard.”

  The Taliban raised a rubber hose and struck the old man on the shoulder. He held up his arms to ward off the blows. “My son has done nothing wrong!” he yelled.

  “Be silent!” They kept hitting him. “He is in violation of God’s law.”

  “He will grow a beard. Will that make you happy?”

  The Taliban threw his father into the same jail cell. They beat him in front of Nadir. It was all the young man could do not to cry out. He was amazed and proud of his father’s courage.

  When the Taliban were done beating him, his father agreed to buy their way out of jail. He gave the Taliban some money, and father and son hobbled out blinking in the sunlight, walking home arm in arm.

  Dostum and his security convoy didn’t stop at the fort but continued into Mazar-i-Sharif to the Blue Mosque. Dostum had triumphantly arrived to reopen it. The rooms had been shuttered during the Taliban’s occupation of the city.

  He stepped from his jeep and looked up at the sparkling minarets. They seemed to float overhead in the midday sun. His muddy boots rang across the tiled courtyard, so peerless that it appeared he was walking across the sky itself. Dostum entered the mosque.

  He removed his boots and knelt to pray. Beneath the mosque’s stone floor, in a sealed crypt, lay the body of Muhammad’s son-in-law and cousin, Ali bin Abi Talib, the fourth Caliph of Islam.

  After his death, in what is now present-day Iraq, the holy man’s followers buried him in Baghdad. But later, fearing desecration of the grave, they dug up and bundled his remains onto a white camel, who was set to wandering for days across miles of desert, before collapsing here, on this spot, in Mazar-i-Sharif.

  Dostum had never been a religious man, but now he prayed. He prayed for Captain Nelson, whom he cared for as if he were a son. I have been at war my entire life and I have killed many men.

  And yet I am alive.

  He climbed back into his jeep and motioned for the driver to take him to his headquarters.

  By day’s end, all of the teams had arrived in Mazar-i-Sharif, except Diller’s.

  He finally appeared outside Qala-i-Janghi in late afternoon, starved and filthy. In the last twelve hours, he and his team, along with their contingent of Afghans, had marched thirty miles to reach the city. He had been powering up his radio just long enough to raise Nelson and communicate his position before shutting it off. He was low on battery power and conserving every volt. The day before, they’d marched twenty miles.

  Now, standing in the road 200 yards from the immense fort before him, his legs were numb. He couldn’t feel them. He was bleeding down his pant legs, the result of painful saddle sores.

  After his horse had collapsed from exhaustion on the stony trail, Diller had led it the last ten miles.

  Diller looked at the fort ahead, and then he looked at the horse.

  “Now, I know you don’t want to,” he told the tired, patient animal, “but, goddamnit, I rode a horse out of Dehi when I started this fight. And I’d like to ride one in.”

  Diller put his foot in the stirrup and sat gingerly in the saddle. He gave the horse a kick. Every bounce was excruciating. Diller grinned like an idiot to avoid crying out in pain. Soon, he drew up to the four men standing at the fort’s entrance, pulled on the reins, and stopped.

  Standing there were Nelson, Spencer, Essex, and Milo. Diller sat and just stared at them. It sunk in: he was here. In Mazar. He slid from the saddle with a groan.

  His teammates rushed forward, shaking Diller’s hand and hugging him. It had only been two weeks since the entire twelve-man group had left K2, and eleven days since they’d ridden out of Dostum’s camp in the mountains. Not that much time, really. But for most of it, they had expected to die at any minute. Now they were together again.

  This feels good, thought Diller, flopping down on a cool strip of grass in the fort’s shadow.

  Soon he was fast asleep.

  As Nelson and his team settled into the fort, Dean sat down to a feast in Atta’s safe house. The men passed around platters of goat, rice, and fruit, washing the mouthfuls down with lots of instant coffee. The house was bordered by gardens and a pond, an oasis within scarred metal security walls. A chubby, dark-haired young man with doleful eyes introduced himself to Dean as the son of the owner. He spoke perfect English and said his name was Najeeb. Najeeb Quarishy.

  Dean’s interest in meeting an English-speaker and possible interpreter was dampened when Najeeb started asking questions. “Do you have a family? Where do you live in the United States? What kind of military training did you go through?”

  Dean wondered (incorrectly) if Najeeb was some kind of spy for the Taliban. If this hadn’t been Najeeb’s home, he would’ve kicked him out to the street. Dean resolved that they had to move to a new safe house as soon as possible.

  There was, in fact, much more to worry about. Local citizens were walking up to the gate outside with news that suicide bombers had targeted Dean and his team. How did they find us so quickly? he wondered.

  Dean instructed Brian Lyle to send news of the threat up to K2. They set up a security perimeter around the house and went over an escape route in case of attack. This was called their “go-to-hell plan.”

  Operations sergeant Brad Highland placed a large orange panel on the roof. Now, if they had to be extracted by helicopter, the pilot could easily find them. They also made up a “go-to-hell” signal, a word that any one of them could utter if they had to leave the house immediately. This word would mean only one thing: get out now. The word they chose was “Titans,” after the Tennessee Titans NFL team.

  As Dean listened to gunfire erupt across the city, he received more bad news. Several of Atta’s men had just been gunned down as they walked up to the Sultan Razia girls’ school.

  Dean told the team to check the situation at the school and radio their report. He would remain at the safe house and direct operations from there.

  The Taliban were firing from the windows when Stu Mansfield and Brian Lyle rolled up in a truck a few minutes later.

  Mansfield backed the vehicle behind a corner out of the line of fire. By standing in the bed of the pickup, he could see the entrance to the school, enough of a vantage to get a sense of the situation. The school building was a drab glass and metal complex. Now its rooms were filled with refuse, firewood, weapons, and feces.

  Atta had been convinced he could get the enemy fighters inside the school to surrender. They were militant Al Qaeda soldiers, Pakistanis mostly, who’d been abandoned by the Taliban during their retreat.

  Atta’s thinking was guided by the school’s proximity to the Blue Mosque, several blocks away, and to the hundreds of mud and cinder-block houses in the surrounding neighborhoods. He couldn’t attack the school without casualties or collateral damage. It was a sticky situation, requiring a light touch—the warlord’s genius.

  Back at the safe house, in a meeting with Atta, before the team had left, Dean had suggested laser-guided bombs could be dropped on the school. Dangerous, b
ut possible.

  Atta had disagreed. He explained that nine more of his soldiers were already in the building trying to negotiate a surrender. This news surprised Dean.

  “Well, sir, what do you want to do?” he had asked.

  “I want to wait.”

  They decided they would give diplomacy a second chance, and if it failed, Dean would level the building.

  Mansfield now looked at Atta’s two envoys lying dead on the grass outside the school’s front doors and wondered if diplomacy really was an option here.

  The envoys had walked up to the doors carrying the Koran opened before them, the pages facing outward at the fighters inside, a sign of peace. The bullets that killed them had passed through the books and riddled their bodies.

  When he heard news of the siege at the school, Dostum, in his office at Qala-i-Janghi, had decided he wanted to bomb the building immediately. Around him his workmen were already hammering, sweeping, and painting, repairing the damage caused during the Taliban occupation. Electrical wire hung from the ceiling, ripped out by the fleeing fighters.

  But then Atta had called and informed Dostum that the school had been surrounded by his men, and that the people of Mazar would object to a bomb being dropped in their neighborhood. It would risk lives and jeopardize Atta and Dostum’s support among Mazar’s citizens. Dostum grunted, reluctantly agreeing.

  About this time, Mitch Nelson was standing in the courtyard of the fortress with Lieutenant Colonel Bowers. Neither had been privy to the discussion between Dostum and Atta, nor to Atta’s insistence that he was in control of the situation.

  Dostum told the Americans that a cleric had been killed in a gunfight at the school, and that the enemy fighters inside had refused to surrender. Dostum explained that he wanted to bomb the place and quickly end the siege.

  Nelson and Bowers questioned Dostum about the wisdom of such an attack. Dostum reminded them that he had seen how accurate Nelson and his men could be with bombs.

  Bowers, nonetheless, felt Dostum wanted to act too quickly, and both he and Nelson worried that hundreds of civilians could die. However, after talking over the situation, they decided to send a team into the school.

  Sonny Tatum, Fred Falls, Patrick Remington, and Charles Jones pulled up a block from the building. With them was CIA officer Mike Spann. While the others stayed at the truck, Tatum and Spann moved forward several hundred yards, dashing from corner to corner, looking for a building from which to watch the school. To blend in, Tatum had changed into jeans and a dark, buttoned shirt.

  Tatum picked a nearby building, and he and Spann climbed the back stairs.

  At the top, Tatum unpacked his laser gear and radios and set up an approach for two F-18 jets on station overhead. Using the range finder, he measured the distance between himself and the school at 300 yards. Close. Too close.

  He and Spann would be in danger of being blown up.

  He also didn’t have a clear line of sight. Too many of the buildings in the neighborhood were the same height. But to get a straight shot with the laser, he’d have to get even closer. He was screwed.

  Tatum aimed the green, box-shaped SOFLAM at the schoolhouse and pressed the trigger.

  The device chirped as it shot out the laser, but he couldn’t get a good bead on the building—only one corner and part of the roof’s southern edge. He needed to place the laser in the middle of the roof, in order to ensure an accurate drop on the target.

  This left a final option, most dangerous of all.

  Tatum turned to Spann and said, “We need to get to the schoolhouse.”

  They would need the GPS coordinates of the building’s position. Tatum had a plan.

  They made their way back down the stairs and dashed from building to building, right up to the school. They stood against it, backs pressed to the east wall, near the corner. Tatum pushed the button on the face of his GPS, logging in the latitude and longitude coordinates of his position.

  They next dashed down the wall to the west corner and Tatum pushed the button again. They ran to another corner and repeated the process. You couldn’t get more perfect coordinates, except by climbing atop the roof.

  Tatum thought that at any minute they’d be spotted by one of the Al Qaeda soldiers inside. Overhead, on the second floor, most of the windows had been busted out. Tatum could hear voices, angry voices. Pushing off the wall, they sprinted a short distance to a nearby building and caught their breath. No gunfire followed them.

  Quickly, they ran back up the stairs to the overwatch building and set up the strike. Over his radio, Tatum asked the two pilots, “See that raggedy-ass house with the boarded windows? Now look to your left.” And here Tatum was careful to visualize himself inside each pilot’s cockpit, orienting himself from above, as the pilot was oriented.

  From the air, the school was T-shaped. The lead pilot said he could see the T-shape. Now they had a visual ID. Tatum then relayed the GPS coordinates as well.

  Tatum and Spann crouched down on the roof and waited.

  Inside the school, the men who had entered as Atta’s envoys, after the first group had been attacked, were in the middle of negotiations with a group of enemy soldiers. They had managed to escape being gunned down, so far.

  At the same time, Remington, Jones, and Falls were positioned around the block in sight of the school, but out of sight of Mansfield and Lyle.

  Each team had no idea that the other was there.

  Standing in his pickup, Brian Lyle was trying to reach Nelson’s team at Qala-i-Janghi, but for some reason his radio malfunctioned. He couldn’t get through. He wanted to let Nelson know that he and Mansfield were at the school.

  Lyle had no idea that Nelson was already aware of the siege.

  Back at Atta’s safe house, Dean was also trying to connect with Dostum and Nelson. It was dawning on Dean that the teams had entered the city so quickly and at such different paces that they hadn’t updated each other with their locations. Dean wasn’t even sure if Dostum had arrived in Mazar yet.

  The situation was fluid. Too fluid, Dean thought.

  Curious about the unfolding events, he and Brad Highland were ready to drive over to the school when they heard the explosion.

  They looked up. Dean was shocked to see how close the mushroom cloud was—just three or four blocks away. Who dropped that fucking bomb? Dean wanted to know. And then: Atta’s men just got smoked.

  How was he going to explain to Atta that the United States of America had just killed his men?

  Up on the rooftop overlooking the school, Tatum checked back with the pilots, “Olive Thirty-one, this is Tomcat. Request a second drop.”

  The bomb, guided by the GPS inside it, had hit the center of the school’s roof, just as Tatum had planned. The back wall and east side of the building had collapsed. A handful of enemy soldiers had stumbled from the building and disappeared down the street.

  The second jet pilot announced he was ready to drop. Tatum ducked just as the projectile streaked in. The earth moved beneath him, beneath the building. Thunder rolled down the city streets.

  Two blocks away, the explosion rocked Stu Mansfield and Brian Lyle. Mansfield, the radio still in his hand, was furious and confused. The Afghans with them, Atta’s men, glared at Mansfield and Lyle, equally uncertain of what had just happened.

  Mansfield didn’t know how many of Atta’s men were in the building, but he knew they were dead. And that wasn’t good news.

  He held up the radio. “I didn’t do it!” he told Atta’s soldiers. “I didn’t call in those bombs!”

  They didn’t seem to be buying the protest.

  Mansfield and Lyle agreed they should leave the area immediately. Mansfield felt terrible over what just happened. Dean could’ve been in that building. What then? They started the truck and sped away, back to the safe house.

  From his position, Tatum surveyed the damage of the second air strike. Half the school was a smoking heap. The bomb had entered through the same hole in th
e roof made by the first bomb, a perfect hit.

  More Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters ran from the jagged reefs of concrete, firing their weapons wildly through the smoke at the surrounding buildings. Tatum worried that they would escape into the city. He radioed the pilots overhead.

  “Look, we just stirred up a hornet’s nest. You guys are going to have to drop another bomb.”

  “Ready for immediate reattack,” said one. “Requesting clearance.”

  “Clear.”

  More of the remaining steel and concrete walls blew outward, shattering the trees surrounding the school. Only the front wall, facing the street, and random portions of remaining walls were still standing. Tatum saw more men stumble from the rubble, faces striped white and red with blood and dust. He was amazed anyone was still walking. Chain-link fence surrounded part of the school, and some of the dazed survivors jumped over it and ran into the neighborhood, darting between houses.

  Tatum watched as the locals and Afghan soldiers chased them. Most ruthless among them were the Shia Hazaras. The Taliban had slaughtered them by the thousands when they seized the city in August 1998. Now it was the Hazaras’ turn. They beat the fighters with shovels and rocks.

  Back at the school, about thirty Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters had survived the strikes. They retreated into the rubble and hid in a corner of the building that hadn’t collapsed. They would stay there for the next two days, exchanging gunfire with Atta’s men, before finally surrendering—hungry, exhausted, somehow at the last choosing life instead of death.

  Dean was pacing the safe house, waiting for Atta’s return. The warlord was traveling somewhere in the city meeting with tribal elders and rekindling relationships that had been cut short three years earlier when the Taliban captured the town.

  Dean felt terrible about Atta’s men killed at the schoolhouse, but he also felt he had lost face with Atta. And if this was true, the mission could fail. Even though he hadn’t bombed the schoolhouse, he was linked to it as an American soldier.

  Back at the school, Atta’s men were dragging the dead men out of the rubble and loading them into a truck. Soon the truck showed up at the safe house. Dean watched as some of the bodies were placed in simple wood caskets. Others were laid in the dirt under the trees.