Horse Soldiers

by Doug Stanton

  One of Atta’s men bent low over the bodies with pliers and heavy wire and bound the feet and hands together so the men would harden in rigor mortis positions that would fit in a coffin.

  Dean’s heart sank at the sight of the dead boys fifteen, sixteen years old. He had traveled with some of these fighters. He knew them. He resolved to make this right, somehow, with Atta.

  The pensive, graying warlord appeared at the safe house later in the day, looking weary. Dean could tell he’d already heard the news.

  Dean couldn’t tell if he was upset. He approached Atta and apologized profusely for the deaths of his soldiers.

  Atta stood listening and stroking his beard.

  Dean walked over and shook hands with the commanders of the dead men and gave them a hug. He kept saying how personally sorry he was about the deaths, trying to communicate his contrition with every ounce of body language.

  Atta asked to talk to Dean privately.

  They stepped away from the other men. Atta looked him in the eye. He could see Dean was upset.

  “These things happen in war,” he said. “These nine people will not change the outcome of the war. It is very sad. But we understand.”

  Dean stared at him in disbelief, realizing what might have seemed coldheartedness on Atta’s part was instead wisdom. After that, Dean felt a little better.

  That night, some Mazar locals brought to Dean’s door two Pakistani soldiers who’d been wounded in the aftermath of the school bombing.

  Somehow, after running from the rubble through the city streets, they had escaped death at the hands of Mazar’s angry citizens. Now they were Atta’s prisoners. Dean looked at their hands, loosely bound with turbans. He wondered why anyone had even bothered to tie them up.

  The prisoners glared at Dean and told him they had come to Afghanistan to wage jihad against Americans. Dean thought, Roger that, and you’d kill me if you had the chance. Medic Jerry Booker went to work cleaning the prisoners’ wounds.

  The first one was in his late teens, short and skinny. He had a pageboy haircut, thick and heavy. The kid reminded Booker of the movie actor Johnny Depp.

  Booker asked him questions about the whereabouts of Al Qaeda operatives in the city. The kid said nothing. Like Dean, Booker saw hate in the kid’s eyes.

  He tapped his chest and heard a dull thud. He realized the boy’s pleural cavity was filling with blood and air, and that this was putting pressure on the lung. He laid him down on an old wool blanket on the floor and picked up a pair of forceps from the duffel at his feet.

  The kid grew wide-eyed, as if he thought Booker was going to hurt him.

  One of Atta’s junior commanders waved Booker away—don’t treat this piece of human crap—but a senior commander told Booker to operate.

  The bullet had entered the left shoulder and exited out the chest, also on the left side. The kid was panting, and he looked pale. Every breath magnified the pressure on his collapsing lung—a true sucking chest wound.

  Booker had never treated one, but he knew what to do. In Special Forces medic training, he’d been told that in a pinch he could use an endotracheal tube, normally meant for insertion down the throat during surgery to allow a patient to breathe. But first he had to drain the chest cavity of some of the air and blood.

  He numbed the left ribs with lidocaine, made an incision between them, inserted the forceps, and spread the bones. He then inserted a catheter into the chest. Booker could hear the trapped air rushing out of the tube with a small whistling noise, followed by blood flowing out onto the floor.

  Atta’s men were holding down the kid, who was screaming in Urdu.

  Wasik, Dean’s translator, told the Americans what he was saying: “They are trying to kill me!”

  He yelled out that he wanted Allah to strike the Americans down. And even though the rib area was numbed, Booker knew the incision had to hurt like hell.

  To fully drain the blood, he had to insert a larger tube in the kid’s back. Again, he numbed the skin before shoving the forceps through the muscle. After the air and blood drained, he capped the hole in his chest with an Asherman Chest Seal, a dressing that works similarly to the seal on a bag of coffee. The seal lets out air, but it doesn’t let any back in.

  Little by little the kid’s face relaxed as his breathing grew easier. He had finally realized the Americans weren’t going to kill him.

  Booker turned to the other prisoner—an older, bald man in a flowing blue smock and sandals. Blood was running down his face. His scalp was split, probably by the butt of an AK rifle. He was even more defiant than Johnny Depp had been, looking as if he would spit on Booker. The man’s eyes darted about nervously as Booker studied his wound. Without provocation, the man erupted in a flurry of epithets. He shouted that he had also come to Afghanistan to kill Americans.

  Booker, ignoring the outburst, debrided the scalp wound and carefully sewed it up. Afterward, he stepped back and looked the guy square in the eye. “By the way, dude,” he said, “I’m an American.”

  When this was translated, the man studied Booker and grunted thanks. Then he was led away. Booker had no idea what would happen to him. Atta’s men told him that the younger prisoner would be taken to a hospital.

  When one of the senior Afghans in the room winked at Booker about this news, Booker thought, Crap, why did we even fix these guys if they’re going to take them out and slaughter them?

  A few days later, though, while touring a hospital, Booker spotted Johnny Depp, shaved and handcuffed to his bed. Booker was thankful he was healthy and alive.

  The day after the bombing at the school, Dean and Nelson turned their attention to building peace in a shattered city. Still annoyed by Najeeb Quarishy’s persistent questioning, Dean ordered the team to move out of the Quarishy household and into another safe house.

  It was a propitious move. The new place was practically a palace by Mazar standards, with running hot water, working showers, and flush toilets. Dean set up guards on the roof and a secure perimeter. The team next started conducting what they called “bug hunts” in the city.

  These involved driving through the city and visiting with locals, asking them if they were aware of enemy activity in their neighborhood. Each night when Dean climbed up to the roof of the safe house, he heard less and less gunfire. He wondered when they might be able to return to Fort Campbell. The question was increasingly on the minds of all the men.

  As peace broke out, news reporters started rolling into the city. Alex Perry, who’d been hired by Time as a travel editor, had been trying to enter Afghanistan from Uzbekistan for nearly a month following the attacks in America. Perry had guessed early that the U.S. military would respond by invading Afghanistan, and he had waited out his chance to enter the country in a $25 a night guesthouse.

  Perry had worked his satellite phone, calling Dostum, Atta, Mohaqeq, and their subcommanders, as they rode north on their horses with Nelson, Dean, and Mitchell. Perry filed his stories from an Internet café in Tashkent, increasingly eager to see the war firsthand.

  “Are the Taliban Leaving Mazar-i-Sharif?” ran the headline of a dispatch he published on November 7, 2001 (two days after Essex, Milo, and Winehouse were overrun in their trench). No one in the press exactly knew the answer to the question. Reporters had been absent from the battlefield. The teams were operating in near total secrecy.

  The following day, November 8, Perry filed another story that described his plight as covering “a war that nobody wants journalists to get to—not the Taliban, not the Americans, not the Uzbek border guards and not, one suspects, the Northern Alliance propaganda chiefs.”

  Hour after hour, Perry would reach wrong numbers and facile explanations while placing calls to contacts in Afghanistan, such as, “Sorry, Commander X is in a battle right now, can you call back later?”

  The odd thing was that the person on the other end was sometimes telling the truth. Commander X really was in the field, fighting. Satellite phones and e-mail had
multiplied and accelerated the lines of communications. As Nelson, Dean, and Mitchell used horses to ride up the Darya Balkh River Valley, theirs was the first war to be fought in an age of cheap, ubiquitous, and instant communication. This irony had not been lost on Nelson when he watched Dostum power his portable Thuraya satellite phone with a car battery he carried in a saddlebag.

  Perry was frustrated by the ability to make easy contact while simultaneously being unable to make sense of the situation. Reporting at night from Tashkent was especially hard because his Afghan interviewees, often low-level commanders and Northern Alliance soldiers, were bombed out of their minds on hash and opium, the drug of choice among the Afghan lower class. The upper class drank vodka. Lots of it. His phone interviews often threatened to squib off into drunken blather and stoned silences.

  He had spent hours trying to arrange safe passage into Mazar-i-Sharif when, finally, a Tashkent press chief invited several hundred journalists to the Uzbekistan border town of Termez, on the Amu Darya River.

  Across the half-mile-wide current lay Heryaton, in Afghanistan. The press chief was desperately buttering up reporters to write about Uzbekistan’s fabulous generosity in opening its border to deliver humanitarian aid to Afghanistan. He put a dozen reporters on the first barge of food aid with strict instructions to return with the ship.

  When they arrived in Heryaton, Perry watched his fellow journalists dutifully filming the unloading of food from the barge.

  Perry himself quietly slipped out of the port and caught a taxi that took him straight to General Atta’s safe house in Mazar, thirty miles south. Perry, although a seasoned reporter, had never worked in a combat zone.

  Yet he was surprised to find that he had become one of the first journalists to enter Mazar-i-Sharif after its fall. He felt he was on to something big.

  As he sat at dinner with Atta—rice, raisins, onions, carrots, and boiled mutton—he met an enterprising and eager young man who spoke excellent English and harbored dreams of being a correspondent for CNN (or so he had told the last guests in his house, gruff American soldiers who moved out abruptly).

  Perry hired the young man on the spot as his translator and “fixer,” or guide. The young man introduced himself as Najeeb Quarishy.

  The day after his arrival, Perry visited the Sultan Razia School. Five days after the bombing, Red Cross workers were still engaged in the grim chore of collecting the approximately four hundred bodies of Al Qaeda and Taliban soldiers.

  Perry wrote: “The stench of death hung across the ruins. The team concentrated on intact bodies that could be lifted by the arms and legs…. Elsewhere, fire had reduced everything—furniture, clothing, people—to ash.”

  When Dean learned that reporters were in Mazar-i-Sharif, he took immediate, if simple, measures to avoid detection. Men and women toting laptops and cameras were pouring into the city, on the hunt for a story about the lightning-quick victory of a group of mysterious American soldiers on horseback, armed with lasers. Because the soldiers had left the States secretly, and because no reporters had been embedded with them (a concept that wouldn’t come to the fore within Pentagon public relations for another two years), there had been a virtual news blackout. Nothing concrete was known about Nelson, Dean, and Mitchell—certainly neither their names nor their faces had been published in any kind of public media.

  But the reporters were still largely stymied in getting a story. They spent their days hanging out in Mazar’s only working hotel, talking mainly to each other about what might be happening in the street. It’s difficult to imagine now, but in 2001, few reporters had any connection with locals on the ground—no ready-made network of contacts and translators, the same kind of supply lines the soldiers relied on to stay alive.

  For Dean, whose modus operandi depended on his ability to blend in with local citizens and operate behind the scenes, the media was a new kind of digital-age meta-enemy. Within minutes, his face could be broadcast around the world, accessible to anyone with a television or an Internet connection. The thought horrified him. At the least, this disclosure could give the larger jihadi world the impression that the Americans had invaded and captured Afghanistan, creating ill will toward the entire postwar rebuilding of the country. At the worst, publishing his name, face, and location could get him killed. There was still a bounty on all of the soldiers: $100,000 for the body of each dead American soldier, to be paid by bin Laden’s Al Qaeda network. Another scenario haunted the men. They feared some wannabe Al Qaeda nut job might show up outside their homes in the States…The possibility was too chilling to consider.

  In short, having a reporter take your picture was like posing for your own Wanted poster. On bug hunts, the teams moved quickly and decisively through the city, keeping watch for anyone pointing a camera at them. If they were spotted, they left that area. They hid behind wraparound sunglasses, scarves, and Pakol hats, to avoid being recognizable in any pictures.

  Several days after they’d moved into the new safe house, communications sergeant Brian Lyle and weapons sergeant Mark House were spotted in the bustling market area by a group of what looked like photographers.

  Dean was at the safe house pulling security duty when his radio crackled to life. Lyle reported that the men were toting serious-looking cameras. Lyle and House had jumped in their truck and peeled away, but they couldn’t shake their pursuers. Dean could hear the panic in their voices.

  The photographers were swerving over the road, barely missing kids playing in the streets. Lyle told Dean they were afraid somebody was going to get run over.

  “Drive by the safe house,” said Dean. “Don’t look at it—just drive and we’ll see how many there are.”

  He saw their pickup race past, followed by a yellow sedan driven by three men pointing cameras out the windows.

  Dean got back on the radio. “All right, lead them to an isolated area and box them in somehow. Stop the car, get out, and then bum-rush them.

  “Tell them to stop photographing you, and that if they continue, tell them you’re going to destroy their car.

  “And, lastly, explain to them the whole Massoud incident,” Dean added, recalling how the Northern Alliance leader Ahmed Shah Massoud had been assassinated two months earlier by Al Qaeda operatives posing as photographers.

  Lyle and House turned down an alley, came to the end, wheeled around, and starting driving back out. They let the photographers’ car pass and complete the same maneuver, and when it was behind them, Lyle wrenched the wheel and turned the truck across the road, blocking the path. He and House stepped out and ran at the photographers’ car.

  The men inside looked as if they might piss their pants.

  “Don’t take our picture,” Lyle said, calmly. “It’ll endanger us, and it endangers our families.”

  The photographers sputtered and cursed in French, “Fuck you! What about freedom of the press?”

  But Lyle remained calm and repeated again what he had said. He saw that they were buying it. He knew that if he stayed calm and friendly, they would have little to react to.

  The photographers talked over the request, and told Lyle they wouldn’t take his picture—at least for now.

  “Thank you,” said Lyle.

  He and House sped away, as anonymous as when they had left.

  As Dean’s and Nelson’s teams ran bug hunts in the city, Mark Mitchell oversaw postwar operations from a second-story office in Qala-i-Janghi. The office was part of Dostum’s spacious headquarters, which opened onto a long balcony overlooking the rose garden, placid groves of trees, and the cold, narrow stream flowing through the northern courtyard.

  Across the courtyard, about 150 yards from the balcony, stood the 60-foot-high mud wall that separated the fort in two. In the southern courtyard, on the other side of the tall wall, several mysterious buildings sat among the stones and thorns, relics of the Soviets’ occupation of the fort when they’d used it, like Dostum and the Taliban later, as a headquarters. One of the buildings was p
ainted a startling pink, the flesh of the faintest rose, in stark contrast to the beige and gray of the fort’s dry, mud walls. None of the Americans knew exactly what the pink building had been used for—Dean and Nelson believed it must have been a school because the floor measured about as much as a one-room schoolhouse in the States, about 75 feet on each side.

  But it was the basement that gave one the willies. You entered by means of stairs standing about 50 feet off the side of the building itself. The doorway was made of stacked brick, with mud steps leading down 75 feet into darkness. The basement might have been a storeroom for ammunition as the walls and ceiling were several feet thick and reinforced with metal bars. Not one of the Americans, or even the Afghans, knew for sure. All stories seemed apocryphal, especially the one that the basement, which was dark and silent as a grave, had been a dungeon. The Americans had simply started calling the building the Pink House.

  The rear wall of Mitchell’s office in the northern end of the fort had been painted as a mural of an undersea fantasyland, with green fans of coral and exotically colored fish. Mitchell surmised that the Taliban hadn’t destroyed the painting because it did not depict the faces of people or animals. Fish, he guessed, were A-OK with the Taliban.

  Soon after moving into the fort, nearly everyone on the teams grew deathly ill. When fresh water had failed to arrive on a resupply drop, they’d taken their chances drinking from the local tap, and now everyone regretted the decision. Ben Milo was struck with a case of diarrhea that he felt would kill him (it would last nine days). He and the rest of his team were camped in three miserable rooms in the northern end of the fort, on the second floor. At one point, Milo grew so sick that he had to sleep in the bathroom, hurriedly scuttling between his sleeping bag and the dark hole in the floor a few feet away.