Horse Soldiers

by Doug Stanton

  “You mean the Taliban are here? In the city?” said Dean, pointing at the map.

  “In Mazar, yes,” said Atta.

  Dean’s worst nightmare—the nightmare of all the teams—had come true.

  After arriving back at the schoolhouse, Leahy bounded up the stairs to the operations center, where he met Major Kurt Sonntag.

  He explained the ambush and nervousness of the looters and that his remaining men were back at the HLZ, waiting for pickup. He asked Sonntag why the friendly Afghans should be so nervous.

  Sonntag said he didn’t know.

  No one at the schoolhouse knew what was unfolding outside the city’s limits.

  Leahy saw CIA paramilitary officer Garth Rogers walk down the cement stairs from his office on the fifth floor. He did not look happy. “We got some Taliban at the wire.”

  Leahy and Sonntag shook their heads, not understanding.

  “About six hundred of them,” the grizzled officer said. “They want to surrender. They’re out by the airfield.”

  Leahy and Sonntag also immediately wondered how they would maintain control of 600 Taliban when most of the American combat fighters and Northern Alliance soldiers were in Konduz.

  Dean’s and Nelson’s teams, accompanied by Atta and Dostum, were scheduled to leave for Konduz within several hours, while Leahy had been assigned to stay at the Turkish Schoolhouse. Major Sonntag would oversee the schoolhouse staff, while Major Mitchell would coordinate the movement of the soldiers patrolling the city. Leahy set aside his worries for a moment, and asked if there was any danger in driving back to the landing zone. No, the CIA officer told him. He should be safe.

  The Taliban had confined themselves to the area near the airfield. In fact, they were asking to be taken prisoner there.

  Sonntag, Leahy, and Betz headed out the door.

  Leahy jumped up in the back of the pickup and Betz gunned it. The news of the Taliban had unnerved Betz. Suddenly the war seemed incredibly close. Leahy had to grab hold of the .50-caliber machine gun, mounted on a tripod on the truck’s bed, to avoid being whipped around as Betz tore out of drive.

  As they approached the landing zone, Betz saw a roadblock up ahead, a handful of men with weapons standing in his headlights. He slowed the pickup, tires crunching on gravel. Leahy stood in the back, manning the machine gun as the truck glided ahead.

  The events of the last six hours were untangling themselves for Leahy. He realized that the Northern Alliance had known of the Taliban’s arrival earlier in the night and that this news had spooked them. They had started seeing demons in every shadow. That’s why they had fired on the second truck that had come to pick him up.

  At the same time, the Americans hadn’t realized they had just run a checkpoint during a curfew imposed to keep the Taliban off the streets. The fact that news of the Taliban’s arrival hadn’t been passed on any earlier to anyone at the Turkish Schoolhouse, including the CIA officers on the fifth floor, reminded Leahy of how volatile his new world was. The intel had become trapped in some eddy in the rapport between Dostum and Atta—it was impossible to tell how.

  Betz rolled down his window so the kid at the checkpoint with the AK-47 could see his face and that he was an American.

  “How ya doing?” said Betz.

  The kid was fingering the rifle trigger, looking uneasy.

  Betz still hadn’t stopped the van. They were already rolling past. Betz was ready to stomp the gas. His eyes locked with the kid’s. The young soldier finally waved them through.

  It was at that moment that Betz knew that something was going wrong with the war as they had been fighting it. The kid seemed to know something he didn’t know, and couldn’t know, and wouldn’t know, until it was too late.

  What he’d seen in the kid’s eyes was fear.

  When Betz arrived moments later at the HLZ, the men still hiding behind the mud walls were drained from the stress of standing the whole night with guns popping off around them. Staff Sergeant Jason Kubanek realized that the rock his foot was resting on was actually an unexploded artillery shell. He looked around and saw ordnance every five feet—they’d been standing all night in a huge field filled with explosives. It was a miracle no one had been blown up. Now it was safe to get in their vehicles. Kubanek was relieved when they pulled up to the schoolhouse in Mazar. He could now rest easy.

  At Atta’s safe house, Dean marched next door to Mark House’s room. “Hey, man, get your ass out. We got Taliban in town!”

  House rolled over. “What?”

  “Wake up,” said Dean. “We got bad guys in the city.”

  House dressed in seconds. The day before, he had played a game of Buzkashi at the Mazar field with some local riders. The game involved two teams on horseback attempting to drag a headless goat into the other’s goal. House couldn’t believe that just hours before they had been playing a game to celebrate their victory, and now the Taliban seemed to have returned.

  He grabbed his rifle and loaded into a truck outside the safe house door.

  House had pointed to the stock of his weapon with his daughter’s name—Courtney—written with white paint. He patted the gun and said a prayer as they sped to the surrender site.

  John Walker Lindh had left Konduz so quickly, clinging to the splintered side of a truck, that he’d taken no food, water, or adequate clothing. The desert nights had been cold and black, the days dry and blistering.

  He was afraid he was dying. As the hours ticked by, the memories must’ve pulsed in his head. Of reading the Koran in a madrassah near a shopping mall in California. Of his mother and father and their divorce. The divorce had changed everything—the family had dissolved.

  His feelings about his father were complicated. There were men in this camp who would call his parents infidels. His father had announced about a year earlier that he was gay. Abdul had left the permissive environment of Marin County, California, and traveled to one of the strictest madrassahs in Pakistan, where the 6,666 shuras of the Koran had been like iron in his mouth, sure and unbending. He had memorized half of them.

  Sitting in an Internet café in Peshawar, Pakistan, he had written: “I am Suleyman Lindh, eater of much wheat crop, drinker of much buffalo tea.” And then he had packed his sleeping bag and left for Afghanistan.

  That was five months ago, another life. Now Abdul Hamid had come to surrender in Mazar-i-Sharif. He wanted to go home to California. He did not want to die.

  When he learned that airplanes had been crashed into buildings in the United States of America, he was dismayed. Why had innocent people died?

  Abdul feared men like Dostum as much as he did the hard-core Al Qaeda fighters surrounding him. After his surrender, he hoped that Dostum wouldn’t line them all up and shoot them.

  Following behind General Atta in his convoy of six trucks headed to the surrender site, medic James Gold pulled his vehicle to the side of the highway, parking beside a primitive wooden arch spanning the bombed-out blacktop.

  Next to the arch stood a rough-hewn guard shack. Dean, sitting beside Gold, studied the shape-shifting mass of Taliban through his binoculars; they were about a mile away, across the red tabletop of sand. Some of the men’s turbans flashed in the sun, shiny and black.

  That’s a lot of bad guys, thought Dean.

  Dean wondered if there were Al Qaeda fighters mixed in the bunch. He studied the men and saw various ethnicities—Pakistani, Chechen, Arab—and the grimace of what he imagined were Afghan farmers, shopkeepers, and doctors conscripted to fight the jihad.

  Dean knew that these last soldiers hated the “foreigners” and given a chance, they’d probably gun them down. Dean got out of the truck and started following Atta up a trail cut into a dune, about 100 feet high, overlooking the plain and the prisoners in the distance.

  “Walk where I walk,” said Atta, turning around. “This place is mined.”

  At the top, Dean could see that the desert stretching before them was littered with the rusted hulks of Russian
tanks and jeeps left over from the Soviet war with Afghanistan.

  He asked Atta what this section of Mazar’s outskirts was called. Atta said it had a colorful name: “the grave of snakes.”

  The hilltop was dug with fighting positions—these, too, had been left behind by the Russians—from which Dean saw you could easily defend the guard shack.

  Next to the shack was a bent piece of metal that could be lowered across the road as a gate. Dean figured the road around the gate was mined as well, and that whoever controlled the hilltop controlled traffic on the road.

  Atta called one of his men over. He touched the courier by the shoulder and gave him instructions.

  The man took off, trotting down the dune to the pickup. He fired it up and drove toward the Taliban.

  Dean watched him drive for maybe thirty seconds, through his binos.

  The man carried no white flag, only a beat-up AK-47 with some cartridges slung across his chest in a battered leather belt. Dean watched as several Taliban fighters moved forward to meet him.

  The men talked for several minutes. And then Atta’s courier started driving back.

  He trudged back up the dune, out of breath.

  “They want to keep their guns,” he announced.

  Atta shook his head. “No. They may not.”

  The man headed back down the dune, to the waiting truck.

  Atta turned to Dean. “This may take a while,” he said.

  Dean was standing on the hilltop overlooking the highway when he heard Lieutenant Colonel Bowers at the Turkish Schoolhouse on the radio talking to Dostum, as the warlord drove to the surrender site. Dean believed that someone needed to figure out what to do with these prisoners in Mazar, and then get to Konduz as soon as possible. The problem was, it seemed to Dean, that no one was in charge.

  Dean believed Atta now had control over the surrender, as he and his men had arrived first at the scene. Dean also expected Dostum to demand an equal share in the spoils of the negotiations, principally any of the local Taliban soldiers willing to give up and switch their allegiance.

  Dean picked up the radio and called Stu Mansfield back at the safe house, saying, “We’ve got to get the guys together out here.” Dean told Mansfield they would need more guns on these prisoners once they turned themselves in.

  He then tried raising Bowers on the radio to report the situation as he saw it, with the hope that he would relay this news to Dostum and tell the warlord to back off.

  But as he was talking, the radio went dead. Dean rapped it with his hand. Nothing. It had suddenly malfunctioned. Now he was cut off from both his command at the Turkish Schoolhouse, and his team at the safe house.

  At about this time, Bowers piled in his vehicle and headed for the surrender area.

  Everybody was about to converge.

  Chief Warrant Officer Stu Mansfield had been at the safe house cooking a turkey, of all things, when he’d gotten the call to meet the anxious captain. He’d reluctantly left the bird in its roaster pan and got into a truck and started driving. Mansfield, who back in Tennessee ran a real estate business out of his home and lived a quiet life fishing and golfing when he wasn’t soldiering, wasn’t easily rattled. He was a bit rattled now. The idea that all of these Taliban had showed up in Mazar was bad news.

  Riding with Mansfield were Sergeants Walden and Lyle. Lyle had an extra radio. Dean used it to call Mitchell back at the schoolhouse and told them what Atta had explained to them, that he had these Taliban who wanted to surrender, and they were located on the highway about twelve miles east of the city.

  From the hilltop, Dean watched as Dostum and his entourage of vehicles appeared on the horizon and roared to a stop at the bottom of the hill.

  Atta explained to Dean how this Afghan surrender would work. “These men are not going to surrender right away. You cannot surrender”—Atta snapped his fingers—“like that. If you do, you will lose face.”

  Dean watched as Dostum and Lieutenant Colonel Bowers got out of their vehicles. Behind them were more people…with cameras and notebooks…Oh my God, Dean realized. It was the press.

  Dean saw about a hundred reporters in all. They were following Dostum! Dean and his team were trapped on top of the hill. Dean was convinced his face was about to end up on the front page of a dozen newspapers.

  Seeing this, Atta announced that he wanted to meet with Dostum and tell his rival that he had the situation under control.

  Dean decided he had better follow the warlord, making sure any friction between Atta and Dostum didn’t develop into a fight. With trepidation, they descended along the narrow road down the dune, careful to avoid the land mines that Atta warned were planted alongside.

  When they reached the bottom, Dean pulled his scarf up around his nose and stood apart from the hoard, hoping that no one was taking his picture.

  He watched Atta and Dostum conferring, each of them gesturing to the other, “I’m in charge.”

  Dean realized that there was no way to ensure that there weren’t any Taliban fighters in the crowd—men who had stayed behind in Mazar in hopes of slipping back into civilian life unnoticed. Now would be a perfect time for someone to whack two warlords at once. Dean understood the surrender as a complete security nightmare.

  He could hear the swarm of cameras going off: Click-clack, click-clack.

  Locusts, thought Dean. Little metallic mandibles just chewing at his anonymity, his safety. His mission.

  Dean was relieved when the meeting ended without a dustup. But he was sorely disappointed when he saw that Dostum was going to come up the hill after all.

  One of the reporters shoved a camera inches from Dean’s face and he batted it away. He heard a cacophony of voices, French, German, Spanish—everybody in the world was here to report this surrender. Dean and Gold hurried back up the hill.

  Dean watched as Dostum followed and occasionally stopped to point in the direction of the surrender, which nobody could actually see with any clarity with the naked eye, as the cameras clicked and whirred.

  Dean thought, He thinks he’s General George S. Patton. Part of him marveled at the general’s savvy.

  Dean looked up at the B-52 circling lazily overhead, sketching a hairline contrail. The bomber had been called on station by Air Force combat controller Malcolm Victors, who had set up his radio gear on the hilltop.

  The Taliban sitting on the highway could look up and see the jet and know that they were being watched by some very serious firepower. Victors had plotted the Taliban’s position and was ready to call in a strike at a moment’s notice.

  Now, thought Dean, the only thing remaining was to get the Taliban to actually hand over their rifles and surrender. Dean looked at his watch. They had planned to leave for Konduz hours ago. They were running seriously behind.

  Two hours later, the surrender was over. Dostum had agreed to the Taliban’s demand that they be held at the Mazar airport. While there wasn’t a fence on the airstrip to contain the prisoners, they would have to run a half mile in any direction before reaching safety, by which time they’d be gunned down by guards.

  From his hilltop lookout, Dean turned to Mark House, his weapons sergeant, standing beside him.

  “You know what? They’re not really searching these guys.”

  When the Taliban told Dostum they were surrendering, this declaration was accepted as it always was on the battlefield: at face value, as inviolable.

  “I don’t like the looks of it,” said Dean.

  “What can we do?”

  “It’s their surrender.” Dean was right. The entire success of the campaign rested on the idea—and the reality—that this was the Afghans’ war. To change gears now, in the middle of this confusing series of events, would be easier said than done.

  It appeared to Dean that about every fifth Taliban fighter was getting a cursory pat-down from a Northern Alliance soldier.

  Dean watched as the Taliban men’s rifles were confiscated and piled on the bed of a large del
ivery truck. Soon there were hundreds of guns lying in a pile.

  Back at the Turkish Schoolhouse, Mitchell had been listening to the negotiations on the radio. He hadn’t thought using the airfield was a good idea, but, on the other hand, there wasn’t a jail big enough to hold all of these prisoners. And then his radio popped to life.

  More news was coming in. Dostum had suddenly changed his mind.

  The prisoners were now being taken to Qala-i-Janghi, where Dostum had decided they would be held securely within the walls of the fortress.

  No, thought Mitchell.

  He recalled the weapons, rockets, RPGs, and rifles, all that ammo…still stored at the fortress. He and his men had never finished blowing them up.

  After the Taliban surrender at the airfield appeared to be complete, Dean and his team came down from the hill and got in their trucks, waiting to leave for Konduz.

  It was now late, about three o’clock in the afternoon. They would now leave directly from the surrender site.

  Sitting in his idling pickup, Dean gazed over at the newly surrendered prisoners sitting only about fifty feet away in their own vehicles.

  Dean was shocked to see the look in their eyes. They did not look defeated.

  Two of the Taliban trucks pulled alongside Brian Lyle and Mark House, who also thought the detained soldiers looked like men prepared for battle.

  Atta ordered his men to load up.

  The plan was to get into positions around Konduz, a half-moon perimeter around the eastern rim of the city, about twelve miles from the center. From there, they would receive prisoners and call in air strikes to further convince the Taliban to surrender. A good plan, perhaps. But if they should be needed back in Mazar, where the six hundred prisoners were to be housed in the fort, it would be a long trip back.

  At the Turkish Schoolhouse, several hours after Dean and Nelson had left for Konduz, Major Kurt Sonntag was at his desk when he looked up and saw the newly surrendered prisoners drive by.