Horse Soldiers

by Doug Stanton

  “Look,” he said, “I’ll volunteer to take some guys over there.” He wondered if maybe just a few unhappy prisoners were causing a big, loud disturbance.

  Several minutes later, more bad news came, though this message was grimmer. Garth Rogers, the CIA officer, came down from the fifth floor and announced that Mike Spann was probably missing or dead.

  Mitchell saw Rogers had taken the news hard. Mitchell respected him. Rogers wore a Harley-Davidson ball cap and wraparound sunglasses, and resembled an outlaw biker more than a veteran CIA officer. Mitchell wanted him in the search and rescue team. Rogers readily agreed, suggesting they should leave immediately.

  Sonntag interrupted him. “Let’s make a plan,” he said. “We have to be careful here.” He saw Rogers was agitated and itching for a fight.

  Sonntag dragged a chalkboard into the operations center, and he and Mitchell sketched out a floor plan of the fort. They marked Spann’s last known position around the west side of the Pink House, set in the southern courtyard.

  They agreed their mission was to find Dave Olson, who was reportedly still alive, and to search for Spann and retrieve his body if, in fact, he’d been killed.

  After they were done, Mitchell squinted out the window. They had about three hours of daylight left, at best. They had to hurry. Once darkness fell, it would be impossible to tell friend from foe in the fort. And the Taliban would likely take the opportunity to escape under the cloak of night.

  Sonntag estimated about 50 Northern Alliance fighters were positioned at the fort, with maybe another 100 scattered in the city who would be available for a fight. Among their own forces, Mitchell had 8 men he could count on as trigger pullers. A thin string of men to confront a fortress filled with 600 enemy fighters.

  Mitchell rustled up the 8 British Special Boat Soldiers, who had arrived in Mazar the night before at the harried landing zone. He didn’t even know these new soldiers’ names, except for one, Stephen Bass, a U.S. Navy SEAL attached to the SBS in an intergovernment exchange program. Complicating matters, the SBS would not be allowed to fire their weapons at the enemy unless they were attacked first. This was because they had not received their orders for rules of engagement, which instructed them when and where they could fire at enemy fighters. Mitchell reasoned that self-defense would be a reasonable justification to shoot back, and he was pretty sure they were about to drive into a serious firefight.

  In addition to Garth Rogers, Doc McFarland, and the 8 SBS personnel, the 15-man rescue force included 2 Air Force lieutenant colonels, attached to the Defense Intelligence Agency, who had happened to be visiting Mazar. Mitchell considered these men to be “military tourists”—a name given to officers who like to fly into war zones and sightsee, even though they are not officially part of the action. Now these Air Force officers were going to get a close-up view.

  Still, Mitchell was glad to have them along. One of the men spoke Russian, which could be helpful. All of the interpreters working at headquarters had left with the rest of the fighting force for Konduz, and Mitchell realized he didn’t have any other way to communicate with the locals. He also brought along 2 trusted sergeants: Pete Bach and Ted Barrow. He would need them both. Barrow was an excellent weapons specialist, and the steadfast, good-natured Bach would run communications.

  When he was in the regular Army fifteen years earlier, Bach had been stationed in Alaska, and he’d trained to get in shape for the Special Forces qualification course by asking his wife to drive him far into the wilderness, and then running home for twenty miles through hip-deep snow.

  None of the men had worked with each other as a combat team, but they did share common training. Mitchell hoped this expertise would be enough of an edge to help them survive in the fighting.

  Having solved the problem of fielding a team, he then had to figure out how they would travel to the fort. In addition to interpreters, Nelson and Dean had also taken almost all of the headquarters vehicles to Konduz.

  Mitchell had to dig through a pile of car keys, and by trial and error, find a spare vehicle that would actually start.

  Finally, thirty frantic minutes after they had received the call that Mike Spann was missing, the team was heading to the fort.

  Mitchell drove at breakneck speed.

  The Land Rover’s suspension was mushy, and the heavy vehicle drifted over the road. Mitchell had trouble shifting with his left hand and steering with his right in the European-style interior, and he felt that any minute he might careen out of control.

  The midday traffic in Mazar was heavy, and he was forced to weave in and out of lines of cars, honking the horn constantly, and barely slowing down at intersections.

  Rogers rode in the passenger seat, calling out approaching obstacles.

  “Goat cart!”

  Mitchell: “I see it.”

  “Donkey cart!”

  “Okay.”

  “Man with load of bricks!”

  “Got it.”

  As Mitchell drove, he worried that they’d be ambushed by prisoners who’d escaped from the fort and who were lying in wait, parked in vehicles of their own at some intersection. As they approached the bazaar in downtown Mazar, a tractor-trailer pulled out in front of Mitchell and he had to slam on the brakes. Traffic backed up behind him and he nervously checked the rearview mirror. Rogers scanned the area in front of them.

  This is it, thought Mitchell. Now we’re going to get whacked.

  After several tense minutes, the long truck finally pulled ahead and Mitchell shot off again, tires squealing.

  As the urgent call went out about the fighting in the fort, Dean in Konduz got word that Mike Spann was missing and that Dave Olson was trapped somewhere inside the fortress walls. Dean’s satellite phone rang: it was someone back at the Turkish Schoolhouse in Mazar asking him if he had all of his men with him.

  “Just checking,” said the caller. He said that the details were sketchy, but definitely something bad was going down in the city. The call sounded like it was coming from the fort.

  Dean thanked the caller and next got Brad Highland on the radio back in Mazar. He, along with teammates Martin Graves and Evan Colt, had stayed behind to run logistics from the safe house.

  “Listen, man,” said Dean. “Get yourself ready to move to the Turkish school. Don’t mess around. The city is heating up.”

  Highland began packing up sensitive items—maps, radios, reports.

  Dean next got Mark Mitchell on the radio. Like Dean, Mitchell at that point was just grasping the enormity of the fight raging at the fort.

  “I’ve got guys inside Mazar,” said Dean. “You need to know they’re there before you get crazy.” Dean meant that he didn’t want his men getting fragged in a bomb strike aimed at enemy fighters.

  Then he asked Lieutenant Colonel Bowers if they would be redeployed to Mazar to take part in the fighting. Nelson, who was standing nearby, wanted to know, too.

  The question was a reasonable one, given how closely the men had worked with one another. But Bowers, worried by the fact that the situation in Mazar had suddenly spiraled out of control, now feared that the same could happen to them at Konduz. He reminded his men that they were about to take charge of thousands of angry, armed Taliban and Al Qaeda prisoners. No, they would not be leaving immediately for Qala-i-Janghi.

  Nelson wanted to get in the fight at Mazar. Mike Spann had been his friend. Now he wanted revenge.

  Approaching the fort, Mitchell could hear the rat-tat of gunfire and the sonorous hiss of RPGs launching inside the tall mud walls.

  Smoke trails whizzed upward from the interior and corkscrewed overhead in the blue sky before smashing into the farm field around Mitchell’s Land Cruiser.

  Several hundred prisoners had climbed out onto the walls and were firing down into the entrance drive. Rounds were hitting around the vehicle as Mitchell ran the gauntlet and came to a rocking halt inside the fort walls, next to a guard shack.

  Cowering near the shack were fort
y Alliance soldiers, all of them terrified by the gunfire. Mitchell ignored them. They’d have to come to their senses and reorganize as a fighting force on their own.

  Time reporter Alex Perry had been driving near the Qala-i-Janghi Fortress when he saw something out the taxi window that made him want to stop. He tapped the driver on the shoulder and said, “Let’s drive over there.”

  He pointed to black plumes of smoke drifting above some distant, towering walls.

  The fighting had been raging for forty-five minutes when Perry arrived, pulling right up to the front gate, oblivious to the danger inside. He knew something bad was happening, something big…

  He was standing beside the taxi listening to the gunfire when a white Land Cruiser came up the gate, running through a hail of fire pouring down from a high wall above. A large group of armed men piled out and one of them hurriedly walked up and asked Perry what he knew about the fighting inside. These guys don’t know what’s going on, thought Perry. He realized he was the first person to have arrived from outside the fort after the fighting had started.

  Perry told them that the greatest volume of fire seemed to be coming from the southern courtyard, which was to their left, on the other side of the ten-foot-thick mud walls.

  The soldier thanked him and trotted off. Perry was left wondering what he should do next. This was his first assignment as a war correspondent and he understood he had hit the jackpot. He didn’t know if this made him lucky or doomed.

  Inside the guard shack by the front gate, a set of cement stairs led up to the fortress wall. Mitchell ordered Stephen Bass and the rest of the SBS personnel to the top. He wanted them to spot where the Taliban fire was coming from within the huge southern courtyard.

  They charged up and set machine guns on tripods behind the long, four-foot-high mud wall. Swinging the gun barrels, they started raining fire into the southern courtyard. Mitchell saw they were killing a lot of the prisoners.

  However, the Northern Alliance soldiers who’d arrived at the fort and now lined the walls were another matter. They were firing into the courtyard by holding their battered AKs over their heads and doing something the Americans called “praying and spraying.” This method of fire was wildly inaccurate. It was difficult to tell if any of the rounds were hitting anyone. Oddly enough, that was the point of this method of fire. According to their beliefs, which Mitchell had studied, if one of the Afghans killed a man on purpose—that is, if he deliberately aimed and shot someone—then the dead man’s soul would become the killer’s responsibility. If, on the other hand, a man was hit by accident—by an errant bullet that had been fired wildly—then it was God’s will that the man should have died. Mitchell hoped to hell God was looking down and urging the Alliance fighters on.

  Mortars kept popping up from some horse stables built against the wall below him, and Mitchell couldn’t pinpoint the exact position of the launches. He considered jumping onto the stable roofs and creeping along them until he found the mortar position. He could chop a hole and drop a grenade inside. But he then realized that the jump itself would probably send him straight through the thick mud roof and land him in the stables, a clear suicide mission. Reluctantly, Mitchell called off the plan.

  Sonntag at the Turkish Schoolhouse had arranged for bomber aircraft to be over the fort by 4 p.m. Mitchell looked at his watch. He had only one hour to rescue Dave and look for Mike before finding cover in preparation for the bomb strike. Mitchell radioed to Sonntag that he was moving along the north wall of the fort and heading to Dostum’s headquarters, Dave Olson’s last known position.

  He next told the communications sergeant to get comms up and track the status of the incoming air support. They were going to need those bombs. It was already clear to Mitchell that there was no way he and his fourteen men could match the volume of gunfire pouring out of the fort. They were going to have to bomb the Taliban into submission.

  As they crept along the base of the wall, heading to Dostum’s headquarters, Mitchell ran into one of the warlord’s subcommanders, a frazzled-looking man covered in dust who had clearly borne the brunt of the battle’s beginning.

  Mitchell didn’t have a radio that operated in Dave’s frequency. The man offered his walkie-talkie. “Here,” he said, “I have been talking with Baba Dave.” Mitchell called Olson and soon he heard the CIA officer’s voice.

  “They’ve exploded some kind of bomb,” Dave said. “They killed the guards, and they control half of the fort.”

  Despite the bad news, Mitchell was immensely relieved to hear Olson’s voice. He was alive.

  “What about Mike?” Mitchell asked.

  “The last I saw him,” said Dave, “he was fighting hand-to-hand.” He paused. “I don’t think he made it.”

  “We’re coming for you,” said Mitchell.

  He and the team pressed ahead, wary of being shot at by Taliban who might be positioned above them on the wall. They hadn’t gone far when the position they had just left exploded in a shower of fire and dust—a mortar had fallen directly on the spot. Mitchell didn’t believe this was targeted fire, but that wouldn’t matter much if you got hit.

  Sooner or later, however, the Taliban would likely get lucky. Mitchell remembered the piles of weapons in the open Conex trailers. Now he heard reports from the Brits at their machine-gun position along the wall about 100 yards behind Mitchell that the Taliban had found the makeshift armory as well as a garage-size mud building located near the middle wall, and could be seen lugging all kinds of weapons—rifles, ammo, mortars, even BM-21 rockets—across the southern courtyard to intensify their attack.

  As fast as they could load the tubes, the prisoners were launching mortars, trying to bracket the long, broad facade of Dostum’s headquarters. And they had started to hit the building. Chunks of plaster and concrete were careening off the wall and spinning into the northern courtyard.

  After about twenty minutes of scurrying along the base of the fort, Mitchell and Rogers now stood looking up at a sixty-foot-high parapet at the northwest corner. (The remaining team members had dispersed along the wall, with Sergeant Bach keeping in radio contact as Mitchell and Rogers moved ahead.)

  At the base, Mitchell was joined by one of Dostum’s trusted men, Commander Fakir, who had made his way to the fort shortly after the fighting had started. Fakir had ridden against the Taliban in horse charges during their battle en route to the city, and he faced this next challenge of breaching the fort wall with the same fearlessness.

  Digging the toe of his scuffed shoe into the mud wall, Fakir began scampering up, securing each toehold with a thrust of his leg. He nimbly made it up to and over the parapet that ran along the top of the walls of the entire fort, and stood.

  He then unwrapped his long green turban and threw one end down to Mitchell, who was standing about thirty feet below him.

  Fakir gave the cloth a shake: Hurry, grab hold.

  Mitchell reached up and clenched the fabric, knotting it around his hands, and began climbing as Fakir hauled on the other end, bracing himself against the parapet.

  Mitchell would later recall that he felt like he’d entered a violent telling of the fairy tale “Rapunzel.” He quickly reached the top. Fakir repeated the process with Rogers, and the three men climbed the rest of the way, another thirty feet above, scrabbling on all fours up the crumbling wall.

  Getting down on his belly and studying the scene, Mitchell could see bullets peppering the front of Dostum’s headquarters, which only several days earlier had been his home.

  He picked up the radio and called Dave Olson. “Where are you?”

  Olson and Mitchell figured out that he was somewhere in the offices directly below Mitchell, about thirty feet down, through mud and timbers.

  “Are you hurt?” asked Mitchell.

  Olson said he was fine. But he said he was concerned about his security. RPGs were smashing into the balcony, rocking the place. The Taliban had figured out how to fire the long, heavy BM-21 rockets without th
e aid of a standard launch pad. They were aiming these like giant bottle rockets at the headquarters building. The explosions shook the fort’s walls.

  Because of the volume of gunfire, Mitchell decided that he couldn’t move any farther without risking getting shot. He would have had to dash about 150 feet across the hard-packed roof of Dostum’s headquarters, run down a long ramp leading to the floor of the north courtyard, and then rush up a set of stairs to get inside the building itself. He thought the run would be too risky.

  About three hundred yards away, in the south courtyard, he could see Taliban prisoners darting out from behind some blown-up vehicles to fire their weapons at the building. The prisoners hadn’t spotted him, he hoped. But he was about to let them know that America’s bombs had arrived.

  He scanned the fortress floor for any sign of Spann’s body, a glimpse of denim jeans or a black sweater, a shock of blond hair among the dozens of dead bodies littering the southern courtyard. Mitchell didn’t want to drop any bombs if Mike was still alive in the courtyard. But he couldn’t see anything that resembled his friend. He decided to call in the air strike. With any luck, this would quiet the enemy gunfire and allow them to reach Olson, still hiding inside Dostum’s headquarters. As a large, well-armed group, they then could try to make their way safely out of the fort.

  Bach called Mitchell on the radio and informed him that he had an inbound F-18 jet, ready to drop.

  Mitchell called Olson and told him. “When the bomb hits, get over the north wall. Use the explosion for cover.”

  Bach then came back and informed Mitchell that the pilot was insisting that he drop at an altitude of 20,000 feet.

  Mitchell was incredulous. At that height, the pilot might hit anything.

  “We’re Danger Close,” he told Bach, meaning that he, Rogers, and Fakir were located within 300 yards of the target, in peril of being injured or killed by the explosion. He needed the pilot to fly as low as possible to minimize this risk.