Horse Soldiers

by Doug Stanton

  Bach came back on, “He’ll go to eighteen thousand feet.” Bach wryly explained that the pilot feared getting shot at by ground fire.

  Shot at? thought Mitchell. I can tell him about that.

  News of the ongoing fight at Qala-i-Janghi continued to reach Nelson’s team at Konduz. Nelson was still itching to get back to Mazar. Diller was of a different mind. There was nothing they could do for Spann—they couldn’t help him now. But what boggled Diller was hearing that Dean’s team members hadn’t been asked to go into the fort and smoke these dudes out.

  Diller believed a trained-up team like Dean’s would have been a useful asset. In addition, another team, run by a Fifth Group Special Forces soldier named Don Winslow, had recently entered the city, ostensibly to link up with the Hazara warlord General Mohaqeq, a plan that hadn’t yet taken effect.

  Winslow was hot for the fight. He had started carrying a camping hatchet on his pants belt as a sign of strength, explaining to Mohaqeq’s violent, aggressive warriors that he used it in battle to hack men to death. The Hazaras thought the American carried some serious mojo. Yet Winslow wasn’t going into the fort, either. He was stationed at the Turkish Schoolhouse as part of the defensive force protecting the headquarters.

  In fact, members of the other teams hadn’t been tasked with fighting in the fort because the fight had erupted quickly, and as events kept rolling over Mitchell and Sonntag, they believed that they were winning. Further, the connecton between Mitchell’s command and control unit and Nelson’s and Dean’s team, had been ad hoc at best and nonexistent at worst, as evidenced by the accidental bombing of Dean’s men by Nelson’s team at the Sultan Razia school earlier. In short, Mitchell correctly believed that he had under his command, in the faces of his own men, the firepower and experience to put down the insurrection. If he were to be forced to storm the fort, then he could call the reserve team members. But for now, he would try to kill the men inside with bombs—something far less risky than entering the enormous fortress and clearing it room-by-room, hand-to-hand, guns blazing.

  Looking at the Pink House, Mitchell figured that the building held the largest concentration of prisoners. Using his range finder, which shot a laser at an object and then displayed its distance in a viewfinder, he calculated the building’s GPS coordinates.

  He relayed these to Bach, who then radioed them to the F-18 pilot.

  “Do you have a visual?” Bach asked.

  “Roger, I see the building,” said the pilot.

  Mitchell cleared him to unleash the bomb.

  The explosion rocked the ground near Mitchell. When the smoke and dust cleared, he glassed the area with his binoculars and saw that the bomb had fallen about 100 yards away from the Pink House.

  Mitchell asked the pilot to correct the coordinates, and the second bomb hit the Pink House squarely, collapsing a portion of the roof and sending chunks of mud and concrete tumbling down the interior stairwell, suddenly illuminating a portion of the main chamber. Inside, the several hundred prisoners who had retreated to the building cowered in its corners. The room filled with smoke and dust.

  Even more prisoners were packed into the narrow hallway and on the stairs leading up to the outside. Terrified by the explosions, they braced for another attack. Some of them had begun to think of surrendering, walking out of the basement and turning themselves over to Dostum’s men. They might be executed, but surely their chances were slimmer if they remained in the basement.

  The foreign Taliban in the group shouted at the huddled men that no one would surrender. They would fight in the fort to their deaths.

  Mitchell ordered three more bombs dropped on the building, followed by two others that exploded along the southeast wall, where some of the prisoners had sought refuge in the horse stable.

  Mitchell was dismayed by the effect of the strikes. The gunfire rising from the Taliban positions scattered around the courtyard only seemed to increase after each explosion. He realized these guys were not going to give up easily.

  In the intensity of the fight, he hadn’t noticed that darkness was descending on the fort. The vastly outnumbered American team would have to leave soon or risk being ambushed by prisoners as they made their way back to the gate and their vehicles.

  Mitchell tried raising Olson on the radio but this time he came up cold. Either he’d been wounded or killed by gunfire, or by the Danger Close explosions of the air strikes. Or maybe he was simply out of contact for less serious reasons. Either way, Mitchell now couldn’t be sure of Dave’s location. He realized he had to go find him.

  “We’ve got to get out of here,” cautioned Rogers.

  Mitchell nodded. He called Bach.

  “Drop one more,” he said. He ordered this one on the Pink House. They would make a dash over the wall under cover of the air strike.

  As soon as the explosion went up, and along with it a scorching fireball, they slipped down the back wall to the desert floor. Once there, Mitchell and Rogers stripped off their heavy load-bearing vests. Keeping their pistols and M-4 rifles and a radio, they were able to scale back up the wall to a window they’d discovered leading into Dostum’s headquarters.

  Mitchell slid inside and yelled for Dave, running along the hallway, swinging doors open, as the walls started shaking under the impact of more RPGs.

  Mitchell shook his head, disbelieving. Even after all the firepower he had dropped on them, the prisoners were still able to pound at the building.

  In one hallway, he stumbled upon a group of frightened Afghan men who’d been trapped inside when the shooting started. Speaking in Dari, and pointing frantically down the hall, they pantomimed that Olson had managed to get out down a back wall when the bombing began.

  Mitchell was relieved, but then decided that he needed to check for himself. He couldn’t trust Dave’s safety to secondhand information like this. He and Rogers searched more rooms, but still they came up empty-handed. At the main gate, they rejoined the rest of the team, where Mitchell asked if anyone had seen Olson.

  No one had.

  Mitchell still wasn’t sure that his friend had made it out of the fortress alive, but at the same time, he could hear more gunfire growing in intensity inside the fort. The Taliban were standing just on the other side of the thick mud walls, about 150 yards away.

  Even the nearby village of Deh Dedi had fallen into chaos. Some of the homes abutted the fort’s southeast quadrant, and the settlement had become a free fire zone, with Northern Alliance soldiers and escaped prisoners roaming from house to house, shooting at each other. Most of the village’s inhabitants had fled to Mazar.

  Mitchell realized it was time to leave the area. And quickly.

  On their way back to the Turkish Schoolhouse, Mitchell learned by radio that a quick reaction force (QRF) of twenty-four Tenth Mountain soldiers was landing at a dirt airfield about a mile away, nearby Deh Dedi. Mitchell thought the QRF’s arrival was an excellent idea. These soldiers could provide extra security at the schoolhouse, and they had trained to act as a search and rescue team.

  Sonntag had requested their deployment when, at one point during the course of air strikes, he’d been unable to reach Mitchell by radio. Sonntag worried that maybe he’d been captured, or killed. (In fact, Mitchell had only switched radio frequencies from Sonntag’s to a “strike” frequency needed to talk with pilots.) Believing that a majority of his security force at the schoolhouse might have been eliminated, Sonntag had called K2 and asked for the QRF.

  Sitting on his cot in his cramped tent at K2, Tenth Mountain Division soldier Eric Andreason, nineteen, from Florida, had jumped up excitedly at first word that he and his buddies were going into battle. They’d hurriedly packed and soon were standing on the tarmac, as Nightstalker mission commander John Garfield, who, a little more than a month earlier, had helped insert Nelson’s and Dean’s teams into the country, addressed the group of twenty-four young men.

  Garfield was concerned by the worried looks on their faces. These men w
ere some of America’s most eager, highly trained infantry soldiers, but they seemed unsure of being inserted in the middle of a raging firefight. Some of them, Garfield saw, were paralyzed with fear.

  Garfield, perpetually witty and affable, didn’t help matters when he addressed the young crowd just before takeoff. He was keyed up and not thinking (he would later realize) when he said, “Many of you won’t be coming back from this mission. We’re going in hot. And there will be shooting.”

  For Garfield, this was a way of mitigating the terror of approaching combat. He remembered what it felt like to be shot at the first time, when he was a young, regular U.S. Army soldier, and then later as a covert Delta Force operator.

  The first time, all he could remember was being angry. And then he managed to focus on simply shooting his weapon. But for the Tenth Mountain soldiers, Garfield’s speech felt like a pronouncement of doom.

  Some of them already in the helicopter started throwing up. What have I done? Garfield wondered. He watched as one soldier broke away from the helicopter. Garfield could tell he wasn’t running to anything—he only wanted to get the hell away from the bird. Garfield, who was maybe fifteen years the kid’s senior and out of shape, started jogging after him.

  He caught up with the tall, lean soldier, and still running alongside him, talked calmly. “Hey, where are you going?”

  The soldier looked around, as if finally realizing what he’d done. “Nowhere,” he said.

  “Then do you mind if we walk?” Garfield laughed.

  “No, that’s okay.”

  The kid stopped running. Garfield was glad. He was out of breath. He put his arm around him. He knew the young man was not a coward; he was just scared, and he’d given in to that emotion.

  “Your men need you,” said Garfield. “They need you to be with them.”

  He pointed at the three large Chinook helicopters sitting on the tarmac, their long rotors spinning.

  “How about we walk back and take charge of this situation?”

  The soldier nodded.

  Once at the helicopter, he strode up the ramp and spoke confidently to his fellow men about the need for all of them to psyche themselves up for the battle. He took his seat along the wall. Garfield was proud, and relieved.

  This was going to be a hairy landing in an active combat zone. He needed these guys to be on their game. He still believed that many of them wouldn’t make it out alive. Including himself. Garfield decided he would go down shooting.

  Now, at the Deh Dedi airstrip, Mitchell helped load the Tenth Mountain soldiers into vehicles and the convoy picked its way along the dark streets to the Turkish Schoolhouse.

  News of the fighting at the fort had driven many of the city’s inhabitants indoors, fearing that the Taliban would soon be returning.

  At about 6:30 p.m., Mitchell stepped down from the Land Cruiser before it had even stopped outside the schoolhouse. He still didn’t know if Dave Olson had made it out of the fort alive. He feared the worst. He ran inside and asked the first soldier he met about the CIA officer.

  Just then, he looked up. Olson was coming down the stairs. Mitchell relaxed. Olson, it turned out, had arrived at the schoolhouse about a half hour earlier. Mitchell asked again about Mike Spann.

  Olson’s face grew dark. “I don’t think he’s alive,” he said.

  Mitchell felt a wave of exhaustion sweep over him. On the second floor in the operations center, he and Sonntag convened an emergency meeting to review the day and plan their next attack.

  They knew that about 50 of Dostum’s men had been killed so far, and another 250 had been wounded. An estimated 300 Taliban, from the initial group of 600 prisoners, lay dead inside the fort. As Sonntag pieced the situation together, he believed that the prisoners had rioted at Qala-i-Janghi in order to force the Americans to rush to the fort’s aid, leaving the city unprotected and vulnerable to attack from the Taliban soldiers now stationed to the north. The American forces would be caught from behind and decimated. The Taliban forces would then join up, re-arm themselves from the armory kept in the Conex trailers, and sweep east to Konduz, trapping Bowers, Nelson, and Dean between the large Taliban and the Al Qaeda armies dug in at Konduz.

  After the meeting, another frightening bit of intelligence came into the schoolhouse, this time from one of General Mohaqeq’s Hazara soldiers. The news was that a gathering force of Taliban soldiers was preparing to attack the city.

  This information seemed to corroborate some intelligence Mitchell had received earlier in the day, that at least several hundred more Taliban soldiers had escaped from Konduz and parked themselves northeast of Mazar, about fifteen miles from the schoolhouse.

  When he’d heard this, Mitchell immediately radioed Sonntag. Sonntag was already on the case. He’d ordered an AC-130 Spectre gunship to fly above the enemy troops and lock them in place at their desert location. The plane’s crew had orders to shoot if the enemy force moved on Mazar.

  Mitchell and Sonntag could still hear gunfire and explosions coming from the western side of the city. Mazar-i-Sharif was no longer safe. All of them resolved that they would not retreat.

  The following morning, November 26, Mitchell was lying on his belly on top of the middle wall, on the fort’s eastern edge. The wall, dividing the fortress into its northern and southern courtyards, gave him an excellent vantage point. Looking down and to his right, some 200 feet away, he could see three Taliban fighters, in ragged gray and green blouses, their black trousers flapping as they ran, firing their AKs and spraying the northern walls. One of them dropped a mortar down a tube set up on a tripod.

  Mitchell heard the thwoop sound and watched it launch.

  It landed wide, but pretty soon more mortars were dropping around him and he feared the guy was going to get him bracketed and smoke him.

  Looking to his left, across the northern courtyard, Mitchell saw Captains Paul Syverson and Kevin Leahy, along with Sergeant First Class Pete Bach and Master Sergeant Dave Betz 300 yards away, also taking mortar fire. This was coming from another position that Mitchell couldn’t locate.

  Bach was on the radio talking to the F-18 pilot overhead, trying to get him to drop his bomb. Betz, Leahy, and Syverson were crouched down and firing their M-4s into the southern courtyard.

  Mitchell lowered his binoculars. These guys just won’t die. He had no idea how any man could have withstood yesterday’s bombardment. As he looked down into the fortress, at the blood soaking the dirt floor, he saw hundreds of suicidal Taliban Al Qaeda fighters firing rifles, rockets, throwing grenades.

  If these fighters escaped the fortress, if they broke through these walls and escaped into the scrum of Mazar-i-Sharif’s streets, it might take the entire winter to recapture the lost ground. If they escaped, Mitchell reasoned, it might be impossible to hold off the larger enemy force.

  He thought of his daughters, his wife, whom he loved to tell, “I may not be pretty, Maggie, but I’m dependable.” He wanted to get home.

  Up on the northeast parapet of the fortress, Paul Syverson heard the rounds hit the mud wall behind him, generating little puffs of dust, as if the wall were being stung by hundreds of invisible bees. The pilot overhead was demanding that Syverson relay his position coordinates, which neither Bach nor he wanted to do. Bach keyed the mike so the pilot could hear the gunfire.

  “Hey, would you hurry this up!” he yelled into the radio.

  A mortar round landed not fifty feet away. The explosion was loud and Bach yelled, “Goddamn it!” He keyed the mike again and said, “You hear that?”

  Both he and Syverson were worried that if they gave their position to the pilot, he’d mistake it for the target’s.

  “Repeat,” said Bach. “You will not drop without coordinates!”

  “Roger,” said the pilot. “I need your position before I drop.”

  It had already occurred to Syverson that they could be overrun.

  Down below in the southern courtyard, scurrying in the grove of poplar trees
, were several hundred Taliban bent on killing him. None of the enemy wanted to be taken alive. They had all decided to go down shooting. Syverson had heard the stories about what the Taliban did to its prisoners. Being strung up by your guts from the barrel of a tank was not preferable to emptying your 9mm at some hardened Pakistani before he killed you.

  Syverson finally nodded at Bach and said, “All right, give ’em the coordinates.”

  Bach relayed their position. Ten thousand feet up, the pilot typed into the keypad the target designation for the JDAM.

  The long, heavy bomb awoke, its electronic brain—a GPS—whirring with this newly inserted information. It dropped from the jet and began flying to its target.

  Mitchell heard the countdown over the radio. He closed his eyes and opened his mouth to relieve the overpressure that he knew the bomb would create on detonation.

  The mud floor shook beneath him. He felt the air being sucked out of the fortress. The noise was so intense that a thick silence draped over him, and in this quiet he opened his eyes and was staring directly at the southern courtyard, where the mortar position had been.

  It was still there. The courtyard was untouched. Mitchell turned to see the mushroom cloud blossoming over Syverson’s position.

  At the last second, Syverson had seen the bomb coming in, accompanied by a sound like the crack of dry kindling. The air flashed. The bomb flew straight into the mud parapet that he and the three other soldiers were sitting on, penetrated, and kept going.

  Buried some twenty feet in the dry, caked mud wall, it finally exploded, throwing a nearby Northern Alliance tank high in the air, flipping it. The tank landed on three Afghan soldiers and they lay dead beneath its green iron turret, their thin brown legs sticking out from underneath.

  Syverson himself had been thrown airborne, punching and kicking within a gray cloud of dust. He didn’t feel himself land, but he heard it—a whumpf that set every bone in his body ringing with a hollow, angry tune.