by Doug Stanton
Sergeant Dave Betz shook his head after he landed, trying to clear his thinking. He’d been catapulted some sixty feet, and at the end of his arc he felt he was falling down a cool, dark cave. He smelled the dead animal stench of burned hair and realized it was his own. The blast had scoured his face. Miraculously, only his eyelashes and mustache were gone. His nose hurt where his Oakley sunglasses had melted; they too had disappeared. He looked at Bach and laughed—and even that hurt. Bach’s hair was sticking straight up. His face was powdered completely white with dust; only the whites of his eyes were visible, wet, with blood running from the corners in thin lines. Bach’s ears were bleeding as well. Betz reached up and touched his own and found blood there, too. Betz was amazed at the impact he had endured. He turned and looked back up at the parapet, where he’d been standing when the bomb landed.
Then Betz looked down at his waist. The lower half of his body had disappeared. He panicked and started digging at the pebbles and sand. His legs emerged, then his knees. The blast had buried him up to his belt in rubble. He realized that even the shirt on his back had been blown off.
Betz looked around and couldn’t find Syverson. He heard Leahy moaning. He turned and saw Kevin in a heap at the bottom of the fort wall, which had collapsed inward in a pile of pebbles and sand. Kevin was twisted like a doll. He looked as if two fingers had reached down from the sky and shaken him until he broke. Oh, man, not Kevin.
Kevin Leahy was his buddy. Betz looked after him like a mother after a wayward son. His father-in-law was the commanding general of all U.S. Special Operations Forces operating in the world. Who was going to make that phone call?
“Uh, General Brown? Your son-in-law was blown up by one of our own bombs.”*
Betz wiggled out of the loose grip of sand and chunks and stumbled over to Kevin. Then he started screaming for help. Everything was moving in slow motion. He couldn’t tell if hours had passed since the explosion, or minutes. He stood there screaming for someone to help his friend.
It was nearly noon. Betz worried they were about to be overrun by Taliban soldiers who could use the chaos of the moment to easily charge them. In a matter of minutes, the military campaign that was America’s answer to the attacks that had terrorized New York and Washington, D.C., had gone terribly wrong.
Mitchell looked across the fort and tried to see through the towering cloud of dust just what had happened. Shrapnel and debris whizzed past his head as he stared through his binoculars.
“Okay,” he wondered, “where did this thing hit?”
The entire northeast end of the fort was obscured by the dust cloud.
He grabbed the radio and called, “Syverson, this is Mitchell. Over.”
Silence.
“Syverson, this is Mitchell. Over.”
Nothing.
Mitchell began to think that maybe Syverson had been so close to the explosion that his eardrums had burst, and he’d been deafened.
He called again. “Syverson, this is Mitchell. Over.”
And then, more urgently, “Any station, do you copy? This is Mitchell. Over.”
One of the Tenth Mountain soldiers, located at the wall along the highway, replied, “Go ahead, Mitchell.”
Relieved, Mitchell asked, “What can you see? Do you have contact with anybody?”
The soldier then delivered the devastating news: The bomb had hit Syverson’s position.
About this time, the dust was clearing, and with his binos Mitchell could see a couple of guys rising up out of the rubble. They stood and started wandering around, dazed. He swallowed hard at the sight.
Then he picked up the radio and ordered everybody to rally at the main gate. He grabbed his gear and ran.
Betz looked up through blurred eyes. Coming for him and the other wounded men were nine soldiers from the Tenth Mountain Division. They had been crouched at their position behind a wall along a nearby road when the bomb hit. As the gray cloud boiled upward, they’d been shocked to hear the cries, “Oh my God, we may have killed the wrong people!” rise up among some other Special Forces soldiers standing there.
“That was wrong, that was very, very wrong,” yelled some of the Afghans.
Wounded men—Afghan and some British SBS soldiers—were already stumbling from the fort’s entrance, walking dazed like zombies, hair sticking up, faces white.
Sergeant Jerry Higley, twenty-six, looked up and saw the sky darken as the debris cloud drifted the several hundred yards toward their group. A loud, thwacking rain began to fall as shrapnel and bits of the exploded building wheeled through the dusty air and hit around them.
“It looks like we’re in for a bit of a scuffle,” joked Higley’s friend, Specialist Thomas Beers, twenty-two, from Pennsylvania.
They quickly piled into a minivan and sped toward the fort, jumping out at the front gate and scaling a set of stairs leading up to the wall’s pathway, where, after a breathless run through Taliban gunfire, they found the bleeding and broken Dave Betz.
When they arrived, Betz didn’t know where he was, or even who he was. The soldiers, having swallowed their earlier fears, scooped up stocky, muscular Betz and the others and walked with them arm-in-arm, dodging the furious gunfire, along a narrow catwalk on the top of the wall. Their movement was slow going. The Taliban prisoners were taking the opportunity to pound the blown-up position. Machine-gun fire zig-zagged across the crumbling dry walls.
Private First Class Eric Andreason, who the day before had been leisurely reading a novel in his tent back at K2, thought for sure they’d be shot. Dazed and in shock, the wounded men sometimes tried running away, heading back down the path to the bomb site. Andreason and his buddies chased after them, ducking as bullets smacked the wall at their back. Andreason found the roar of the shooting relentless. Yet he was suddenly bathed in a soothing calm. Finally, he and the others struggled down a steep set of stairs near the main gate, where Doc McFarland was waiting.
Kevin Leahy was near death and had to be resuscitated several times. All of the men had broken bones and concussions, but miraculously, they were alive. Syverson had suffered, among other wounds, a broken hip and back. Sergeant Pete Bach, blood still running from his ears and from the corner of his eyes, wandered away from the aid station and found a truck with the keys in the ignition. After fumbling with the door for several minutes, too dazed to figure out how to open it, he managed to get inside and drive himself back to the Turkish Schoolhouse, where he walked into the lobby, shocking everyone with his macabre, cartoonlike appearance. Everyone at the schoolhouse, hearing of the errant bomb strike over the radio, had thought that all of the guys had been killed. (After fully recuperating from their wounds, all four men would receive the Purple Heart and Bronze Star and return to active duty.)
As he headed toward the wounded men, Mitchell struggled under the sixty pounds of gear he’d stuffed in his load-bearing vest. The endless rope climbs, bench presses, and gut-wrenching twenty-mile runs back at Fort Campbell were paying off. Mitchell felt like collapsing on the ground, but pushed himself ahead one stride at a time.
He tried raising the bombers on the radio. He had to stop them from dropping any more bombs. “Shasta one-one,” he said, using the plane’s call sign. No reply. And then in the melee’s confusion, he couldn’t remember the call signs of any other planes, so he blurted out: “Any U.S. aircraft, any U.S. aircraft, cease fire, cease fire, we have friendly casualties on the ground.”
Finally he heard a voice on the radio.
“Roger, this is Shasta one-one, I understand that you have U.S. casualties on the ground. Ceasing fire.”
And then the pilot asked Mitchell if he wanted him to stay in a holding pattern overhead, ready for another air strike.
Mitchell considered this, then said sadly, “Negative. We are done for the morning.”
He had to gather everyone including Betz, Leahy, Syverson, and Bach, and retreat to the schoolhouse. There, they would make a new plan to destroy the fort once and for all.
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Mike.
He thought about Spann, lying somewhere in the courtyard.
We have to find Mike.
Finding Spann was now his mission.
As the battle raged, Najeeb Quarishy caught a taxi in Mazar and rode out to Qala-i-Janghi to watch the mayhem. He stood outside the fortress on the main highway along with several hundred other men, many of them armed. Every few minutes, another taxi would arrive from town, and another soldier would get out, leaning in to retrieve his long RPG tube from the backseat, pay the driver, and then trot off across the farm field leading to the towering fortress.
Najeeb could feel the explosions of the bombs and mortars in his chest. The air crackled overheard with the passing of stray rounds, like a thousand snapping whips. He wanted to go inside and see for himself what was happening, but knew it was too dangerous. He was glad to see the Taliban receiving so much punishment from the Americans bombs.
Inside the city, Nadir Shihab, who had been beaten severely by the Taliban and whose father’s house had been dug up by vengeful Taliban soldiers, had climbed to the roof of a friend’s house and watched the spectacle in the distance, the sky flashing like lightning as the daylight faded. The sound of the bombs falling rattled the windows in his friend’s house. The sky was filled with black smoke.
He saw a big plane, a B-52, fly overhead, very high, and then it dropped its guided bombs and the fortress exploded. After a while, he went home. Nadir was sitting in his own house when suddenly the walls exploded around him.
A rocket had flown from the fortress, one of the hundreds that were exploding on their own in the fires burning in the courtyard, and crashed through the roof of his house, several miles from the fort. Nadir was the only one home, and when he regained consciousness in the rubble, he knew he was lucky to be alive. He was bleeding. He felt around at his back and found it wet. He tasted blood in his mouth. His legs were cut with shrapnel. He couldn’t walk.
He lay in the dust and fallen chunks of mud. Then his father rushed into the house and carried him outside to a car, and drove off to the hospital in Mazar. The Afghan doctors bandaged him and sent him home later that night. Nadir smiled at the damage he knew the bombs must be inflicting upon the men who had tormented him during their occupation of his city.
News of the errant bomb strike soon flashed across the airwaves in the United States. Karla Milo, Ben Milo’s wife, heard it while she was up early readying their three kids for school. She was standing at the ironing board in the living room when footage of the explosion flickered on the television. Almost simultaneously, the phone rang in the kitchen.
It was a family friend of theirs, the wife of one of Ben’s buddies from his days in the regular Army, wanting to know if he’d been hurt in the bombing.
Karla froze, standing there in her bathrobe, the iron poised in midair over the board.
“I don’t have a clue,” she told the woman, and hung up.
Then the phone rang again and didn’t stop as the rest of the team wives called each other, asking, “What have you heard? What do you know?”
They didn’t know anything. The wait over the next several days was excruciating. Usually, when something bad happened, when someone was killed or wounded in a training exercise or a training deployment overseas, it took at least a few days before anyone got an official account of what had happened. This was because the command wanted to positively identify who had been hurt, or who was now dead, before notifying the family. Not that the wives weren’t able to figure out who was dead or hurt before this official confirmation. Karla just wished that Ben would call. The phone looked enormous as it hung in silence on the kitchen wall.
After the errant bombing of Syverson’s position, Sonntag and Mitchell decided to level the south courtyard with cannon fire from an AC-130 Spectre gunship. The two officers felt they were running out of time. The Taliban had to be smashed now. The enemy soldiers remained too sheltered in the various rooms, stables, and storehouses that dotted the courtyard. And they were able to re-arm themselves too easily with the weapons and ammo lying around in the various nearby caches.
The U.S. attack was planned for that night.
Meanwhile, the Northern Alliance launched a daylight assault and began battling their way into the south courtyard, yard by yard. Often, the fighting was hand to hand. Ali Sarwar and several other men had started from the secure north end and crept along the narrow path lining the fortress wall, engaging in vicious firefights along the way. At one point, one of Sarwar’s men stooped to reload in front of a small six-inch opening in a mud wall and was shot in the stomach by a Taliban soldier. The man looked up in surprise and went tumbling down the wall into the fort. He lay at the bottom, moaning.
Ali had to leave him behind as they pressed ahead.
He and his men spent the night hiding in a house in the nearby village of Deh Dedi while the Spectre gunship pounded the fort. The Taliban’s main store of weapons and ammunition was hit by one Spectre cannon shell, and it sent a fireball shooting several hundred yards in the air. The explosions could be seen by some of Sonntag’s men standing on the roof back at the Turkish Schoolhouse, eleven miles away.
The following morning, Ali and his men arrived at the southern end, behind the main parapet, the Taliban’s remaining stronghold. They hacked their way through a mud wall into a small room—a makeshift guard shack that overlooked the wide parapet. They hacked quickly because inside the room were Taliban soldiers who were firing across the fort into the north courtyard, and they wanted to take them by surprise.
The Taliban soldiers turned to see Ali and his men standing before them in a hole that had suddenly opened in the wall. Ali’s men gunned the Taliban down and occupied the position, eventually moving out to the lip of the parapet, where they had a clear view of the remaining Taliban forces below in the south courtyard.
The fighting grew so intense that Ali and other Alliance soldiers who joined them dragged the dead bodies of fallen soldiers in a pile and used them as barricades from which they could safely fight.
After several hours, near dark, Ali and the rest of the Alliance force, now numbering several hundred men, were able to move down the sloping ramp into the south courtyard itself.
From one of the horse stable, fifty yards to the east, across grassy, open ground, a Taliban started charging at the line of Alliance soldiers, screaming in rage, a war cry that was interrupted by a fusillade of gunfire. Still, the man continued running, a grenade clenched in one hand held high over his head. Ali could see the man jerk as the bullets hit him. But he would not drop.
He managed to reach one of Sarwar’s men, stopping to heave his grenade. The heavy, metal object sailed through the air and struck the soldier on the head, blowing up and killing him instantly. The Taliban soldier was finally cut down by a last, long volley of fire.
Ali’s men walked another 100 feet through waist-high grass, when suddenly some fifty Taliban soldiers jumped up from hiding on the ground and opened fire, their AKs held at their hips, spraying bullets.
When the shooting stopped, some 150 Taliban and Alliance soldiers lay dead. Bitter smoke and the cries of bleeding men drifted over the suddenly quiet courtyard. Somehow, Ali was unhurt. He cautiously thought, as he had back in the canyon when confronting the Taliban there, and surviving, that his day to die still had not come. He continued moving through the fort, fighting and winning.
Shannon Spann was visiting her parents’ house in California when there was a knock at the front door. Standing outside was a “grief team” of five CIA employees. One of them was the paramilitary officer whom Mike had asked to be the person to deliver any bad news to Shannon.
Shannon listened as the man spoke, but she could barely believe he was telling the truth. Mike couldn’t be dead.
The officers explained what had happened at Qala-i-Janghi, telling her that her husband had been shot. Shannon immediately thought of Mike’s two young daughters and their own six-month-old son. The girls’ mo
ther, Spann’s first wife, was dying of cancer and wasn’t expected to live much longer. Shannon resolved to remain steadfast, even when one of the girls later started crying and asked, “Who’s going to teach Jake the daddy stuff?”
By November 28, Ali Sarwar and the rest of the Alliance soldiers had captured the southern courtyard. The area was shaded by pine trees whose shaggy trunks had been shattered and pockmarked by bullets. Severed tree limbs lay on the ground. Nearby stood a tiny mosque, its smooth white walls defiled by hundreds of bullet holes.
The Pink House, too, was pocked by gunfire, and thousands of tiny, pink chunks of concrete were scattered on the hard ground.
That morning, General Dostum and his troops returned to reclaim the fort as their own. Dostum had driven back from Konduz the night before with now-prisoner Mullah Faisal in tow, along with Dean, Nelson, and Bowers.
Freelance video cameraman Dodge Billingsley, who had been inside the fort filming much of the battle, had been asleep in his hotel in downtown Mazar when he heard Dostum’s armored column roll past along the main street, shaking all the windows in the building. Billingsley got out of bed and went to the balcony. He counted about six troop carriers, several large cargo trucks, and an assortment of Toyota Land Cruisers. He guessed that the warlord would not be happy when he finally reviewed the damage the Taliban had inflicted upon his headquarters.
At the fort, Dostum grabbed Mullah Faisal, the Taliban general with whom he had negotiated the ultimately perfidious surrender, and shoved him along on a tour of the destruction.
Also in tow were hundreds of news reporters and television cameras, capturing Dostum’s furious glare as he pointed out the physical damage, as well as the piles of dead bodies strewn everywhere. The stench of death was overpowering.
As the soldiers and reporters walked around the southern courtyard, a number of Taliban prisoners were still trapped in the basement of the Pink House. None of the Alliance or American soldiers knew exactly how many were there. Estimates ranged from a handful to several hundred. No matter the number, it was clear to everyone they were refusing to surrender.