by Doug Stanton
In the basement, the prisoners sitting near the air vents and holes that had been punched in the foundation could hear the anxious, upbeat voices of their guards, who believed they had killed most everyone below. In fact, the prisoners were still armed with rifles, mortars, and grenades and they were considering rushing up the stairs and attacking.
Up top, Dostum angrily asked Faisal, “Did you know anything about this?”
The Taliban leader shook his head, no.
Dostum, surveying the human carnage, told one reporter that he was “sick of death.” Soon, the Red Cross would begin hauling away seemingly innumerable bodies that would be buried in a mass grave outside the city.
Back in his headquarters office, Dostum held court, looking beyond the messiness of the battle to his political future. He explained that he wanted to build a new country. Women should be educated, he said, and he insisted that they would have representation in the new government. He further explained that he wanted to spend more time with his family.
Back in the basement of the Pink House, the last Taliban fighters waited and considered making one final attack.
In an effort to get the remaining prisoners to surrender, the Alliance soldiers began to throw rockets and grenades into the basement through jagged holes they’d hacked in the brick foundation. Periodically, men also walked up and jammed their gun barrels into the holes and emptied their clips.
Still, there was no sign of surrender.
At one point, several foreign aid workers had started walking down the long stairs to the basement and were shot by machine-gun fire. After they were bandaged up, all concerned decided that no more such trips would be attempted. Dostum’s men next poured fuel oil through the holes and then set fire to it.
Down below, men were burned alive. Others pressed against the wall, away from the licking flames.
Still, no surrender.
Finally, Ali Sarwar found a shovel and ax and started digging a trench all the way across the southern courtyard.
A small stream entered the fort at the southwest corner; in prosperous, pre-Taliban times, the water had been used to irrigate fertile plots of corn and cucumber that dotted the fort. Sarwar was now diverting the stream so that it flowed to the Pink House.
Someone in his group hacked another hole in the brick foundation, which opened at ceiling level in the basement below. Just then, a prisoner pointed a gun barrel out of the new hole and fired, hitting some of Sarwar’s men in the ankles. They crumpled and had to be quickly dragged away to an aid station.
Soon, however, the current of muddy, brown water was lapping against the building and then slurping through the hole in the foundation. Freezing water started filling the basement.
After a day, just thirteen Taliban soldiers had emerged from the basement. The water had risen inside to nearly seven feet, causing the men inside to dog paddle as their heads brushed the ceiling. A majority of them who were wounded or sick drowned. The room became a slurry of human body parts, excrement, even raw horsemeat, which some of the men had been eating, having hacked pieces off some of the dead animals lying in the courtyard.
Seeing that the basement was now flooded to a depth of about eight feet, leaving two feet of air space, Ali Sarwar and his men shut off the water supply. As the water drained through the porous soil floor below them, the surviving men, freezing and delirious, took a vote as to whether they would surrender.
They could either die in this stinking hole or they could die in the sunlight above, on firm ground. At least, by surrendering, they would have a chance of living. To remain in the room was to surely tempt being flooded again.
So it was that four days after Mitchell had tried leveling the Pink House with fusillades of bombs, eighty-six wet and miserable Taliban prisoners walked up from the basement, blinking in daylight, many of them, for the first time in seven days. John Walker Lindh was among them. Shortly after the fighting had begun, he’d been shot in the leg and lay in the courtyard as the battle raged around him. Finally, he was dragged by others into the basement. There, he had feared for his life, both at the hands of the soldiers firing from above, and from his fellow prisoners hunkered in the dark room. For the first several days of the battle, any talk of surrender was silenced by Lindh’s hard-line comrades in the group. Lindh feared getting shot in the back if he made a break upstairs, to what he hoped would be freedom.
He felt he had no choice but to remain in the basement and hope for the best.
As the fort was secured, Ben Milo finally called his wife, Karla, back in Tennessee. He had been shaken by the errant bombing at the fort as well as the savagery of the battle within its walls. Ben knew Karla would be worrying about him, given all the extremely bad news.
She knew it was Ben calling because the words “Ft. Campbell” lit up on her phone’s caller ID at home. To make the call, Ben had phoned the Fort Campbell switchboard, which then directed the call to their home in the Hammond Heights neighborhood on the Army post.
She didn’t even say hello. “Tell me you’re okay.”
“I’m fine.”
“Is the team okay?”
“Yes.” Karla could tell he was being tight-lipped. She wanted him to say more.
“Was it the battalion?” she asked. Meaning: were you guys hurt in the bombing at Qala-i-Janghi? Had he been hurt?
“I can’t say.”
Because of security measures, he wasn’t able to tell her that he hadn’t even been in the vicinity of the bombing. They talked for maybe five more minutes and then Ben said he had to hang up, that he had to go to work. The lag in their conversation caused by the satellite link had been horrifying. Ben’s voice had sounded like he was talking to her from underwater. She had ended up interrupting half of his sentences. But still: he was alive.
She was relieved, but she had no one outside the immediate group of Special Forces wives to share the news with. Ben’s being in Afghanistan was officially still secret (even though news reports had noted their presence in the country). In fact, several days earlier, President Bush had come to Fort Campbell to eat Thanksgiving dinner with the regular Army troops, but as far as Karla knew, none of the Special Forces wives was invited.
Hey, what about us? My husband’s over in Afghanistan fighting, too! Karla thought.
Then she went back to ironing the clothes and getting the kids ready for school.
Spann’s body was retrieved and delivered to the Turkish Schoolhouse, where it was stored, sealed in a blue vinyl bag, in one of the kitchen’s overlarge chest freezers adjoining the cafeteria.
The body bag was wrapped in an American flag that had been presented by Mitchell’s fellow teammate Martin Homer. Homer had carried the flag into battle as a Special Forces soldier in the first Gulf War and it had accompanied him on this last campaign. He had been honored to give it to Mike. The body was driven from the schoolhouse to the Mazar airport, where two Chinook helicopters were waiting to escort it to K2. At the airport, the flag was neatly folded and presented to one of Mike’s CIA colleagues, who sat in a seat on the helo and held it tightly. Helicopter pilot Greg Gibson saw that the man was nearly in tears. Spann’s body was loaded onto the lead bird.
Sitting behind it, in his own aircraft, Nightstalker pilot Jerry Edwards, who in the last month had learned during a phone call with his wife that he was going to be a father again, watched the honor guard solemnly unfold on a video screen in his aircraft. He had turned on the helo’s FLIR radar, which picked up a grainy image of the soldiers as they walked up the lead bird’s ramp with Spann’s remains strapped to a body board.
Edwards and his crew had been shaken by Spann’s death, even though not many of them knew him well, if at all. But his death had diminished their own sense of invulnerability. They hadn’t wanted to miss the ceremony, which they learned would take place in the dark (the only time when the Nightstalkers liked to fly missions), and Edwards felt lucky to have figured out how to use the FLIR to witness the moment. He sat strapped in h
is seat reflecting on his own mortality and the impending birth of a new baby.
At almost the same time, CIA director George Tenet publicly announced Mike Spann’s death.
“Mike was in the fortress of Mazar-i-Sharif, where the Taliban prisoners were being held and questioned. Although these captives had given themselves up, their pledge of surrender—like so many other pledges from the vicious group they represent—proved worthless.
“[Mike’s] was a career of promise in a life of energy and achievement. A precious life given in a noble cause.” Spann’s death soon dominated the news. President Bush issued a statement of condolence.
In his hometown of Winfield, Alabama, neighbors plied his parents’ house with food and sympathy. Many of the townspeople were shocked to learn that Spann had worked for the CIA. A next-door neighbor would remark that Spann never seemed to be home much. On Main Street, a black bow hung on the front door of the real estate office of Johnny Spann, Mike’s father. Flags flew at half mast at the post office.
Mr. Spann held a press conference at a neighbor’s home: “He was a cherished son, he was an amazing brother, a devoted father, and a loving husband. Our family wants the world to know that we are very proud of our son, Mike, and we consider him a hero.” Mr. Spann was near tears as he spoke.
News of a CIA employee’s death is usually kept a secret, with a silver star being placed afterward on the memorial wall at Langley’s CIA headquarters to honor the deceased. In the case of Mike Spann, he bore the grim distinction of being the first American to be killed in the first war of the twenty-first century, and George Tenet as director of the CIA took the unprecedented decision to make Spann’s death a matter of public record. Complicating any idea that his death might have been kept secret were the reporters who had been at the fort chronicling the uprising. Tenet had no other choice than to disclose Spann’s death in the melee.
The effect was that Mike Spann became an overnight hero, an accolade he would have shunned while alive. He became a figure of everything that a nation felt was honorable about itself, namely, selfless sacrifice while at war with a new and mystifying threat.
The further effect was to make Shannon Spann the face of a nation’s grief as it met this new threat. The publicity over Mike Spann’s death tore away the veil of secrecy that had covered her own employment as a CIA officer, and she found herself thrust before the television cameras, and reporters camped outside her home in Manassas Park, Virginia.
News of the Battle of Qala-i-Janghi started to make headlines around the world.
Perhaps most shocking for Americans was the discovery of John Walker Lindh hunkered in the basement of the Pink House, as well as the death of a CIA paramilitary officer. Who even knew America had such men fighting in Afghanistan?
Back in Marin County, California, Lindh’s mother, Marilyn, logged on to the Internet when she heard news that an American had been discovered in Afghanistan. She had a sinking feeling it might be John, and this feeling was confirmed when she happened upon a photo of him at the fortress.
Yet Marilyn was shocked. She had never expected John to get into any kind of trouble.
“He knows we wouldn’t have approved,” his father, Frank Lindh, told a reporter, one of many who would soon be descending upon the Lindh household.
Marilyn felt that John must have been brainwashed to have been tangled up with the Taliban. “He would freeze” when confronted with danger, she said. “He’s totally not streetwise.”
For his part, Lindh was spending his days under close guard in a second-story room in the Turkish Schoolhouse. But he had not been identified immediately. In fact, after emerging from the Pink House basement, wounded and dirty, he had been loaded onto a truck headed for Sheberghan, seventy-five miles west. At Sheberghan, he and the other prisoners would be housed in a large prison there.
As the truck was about to leave, a reporter for Newsweek named Colin Soloway had happened to pass by and peer inside, curious about a filthy, Western-looking figure he saw hunched there in the gloom. Soloway had come to Qala-i-Janghi, like hundreds of other reporters, to report on the battle and Spann’s death. But now his interpreter had approached him and said that an American was on board one of the trucks. Soloway found the bed of the vehicle filled with moaning, bleeding men. He was amazed that any of them had survived the bombs that had been aimed at the fortress. The young man in question was dressed in a black tunic and blue sweater. He was covered with dirt. His face looked as if it had been burned.
One of the truck’s guards tapped Soloway and motioned again at the prisoner. He insisted that he was an American.
“Are you American?” Soloway asked the young man.
“Yeah,” he replied.
This struck Soloway as unusual—indeed, shocking. He asked Lindh his feelings about the attacks in America, which had taken place some eleven weeks earlier. Did he support this action?
Groggy, speaking slowly, Lindh replied, “That requires a pretty long and complicated explanation. I haven’t eaten for two or three days, and my mind is not really in shape to give you a coherent answer.”
Soloway asked again for his opinion.
“Yes, I supported it,” Lindh said.
Accompanying Soloway was translator Najeeb Quarishy, who earlier in the month had hosted Dean at his home, and a French photographer named Damien Degueldre, who recounted the surreal encounter this way:
Earlier in the day, one of the survivors of the fighting in the fort had come up from the basement [of the Pink House], asking if their lives would be spared if they surrendered. The local Afghan commander agreed and they started coming out, eighty-six in all.
I was at the Red Cross office when they received a radio call saying survivors had been discovered. I tried catching Alex Perry [of Time], but couldn’t find him. Then I caught a taxi and drove straight to Qala-i-Janghi. That’s where I met Najeeb, who said there was an American within the prisoners.
Lindh was sitting in the front of a truck with some of the others. Being an American, Soloway engaged in conversation with Lindh while I stood filming nearby. Lindh wasn’t too keen to be filmed. I didn’t really want to interview him, as I felt these guys were coming back from hell. They looked completely in shock. I felt the visual of this young American with his long hair and beard, and his face covered in dirt, was really amazing. The image was talking for him.
I still believe he was in shock when he answered Soloway’s questions. It is true that he answered “yes” when he was asked if he was approving of the September 11 attacks, but he didn’t focus on this matter or extend the discussion. He was embarrassed.
I also perfectly remember his answer when he was asked why he came to Afghanistan. He said it was the most ideal Islamic republic in the world, the purest.
That same night, Colin Soloway’s interview was out on Newsweek’s website. When we finally made it to Shebergan prison [the next day], it was too late. The U.S. Special Forces had taken him.
In fact, after Lindh had arrived at Sheberghan, one of Dostum’s aides had talked with the young man and discovered that he could speak English. He immediately informed Dostum that there was a captured American in his midst.
As medic Bill Bennett was treating the dehydrated, starving Lindh, the moment was recorded by video camera (a CNN free-lancer, Robert Pelton, conducted an interview during the medical exam). And once the video appeared on television, John Walker Lindh’s odyssey from California to the Qala-i-Janghi Fortress became worldwide news.
Among those watching the broadcast of the medical examination were Frank and Marilyn Lindh. They hadn’t seen or heard any sign of their son for seven months. They had believed he was in Pakistan, where he’d told them he had been studying Arabic at an austere, demanding madrassah. The sight of him on television, shirtless and emaciated-looking, crushed them.
Soon, the crank phone calls and death threats started to come in:
“Great parenting job.”
“You should be shot with t
he same gun used to shoot your son.”
Frank Lindh, a lawyer for Pacific Gas & Electric in San Francisco, had been proud of his son’s disciplined study of Arabic and Islam. But he had never imagined John was in Afghanistan, fighting with the Taliban. When he saw his son on television, he broke down crying.
Not long after Mike Spann’s death, Shannon received a package from one of Mike’s former colleagues. It was a series of tattered, charred pages from his journal.
The morning he was killed, Mike had parked their truck in the fortress and walked with Dave Olson to the southern courtyard, to interrogate the prisoners. Inside the truck was a journal he’d been keeping. In the air strikes that followed, as Major Mitchell fought to quell the uprising, the truck was blown up.
Shannon now held what was left of the charred journal.
“One thing has troubled me,” Mike had written, as he rode north to Mazar. “I’m not afraid of dying, but I have a terrible fear of not being with you and our son…I think about holding you and touching you. I also think about holding that round boy of ours….”
Five days after leaving Afghanistan, Spann’s body arrived at Andrews Air Force Base by military transport. Shannon, along with Mike’s family, went on board to view the coffin in private. The casket was then carried to a waiting hearse, while Shannon and the family watched tearfully. Johnny Spann, Mike’s father, was consumed by grief.
Mike, trying to prepare his father for the dangerous, clandestine nature of his work, had always warned: “Daddy, don’t ever believe I’m dead until you see my body.”
Shortly before Mike’s burial in Arlington National Cemetery, Mr. Spann visited his son one last time. He stood at the casket and gazed down. He touched Mike’s forehead. He then lifted his boy’s head, bent down, and looked.