Dean said, “Hey, man. How you doing?”
“Fine,” was all Nelson would say. It was clear he was taking the ban on fraternization seriously.
Dean didn’t blame him. “Okay,” he said, “take care.”
And that was the last thing he’d said to Nelson.
Now, listening to the battle on the radio, Dean wondered how he’d react when the bullets started flying. He didn’t want to kill people, didn’t relish that thought. What he loved was politics and watching the way governments turned on the end of an idea, and often at the end of a gun.
Since 1999, when he entered Special Forces, he felt he’d never had a dull moment. He’d survived being exposed to live nerve agents during a mock biological attack. He’d spent weeks in the Nevada desert outrunning and hiding from UAVs, unmanned aerial vehicles. He’d survived the Army’s SERE school, aka Survival Escape, Rescue, and Evasion training. The grueling event, held in rural North Carolina, lasted eleven days. On the run behind “enemy” lines, Dean lived on raw pumpkins and barely cooked chickens stolen from local farmers. He ate them hunkered in muddy ditches, clawing at the food with his bare hands before being “captured.” Men in SERE training are buried alive, berated, and ground to the barest nub of self. When it was over, Dean emerged from the pinewoods at Camp McCall having seen God, or at least the U.S. Army’s version.
Dean had been led into this hell of total privation so that if he was ever captured, he’d have already experienced the inferno. This was Special Forces’ rule number one: let men experience failure so they never fail again. And by failing, they will learn how to be successful soldiers. Dean pretty much believed there wasn’t something he couldn’t improve, himself most of all. Growing up on a small farm in Minnesota, his father had drilled this work ethic into him. And something else, too: that no one accomplished anything without the help of others.
For the past year, Dean had been bugging his superiors at Fort Campbell for a training mission in the Middle East. He campaigned relentlessly. In January 2001, he and his team traveled to Uzbekistan. Dean was fluent in Russian, and the political challenges facing the former Soviet republic were a heady fit with his omnivorous intellect.
He was able to learn from the Uzbekistan army firsthand about the Islamic Militant Union insurgency, and this made him think of terrorism broadly. He started asking his intel sergeant, a tall, taciturn Texan named Darrin Clous, about a group of fundamentalists in Afghanistan called the Taliban, and their enemy, the Northern Alliance.
Dean loved parsing the political matrix. Whenever he and the team returned from a trip overseas, Dean posted his findings—pie charts about terror attacks, informal intel summaries about the Taliban, and general musings about geopolitics—on a bulletin board in a back hallway at Fort Campbell’s Fifth Group Headquarters. But not many people paid attention. Afghanistan wasn’t on anyone’s radar.
And still, sitting in K2, Dean didn’t have a mission.
He hadn’t given up yet. He was the personification of persistence. Several years earlier he’d been rear-ended by a drunk at a stoplight and had gotten out of his car to have a talk with the driver. As he approached, the driver sped away. Dean gave chase on foot.
He ran alongside the vehicle and managed to wrangle himself up into the passenger window and onto the front seat, whereupon he persuaded the driver to pull over. The driver just looked at him, amazed. Dean ached to do an excellent job as a soldier. Ached.
But the higher-ups at K2 and the Pentagon had yet to make a decision. What Dean needed was a warlord eager for American expertise.
A hundred miles to the south from where Dean now sat in his tent watching Moulin Rouge on DVD for the tenth time (and hating it), the warlord Usted Atta was meeting with CIA officers and discussing just such a plan.
After Dostum’s charge up the hill, Nelson and Jones had to turn from the fight and head back to Cobaki, to plan the next day’s movement of the team. Nelson hated to leave.
He stood on the hilltop and watched the Afghans continue fighting, running and riding toward the village of Chapchal, several miles to the north. The Taliban were in pell-mell retreat. Shouts filled the dusk as they ran.
Nelson had to get Sam Diller riding to a village called Oimitan, in order to set up bomb strikes on Taliban tanks that Nelson and Dostum were sure would be coming down the valley. And as Diller would leave, Spencer would come in, riding up from the base camp at Dehi. Nelson could hear the eagerness in his voice whenever they talked on the radio: Spencer wanted to see the battlefield.
Nelson and Jones rode to the rim of the valley at the trailhead and they picked their way in the dark with the horses’ metal shoes sparking on the rocks. At times, they couldn’t see anything except a skim of stars overhead, like ice crystals thrown against a black dome.
At the bottom of the canyon, Fakir met them. He told Nelson that he admired his courage. They rode in silence to the trailhead leading up the valley wall, Nelson bobbing in the saddle, exhausted. After four hours, they rode back into the outpost at Cobaki, the wind rising off the river with its chalk smell and the current’s hush brushing the canyon’s walls.
Back in the States, news had finally hit the papers that U.S. Special Forces were in Afghanistan. As Nelson was riding back into camp, Americans logging onto their computers could read a dismal assessment issued by the Center for Defense Information, an independent think tank made up of academics and retired military, about the military’s effort: “…The Northern Alliance advance has been described as ‘stalled,’ largely because the opposition force is still grossly outnumbered and their transport is unreliable and slow.
“Afghan opposition troops in the area around Mazar are reportedly almost out of ammunition, food, and medical supplies, which would hamper any attempts to convert U.S. strikes into permanent military gains.”
Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld called Colonel Mulholland at K2, blistering him with questions. What the hell was going on? Where was the progress? Why weren’t more Taliban positions being destroyed? Mulholland didn’t have an immediate answer. But he’d get one.
When Nelson threw down his rucksack, ready for sleep, one of his teammates nearby stirred and sat up. He said he had a message for Nelson from an intel specialist at K2 who worked as their interface with Colonel Mulholland. The message wanted to know, as Nelson would later say, “When are you guys gonna get off your ass and do something?”
Nelson couldn’t believe it. How dare the old man question what they were accomplishing? He didn’t know where to begin.
He walked around the camp, getting angrier by the minute. He thought of going to bed. He needed sleep badly. He decided that he wouldn’t respond until morning, with a cooler head. He climbed into his sleeping bag. His mind wandered to his wife, Jean, who was pregnant and working mightily to keep the house going. He’d give anything to tell her about this. This goddamned message. He couldn’t get it out of his mind. What did it mean? When are we gonna start doing something?
Annoyed by his fidgeting, his teammate asked, “Are you gonna answer it tonight, or go to sleep?”
Nelson decided to get up. He drank some water and ate part of an MRE, thinking about all that he had seen these last few days. Goddamnit it all. He’d been fighting his heart out, and meeting the Afghans had nearly broken it. Seeing them—the lame, the scarred, the broken—had touched something in him, deep. Men riding horses into sheets of gunfire. These were men who had nothing, yet they offered him everything: their lives. They would die for him. He wanted to tell the Pentagon that he was doing the best he knew how to do. He set his Panasonic Toughbook on his knees and opened it, the screen lighting up his face. He began typing faster and faster. It read in part:
I am advising a man on how to best employ light infantry and horse cavalry in the attack against Taliban T-55s [tanks], mortars, artillery, personnel carriers, and machine guns—a tactic which I think became outdated with the invention of the Gatling gun. [The mujahideen] have done this every day we have
been on the ground. They have attacked with 10 rounds of ammunition per man, with snipers having less than 100 rounds—little water and less food. I have observed a PK gunner who walked 10-plus miles to get to the fight, who was proud to show me his artificial right leg from the knee down.
We have witnessed the horse cavalry bounding overwatch from spur to spur to attack Taliban strongpoints—the last several kilometers under mortar, artillery, and sniper fire. There is little medical care if injured, only a donkey ride to the aid station, which is a dirt hut. I think [the mujahideen] are doing very well with what they have.
We could not do what we are doing without the close air support—everywhere I go the civilians and mujahideen soldiers are always telling me they are glad the U.S.A. has come. They all speak of their hopes for a better Afghanistan once the Taliban are gone.
Finished, he closed the laptop, feeling better.
The e-mail would become, in the words of Major General Geoffrey Lambert back at Fort Bragg, the most famous intel report of the war. Several days later, standing before reporters and television cameras at a Pentagon press conference, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld would hold it up and read out portions to the nation.
The crowd was moved by the poignancy of this young, anonymous soldier. Nelson’s words flew around the newswires. Nightly anchors quoted from it. Nelson had managed to sum up the frustration, fear, and hope among his own men and among the Afghans. That he had written in a fit of pique, when he was tired, hungry, and pissed off, would remain his secret.
Later that night, Dostum, having also returned to Cobaki, told Nelson that at the very end, the fighting had been at close quarters, the opposing sides as near as sixty-five feet from each other. “I have never seen the Taliban fight so hard,” he said. He shook his head in amazement. He believed the Taliban knew they were losing the war. His men had killed 123 Pakistanis and captured 2. Dostum had lost several of his men. One had taken a grenade, the last one remaining among the entire force, and run into the Taliban lines to blow them up, killing himself.
When he heard this, Nelson was upset. He and Jones had carried eight grenades and returned to Cobaki with them. Nelson was worried that the general had put himself in harm’s way. He regretted not staying with him. He realized how protective he had become of the warlord.
Back at the Alamo in Dehi, as more wounded Afghan soldiers trailed into camp, medic Scott Black found himself knee-deep in gore. For the past several days, he had been working frantically to care for both Afghan and Taliban fighters. Black didn’t think he’d ever seen a tougher people in his life. Their eyes were full of terror but they rarely made a sound. These guys, it seemed, could withstand any kind of pain.
He was asleep well after midnight when he was shaken awake. Black woke with a start, looking around the dim room in the fort. He saw before him a middle-aged Afghan man, one of Dostum’s soldiers, holding a lantern and looking concerned.
“Commander Scott, we need you now. There is emergency.”
He scrambled out of his sleeping bag and walked in flip-flops, camo pants, and brown T-shirt across the dusty courtyard and out the front gate. Before him sat a parked Nissan pickup with all its doors flung open. The truck’s pale dome light was on. It cast a feeble light on the ghastly scene inside.
On the rear seat in the cab of the truck lay a young Afghan boy, maybe only fourteen, fifteen years old, it was hard to tell. He’d been shot in the stomach and was rolling his head back and forth on the vinyl seat, which was slick with blood. He was opening his mouth to moan. But no sound was coming out. Black saw that he had to act fast.
He shot the kid up with morphine while another boy, maybe eighteen, who turned out to be his cousin, held his hand. Black stood at the kid’s feet. It was as good a place as any to treat him. He probed the wound—it was deep. He felt around inside trying to find the bleeder, the vein that was gushing.
He couldn’t feel it with his slippery hands. There were no guts hanging out, so he couldn’t examine them for wounds. He guessed an AK-47 round had penetrated the kid’s peritoneum, but he couldn’t find the hole. The bullet had likely nicked an artery. It was dark in the cab of the pickup, except for the glow of Black’s halogen headlamp—and it would be a tough place to do surgery. But Black was pretty sure he was going to have to cut the kid open if he couldn’t stop the bleeding.
He first tried packing the wound with an absorbent material called Curlex. The idea was to pack it against the wound with your index finger, as if you were stuffing Kleenex down a Coke bottle. Black packed about two rolls inside the kid but the bleeding didn’t stop. He’d lost an immense amount of blood and fresh plasma was something Black didn’t have on hand. The kid was quickly slipping out of his control. If he died during the surgery, the Afghans would blame Black for his death. Black knew that and worried about it. This worry had little to do with medicine and everything to do with fighting the kind of war he was in, where his relationship with the locals could mean life or death—his own. Black decided there was nothing he could do, short of transferring him back to a hospital in K2. Unless he could stop the bleeding with the Curlex.
He worked for two more hours, packing and repacking the wound, until he reluctantly accepted that the bleeding just wouldn’t stop. Blood had splashed all over his feet in his flip-flops. He’d never lost a patient before in the field. In fact, this was his first battlefield casualty in his six years in Special Forces. In the tiny compartment of the pickup, he could smell the blood and hear the kid’s troubled breathing, and he felt a wave of despair sweep over him.
The cousin was still holding the young boy’s hand as Black shot him with even more painkillers and through an interpreter told the cousin that he should take him home to his family. Better to let him die in peace surrounded by the people he loved. The young man just nodded. Black helped him lift the wounded kid’s legs up in a bent position on the seat so they could shut the truck doors. Black stood in the dirt and watched the taillights of the Nissan disappear over the ruts in the road.
He was running low on med supplies again and had ordered an air drop. This was supposed to come any night now. With the fighting picking up, he realized he had to brace himself for dozens, maybe hundreds, more casualties like the one he’d just treated. It was a daunting thought.
He had believed himself to be a pretty hardened customer, but the kid’s impending death ate at him. Just a teenager…. He walked back to his sleeping bag in the horse stable and tried to sleep but couldn’t.
As Black treated the wounded, Nightstalker pilot Greg Gibson and mission commander John Garfield had taken off from K2 on the resupply mission bringing in the equipment that Black and the team had requested—ammo, blankets, winter coats, sterile water, IV sets, rubbing alcohol, latex gloves, nylon sutures, bandages. The glue of war, the tools for healing men.
The flight in was terrible, the visibility zero. An hour after taking off, Gibson had flown straight into the gullet of the Black Stratus, the wide slough of fog, snow, and dust whose existence had mystified weather forecasters at K2. Gibson was flying strictly by cues presented to him on the tiny screens in the dim cockpit. The world outside the windscreen was a depthless white.
After three hours at the controls, Gibson’s nerves were fried, but he had entered a zone where he remained completely in control of the craft and all of his faculties. He completed the majority of the flight without incident, and as he neared the HLZ at Dehi, Gibson handed the controls to his copilot, Aaron Smith. They would land, offload the gear, and zoom away, turning around to head back through the lousy weather to K2.
As they dropped altitude, Gibson, sitting in the pilot’s seat with his arms folded, heard a voice from the back of the ship. One of the crew members, standing in the open ramp, was yelling over the intercom: “Pull up! Pull up! Damnit!”
Gibson waited for Smith to do as he was told. The crew in back provided a second set of eyes and ears for the pilots, who implicitly trusted their directions.
But
when Smith hadn’t corrected course, for whatever reason, Gibson grabbed the stick between his knees and put the aircraft into a serious bank. They were practically tipped on their side, with Gibson staring up at the sky over his left shoulder as they turned.
It was then that Gibson saw they had nearly run straight into a mountain.
The crew in back was knocked to the deck. One of them, Tom Dingman, had seen the rockface coming at them and had been the one to yell just in time. They had been seconds from hitting it head-on at 90 mph.
However, they turned so sharply that the helo’s tires hit the mountain wall. The large aircraft bounced as if off a trampoline. They hit so hard that the FLIR, or radar, probe on the nose of the craft was knocked loose; it was hanging now by just heavy wires.
As they finished turning, Gibson caught sight of an Afghan man sitting atop a horse on the ridgetop they’d just struck. He was blown backward out of his saddle by turbulence from the rotor blades.
Gibson leveled the helicopter out. It was shaking violently. The twin rotors were out of synchronization after the impact. The cabin was shaking so hard that Gibson found it difficult to read the instruments.
John Garfield, sitting in the jump seat, got on the intercom. The unit’s official motto was “Nightstalkers don’t quit,” but Garfield felt they would be pushing the limits of the craft’s endurance if they tried to land. He didn’t want their epitaph to read: They just didn’t know when to quit. Garfield announced that the conditions were just too hairy. Screw the supply drop. They were returning to K2.
Gibson got on the radio and told K2 what had happened.
“What’s your status?” came the reply.
“Well, we just bounced off a mountain,” said Gibson in his cool, southern pilot’s voice. “We don’t know how bad it is,” said Gibson. “It’s looking pretty damn bad. When we get things figured out, we’ll call you.”