Horse Soldiers

  “What’s going on?” he asked Sihed.

  Sihed shook his head sadly. The Taliban were coming through town, he said, burning the homes of the men who had joined Atta’s forces.

  “What about their families?”

  “If they’re lucky, their families went with them.”

  Dean realized there was no more to do here tonight except watch Ak Kupruk burn. He couldn’t bear the sight. He couldn’t bear thinking about the screams and gunfire he imagined arising in the village.

  He looked at the fighters standing with him. These people are starving. Winter is coming. It’s cold. He told Sihed they would return to Atta’s compound. They would come back tomorrow and set things right.

  They rode back in pitch dark. Getting off his horse, he was shivering. He smelled hot, cooked rice and bread warming on an iron skillet somewhere. His mouth was watering. He practically fell off his horse, dead tired.

  He was met at the door by one of Atta’s men. There was some bad news. They would not be attacking Ak Kupruk tomorrow. They had to wait. Dean was disappointed and he wanted to know why.

  Because Dostum’s forces were not yet in place, said the soldier.

  Dean thought about the town burning, the children, the women. Maybe they were being killed as he stood there, but there was nothing to be done. He felt both frustration and grief.

  Dean and his team entered the door to the eating room and sat down heavily on the carpet, the room lit by guttering candles. An Afghan came by with a towel draped over his arm, bearing a pitcher of water. Each diner held out his hands and washed them, then took the towel from the man’s arm, dried off, and replaced it. This was meant to show everyone that each man was clean. They sat cross-legged on a red cotton blanket. Dean tucked his stinky feet under him as best he could, trying to muffle the odor. It didn’t work.

  God, he was hungry. He smelled something good and greasy: goat.

  He couldn’t remember when he’d been so hungry. He and the team watched as the Afghans they’d been traveling with these past three days reached out with their left hands and cupped the rice from a communal bowl, then brought the hand to their mouth in one smooth motion: reach out, stroke to the mouth, suck from the hand, and repeat.

  Dean tried doing the same and soon made a mess. The rice grains were falling all over the red carpet beneath him. Nobody seemed to care.

  His team had a pile of goatmeat at the end of their blanket, and the Afghans had a pile at their end, and they were all eating like mad. The meat had some kind of marinade on it. He bit into a piece of bread and his teeth crunched on the sand grains in it. Dean thought that he would never taste anything as good again.

  He understood that Atta and his fighters were giving him the best they had, and that this food could probably feed their families for a week. He realized that generosity was in proportion to what you had. These were some of the poorest people he had ever met, and yet they would give him—it seemed to him—even their lives if it came to that. In return, he wanted them to win their freedom.

  Someone on the team pulled out a Dari phrase book and, their shadows flickering on the walls, the Amercians started saying “hello” in Dari.

  “Namse-chase Dean,” said Dean. My name is Dean.

  “Namse-chase Darrin,” said Sergeant Clous.

  “Namse-chase Brian,” said Sergeant Lyle.

  Whenever somebody swore, “Goddamn, this is good food!” or, “Shit, what a fucking mess the bomb strikes were today!” Atta repeated the profanity and laughed.

  “How do you say ‘mudder-futter?’” he asked.

  “Say ‘muther-fuck-er’?” repeated Dean.

  “Mutha-fooker!” said Atta.

  The Afghans and Americans laughed as if they were drunk, but they weren’t drunk, except on the wind and the harsh sun and the feeling that at any moment they could all die.

  Pretty soon, the goat was gone. They had consumed the entire fifty-pound animal. All that was left was the grease at the bottom of the porcelain dishes, which were decorated with fishes and tiny flowery designs. They swiped pieces of flat bread into the grease and gobbled them down and opened the phrase book to the word “good” and pointed at the empty platters, chewing, and exclaimed, “Good!” Dean had felt so terrible riding back to the safe house—terrible about missing the bomb targets, about the fires burning in Ak Kupruk.

  But now they were all laughing.

  On November 3, as Dean and his team climbed to their observation post above Ak Kupruk in preparation for bomb strikes, Major Mark Mitchell was busy continuing getting to know General Dostum in his camp in the Darya Suf. Mitchell and Dean were separated by less than twenty miles of roadless mountains, but they had been thrust into vastly different camps.

  Dostum turned out to be a gregarious host who laughed easily and turned serious without pause, his eyes narrowing. Atta, thin, shy, introspective, whose ambition to power was no less than Dostum’s, smiled slyly when he might’ve spoken bluntly, more Cheshire cat to Dostum’s German shepherd–like visage.

  Dean sensed that Atta was truly his own man, regardless of the fact that he seemed loath, at times, to betray exactly what he was feeling. Mitchell grudgingly admired Dostum’s uncanny ability to be any man that any situation called for.

  Dostum, Mitchell, Bowers, and CIA officer J.J. were sitting on a rug as Bowers explained the coming two days’ strategy. On November 5, Dostum’s forces would mount an assault on the village of Baluch, about eight miles to the north, and from there link up with Atta’s soldiers near Pol-i-Barak. It would be Bowers’s and Mitchell’s job to coordinate bomb strikes between Dean’s team to the west and Nelson’s team in the east, as they moved north in parallel lines.

  Bowers explained that the danger was that one of the teams could get ahead of the other and risk being bombed by its own friendly forces. Bowers would have oversight of the entire operation.

  Bowers hadn’t been convinced he needed to explain the battlefield in these simple terms, but he was later glad that he had when he discovered that many of Dostum’s men couldn’t read a map or discern east from west on a compass. These earnest, illiterate men navigated by orienting themselves by terrain features, such as mountains. They knew which way to turn in order to pray (east), because that was the direction in which the sun rose.

  Dostum’s men were low on ammunition. They had shot thousands of rounds and launched hundreds of rocket-propelled grenades at Taliban lines. They were so low on bullets that they were picking stray rounds off the ground and pocketing them. If they were dirty, they cleaned them by shaking them in a bucket filled with crushed glass, which polished the shell casing and ensured the round would fire.

  “You’ll have your ammunition,” promised Bowers. Before leaving K2, he had devised a phrase that he thought might be effective in gaining Dostum’s trust when they met.

  “In this coming battle,” he said, “we must be brothers and drink from the same cup.”

  Dostum considered the sentiment, and then nodded. He offered Bowers eight horses for his men—eight horses that he could barely afford to loan out, given the shortages among his own fighters.

  Bowers ordered his team—Major Mitchell, Sergeant Major Martin Homer, combat controllers Malcolm Victors and Burt Docks, Sergeants First Class Chuck Roberts and Pete Bach, and medic Jerome Carl—to saddle up.

  Martin Homer, who had grown up in a rural West Texas town, sat comfortably on his horse. His friend Victors struggled atop the saddle and wobbled uneasily in the cramped wooden frame.

  The eight Americans, led by Dostum and a dozen of his men, struck along the riverbed, south, toward a trail climbing up from the valley to the battlefield on top, headed for the south rim of the Darya Suf gorge. Their job: survey the battlefield in preparation for the November 5 attack.

  Victors yanked back and forth on the horse’s reins and confused the animal. It reared and shot down the trail, with a frightened Victors whooping and clutching handfuls of the horse’s mane.

 
Victors raced past Dostum, calling over his shoulder, “I don’t know to ride a horse!” and, galloping further, finally stopped the animal. Homer rode up and patted Victors on the back and said, “Nice.”

  They rode across harrowing switchbacks. The rugged terrain astounded Mitchell. Soon the entire U.S. force was spread along the trail, so much so that when Mitchell crested a rise, he had to look ahead and scan the horizon for the bobbing, charging silhouette of Dostum, riding still farther forward.

  Mitchell was having slightly better success than Victors on his horse. Mitchell’s hiking boots slipped out of the narrow stirrups and he was constantly forced to lean and jam his boot back in, worried he’d lose his balance and fall off the horse, and continue falling until he hit the valley floor far below.

  He watched as Burt Docks wended his way along the three-foot-wide mountain trail ahead of him. At a sharp turn, Docks’s horse slipped and sent him tumbling from the saddle, and off the edge of the cliff. The horse regained its footing and galloped ahead. Mitchell shook his head, horrified: We’ll never even find his body.

  He peered over the edge, expecting the worst. He saw Docks lying on a narrow ledge a few feet down from the trail. Docks was white as a sheet. Mitchell laughed as they pulled him back up to the trail.

  And then the situation worsened. Mitchell discovered that the horses, all stallions, fought constantly. Dostum’s horse bucked and shot out a heavy, rear hoof, which struck Bowers, who was following close behind on his horse.

  Mitchell couldn’t believe the sound of the impact. He thought somebody had snapped a baseball bat in half. Bowers grimaced and doubled over the saddle, grabbing his shin.

  “Sir, are you all right?” asked Mitchell.

  “Yes,” gasped Bowers. “The General’s horse”—gasp—“kicked me.”

  Mitchell admired the lieutenant colonel’s self-control when he knew he wanted to scream. Any sign of agony might have raised suspicions in Dostum’s mind about the Americans’ steadfastness. Bowers rode upright and silent in the saddle.

  After that, he kept a respectful distance from Dostum’s rearing steed. They all did.

  On November 5, to kick off the final, coordinated assault on Baluch, Stu Mansfield, positioned with Atta at the warlord’s mountaintop compound, ordered the drop of a bomb called a BLU-82, which Mansfield called “the Motherfucker of All Bombs.”

  A few minutes after dawn, barreling toward earth was the largest non-nuclear explosive device in the United States’ arsenal.

  Brian Lyle was walking outside Atta’s compound scanning the treeless terrain, looking for a place to relieve himself, when he saw a flash in the eastern horizon, followed by a long, sonic bath of crunching thunder. Lyle thought they had come under nuclear attack. A gray, angry mushroom cloud filled the sky.

  The bomb, weighing 15,000 pounds and measuring about the length of a VW Beetle, had been rolled out the back end of a C-130 and plummeted thousands of feet before a chute deployed and gently carried it to earth.

  Armed with a pressure fuse, the steel, barrel-shaped container exploded aboveground and vaporized any plant or animal within 250 yards of ground zero. The concussion created a flash of overpressure totaling 2,000 pounds per square inch, the same amount of pressure one would feel standing on the floor of the sea a mile underwater. No one, though, was killed by this explosion.

  By design, the bomb had been dropped on an expanse of empty desert solely to terrify the Taliban before the day’s battle.

  A half hour later, another one of the bombs slid from the back of another C-130, and this explosion also shook the ground beneath Lyle’s feet. Lyle looked in the direction of Ak Kupruk and saw several pickup trucks with their headlights on, racing out of the village. It looked like the bastards were on the run. Sixteen days after Nelson’s team had stepped off the helo at Dehi and started fighting, all of them—Nelson, Mitchell, and Dean—wondered if victory might be within reach.

  The nearly several dozen soldiers who made up the American force were spread over sixty square miles of desert and mountaintop in a U-shaped formation. The center of the “U” was the village of Baluch, the assault’s objective.

  Diller, on his mountaintop in the west, formed the top end of the “U,” and Sergeants Milo and Essex, and combat controller Mick Winehouse, sitting thirty miles across the valley, formed the eastern tip of the U-shaped formation.

  Several miles southeast of Diller, Dostum, Mitchell, and Bowers were overwatching the battle from the south rim of the Darya Suf Valley.

  Captain Mitch Nelson, demoted from his position of official influence alongside Dostum since Bowers’s arrival, was riding with the secondary commander named Ahmed Lal and a hundred of his horsemen, positioned in the center of the U.

  Five miles to Nelson’s east, combat controller Sonny Tatum, weapons sergeant Patrick Remington, and commo sergeant Fred Falls were riding with another subcommander named Ahmed Khan, leading 150 horsemen of his own.

  Situated about a half mile behind Khan, Cal Spencer and Scott Black were running the log train and aid station. In all, this force of 3,000-plus men was facing 20,000 Taliban soldiers arrayed in hundreds of bunkers dug into the surrounding hills. Yelling, screaming their battle cries, weapons raised, the Afghan horsemen spurred their horses and charged the Taliban lines.

  By midafternoon of November 5, after several hours of furious gun fighting, Milo, Essex, and Winehouse suddenly found themselves in a fix. They had been anxious to push north of the rest of the fighting force, well past the village of Charsu. With them were some of Dostum’s soldiers. Now they were about to be surrounded and overrun.

  Milo had looked over the berm and there they were, the Taliban, coming up the hillside, their white robes flapping in the wind as they ran at them. One minute they hadn’t been there, the next minute they were firing at Milo and his crew tucked in their trench. Rounds zinged overhead, hitting the dirt around them.

  Sergeant Pat Essex pressed his cheek to the stock of his rifle, squeezing off shots, yelling at Winehouse to stay on the radio and talk to the pilot, because they needed to drop some bombs, quick.

  Milo counted fifty Taliban in all, running up the hill at them, their AKs held at the waist, firing at full auto. Milo wished they had been carrying mortar tubes and heavy .50-cal machine guns. They had left those weapons behind at K2 because they had thought they’d be traveling by foot to Mazar.

  The Taliban were about a half mile away, running from the bunker on the left, in the west.

  Milo had the SOFLAM perched on the trench’s lip and he was pulling the trigger with the laser. The bunker squatted in the dry earth about one mile away. Milo was talking to the laser even though he couldn’t actually see it; it was invisible to the naked eye. What he did see were the crosshairs of the viewfinder, which resembled a rifle scope’s, and he zeroed those on the wooden crossbeams of the bunker doorway. He’d spent hours going through the designator’s manuals making sure the device was correctly adjusted. He was confident it was. “Come on, you sonofabitch, blow the fuck up.”

  He could feel the steady pump of the Zeus as it threw rounds at them. They exploded around the trench, in front, behind, off to the side. The Taliban had elevated the gun and were lobbing them in Milo’s direction, hoping to get lucky.

  The pilot came over the radio and said he had dropped the bomb. Milo started talking to the bomb as it fell and latched onto his laser, sailing toward the bunker. “Hit that damn thing, hit that damn thing…” he muttered.

  When the bomb hit and the Taliban bunker blew up, Milo impulsively jumped up and cheered, and a fusillade of machine-gun fire from the Taliban’s position erupted around him.

  He could hear the bullets snapping overhead. He stood shouting at the smoking hole. “You pissed my wife off, and you pissed me off!”

  And then he gave the smoking hole the finger.

  Essex looked up in astonishment.

  “Milo, what the hell are you doing up there? Get down!”

  He grabbe
d Milo’s arm and yanked him into the trench as the machine-gun fire increased in intensity.

  Milo sunk down, and it dawned on him that the situation was getting worse. Essex was popping up and firing at the Taliban coming up the hill, while behind them Winehouse was on the radio, yelling, “Drop again! We are being overrun!”

  Rocket-propelled grenades were exploding around the trench.

  Essex yelled that he was running out of ammo. Milo started firing, too.

  Essex ordered the Afghans with them, terrified men dressed in suit coats, sandals, and turbans, to spread along the trench and return fire. They peeked over the lip and started shooting reluctantly. Essex heard Winehouse on the radio still talking to the plane. Essex was squeezing off rounds methodically, pausing to relay to Winehouse the advance of the Taliban up the hill. Milo had his M-4 in one hand resting on the trench and the trigger grip to the SOFLAM in the other. He was painting a group of men—about 150 Taliban—with the laser and shooting at them at the same time. Essex picked out what he thought was the leader of the Taliban assault, a man in a flowing white robe, who was running along the hill, about halfway up, from left to right. The soldier was trying to flank their position.

  Essex started shooting at the guy. His M-4 rifle was accurate at a little over 550 yards. The target was still 800 yards away. Essex elevated the barrel and tried lobbing his shots.

  As he was looking through his scope, the Taliban soldier turned and looked directly at Essex. Essex was struck by the confused, nearly comical, look on his face, that said, “I know I am being shot at!” and he dropped suddenly to the ground and started rolling down the hill.

  Essex began shooting more rapidly as the man rolled. He knew he could never hit him, yet he kept shooting. And then he lost track of him. The man had rolled out of view.

  When he lifted his head from the scope and looked at the hill with the naked eye, he was shocked to see a Taliban fighter crouched down about 100 yards away, ready to fire an RPG. He watched the grenade spiral toward him and explode in the dirt about 50 yards from his position.