Horse Soldiers

  Essex squeezed the trigger and the round hit at the guy’s feet. The Taliban jumped straight up in the air at least several feet and Essex laughed. More of the Taliban were rushing up the hill.

  The pilot’s voice cracked over the radio that he had dropped.

  The explosion rocked the ground and Milo saw that nearly all the men were dead. He turned around to relay this information to the Afghans. They were gone.

  They had fled the hill. They had taken everything—the horses, the rucksacks, all the spare ammo inside them. Milo had just what was in his vest, a couple dozen rounds. Essex and Winehouse yelled out that they were running low, too.

  Essex was shocked that, of the Afghans, only their security chief remained. The frightened man was yelling, “Let’s go! Let’s go!”

  Essex wasn’t leaving until the aircraft arrived with its load of bombs. The Taliban had to be slowed, so that they would have time to get off the hill.

  He looked at the security chief and said, “I ain’t leaving!”

  The man ignored him and bent to pick up the Americans’ rucksacks.

  “No!” yelled Essex.

  The man next picked up his rifle and threw it on the ground. He picked it up and repeated the frantic gesture. He did this several times, until the gun broke in two pieces. Essex couldn’t believe his eyes. The man had lost his grip.

  Essex had thought they could hold off the Taliban, until more planes dropped more loads and blew everything up. Now he wasn’t sure.

  “Just keep shooting,” he said. He yelled to Winehouse, “Where are those bombs?”

  They needed time to get off the hill. They needed to blow the hill without getting killed themselves.

  Winehouse was on the radio arguing with the pilot. He was refusing to drop bombs so close to friendly personnel. They would hit less than 200 feet from Milo, Essex, and Winehouse. Anyone within approximately 900 feet was likely to be killed.

  Milo peeked over the ridge. The Taliban were walking steadily up the hill, firing their AKs from the hip.

  Milo ducked back down in the trench. Thousands of rounds were hitting the berm. Dirt was flying everywhere.

  “Tell him to drop now!” Essex yelled to Winehouse.

  “Listen, we’re in trouble here,” said Winehouse, real calm.

  The pilot said he would drop.

  “Get ready!” Winehouse screamed, done with the call.

  The three men ducked down, hands over their heads. Milo opened his mouth and kept it open to lessen the overpressure that the concussion of the blast would create. Otherwise, his eardrums would burst.

  And then the bombs hit, seven of them.

  Milo felt the air leave the trench. He couldn’t breathe. His head drained of all sound. Silence.

  And then they stood up, covered in red dust, and the sound returned as the hard rain of dust and rocks fell around them. Essex madly scooped up the radios, his binos, all the gear, and stuffed it in his bag. Then he started running, with Milo in tow.

  Winehouse was still on the radio. And then he closed it, stuffed it in his knapsack, and jumped up and started sprinting down the back side of the hill.

  “Come on,” he yelled, catching up with the other two guys. “I just called in a helluva strike.”

  Behind them, the Taliban reached the trench just as the men scooted down the hill behind it.

  The Taliban stood at the top firing at Essex and his crew as they ran.

  And then the bombs hit around the trench. Six of them.

  Essex felt the shock wave pursue them down the hill, then it tumbled them head over heels. They rolled and stood up and kept going. It was hard running through the loose scree. Essex felt like his legs were barely moving.

  To make better time, they dropped to their butts and started sliding. Milo sat jouncing over large stones as he slid, sputtering in a cloud of dust. They slid for about twenty seconds down the 200-foot incline and got up and started running again.

  They were headed to the ridgetop they had vacated earlier that morning. Essex was calling out, “Clear on the right!”

  Milo: “Clear left.”

  Winehouse was still talking on the radio to the pilot overhead. “Drop, Drop, Drop!” he kept saying. He wanted to bomb the trench some more.

  Each man had a sector to scan as they ran. At one point, Milo yelled, “Bad guys out front!” and he dropped and fired. He didn’t know if he hit anything. The Taliban had ducked back down behind a hill. They kept running. When they passed the hill, the Taliban were gone.

  After ten minutes, they made it back to their previous position on the ridge.

  Milo was suddenly weary, more tired than he’d ever remembered being in his life. He looked through the binoculars at the ridgeline they’d just vacated. He watched as a Taliban soldier bent down and picked up an MRE and started eating the Skittles inside. Milo recognized it: that was the MRE he had just opened when they were attacked. He’s eating my fucking lunch, he thought.

  Winehouse announced that they had to replot and blow the hill. About thirty Taliban soldiers now milled around the top.

  “We got the coordinates already,” said Milo.

  “We do?”

  “Yeah. On the GPS. I punched them in when we were there.”

  Milo looked again at the guy munching on his MRE. He was mad. He thought, Eat up, brother.

  Winehouse picked up the radio and called in the coordinates off the GPS. “Can you set the fuse to proximity?” he asked the pilot.

  The pilot said he could. Winehouse, Essex, and Milo sat and waited.

  On proximity, a bomb blows up at a preset height aboveground, vaporizing anything within a 500-foot radius.

  Milo watched the bomb streak in. Gone was the man eating his lunch.

  Meanwhile, ten miles to the west, Lieutenant Colonel Bowers watched through binoculars as Commander Lal and Commander Khan’s soldiers massed on the plain for a horse charge. Hundreds of horsemen were gathering in ranks behind the cover of small ridgelines.

  The Taliban were well dug in around the village of Baluch. All day the fighting and air campaign had been intense, but with little effect. The Taliban had taken key positions in the avenue of approach to the village, and the Northern Alliance couldn’t get past them.

  Nelson got on the radio and told two of Dostum’s subcommanders to get ready to charge the line. This was meant to be coordinated with a bomb strike. The bombs would hit the fortified Taliban positions, and then the horsemen would swoop through and attack. In fact, as Nelson relayed this plan to Dostum’s subcommanders, the pilot was overhead, getting ready to drop.

  And then he did.

  At the same time, however, Nelson saw that something was going terribly wrong.

  The subcommanders had mistaken his order to get ready for the charge as an order to charge immediately.

  Nelson couldn’t believe it when he saw the first rank of riders shoot ahead. They were heading straight into the strike zone, with the bombs set to fall any second.

  There were some 400 riders, in groups of 100 riders each, reins in one hand, rifles in the other, as they charged. Nelson feared they’d all be killed by the bombs when they hit.

  Dostum, in the heat of the moment, was on his radio, yelling, “Charge! Charge! Charge!” as his men galloped across some 1,500 yards of grassy ridgelines.

  Almost immediately, from the Taliban positions, erupted blasts of tank fire and the rattle of machine guns. Dostum’s radio crackled with the excited cries of his commanders pounding over the field.

  Nelson saw that the riders had less than a half mile to go before reaching the Taliban lines. He realized again that the bomb might hit the line just as the horsemen approached it.

  Seeing hundreds of screaming Afghans galloping at them, some of the Taliban soldiers, in groups of ten and twenty, started jumping up and running away.

  The charging horsemen disappeared behind a last hill. Nelson held his breath. And then the bomb landed.

  The riders climbed b
ack into view and rode through the debris cloud just seconds after the explosion, leaping over trenches and landing behind the line. Miraculously, they had escaped injury.

  Nelson watched as some of the riders disarmed a truck with a machine gun mounted in the back. They circled the vehicle, firing their AKs and killing everyone in the back.

  The rest of the Taliban who hadn’t been killed by the strike were in full flight. Some of them turned to fire at the riders. The horsemen shot them as they passed. Mitchell thought it was a slaughter. He also understood that this was a turning point in the offensive. His job now was to keep pressing the enemy.

  That night, Atta’s forces, with the support of Dean’s team, would continue their assault on Ak Kupruk and capture it. The demoralized Taliban forces would begin to fall back almost as fast as the Northern Alliance could advance. Despite reinforcement by thousands of volunteers from Pakistani madrassahs and contingents of Al Qaeda forces, the Taliban were soon in headlong retreat for the Tiangi Gap.

  The following morning, November 6, Milo, Essex, and Winehouse hit the command bunker again that they’d won and lost the day before. When they went up to inspect it, Milo saw one thing he knew he’d never forget. A Taliban soldier was lying facedown in the dirt, his legs mangled. Milo bent down to study the strange sight of the man’s foot.

  It had no bones inside it—it was just skin and toenails. No bone, no meat, no ligaments. It lay flopped over like a boot.

  From that point on, realized Milo, they’d beaten the Taliban.

  The day after Essex and Milo were overrun, Sam Diller was trapped in an ambush at his position twenty miles across the mountains to the west. He and his men were riding across a hillside when a Taliban gun, positioned about 800 yards on their left, on the opposing hillside, fired. Between them lay a valley—or draw—a half mile long, speckled with grass. Diller was pissed. The day before, his Afghan intel officers had informed him that the bunker was empty. Diller had wanted to level the place but he’d left it alone. He had thought he was sneaking successfully through Taliban country. Now he wished he’d bombed the place.

  They had only one escape route available to them, and that was up the hill they were crossing. Diller studied the rocky path, about two feet wide. They couldn’t charge up the path en masse. Somebody would likely step on a mine.

  And they couldn’t cut across the hill and ride down it, as had been Diller’s plan. He had thought he was sneaking successfully through Taliban country.

  Small-arms fire started pecking at the hillside behind them. Light at first but gathering like rain.

  “Get down!” Diller shouted.

  And then came the spiraling whoosh of rocket-propelled grenades. They launched from wooden portals in the bunker and swam speedily across the draw and smashed against the hillside. The fire was not accurate, but if the Taliban got lucky, it could be deadly. Diller next heard the ugly, jacking sound of a big .50-cal machine gun open up. The big rounds starting knocking bucket-size divots out of the hill.

  Diller reasoned they had to climb up the hill to safety. He ordered everyone to take cover behind the scattered, tall boulders along the path. And then in groups of two and three the Afghans and Americans began leapfrogging up the hill, from boulder to boulder. It took ten minutes for everyone to make it to the top. Diller was last. He was carrying the eighty-pound satellite radio in a pack and he couldn’t move quickly.

  Bennett and Haji Habib ran behind him, pushing him along. Diller expected that at any minute he’d get shot in the back.

  “Run, damnit,” urged Bennett. Diller realized that his friend was saving his life. He was out of gas when they reached the top. He didn’t know how much farther he might’ve been able to run. He sat on the far side of the hill, out of view of the Taliban bunker, and caught his breath.

  He turned to Haji Habib. “All right, get those sonofabitches. Get your men down there and charge that bunker.”

  Diller, Coffers, and Bennett crawled to the lip of the hill with binoculars and began calculating the bunker’s position. Diller was personally going to call this strike in. He was pissed that he’d been ambushed. He had no margin for error. He was low on ammo and food again, and he had at least forty miles to march through hostile mountains to reach Mazar. They were still a long way from home.

  Through the binoculars, Diller saw that the Taliban had constructed the bunker poorly. They had limited fields of fire. Because of the size of the firing ports, they could not tilt their gun barrels easily. They could shoot across the draw but not down the hill. Diller realized that if the Taliban had any gumption, they could charge and overwhelm his outnumbered force.

  Habib and his men erupted down the path, the Afghans shooting over their horses’ heads as they rode. The Taliban soldiers fired their AKs and machine guns but kept missing. Diller figured the Taliban were shocked by the audacity of the maneuver. He waited for Habib’s men to slump off their saddles to the ground. None had so far.

  By the time they reached the bottom of the draw, they were safer. The Taliban guns couldn’t reach them now.

  Habib’s men spurred their horses and the animals started climbing to the bunker. The machine guns fired impotently out the windows, still hitting the opposite hill. Diller could see Taliban soldiers inside the cramped ports craning to aim their rifles down, but their movement was limited.

  Habib’s men surrounded the front of the bunker and lobbed grenades through the ports and on top of its dirt roof. Then they shoved their rifles inside and fired on full auto. The firefight lasted a furious ten minutes. And then they mounted their horses and rode down the draw and back up the hill just as the bomb strikes came in. The bunker turned into a tornado of dust and wood. In the swirling cloud, Diller could see that nothing was left but a smoking hole.

  Goddamn you, he thought. I want to get home to my wife. And I will. They saddled up and kept riding north.

  As they made their way along the Darya Balkh River, also headed north, Cal Spencer, Scott Black, Vern Michaels, and their Afghan interpreter, Choffee, were driving one of the John Deere Gators brought in by Lieutenant Colonel Bowers on his helo. Black and Michaels were traveling in one Gator, with Spencer at the wheel of the other, Choffee riding shotgun.

  Spencer, nursing the blown disc in his spine and an excruciating backache, had welcomed the chance to get off his horse and drive.

  The nearly nine-foot-long vehicle was stacked on the back with cases of MREs and the team’s rucksacks. The tower of gear, lashed with rope, rose nearly six feet off the ground. Spencer marveled at how the buggy puttered along, quiet as a garden tractor, over rocks, ditches, and up and down hills.

  As they rode, Choffee kept a sharp lookout for the enemy. Tall, thin, easily worried, Choffee was in his late thirties, a former industrial plant manager who had the annoying habit of repeating everything Spencer said.

  Spencer would say, “We are going to kick the shit out of the Taliban,” and this would confuse Choffee, who did not understand American slang.

  “Could you rephrase that?” he’d ask. “What do you mean, ‘kick the shit’? Where will the shit go?”

  Spencer realized he had finally met someone with as quirky a sense of humor as his own, albeit unintentional.

  As they drove, Choffee fretted constantly about being attacked. “There are bad guys all around here,” he told Spencer. “We can’t see them because we are going up and down hills.”

  Spencer handed Choffee his M-4 rifle. “You shoot the bad guys because I’m driving.”

  Choffee looked at Spencer. “Oh, no. I cannot do that.” He didn’t want to touch the rifle. He was afraid of it.

  “Well, why not? You earn your pay.”

  “Do you really want me to do this?”

  “Hell, yeah.”

  “Okay.”

  Choffee cradled the rifle gingerly, sitting beside Spencer on the bench seat as they bounced along. Spencer grinned at the sight.

  He knew Choffee was thinking, Am I going to be able
to shoot somebody?

  Along the way, they stopped and talked with Nelson, who was traveling north by horse. They met up alongside the river. Nelson wanted to know how they were faring.

  “We’re doing all right,” said Spencer. “Choffee is guarding me.”

  Choffee broke into a satisfied smile. He slapped the weapon. “Yes, I am doing a good job.”

  Spencer was glad. He had accomplished his goal: to make Choffee feel good. And to allay the Afghan’s fears about being captured and tortured by the Taliban.

  Still, Spencer was worried. He knew they could be attacked. They were running low on fuel—maybe a few gallons left in the plastic cans lashed to the buggy. If they did come upon some Taliban, they would be able to outrun them for a while, but they wouldn’t be able to scoot up into the hills, into the rough country, where the Taliban’s trucks and tanks couldn’t follow. They were driving a twenty-first-century gas-powered vehicle, and it had its disadvantages. Part of him longed for his horse.

  This was especially true when they crossed the Darya Balkh River after passing through the village of Shulgareh. The water was wide, maybe 200 yards across, rushing in braided streams. Spencer couldn’t tell how deep it was.

  Black and Michaels drove into the river first and started heading across. Spencer watched as the heavy, bulky vehicle lifted in the current and drifted downstream. Michaels jumped off and grabbed the back end, leaning on it to make the tires grab the river bottom. He howled when he hit the frigid water. Black gunned the engine, and the knobby tires spun and bounced on the gravel. Little by little, Black and Michaels made it across. Black powered the buggy up the riverbank and turned the vehicle, and they sat looking back at Spencer. Michaels stood dripping on the sand, freezing. It was near dusk, orange twilight blooming behind the distant mountains.

  Spencer looked at Choffee. “Okay, we’re going to do the same thing, Choffee. You’re going to drive this thing.”

  Choffee nodded.

  “I’m going to jump off and push. You got me?”