Nelson, listening in, got on the line and told the hesitant pilot, “Any military vehicle on the battlefield be at liberty to destroy.”
“Wait a minute, come on now,” said the pilot.
Nelson explained, “All friendlies are either on foot or they’re riding horses.”
The pilot asked Nelson to repeat the part about the horses.
“We’re riding horses,” Nelson explained.
The pilot, obviously new to the conflict, couldn’t believe it. “You guys are doing what?”
Essex, Milo, and Winehouse called bombs on anything they could spot, truck-mounted guns, vehicles, and Taliban troops. Milo identified at least twelve targets.
They had blown up about half of them when they suddenly came under counterattack. Essex could hear a faint whooom, whoooom, whoooom, and he recognized the sound from his stint in the Gulf War.
Milo and Winehouse looked at him: “What’s the matter?”
And then the rockets hit.
Down in the valley, Dostum and Lieutenant Colonel Bowers, along with several hundred of Dostum’s men, had begun moving into the pass. Dostum had staggered the departure of his men to keep some fighters in reserve, in case the Taliban attacked.
After the rocket attack, Essex, up in his mountaintop perch, feared that Dostum, Bowers, and all the soldiers were dead.
Nelson, meanwhile, was standing at the south end of the Gap, about a half mile from its entrance, when the Taliban rocket barrage started.
The rockets ricocheted off the canyon’s sides, spinning end over end and exploding. Molten skeins of shrapnel clawed at the rock walls. Nelson counted twenty-one rockets in all. He didn’t think anyone could survive the barrage.
After the first explosions, Dostum’s men had scrambled up the rock and tucked themselves on ledges and hid behind outcroppings. They were unsure of what to do next. Some of them were out of their minds with fear. The rolling explosions had been terrifying.
Nelson knew that these kinds of rockets, called BM-21s, landed in salvos. They were launched from a wheeled pad capable of holding forty of the nine-foot-long projectiles. Nelson guessed the Taliban wasn’t done with them yet. He worried about Dostum and Bowers.
The canyon exploded again, driving even more men up into hiding in the nooks and crannies. Around them, horses lay kicking in the dirt, riddled with shrapnel. Men walked around holding their eyes, blinded. Arms and legs that had been blown high in the air landed with sickening thuds along the riverbank.
Nelson, sitting on his horse, watched smoke drift out the canyon’s mouth. He turned in his saddle and surveyed the remaining Afghans with him. They were scared. So was he. He turned back and faced the canyon mouth and tried to think what to do. He’d wait. He figured they were in for more salvos.
After several minutes, none came.
He knew that Diller was somewhere off to his right, in the east. He didn’t know if he was dead or alive. Essex was also on his right, up on the ridge.
Nelson tried raising Bowers and Dostum on the radio. Nothing. He then called Essex up on the ridge.
“I don’t have comms with Dostum. Can you see him?”
Essex said he couldn’t see into the canyon. A ridge was blocking his view.
Nelson worried that everyone was dead.
About one mile west of Nelson in the Gap, Diller was skirting along the crumbling foothills and looking for a trail up and over the mountain, when the rockets starting landing around him. His job, after leaving Shulgareh, was to keep moving east and hit the edge of Mazar not by the main road, as Nelson was doing, but through the backcountry. The rest of his team, as well as Atta and Dean’s men, were to travel through the Gap and enter Mazar by the main highway that led into the city.
Along the way, Diller was to hunt for Taliban soldiers in hiding who might circle and attack the approaching main force from its rear.
He heard the rockets launch just as he was getting on his horse. He froze, with his left leg in the stirrup and his right swung over the horse’s rump. The rocket made a screeching chooo sound and exploded about 100 yards away down a ridge. Diller’s horse reared and he was thrown backward and lay a moment looking up at the sky. He scrambled up and started running after the horse. Most of all, he was afraid he’d lose it and that one of the Afghans would claim it for himself. Sure enough, as Diller ran a short distance through the smoke, he saw an Afghan soldier, one of Dostum’s men, reaching for the reins.
Diller ran up and snatched them from the man and yelled, “No!” He then tried leading the frightened animal down the hill, but it wouldn’t budge. Diller reared back and punched the horse in the jaw. He dragged its head down to the ground just as the second rocket barrage came in.
The explosion threw him on his back in a ditch. The horse was standing over him, its feet straddling the edges of the deep depression in the ground. He looked up at the horse, silhouetted against the sky. The horse was looking down at him as the rockets crashed. Diller thought Bennett and Coffers were probably dead. They’d ridden ahead a few minutes before the rocket attack and he didn’t know where they were.
He lay there listening for the telltale screech of a next launch. It was quiet. The barrage had come from the north and west, from the back side of the Gap, about a mile away. He figured the Taliban hadn’t targeted him specifically. They were spraying the ground indiscriminately.
He turned at the sound of approaching hoofbeats. Bennett and Coffers were riding up fast. They pulled to a halt and Diller stood up and brushed himself off. They explained that when the barrage started, their horses had taken off and they couldn’t stop them running. They had laid out along the necks of the racing animals and held on. The horses ran maybe a half mile, then stopped. Then they’d turned them and raced back to Diller.
Commander Ali Sarwar, who had watched Nelson and his team get off the helicopter three weeks earlier at Dehi, was attacked by BM-21 rockets in the Gap as he moved the twenty-five soldiers under his command. He had been traveling and riding with Commander Kamal, attached to Essex’s group. Ali had been fearless throughout the campaign, but the rockets falling around him were terrifying, totally random. The canyon rang with their explosions.
He heard the whooshing sound of their launching, one after another. They started hitting his horsemen. When the smoke cleared, five rockets had hit in the canyon; others had flown over and crashed on hillsides (near Sam Diller and Bill Bennett, traveling north on the east rim of the canyon). Ali could see about sixty-five men lying dead on the canyon floor. Their horses were in pieces around them. The blasts had split one horse in half, lengthwise, so the animal was laid out on a pile of its own guts and its feet were spread in all four directions as if staked to the ground.
After leaving Shulgareh, Ali and his men had moved up the road through the Gap and found it littered with cars that had been bombed by American air strikes. Some of the cars were charred and melted on the road; others were perfectly fine. The Taliban drivers, terrified, had abandoned them with the keys still in the ignition, and ran north, into the hills, to escape the Americans’ bombs that seemed to haunt the road.
As Ali rode through the canyon after the rocket attack, he spied something ahead on the road that scared him. His first thought was to flee. He squinted and saw about fifty cars and pickups racing toward him.
The vehicles were still a half mile away, but they were coming, that was for sure. And they were filled with Taliban soldiers.
Ali and his men had fought for three weeks without rest. But here they were going to have another fight, a bad one. Ali looked behind him. He and his men could head back down the river valley. If we push ahead, he thought, we could be killed.
He inched down in the saddle, jammed the magazine tight in the rifle, making sure it was there.
It’s either victory or death, thought Ali. If God is with me, I will go toward Mazar.
Ali and his men rode into a furious firefight.
They battled for two hours and Ali lost severa
l men. But they killed many Taliban. He watched as the survivors of his wrath scrambled back the way they had come in their pickups, heading north up the valley, to Mazar.
Nelson, sitting on his horse at the mouth of the Gap, saw that the Taliban rocket attack had quashed the forward momentum of the Northern Alliance. Nelson felt this was a critical moment. Dostum’s men had scattered into the hills. He knew he had to do something. He could see men lying up in the rocks, like stunned lizards.
You have to lead these men, he thought. If they stopped here, the Taliban might have time to regroup and attack again.
He swallowed hard and spurred his horse ahead.
Inside the canyon, Taliban vehicles were canted and burning. The drivers had been burned alive and spilled from the doors, dark as wicks. Nelson looked down to the river and saw more men and horses lying in the water. The Taliban had even mined the river.
At the sound of his approach, Nelson saw men stand up on the rock ledges and look at him. They looked startled and watched him pass. And then, slowly, one by one, he heard them scrabbling off the rock. The scrape and trickle of pebbles rolling downhill.
He closed his eyes and thanked God. He was horrified by the sights around him, yet he felt exuberant. It was hard to explain.
He had hoped the Afghans would follow him. If they hadn’t, he would’ve felt that he’d failed as a U.S. Army captain. As a teenager in Kansas, he had always admired a particular painting of a Civil War battle. It depicted a general riding through a battlefield, and following him were his men, hollow-eyed, trusting, hopeful. He felt that whatever happened in his military career, for this moment he was leading these men through a version of hell.
He still had no idea if they’d be attacked again by more rockets. He kept riding.
He looked behind him and saw that about three hundred Afghans were marching with him, some carrying weapons, others walking empty-handed, their rifles having been lost in the explosions.
About halfway through the canyon, he found Lieutenant Colonel Bowers and General Dostum. After walking about a quarter mile, Bowers had been caught in the barrage of rockets, which exploded about twenty-five yards from where he’d been sitting on his horse. All of the animals started to rear, threatening a stampede. Bowers ordered his men to dismount and hide in a nearby hillside, and they crammed into what looked like a crack in the rock, while Bowers stood before them, trying to shield them. One man tried containing all of the horses by grabbing their leads, but most of the animals broke free and started running up and down the canyon.
Nelson hugged Dostum, who asked him where he’d been. The burly warlord had worried that Nelson had been killed in the attacks.
“I got here as soon as I could,” said Nelson.
They rode back through the Gap and met Essex, Milo, and Winehouse as they walked down from their observation post atop the mountain. When Major Mark Mitchell arrived in a truck, along with his team, the entire force was ready to move into Mazar.
The Gap was cleared.
Dean and Atta stopped at sunset at the south end of the Gap, for prayer. Atta planned to spend the night here, before heading to Mazar at dawn, with Dostum.
Dostum’s men were picketed a half mile farther south, along the same road. Most of them were on horseback, while Atta’s men were traveling by vehicle.
Atta had either bought, stolen, or captured all the vehicles he could from the Taliban. Dostum, on the other hand, was overextended. His men and horses needed time to rest. They couldn’t keep up with the speed of Atta’s mechanized advance.
The two warlords met and agreed that no one would leave for Mazar-i-Sharif until dawn. Victory would be theirs as comrades-in-arms.
Dostum didn’t know that Atta had other plans.
Atta already had forces inside Mazar-i-Sharif, holding select pockets, even though the city still crawled with Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters. He was eager to beat Dostum into the prized city.
After the meeting, Dean watched as Atta sat on a carpet on the dirt, surrounded by different satellite phones, all jerry-rigged to run off car batteries, and began talking to different Taliban commanders in Mazar-i-Sharif. He was trying to arrange defections and increase his own troop strength with the newly surrendered soldiers. Dean admired his smooth and efficient diplomacy.
Meanwhile, in Mazar, hundreds of Taliban vehicles—their headlights bobbing in the dark and visible for miles—were fleeing the city for Konduz, eight hours to the east over a bumpy road. The trucks were filled with retreating enemy fighters.
Atta decided he couldn’t wait any longer. He had to get to Mazar before any more Taliban fled for Konduz. His prospective power base was slipping away from the city.
When he heard the news that they were leaving early, Dean readily assented. He had immense respect for the bookish, pious warlord. Dean knew it was not his place to get between Atta and his rivalry with Dostum. He climbed into a jeep and took a seat next to the general. Crammed next to Dean was his senior medic James Gold, while other members of his team were following behind on horses and in pickups. Dean’s second in command, Warrant Officer Stu Mansfield, was jammed in the dusty cab of a large wooden-sided truck bringing up the rear of a caravan that measured a half mile long. Atta’s several thousand men—on foot, on horseback, and behind the wheels of trucks wheezing ahead on the few last precious gallons of gas available to his army—lurched ahead through the dark. His men hadn’t eaten in several days. This was an army on its last legs.
Dean was amused thinking that he would beat Mitch Nelson into the city. During the last week, the two young Army captains had grown competitive, each of them hewing closer to the psychological needs of their warlord. Dean looked over and saw that Atta was smiling. The war, it seemed to Dean, was ending. They’d roll into Mazar, clear the streets of any Taliban refusing to surrender, and begin rebuilding the place: water and power plants, schools, a police department, the mechanics of daily life badly needing repair.
They’d scour the city for intel about the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden and other Al Qaeda soldiers. A recent report had placed bin Laden in the town of Balkh, thirty miles west of Mazar. The veracity of the report was doubtful. The teams were getting regular notice of these sightings and most were wishful thinking by Afghan citizens hoping to collect the enormous reward for the terrorist’s capture. But still, the news excited the team.
As they proceeded through the canyon, they drove with their headlights off. Dean didn’t know if any Taliban had remained behind to snipe at them from the heights of the mountain wall, but they weren’t taking chances.
Through his night vision goggles, communications officer Brian Lyle, sitting in the large truck, could see that the Gap was about a half mile wide and that the road was narrow and gouged by explosions. It was also littered with blown-up Taliban pickups that loomed suddenly out of the night.
The driver kept wrenching the steering wheel to veer around these charred obstacles. The road was cut high into the canyon’s side, and down several hundred feet below, lay the Darya Balkh River. Lyle figured that it’d be easy to sail straight off the edge. He tried crouching lower behind the truck’s wooden sides, but this was impossible. Lyle’s back was still sticking above the flimsy wood. He thought that it would be hell to get shot in the dark, not even knowing where the deadly round had come from. The team’s rucksacks were piled so high that all of the men had to lie on the equipment and none of them could find good cover. Lyle lay with his rifle poking through the slats. He hoped to hell the Taliban hadn’t hung around.
About halfway through the canyon, they began to pass the bodies of the Taliban and Afghan soldiers killed in the fighting earlier in the day. Lyle saw severed arms and legs jutting from the ground as if they had been planted there. It was as if they were driving through the unearthly garden of a macabre giant.
Lyle thought it was amazing the way the explosions had severed some of the heads cleanly from the bodies, which often were nowhere to be found. One head watched the men
as they approached. Like a painting whose eyes follow you across a room, it tracked them as they passed. Some of the men laughed nervously and snapped pictures with digital cameras. Others turned away in disgust at the sight.
After thirty minutes, they drove out of the cooler canyon into the dry air of the plain. The first light of dawn was seeping above the crumpled edge of the horizon and ahead lay the dark hump of Mazar-i-Sharif. Through his goggles, Lyle could see hundreds more trucks with their headlights on racing from the city, headed to Konduz. Lyle had received reports that the Taliban were preparing a final battle there, which was now barricaded by thousands of Northern Alliance soldiers. All the roads in and out were cut off. It was a place under siege. Hard-core Al Qaeda soldiers from Saudi Arabia and Pakistan had taken to executing the local Taliban in their midst. These men had only wanted to surrender, walk back to their villages, and return to their lives with their families.
Seeing now that Mazar-i-Sharif was so close, the men atop their horses sat up and spurred their reluctant animals and began galloping across the plain. The men in trucks raced their engines and shot off in pursuit. Those on foot began running, swinging up to one of the passing trucks if they could. They were in full flight toward the gates of the city.
Near the outskirts, still several miles from the city center, the first crowds of welcoming Afghans appeared. Hundreds of men, women, and children stood and watched as Atta and Dean passed. They clapped and cheered. They stepped to the trucks with outstretched hands to touch the Americans as they passed. They asked the soldiers to take their pictures. Scott Black had two disposable cameras with him and he did the best he could—the truck was moving briskly as he snapped away. He couldn’t figure out why the kids wanted him to take their pictures since he would never see them again. And then he thought that maybe they just wanted someone to remember them.
From his carpet shop, Nadir Shihab spotted the American soldiers as they entered the city.
They came trotting by on horses and zipping past in trucks. They wore scraggly beards and long hair, longer than most American soldiers, and he thought they looked half dead. He noticed, however, that they were gripping their rifles over the tops of their saddles and that they only looked asleep. They wore sunglasses and he saw that they constantly scanned the crowd for any sign of trouble. Some of them had wrapped their faces against the dust with long scarves, and there were wet, dark holes where their mouths were.