Horse Soldiers

  The tiny speakers of the Motorola radios in the trenches around Abdul squawked the news: The world in flames, America tumbling down.

  Major Mark Mitchell walked into the packed mess hall at Fort Campbell just as the first scenes of the attack were playing out on a TV mounted in the big room. Mitchell nearly dropped his fork as the news sunk in. There were about seventy-five guys inside, and they’d fallen silent as they stared at the monitor. Mitchell had just come from morning physical training out on the parade field, playing Ultimate Frisbee with the men in the support company. He was standing there holding his mess tray with an omelet, biscuit, and salsa on top, when he heard the reporter on TV explain that a Cessna, or some kind of other small plane, had flown into the World Trade Center.

  “That was not a Cessna,” Mitchell said. “And no commercial pilot in the world would fly into a building. He’d be ditching in the Hudson River.”

  Some of the younger guys at one of the tables started snickering, announcing that the footage had to be a prank.

  “It’s a clear, blue sky day,” Mitchell went on, “there’s not a cloud in the sky.”

  “It’s an accident!” somebody else said.

  Mitchell turned and shouted: “Shut up! This is not a joke. This is not a laughing matter!” The depth of emotion startled even him.

  The younger soldiers shut up. Seconds later, the second plane hit.

  Mitchell hurried out the door and across the parking lot, under the scraggly oak trees, across the burnt grass, and up the concrete steps to his office.

  As the operations officer for Third Battalion, Fifth Special Forces Group, it was Mitchell’s job to help make sure that the group was ready to mobilize to anywhere in the world within ninety-six hours. The group’s main theater of operations was the Middle East, under the command of Central Command (CENTCOM) and General Tommy Franks, down in Tampa at MacDill Air Force Base, and he knew the folks in Florida would already be making plans.

  When Mitchell turned down the hall, he saw his fellow staff officers standing around looking stunned. He could tell already that everybody was running on all cylinders, but with nowhere to go. He wondered what they’d look like by the end of the day.

  Mitchell found another group of them standing around a TV in the conference room upstairs, watching the towers burn. A staff officer walked up and told him the Pentagon had just been hit.

  Mitchell couldn’t believe it.

  The towers had been a matched pair, but the attack on the Pentagon, in a different city, nearly simultaneously—this raised the game to a different level.

  By the time Greg Gibson, a helicopter pilot, passed through the guard gate at the 160th SOAR headquarters, he had heard enough on the radio to realize the crash was not an accident. Walking into the hangar, he told his crew to get ready to break down the Black Hawks and twin-rotored Chinooks for travel.

  Gibson knew they were going to war.

  Mitchell rushed back down the stairs to his boss’s office, Third Battalion commander Lieutenant Colonel Max Bowers, to update him on what he knew.

  Bowers had been at home finishing a shower when he heard news of the attacks delivered by his five-year-old son standing in the bathroom.

  “Dad,” the young boy said, “a plane just flew into a big building in New York! Really!” His son had been watching TV in another part of the house and Bowers hadn’t heard any of the reports.

  Bowers, wrapped in a towel, smiled, ruffled his son’s hair, and told him not to joke about something like that, then he hurried to get dressed for work. On the way, he turned on the radio in the car.

  Bowers’s short salt and pepper hair was still wet from the shower as he gravely listened to Mitchell report the strike on the Pentagon. Mitchell could tell Bowers was upset, and he knew Bowers was not one to scare easily. A powerfully built, forty-two-year-old career officer, he was smart and articulate. In Bosnia in 1999, Bowers had snuck into the war-torn country by commercial flight, a risky move in contravention of U.S. policy at the time (Congress would eventually authorize U.S. troops on the ground). Once there, Bowers had called back to Fort Bragg on a payphone at the airport to say, “I’m in,” and then hung up. He proceeded to help guide the air war by spotting targets from the ground. The mission was a success: Nobody had gotten hurt but the bad guys. Instead of a demotion, upon his return Bowers was secretly applauded.

  Bowers told Mitchell that there were reports coming in from the Department of Defense in Washington on “the red side”—classified e-mail—and that, for the moment, the plan was: there was no plan.

  Mitchell hurriedly left Bowers’s office to call Maggie.

  “Where are you?” he demanded.

  “I’m driving,” said Maggie. “I’ve left the post.”

  “Get back here. Now!”

  She could tell Mark was worried, and that had her worried.

  Maggie, a mother of two, had left to do some errands at Target in the mall. She’d left their older girl, age three, with a nanny, and had taken the younger, age two, with her.

  “Did you hear what happened?” Mark asked.

  “Oh, Mark, I was listening to the radio…”

  “You need to get home and get in the house.”

  Without further thought, she wheeled the Ford Explorer around and headed back in the other lane. It was nine thirty in the morning.

  Because security had been tightened at Fort Campbell, each car was now painstakingly searched at the front gate. Normally, Maggie would have been able to flash her driver’s license at an armed soldier at the gate and drive on. Traffic was now backed up for at least a mile on Highway 41A, all the way from a place called Sho-West, a strip club, to the Army surplus store and pawnshops outside Gate 4, the post’s main entrance. There were nearly four thousand families living on base, and it seemed every one of them was trying to get back home.

  Cal Spencer and his team got back from the Cumberland River around midmorning, then promptly ran smack into the same traffic jam that had snarled Maggie Mitchell. Sam Diller got out of the truck, stood bowlegged in the middle of the road, and looked up and down the long line of cars coming and going from the fort. The snarl was particularly bad because of a concrete barrier cutting off a lane.

  “We can get through,” said Sam. “We just need to move one of these barricades.”

  Spencer agreed. He and Sam and a couple other guys on the teams bent down and heaved ho.

  “I don’t think you should be doing that,” said an approaching guard from the 101st Airborne, the regular Army. He had an M-16 slung across his chest. He looked scared by the morning’s events.

  Guys like Spencer and Sam had spent their Special Forces careers avoiding the regular Army. And now here was this kid, afraid to break the rules when it made sense to break them.

  They ignored him and kept grunting until the cement divider was moved.

  Spencer ran back to the truck, drove it through, and then helped the others push the big chunk back into place. Then they sped past the Fort Campbell bank, the PX, the Kentucky Fried Chicken and Taco Bell, to Third Battalion Headquarters. Spencer felt he was seeing all of these ordinary sights for the very first time.

  As the morning wore on, from his office at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, Major General Geoffrey Lambert was working the odds.

  The son of Kansas Mennonite farmers, Lambert, at fifty-four, was the commanding general of United States Army Special Forces Command (USASFC), which was composed of 9,500 men spread across the world in different geographic zones. Fifth Group ran the Middle East and Africa. Seventh and Third Groups, based at Bragg, operated in Latin America, interdicting narcotraffickers and insurgencies. Tenth Group was based in Colorado and operated in Europe. (Lieutenant Colonel Bowers had been part of Tenth Group when he went into Kosovo.) The Pacific Rim, Indonesia, and the Philippines fell under First Group’s oversight, based in Fort Lewis, Washington. The other groups, Nineteenth and Twentieth, which were made up of National Guard soldiers, went wherever they were needed
. These groups formed a wide net cast by highly secretive men.

  Lambert knew that Fifth Group’s bell had just been rung.

  It had taken him about ten seconds to figure out who had masterminded the attacks, and who had carried them out. For the past several years, he had observed a top-secret intelligence program called data mining that had identified one man, an Egyptian by the name of Mohammed Atta, as a serious terrorist with links to a Saudi named bin Laden, who was a financier of terrorist training camps for men like the Egyptian. Months earlier, the people involved in the program had tried telling the FBI what they had discovered, but Army lawyers had discouraged the disclosure, even though the project had identified the hijackers. Lambert figured they knew everything there was to know about Osama bin Laden and his military training camps in Afghanistan, but none of the legal minds could decide if the surveillance was lawful. Now Lambert felt sick that more effort had not been made to warn someone. (Lambert, extremely upset, later agreed with lawyers that the information not be shared with the FBI.)

  Usually, there was a contingency plan on the shelf at the Department of Defense for invading a country. But when it came to Afghanistan, Lambert knew that no such plan existed—nothing, not one scrap of paper describing how you mobilized men and weapons to take down the place. Since the end of the Cold War, U.S. military planners had been floundering in the backwash of old conflicts, unsure of how to prepare for imagined threats from unfamiliar enemies.

  The attacks were, to Lambert’s mind, perfect examples of the kind of violence that the future held for Americans. They had come quickly and cheaply, carried out by a small number of men communicating by mobile phones and the Internet. The damage had equaled that which might’ve been achieved by an entire army, yet it had cost only a half million dollars to inflict—small change, all things considered.

  Lambert had been a hard-charging U.S. Army Ranger, serving ten years in the jungles of Latin America, fighting all kinds of insurgencies, great and small, secret and public, when he’d left to become a Special Forces officer. Being a Ranger, he said, was a fine thing, but being in SF was a lot finer.

  Lambert was resolved to get his guys in this new fight, though he figured that General Tommy Franks, the CENTCOM commander, would never consider them a viable option. Franks didn’t understand Special Forces soldiers, nor did he really like them. Few officers in the big, regular army were fond of this secretive branch of independent-minded warriors. Over the past several years, funding for Special Forces had been cut, and few people outside the community realized that many of the teams lacked the equipment they needed. Hell, a lot of the teams didn’t have a full contingent of men—short a medic here, a weapons specialist there.

  Vietnam had done them in. During that war, the men of Fifth Group grew their hair, slept in hammocks, took native women as girlfriends, and lived and fought in the jungle far beyond the reach of anyone’s official control. They had also committed some of the conflict’s worst atrocities.

  In the late 1980s, the unit was shunted into deeper twilight, providing what was called FID, or Foreign Internal Defense—a euphemism for training the armies of foreign governments. Other missions, such as serving as policemen on Native American reservations, had been more routine. Desert Storm had provided the first use of Special Forces in combat since Vietnam, much to the initial chagrin of General Norman Schwarzkopf, who’d seen their dirty work while commanding in Southeast Asia. The SF guys weren’t particularly happy with their assignment; hunting SCUD sites was, they figured, the kind of soldiering better suited to gung-ho Marines, the publicity-savvy Navy SEALs, or the Army’s secretive counterterrorism unit, Delta Force. They were masters at the snatch and grab—“door-kicking,” Lambert called it. Let these other troops handle hardware hunts and scavenger forays.

  Special Forces trained to do something different from everyone else. They fought guerrilla wars. This fighting was divided into phases: combat, diplomacy, and nation-building. They were trained to make war and provide humanitarian aid after the body count. They were both soldier and diplomat. The medics worked as dentists, fixing the teeth of local villagers; the engineers, experts at the orchestrated mayhem of explosives and demolition, were trained to rebuild a village’s bridges and government offices. They spoke the locals’ language and assiduously studied their customs concerning religion, sex, health, and politics. Their minds lived in the dark corners of the world. Often, they were the senior ranking American officials in a country, hunkered down in the dirt drawing out a water treatment plan with some warlord and acting as America’s de facto State Department.

  The SEALs and the regular Army generally studied none of a country’s languages, customs, or nuances. Special Forces thought first and shot last. They were the velvet hammer. Lambert knew that in the history of the United States, Special Forces soldiers had never been given the chance to fight as a lead element.

  To get them off the bench and on the field was going to take considerable backchannel maneuvering. The U.S. Army had zero interest in deploying a bunch of cowboys in Afghanistan who had served as inspiration for the best scenes in Apocalypse Now.

  Lambert was banking on the cooperation of the CIA and its covert ties in the country. During the 1979–89 Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, the Agency had funded the mujahideen—“freedom fighters.” Of all the diplomatic and military branches of the U.S. government, the CIA had kept the closest watch on Afghanistan. It was the go-to authority. It was also the progenitor of U.S. Special Forces.

  After World War II, the OSS (Office of Strategic Services) had disbanded and its members migrated into either what eventually became the Central Intelligence Agency or into Special Forces. The unit itself wasn’t officially formed until 1952, as the First Special Forces Group, adopting a red arrowhead with a dagger down the middle as its emblem. The symbol was not a haphazard choice. The World War II Army soldiers who had fought as guerrillas had drawn their inspiration from the Apache Scouts of the nineteenth century. They had survived behind German and Japanese lines by relying on the goodwill of the friendly people they encountered. Often outgunned and outnumbered, they ambushed instead of employing frontal assaults. They harassed supply trains. They attacked in several places at once and vanished into the woods. They followed none of the regular rules of warfare. Relishing their lethal craft of stealth and surprise, these World War II soldiers even nicknamed themselves “the Devil’s Brigade,” sneaking into German trenches in the night and slitting the throats of a surprised enemy. Daylight would reveal a chilling scene: paper arrowheads left on the foreheads of the dead men.

  Earlier, in the American Revolution, this homegrown brand of war had been practiced by Ethan Allen in the northeastern states and Francis Marion, aka the Swamp Fox, in the South. A particularly rough group of marauders named Roger’s Rangers had terrified the British with their lightning raids. The credo of the band was simple: “Let the enemy come till he’s almost close enough to touch, then let him have it and jump out and finish him up with your hatchet.”

  Lambert relished the prospect that his soldiers would be called to fight this kind of war. He was also worried. The men were untested. Once he launched them, quick rescue would be impossible.

  By midday, when Mitchell checked with Bowers, there still was no plan. The order stayed the same: Be ready to leave at a moment’s notice. As Mitchell walked the halls, he heard the crackle and burble of the same news playing on the radios and TVs. Each minute seemed trapped in the endless looping of one moment: the towers falling, the towers falling. By late afternoon, the day felt like it had lasted for a year.

  When it was clear nothing more was going to happen, that no plan for action was forthcoming from Washington, Mitchell decided to go home. He pulled into his driveway well after dark, staring at the lights burning in the windows of his trim brick ranch house. He and Maggie lived in a far corner of Fort Campbell, in a place called Werner Park that was filled with deer, bordered by woods, and populated by officers and their wiv
es. The day before, September 10, he had returned from a trip out west, ten days in a rental car spent pulling into ranchers’ driveways, asking whether the U.S. Army could use their property for a war game. A game. He shook his head at how much had changed in one morning.

  Mitchell got out and walked across the lawn, flipping and reflipping the interior switch that all men reach for who are not violent but who live in a violent world.

  Warrior/Father.

  Warrior/Father.

  Father.

  He pushed open the door and kissed Maggie. I will do anything to protect this place, he thought.

  Cal Spencer arrived home at the end of the day in his ratty secondhand Mercedes and swept Marcha up in a hug when he walked through the door.

  “I can’t believe it,” he said quietly.

  She felt him tense as he said this. She stepped back and looked at him.

  “You’re going away,” she said.

  He nodded. “Yeah.”

  “When?”