Horse Soldiers
He saw two holes in Mike’s skull. He lowered the head back down on the satin pillow. and looked at his son’s temples. There was a hole on each side. He figured the bullets had entered there, and exited at the two wounds he saw at the back of the head. He touched his son’s arms and legs and studied them. They were bruised. He wondered if Mike had been tortured. The wounds told him nothing.
Back in Mazar, Mark Mitchell could not help but remember the very moment that the fighting in Qala-i-Janghi had stopped. He had surveyed the smoking rubble, a dusty M-4 in his hand, barely able to stand after fighting for his life for seven straight days.
Dead and dying men and wounded horses had littered the courtyard, a twitching choir that brayed and moaned in the rough, knee-high grass. The horses killed first had swollen to twice their size. The fort’s mud floor was spongy with blood.
Mitchell’s buddies were equally wrung out. With every nerve jangling, Major Kurt Sonntag stumbled upstairs in the schoolhouse and told Doc MacFarland, “Gimme something.” Whatever it was, Sonntag was soon out cold and slept for a day. The schoolhouse was filled with men who’d been pushed beyond their limits.
They had come within minutes of losing the entire war in Afghanistan. That was the scary thing, thought Mitchell. That was the really scary thing. And yet they had prevailed. Mitchell had been part of “the first U.S. cavalry attack of the twentieth-first century,” a feat trumpeted in news photos showing bearded Americans riding across a sunlit Afghanistan plain. “It was as if warriors from the future had been transported to an earlier century,” General Tommy Franks later remarked.
On November 14, 2003, Mitchell found himself standing uncomfortably at a podium at Special Operations Command back in Florida. That day, USA Today had carried the headline “Soldier to Receive Honor for Valor in Afghanistan.”
“Maj. Mark Mitchell doesn’t like to talk about what happened in Afghanistan in late November 2001,” ran the story. “But the Army thinks it’s a pretty big deal.”
Mitchell stood at attention as General Bryan D. Brown, commander of Special Operations Command, pinned his uniform with the Distinguished Service Cross for “extraordinary heroism.” The audience was a mix of family and colleagues from the covert world of special operations, America’s brain trust in the war on terror. Mitchell’s parents had arrived from Green Bay, Wisconsin; Mike Spann’s wife, Shannon, sat near the front, fighting tears. Mitchell’s wife tended two fidgeting daughters who knew their father better as someone who read them Goodnight Moon and then was gone for months out of the year.
Emceeing the ceremony was a former Delta Force commander, Brigadier General Gary Harrell, who had survived the harrowing 1993 fight in Mogadishu, Somalia. Harrell described the ninety-six hours of fighting that Mitchell and the men of Fifth Special Forces Group had endured as “the most intense urban combat conditions to date in Operation Enduring Freedom.” General Brown described Mitchell’s task as “mission impossible.”
“The fortress [was] nearly impregnable,” recounted Brown. “Seventeen warriors attacked on what—on a good day—would have [involved] thousands of soldiers.”
Balding, smiling, looking more like a high school biology teacher than a stone-cold killer, Mitchell was suddenly the most famous soldier in America.
Pretty good, he thought, for a kid from Milwaukee who had nearly quit Special Forces a year earlier.
A handful of men had gotten on wild horses and defeated the Taliban.
Mitchell had to laugh. He remembered the day when he couldn’t even ride a horse.
EPILOGUE
After the victory in Mazar and the Battle of Qala-i-Janghi, combat operations in northern Afghanistan began to wind down. The Taliban were beaten, and the Northern Alliance was in control. Conventional U.S. Army and Marine forces soon arrived in large numbers and began the long-term effort to secure the country and hunt down Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda.
The epic success of the Horse Soldiers, as they were dubbed, was stunning, by both historical and contemporary standards. The campaign is, in fact, a template for the way the present war—and future ones—should be fought. Instead of large-scale occupations, we should rely on small units of Special Forces who have proved it’s infinitely more effective to work with a country’s soldiers and citizens at eye level. The SF soldiers believe that we must now resolve the root problems plaguing Afghanistan; they are uniquely trained and equipped to do just that.
At the time of the capture of Mazar-i-Sharif, there were fewer than fifty U.S. military personnel like Nelson and Dean on the ground. They accomplished in two months what Pentagon planners had said would take two years. In all, about 350 Special Forces soldiers, 100 CIA officers, and 15,000 Afghan troops succeeded where the British in the nineteenth century, and the Soviets in the 1980s, had failed. Between October 19, 2001, when Captain Mitch Nelson’s team landed in Afghanistan, and the early months of 2002, when Nelson and other Special Forces teams left the country for good, the United States would eventually spend a mere $70 million to defeat an army of 50,000 to 60,000 Taliban fighters. The story of the Horse Soldiers was not unlike a Western, featuring high-tech lasers rather than six-shooters, fought on horseback.
“It’s as if the Jetsons had met the Flintstones,” Special Forces soldier Ben Milo said to me.
The political victory proved just as overwhelming as the military one. “To this day Al Qaeda still considers the campaign their largest, most destructive defeat,” Dean explained. American military planners and Afghan leaders like General Dostum and General Atta had taken great pains to make sure that the war remained the Afghans’ war, and not one of American occupation. Local Afghans hailed Nelson and Dean as liberators. In 2001, as hostilities began, the Taliban had little base of support among local people. And when their leadership began to collapse, they had nowhere to retreat. They couldn’t blend into the countryside and fight an insurgency from there.
By entering Afghanistan with a small force, and by aligning themselves with groups that once had been battling each other and pointing them in one direction at the Taliban, U.S. forces found robust support among Afghans. They proved the usefulness of understanding and heeding, the “wants and needs” of an enemy, and the local population that may support it. Awareness is the soldier’s number one tool in his kit, beside his M-4 rifle. To win wars against enemies like the Taliban, which are often stateless in their affiliation, you adapt.
You eat what they eat, sleep where they sleep, and think like they think. The information and insight gained from this was the essence of the Special Forces soldiers’ training and experience.
As the Chinese general Sun Tzu wrote in the sixth century B.C., “To win 100 victories in 100 battles is not the acme of skill. To subdue the enemy without fighting is the acme of skill.” Sergeant Sam Diller, part of Nelson’s team, carried this aphorism in a notebook, and he read it often while atop his mountain lookout.
The success of the mission was “about as perfect an execution of guerrilla force as could be studied,” reflected the commander of U.S. Special Forces at Fort Bragg, Major General Geoffrey Lambert. Unfortunately, said Lambert, “It may never be repeated.”
His words would prove prescient.
On December 10, 2001, Nelson and his men had to suddenly leave their safe house in Mazar—and Afghanistan. They would not return as soldiers riding at Dostum’s side. For all intents, their time in Afghanistan was done. The order was as shocking as it was abrupt. Leave? Without saying goodbye to anyone? To Dostum? It was unthinkable. Dostum, when he heard the news, was hurt and angry. But Nelson and his team had no choice. They’d been summoned to fly to K2 and meet with Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who, riding a tide of popularity in the United States, wanted firsthand to hear their tales of war.
They had just a few hours to pack. They needed a hot shower, clean clothes, and haircuts, but there wasn’t time. That was okay, the order said. Come as you are. The SecDef wanted to meet the men who captured Afghanistan.
&nb
sp; Ben Milo had picked up a bayonet at Qala-i-Janghi as a souvenir. He polished off the dirt and decided he would give it to Rumsfeld.
Cal Spencer wanted anybody but the easily excitable Milo to present the gift to the SecDef. Milo was the soldier who, after he had almost been overrun in a firefight with the Taliban, jumped up in his foxhole and gave the enemy fighters the finger.
“Just make sure you watch what you say to him,” said Spencer. “Can you tell a story without swearing?”
“I could try,” said Milo.
“Well, just try,” said Spencer.
They landed at K2 and set foot back on the ground that they had tried so hard to leave six weeks earlier, worried that they’d never see combat. In their absence, a veritable tent city had sprung up. Thousands of soldiers and aircraft and vehicles buzzed along paved and graveled streets with names like Broadway, Main, and Lexington, all marked with road signs. The men in camp who recognized them watched warily as they passed, as if Milo and the rest had stepped from the pages of a fantastic spectacle.
They entered a large tent near Colonel Mulholland’s headquarters. Donald Rumsfeld was sitting inside at a table, waiting.
Milo gave him the bayonet, shook hands, and found himself tongue-tied. This was the secretary of defense of the United States of America. Ben awkwardly stepped back into the line of men. Rumsfeld broke up the formality of the moment.
“A lot of people say you’re heroes,” he said.
The guys shook their heads.
“You were doing your job,” said Rumsfeld.
They agreed that they were.
Rumsfeld explained that many people in the United States were surprised that such a small number of men were able to accomplish so much, so quickly.
The men said it had been the Afghans’ victory, and that they had simply helped. And they meant this. They weren’t being coy.
The meeting ended as quickly as it had begun, after about half an hour.
On December 20, 2001, Nelson and five members of his team briefly returned from K2 to Mazar for a difficult, tearful farewell ceremony with Dostum.
The general, along with many of his commanders and troops, had wanted the men to stay as they tried rebuilding the country.
By the middle of January 2002, practically all of the Horse Soldiers were headed home. Upon their return, reporters clamored for the story of these men on horseback, galloping under fire through an Afghan sunset; but after a brief period of notoriety on television and in newspapers, they fell silent, true to their motto as the Quiet Professionals. They didn’t give interviews. They didn’t write books.
Among the many things the team didn’t discuss was John Walker Lindh, though they had been shocked by the discovery of the young man in the fort during the battle.
When Sam Diller had heard that an American had been found among the prisoners, he was incredulous.
“An American what?”
“American Taliban.”
Diller told his fellow teammates to stay away from the man. “Do you all want to go to court?”
Diller understood full well the implications of discovering an American citizen in the middle of a bloody, defiant crowd of Taliban and Al Qaeda prisoners. Diller figured that Lindh would be heading to court, and so would any U.S. soldier who had contact with him.
Nelson told Lindh in his makeshift jail cell on the second floor of the Turkish Schoolhouse, “You’re safe here. But if you jump out of this window, you’re probably going to break your leg.” The message was: stay put.
“What’s going to happen to me?” Lindh kept asking.
“Man, I don’t know. That ain’t for me to decide.”
On December 7, 2001, a week after walking out of the Qala-i-Janghi basement, Lindh was transferred to Camp Rhino, a U.S. Marine base in Kandahar. He was blindfolded, stripped naked, and strapped on a cot that was placed inside a metal trailer. At night, the desert temperatures plummeted. Loud music was played outside the dark, nearly airless container. Periodically, someone would bang on the metal walls and yell insults.
Lindh had announced that he wanted to speak with a lawyer. His FBI interrogators told him that he was certainly entitled to a lawyer, but, “as you can see, there are none here in Afghanistan.” Frank Lindh had in fact hired a San Francisco attorney, James Brosnahan, to represent his son. Brosnahan contacted the FBI to say that the family had retained him, but this information wasn’t communicated to John in Afghanistan.
On January 15, 2002, Attorney General John Ashcroft, in a nationally televised press conference, announced that John Walker Lindh was being charged with aiding and abetting the Taliban in Afghanistan. The charge carried the possibility of life in prison.
A week later, Lindh returned to the States, setting foot on American soil for the first time in seven months, this time in handcuffs.
On February 3, he entered the federal courthouse in Alexandria, Virginia, where he pleaded not guilty to the ten-count indictment against him.
Afterward, Shannon Spann told CNN correspondent Deborah Feyerick that she would prefer the death penalty for Lindh, if he were to be convicted.
She had sat in the courtroom thinking about her husband. “Mike’s life is all about taking responsibility. I wanted to come today to see if John Walker Lindh will take responsibility for what he has done,” she told Feyerick.
When the pleading was over, Spann’s parents and Shannon left the courtroom and walked to the elevator.
Frank Lindh was also leaving the courtroom at the same time. Suddenly, Lindh spotted the Spanns and walked quickly toward them.
Standing before Johnny Spann, Frank Lindh held out his hand in greeting.
Spann stood with his hands in his pockets, unmoved.
“I’m sorry about your son,” said Frank Lindh finally. “My son had nothing to do with it. I’m sure you understand.”
Johnny Spann turned and walked away. He later remarked of the meeting with Lindh, “I should have taken out some of my revenge on him.”
Johnny Spann blamed Lindh for Mike’s death. Of course, Lindh had not actually been the person who fired the shots that killed Mike Spann. But he had aided the enemy, and for the Spann family he was the face of that enemy, perhaps easy to hate but not to understand.
On July 15, 2002, shortly before his trial was to begin, Lindh’s lawyers and prosecutors agreed to a plea arrangement. Lindh would plead guilty to “contributing services to the Taliban and carrying explosives in commission of a felony.” Government prosecutors, on the other hand, would not have to drag into court disclosures about classified operations and CIA officers in Afghanistan. As far as the government was concerned, this was a good deal.
For Lindh’s lawyers, it was the best outcome they felt their client might get, given prevailing attitudes about Lindh. He had become known as a traitor to his country—an “American Taliban.” The deal also meant that the charges against Lindh that he had conspired to kill Spann, and provided material support to the Taliban, were dropped. Lindh would not be held accountable for the death of Mike Spann.
Johnny Spann was in Winfield, Alabama, at the drive-through lane of a fast-food restaurant, when his cell phone rang with the news of Lindh’s plea. He had to pull over and collect himself. He was upset that Lindh’s role in his son’s death would never be investigated.
He didn’t understand why Lindh hadn’t asked Mike for help. He felt that Mike would have done anything to help Lindh escape from the prison. More than ever, he held Lindh responsible for his son’s death. Spann also felt that justice for his son’s death had been sacrificed in order to prevent U.S. soldiers and CIA officers from testifying in court. Lindh’s plea bargain meant that the trial was over.
He later told a television reporter, “We never thought he would get less than a life sentence.”
On October 4, 2004, Lindh was sentenced to twenty years in prison. After the sentencing, Frank Lindh told reporters: “John has no bitterness. He has never expressed the slightest bitterness about
any of the treatment that he suffered…. Never once did John ever say anything against the United States. Never once, not one word.
“John loves America and we love America.”
Today, Lindh is serving his sentence in a federal prison in Indiana. He will be released in 2022, when he is forty-one years old.
Since 2004, his father has petitioned the U.S. government to commute his son’s sentence. His requests thus far have been denied.
As for Shannon Spann, on the cold, gray morning of December 10, 2001, two weeks after he’d been killed at Qala-i-Janghi, she buried Mike at Arlington National Cemetery, in an area where Ira Hayes, one of the Iwo Jima flag raisers, had also been laid to rest. Mike would have been happy with the serendipitous choice of this resting place.
When he lived nearby in Manassas Park, he had enjoyed walking through the cemetery and studying the headstones. Even as a boy during family trips to Washington, D.C., he liked to walk among the headstones.
This bored a sister, who told him, “Mike, let’s go! They’re all the same!”
“No, Tanya, they’re not,” he had said. “There are stories behind them.”
At a memorial service in Alabama several days earlier, one of Mike’s daughters had written him a letter that read: “Dear Daddy, I miss you dearly. Thank you, Daddy, for making the world a better place.” The letter was placed in his casket. The church was packed with five hundred of Mike’s neighbors, his Sunday school teacher, former football teammates, a former Marine buddy. American flags flew at half mast around town, and Christmas lights had been hung up to read: GOD BLESS AMERICA.
Now, at Arlington, the crowd of two hundred people, including George Tenet, listened as Shannon addressed the group with a eulogy about Mike. At one point, she spoke to Mike directly: “Darling, if you were here today, I would tell you that I love you with every part of who I am, and I would thank you for giving me the greatest honor of my whole life, and that was to be called your wife.”