Horse Soldiers

  She would later write of the emptiness that Mike’s death had left in her life. “There are times when I just lie on the floor and say, ‘God, why did this have to be part of your plan? I miss my husband so much.’” After the service, she approached the casket, kissed her hand, and then placed her palm on top.

  “Farewell, my love,” she said, barely above a whisper.

  Captain Mitch Nelson came home to a hero’s welcome in his home state of Kansas, at the state legislature in Topeka.

  Standing next to his wife and their new baby daughter, who had been born while Nelson was riding out of the Darya Suf Valley during the first horse charges, Nelson listened as a resolution was read acknowledging that he had been “instrumental in the liberation of over fifty towns and cities; for the destruction of hundreds of Taliban vehicles, bunkers and heavy equipment; and the surrender, capture, or destruction of thousands of the Taliban and al-Qaeda.”

  “It was an extremely challenging situation,” said Nelson, typically understated. “You never quite knew how things were going to turn out.”

  “I’m not a hero,” he added. “The men of my detachment are the heroes.” He explained that General Dostum had called him “my brother.” Nelson had been honored by this statement.

  Dostum, too, had complimented Nelson on his skill as a warrior. “I asked for a few Americans,” said Dostum. “They brought with them the courage of a whole army.”*

  Cal Spencer’s wife, Marcha, had decorated their team room with red, white, and blue balloons and streamers. Propped up on a desk was a large, white dry-erase board on which one of the wives had written WELCOME HOME!

  Spencer and some of his teammates had walked in, dead tired from the three-day flight, but smiling. Spencer appreciated Marcha’s effort, but all he really wanted was to go home and have a beer.

  He dropped his bag on the dingy linoleum floor and took the scene in. The ceiling tiles were still sagging, and they were still water-stained from the leaky roof overhead. It was good to see things hadn’t changed. The fluorescent-lit hallways still had the same damp, chalky smell.

  In the absence of a bona fide public homecoming celebration, like the kind the guys in the regular Army got, the wives had wanted to make this moment special. They had set out cookies and SunnyD, a nonalcoholic fruit drink (officially, beer wasn’t allowed in the team rooms).

  “Honey,” said Spencer, “let’s go home.”

  On the way back, he and Marcha held hands. She was driving. It had been so long since he’d driven on a civilian street, in a country not at war, that he felt it was better Marcha take the wheel. He didn’t trust himself. Any loud noise, such as the sudden slamming of a door, made him jump.

  Once they got home, one of the first things they did was to have a huge fight, which seemed to clear the air. After that, they got along just fine.

  Ben Milo came home in the middle of the night on January 15, 2002.

  It had been a long wait for all of the wives at Fort Campbell. First, they would be told by the command that the guys would be coming home on a particular day, then that day’s return was inexplicably canceled. Many of the wives had spent the night waiting in the team room, drinking coffee and eating the cake they’d set out for the men.

  Karla finally gave up trying to anticipate Milo’s arrival. But she still went through the normal rituals that all of the wives performed before a homecoming. She made lists of tasks. “Monday, I’m going clothes shopping. Tuesday, I’m going to Sam’s Club to get food. Wednesday, clean the house. Thursday, I’m going to mow the grass…” Karla ended the week by giving the three kids baths, combing their hair, cutting their nails. Everything had to look perfect: We were okay in your absence. It is okay that you were gone. We love you. After several weeks of false alarms, she was sleeping when the phone rang and jarred her awake at five in the morning.

  “I’m home.”

  It was Ben. She breathed a sigh. It was all she could manage.

  “Could you come pick me up in the parking lot?” he asked.

  She threw on some clothes and ran into the kids’ room. “Dad’s home and I’m going to go get him!”

  She asked their eldest son to watch the smaller ones and drove like mad to the church parking lot a mile away. She expected to find him surrounded by a crowd of people and that they would run toward each other and hug, like in the movies.

  Karla pulled into the lot and Milo was standing under a street-light with his duffel bag at his feet. He was alone. He looked tired. He looked up when she pulled in. He gave her a smile as she got out, and they hugged and he kissed her, and then he said quietly, “Let’s go home.”

  They got back in the car and drove in silence. There was so much to say and so few ways to say these things. How do you catch up on four months of anything, let alone four months of being at war? It will take time, Karla thought. She looked over at him and she could see that he had aged.

  She could tell Ben had learned something, but hadn’t liked the experience of learning it.

  The couple had just gotten into bed when the kids came running in and started jumping up and down. “Dad’s home! He’s home!”

  The two youngest children didn’t know who Milo was. They had been just one and two years old when he left. Milo bent down and picked them up and gave them a kiss. He knew he’d have to reintroduce himself. And that, too, would take time.

  Over the next few weeks, Karla wondered when she and Ben would start fighting over the little things needed to run a household. The other wives had told stories about their husbands who had come home from deployments and insisted on taking charge of the household, as if their wives had been waiting to be told what to do.

  With Ben, Karla felt none of that belligerence. He pretty much split the parenting fifty-fifty. He asked Karla for advice when it came to handling a discipline problem with one of the kids. He wanted to know how she’d handled things in the past. He seemed to think first and then open his mouth.

  At the end of January, they celebrated their fifteenth wedding anniversary. They went to visit Milo’s parents in Chicago, and his mom and dad watched the kids and they took a hotel in the city and went out on the town. She would catch Ben thinking and wonder what it was that made his face so troubled. Over time, he told her: the killing.

  Had it been right? Karla guessed he had shot his weapon before, but that this was the first time he had killed someone.

  Karla didn’t feel they were a strictly religious family, but she saw her husband struggle with the fact that he had killed someone. He talked about being in the trench with Essex and Winehouse, and being overrun, and shooting at people.

  He talked with his sister a lot about these feelings. Karla figured it was easier this way for him to unburden himself. He told his sister that he had killed people and he didn’t know how many. He wanted to know if God would forgive him. He knew that he had belonged in Afghanistan, and that the Taliban soldiers would have killed him if he hadn’t shot them first, but still the killing troubled him. He figured it was something that he would carry with him for the rest of his life.

  As for Major Mark Mitchell, his wife threw a Christmas party when he returned home to Tennessee. Also invited were the guys who’d been blown up at the fort, many of whom Mitchell hadn’t seen since last glimpsing them through his binoculars moments after they’d come tumbling back to earth, bleeding and dusty.

  Mitchell, like all of them, felt lucky to be alive. He reflected on how, exactly, he had survived. His Special Forces training had taught him to ignore pain and mental exhaustion. But it had taught him something more important, and complex: to think first and shoot last. He was able to set aside his ideas about how he thought Afghans, Pakistanis, and Saudis might act in a given situation, and he listened instead to what they were saying or doing in response to a question or turn of events. He had been trained to see the world through other people’s eyes.

  He knew that if he asked an Afghan man to do something for him, and if the man answer
ed, “Inshallah”—God willing—what the man really meant was, I don’t want to do this for you. This was an important insight to have if what you had just asked was whether or not the man could provide soldiers for a next day’s battle.

  Such an insight required Mitchell to ask new questions of himself, such as, “What can I do for him, so that he will do something for me?” His weapon would stay in its holster; coercion rarely worked in attempting to gain the cooperation of a population already terrified at the hands of an oppressor like the Taliban.

  Shortly after the battle, Mitchell called his wife in Tennessee. “Did you see what happened?” he asked. “I was the ground commander during that fighting.” Maggie could tell he was overwhelmed. He kept trying to explain to her the enormity of the battle. He sounded frustrated and tired. Months later, even as he prepared to receive his Distinguished Service Cross at the ceremony at Central Command, he still hadn’t grasped the battle’s impact. One of his uncles, a World War II veteran, explained to Mitchell that the ceremony would bring back memories of the fighting, and that not all of them would be welcome. And he was right.

  What had happened during those days suddenly seemed as vivid and real as ever, and Mitchell started reliving it. He smelled the dead bodies again, heard the roar of the bombs. It was not pleasant and he tried to put a lid on it. As he stood on the stage, he looked up, sought out Maggie in the audience, and smiled. She beamed. He felt he’d come home, finally.

  Soon, however, he had to leave again.

  In February 2003, along with most of the soldiers of Fifth Special Forces Group, a number of whom had fought in Afghanistan, Mitchell deployed to Iraq. Some of the men in the Special Forces were not fans of this war from its beginnings but, as true and loyal soldiers, they fought there.

  And they died.

  Bill Bennett, the jovial, good-natured medic who had ridden with Sam Diller and yodeled country and western songs from the saddle, was shot and killed in a firefight in Ramadi on September 12, 2003.

  Ten months later, Captain Paul Syverson, who had been blown up in the errant bombing in Qala-i-Janghi, was hit by an enemy mortar that came flying into his base camp in Balad. Syverson had been walking along and talking to a friend as they made their way to the camp’s mess hall.

  And Brett Walden, whom the Afghan women had found handsome and who had been embarrassed by their flirtations, was killed in Rubiah on August 5, 2008, while carrying out a convoy mission.

  Before deploying to Iraq, Sergeant Kevin Morehead, a medic who had been attached to John Bolduc’s team (Bolduc had been the Fifth Group soldier tasked to K2 to survey its building), paused to reflect on the injuries two close friends had survived in Afghanistan.

  “I would never in my wildest dreams have said, ‘Mike [a teammate], you’re gonna get your right arm blown off. And Corey, you’re gonna get shot in the gut.’”

  At that time, I was visiting with Morehead in his team room at Fort Campbell. Strewn around us were radios, weapons, and Iraqi tank manuals, which men like Morehead were studying before they headed into Baghdad.

  “To me,” said Morehead, “that’s the amazing part of the story. You’re sitting here talking to me, and maybe you’ll look back and say, ‘I knew that guy once—that’s the guy that got killed on infil, goin’ into some other place.’”

  Morehead was killed in the same firefight alongside Bill Bennett.

  When I had asked Morehead how this premonition that he might be killed affected his daily life, he said: “I’ll tell you honestly, it doesn’t, because I believe in God, and I believe in America.”

  As many of the same men who had ridden horses against the Taliban in Afghanistan were deployed to Iraq, the worst fears of the Afghans who had fought with them against the Taliban were confirmed.

  Nadir Shihab, whose house had been blown up by the Taliban during the fighting at Qala-i-Janghi, told me, “We were very happy, sir, after the Americans came to Afghanistan. Very happy.

  “The Taliban was a bad regime. And now we want to have security. We want to rebuild our country once again, sir.” He wondered if the Americans would stay and help with this enormous task.

  Commander Ahmed Lal, the subcommander who’d fought alongside Nelson, later echoed his same concern to a U.S. government official. “We are men,” Lal had said. “If we give our hand to someone, we will be with him until the last drops of our blood.”

  Lal, who had sacrificed much while fighting the Taliban—he had not seen his family, who were living in exile in Iran, in over five years—felt a bond with his American counterparts, one that he did not want to see broken.

  In May 2003, when Ambassador Paul Bremer, the director of reconstruction and humanitarian assistance in Iraq, “fired” the Iraq National Army by disbanding it, I received a phone call from a soldier who’d fought in Afghanistan alongside General Dostum.

  “We just lost Iraq,” said the officer, referring to Bremer’s decision.

  This was well before pundits or reporters had begun making similar assessments about America’s fight in that country.

  I asked what he meant.

  “Ambassador Bremer has sent 500,000 young men home with their weapons, after we’ve bombed their country. They’re angry. In the end, they won’t be on our side.”

  The Special Forces officer was correct. Instead of assimilating, and working with, this former enemy army, the Americans had driven it underground, where it mutated into a potent insurgency.

  That this officer had anticipated this outcome was not surprising. During the course of my research, it became clear that solutions to problems such as these likely would be found in the ethos of the Special Forces community. Just as a painter would not study light without studying shadow, or as a composer would not consider one tempo without its counterpoint, we would do worse than to study war-fighting as practiced by these men in order to study and create peace. Wars, as the earlier military thinker Carl von Clausewitz pointed out, are not fought to kill people; they are fought to effect political change. They are violent, expensive, and represent one of the universe’s great rifts in the social contract. To study peace, then, is, de facto, to study war. Any political or social movement, of any stripe, that does not grasp the degree to which these opposites are actually twins is fruitless.

  In this way, the story recounted here is also a flag raised against the brute visage of fundamentalism, in all its forms, here and abroad. The book is, I hope, an account of religious and cultural hubris and misanthropy. What struck me during my research was learning the degree to which violence had often been a third or fourth choice in resolving conflict. Indeed, some men in this book never fired their weapon, even when doing so would have put an “end” to a problem. Instead, the crisis of a particular moment was fixed by crouching in the dirt with a stick, opposite the “opponent,” and scratching out a solution. This method, though time-intensive, can be far more effective and lasting than kicking down doors, guns blazing, a more usual (albeit often incorrect) perception of a modern soldier’s modus operandi.

  In short, the story recounted here seems to exist in another time, before news cycles filled with stories about abuses and sometimes confused military thinking. Because the Horse Soldiers were so underequipped when they deployed, and because, in fact, the United States was not prepared at all to fight a war in Afghanistan, these warriors landed in Afghanistan and comported themselves with the nuanced awareness of anthropologists, diplomats, and social workers. They had realized that their deployment was historic. Indeed, Special Forces, and America, had never fought a war in just this way. These soldiers were loath to offend any customs of local people or to appear as hegemonic imperialists. This demeanor is drilled into them during their grueling training. As Major Dean Nosorog recently told me, it’s precisely this ethos that accounted for their success.

  In Iraq, America would be perceived by the local population to be the invader, the heavy-handed imperialist. In Afghanistan, the Taliban, especially the “foreign” Taliban so
ldiers, bore this unlucky distinction. But as more men and money and lives were lost in Iraq, the Taliban regrouped in Afghanistan, feeding on the growing discontent of villagers who did not see the promise of a post-U.S. victory bringing a new, prosperous future.

  Millions of dollars of aid poured into the country, yet the funds remained bottled up in Kabul, a city now teeming with nongovernment workers and diplomats afraid of Taliban attack in the countryside. This is unfortunate, because the rural and remote regions are often where the goods and services are needed most. Car bombings, kidnappings, ambushes, all tools from the war in Iraq, are now endemic in Afghanistan.

  In light of these developments, U.S. officials have gone so far as to announce a new willingness to deal with moderate elements of the Taliban organization, an enlightened move that men like Dean would approve of. “We weakened their leadership,” he told me, “by asking them to defect and join us. They started fighting each other. Their organization collapsed from the inside as well.”

  In the parlance of guerrilla war, we will have to “get down in the weeds” and also work a diplomatic magic from there. The reality of working with and uniting disparate factions can be fraught with traps, such as when, after the Battle of Qala-i-Janghi, Dostum’s men were accused of sequestering hundreds of Taliban soldiers in truck containers and suffocating them, a timeworn method of murder also practiced by the Taliban.

  At present, in early 2009, the Taliban once again control large portions of Afghanistan, and to subdue them, the U.S. government has promised to commit greater forces in the entire country. At the same time, Pakistan is becoming less politically stable, a development that affects both Afghanistan and America’s ability to defeat the Taliban. The clock is ticking.

  Afghanistan president Hamid Karzai, the saying goes, is really just the mayor of Kabul.

  On February 11, 2009, however, even that seemed in doubt. Suicide bombers, reportedly supported by Pakistani fundamentalists, shocked Kabul’s four million residents by attacking the Ministry of Education, Directorate of Prisons, and the Ministry of Justice, killing, according to the New York Times, “at least 20 people and wounding 57.” These attacks took place just several hundred yards from Karzai’s presidential palace.