Horse Soldiers

In high school he ran cross country, played football, and wrestled. He had a quirky sense of humor. He loved to play the piano and knew most of Ray Charles’s numbers. He liked Sting and the Talking Heads. He loved Coen brothers movies. He had an artistic side that Maggie rarely saw except when he was taking photographs.

  His humble demeanor disguised brute strength. Mark could lift himself hand-over-hand forty feet up in the air, with sixty-five pounds of field gear on, while down below, as he clung on the rope, other guys were bent over their knees, vomiting into the cinders. Mitchell’s training had taught him to ignore pain and mental exhaustion. It taught him to pay attention to nuances, to what a man says and what he doesn’t say. It taught him to think about using his brain first, his weapon next. During his deployments, he had tried to set aside his ideas of how he thought Pakistanis, Jordanis, Saudis would act, and to listen and observe what they actually said and did. He hoped to do the same with the Afghans he would encounter.

  The son of a federal prosecutor, Mitchell had grown up listening to stories of his father’s exploits. Back in the 1970s, Milwaukee was at the center of the burgeoning U.S. heroin market. He had admired his dad’s courage, and never forgotten that he lived in a world where there were bad people, and it was a just thing to punish them. He’d entered the military to prove himself in such a world, what Maggie called his “Hoo-ah” macho stuff.

  After fours years as an infantry officer, he found Special Forces and it changed him. He loved who they were, what they did. They were the best kept secret in the world. It seemed the Navy SEALs got all the publicity, with a new movie every summer about some cool shit they had blown up in a fictional South American country. Even the Delta Force, which the U.S. Army didn’t officially acknowledge as existing, got more press than Special Forces. None of the guys in SF had ever written a book, which was fine with them. They knew the public spotlight only helped the enemy target you more easily. There was a Special Forces bumper sticker around Fort Campbell that read: THE QUIET PROFESSIONALS. They joked about it—“Hey, man, we’re the quiet professionals,” delivered with their best DJ voice—but they meant it, too.

  Around four o’clock in the afternoon on October 24, Maggie and the girls dropped Mark off at the church parking lot. He picked up his daughters, one in each arm, and told them he loved them. He’d spent the day in the house watching the Disney Channel with the girls. They’d played tag in the yard. For lunch, they’d gone to Burger King. All the while, he’d been anxious.

  The key was to keep life “normal.” More than anything, he wanted to get the leaving over with. He expected to be gone six months, maybe a year. All his gear, his rucksack with his food, sleeping bag, a change of brown desert camo fatigues, his ammo and weapons, was packed neatly in a pallet on the plane waiting at the airfield. In a small knapsack slung over his shoulder he carried a Nalgene bottle with water, a toothbrush, a razor, and some old issues of U.S. News & World Report, the only newsmagazine he could ever find time to read. All that was left to do was to walk on the plane.

  Mark boarded the bus and rode out to the airfield to the C-17 grumbling against its anchors on the runway. After less than six weeks of preparation, he and the rest of the Fifth Group were ready to take down a country.

  Twenty-four hours later, he stepped off in the dark at K2, in Uzbekistan, the sky engorged, oozing the milk of a new starlight.

  He was in. Game on.

  PART TWO

  HORSEMEN, RIDE

  Dehi, Afghanistan

  October 16, 2001

  Finally, thought General Mohammed Mohaqeq, the Americans were coming. Finally…finally.

  When the two towers that had seemed to stretch all the way to heaven had swallowed themselves and lay in heaps like strange, smoking beasts, the Americans finally heard the cry that Mohaqeq believed all people hear at the hour of their dying. They had awakened to the soundtrack of life in Afghanistan.

  He had heard that sound for decades now, in Kabul, Mazar-i-Sharif, and today in a place called Safid Kotah—the White Mountain—where he had been fighting several thousand Taliban soldiers at the very hour America was attacked.

  Mohaqeq had been hunkered in his mud hut near the mountain, his field headquarters, wearily poring over a map, when an aide rushed in with a radio and handed it to him. “Sir, there is news on the Motorola.” Mohaqeq, leader of the Hazara people, with 2,500 men under his command, had listened and then set the radio down. He was speechless. He had been to the United States as a young man. New York. So big. A giant. He knew immediately that the Americans would be coming. For seven years, he had been fighting the Taliban, and losing. He was overjoyed.

  He and his people had endured unbelievable hardship in that struggle. Along the streets of Mazar-i-Sharif, past the butchered goats draped in shimmering veils of flies, past the vegetable hawkers, past old men beating spoons out of hubcaps, past the war orphans staring mute at the sun, hands out, begging for even a crumb, past all of this the Taliban had come, to the doors of the Hazara. The crazed soldiers had kicked in the doors.

  They had dragged the men—old men, young men, boys—any Hazara male unfortunate enough to be caught cowering under these rickety, dry eaves, and hauled them into the street, slit their throats and castrated them, and left them to rot in the road, dark eyes frozen wide as the killer’s dagger had snickered across their stretched necks. So much damage and sorrow that it had seemed to General Mohammed Mohaqeq that it would take years for any man to ever live normally again.

  But he would try.

  In early October, Mohaqeq had received a mysterious visit from a most dangerous man, General Abdul Rashid Dostum, who had told him, “Brother, we are going to be visited by some special friends. What is your feeling about this?”

  Mohaqeq explained that he had been writing letters for the past year, three hundred in all, to the United Nations in New York City, in America, beseeching: “You must do something to help us. The Taliban are killing us.” Mohaqeq said he would take help anywhere he found it.

  “Our friends,” Dostum continued, “need our help. I want you to lay fourteen lightbulbs in front of your home, and light them.”

  “But how will I light them?” asked Mohaqeq.

  Mohaqeq did not know where he would find electricity in this cold, rocky place along the Darya Suf River. He was several days’ ride from any electricity in any direction. The nearest large city was Mazar-i-Sharif, sixty miles upriver by horse.

  The man held up his hand. “You will figure it out. If they see fourteen lights, they will know it is safe to land.”

  And then he left.

  Now, one week later, in the dark of the autumn midnight, Mohaqeq bent down and connected an electric cable strung with fourteen bulbs to a gas-powered generator he’d been able to procure. The bulbs flared and lay glowing in the fine dust that puffed underfoot with the lightest step.

  Mohaqeq stepped back to admire his handiwork. There was no sound except the thwap of the approaching helicopter.

  The helicopter landed and several strange men got out, wearing American dungarees and flannel shirts, carrying guns and computers and heavy black duffels. Mohaqeq made them tea in his headquarters and fed them bread, and they seemed to sleep with their eyes open—they were that vigilant—and in the morning Mohaqeq drove them up the river several miles to the village of Dehi, the pickup jouncing over rocks and ruts and straining through the iron-dark shadows of the valley.

  At a bend in the river, facing a broad yellow plain, they came to a mud building—a paddock surrounded by high mud walls, braced by heavy timber. The Americans named the place upon arrival: “the Alamo.” They anxiously set about sweeping and unpacking.

  Also in the camp was Abdul Rashid Dostum, who seemed to Mohaqeq to already have a close relationship with the CIA, and Atta Mohammed Noor, a fierce lieutenant who was commanded by Mullah Fahim Khan. The owly, gray-bearded mullah had succeeded Ahmed Shah Massoud, who had been assassinated September 9, and now lay buried on an Afghanistan mountaint
op.

  These fierce men formed the triumvirate of the Northern Alliance, the Taliban’s mortal enemy, which had been organized and commanded by Massoud.

  It was Fahim Khan who had spirited Massoud’s torn body out of the country into Tajikistan after his assassination for safe burial, and it was Khan who had held the Northern Alliance together in the aftermath of the great warrior’s death in September. Massoud had spent years forging the front with Dostum’s Uzbeks and Mohaqeq’s Hazaras, alongside his own Tajik soldiers, and the Alliance had come close to crumbling.

  Some 7,000 men had been fighting all summer against the Taliban in the Darya Suf River Valley, rife with thousands of land mines, dotted by villages that stood mute in the mountain light, the broken bric-a-brac of buildings strewn on cold ground in the aftermath of months of Taliban attacks. In some places, the Taliban had barred the inhabitants inside their homes and burned the villages to the ground.

  Through the summer, Mohaqeq, Dostum, and Atta’s men had been pushed farther and farther south, deeper into the valley. At this same time, Massoud was battling in the north, about seventy-five miles away, in an ever-thinning slice of the verdant Panjshir Valley, his supply lines in threat of being cut. Holding this northern front, if he could, Massoud would wait for Mohaqeq, Atta, and Dostum to ride up from the south, attacking the outnumbering Taliban from the rear.

  If the Alliance could do this, the Taliban front, which stretched eighty miles east and west, from Konduz near the Pakistan border to Mazar-i-Sharif, would be divided.

  The Alliance’s goal was to capture Mazar-i-Sharif. If a man held Mazar, then he could hold the north. And if he held the north, he could capture the capital, Kabul. From there, he could attack the desert wastes in the south stretching from Kandahar to the border with Pakistan. His army would rule Afghanistan.

  But capturing Mazar had so far proven impossible. In 1998, the Taliban had marched into the city, laid waste, killing an estimated 4,000 to 5,000 people, and held it ever since. They were encamped in a mammoth mud fortress, complete with a moat and gunports cut into its high walls. The place was called Qala-i-Janghi, and it happened to have been Dostum’s former headquarters when he commanded the city in 1997 with a 20,000-man militia. Dostum was eager to return to the fort and reclaim what was his.

  Under his protection, Mazar had been a quasi-cosmopolitan city, by relative standards, escaping the plague of devastating urban warfare and aerial bombings that had leveled other parts of the country. As the Taliban captured parts of the eastern and southern sections of the country in the mid-1990s, Dostum snorted, “I refuse to live in a country where a man can’t drink vodka, and where women can’t wear skirts and go to school.” He could be a benevolent dictator.

  There had been much for him to protect. Rich oil and gas deposits lay nearby. The city’s airport boasted the country’s longest paved runway, capable of landing transport and supply aircraft; the bridge north of the city over the ancient Oxus River (which Alexander the Great had forded during his conquest of the area) could be used to move men and matériel from Uzbekistan. This was why it was such an important piece of ground to hold in the defeat of the Taliban. But increasingly, Mazar’s capture seemed unrealistic.

  The men under Dostum, Mohaqeq, and Atta’s command had marched and ridden horseback against the Taliban in countless fierce gunfights. Their loyalty to their leaders remained unwavering. However, now their supplies were running low, and winter was coming. The mountain passes of the Hindu Kush Mountains, catapulting 25,000 feet from the desert floor, would soon freeze; large parts of the country would be locked in the white, hoary iron of winter.

  For the men, breakfast was often a dusty rind of flat bread. At night, the exhausted soldiers cloaked their horses with warm blankets and slept uncovered in the open under piercing starlight. In the mornings, they drank from the cold, rank buckets only after the horses had taken their fill and lipped from their masters’ hands a morning’s breakfast of weevily oats. Then the men saddled up, battered rifles across their saddles, and rode back into the withering fire of another day.

  Their supplies and matériel had been seriously depleted by the fighting in nearby Safid Kotah. There, the Taliban had dug in with some two hundred bunkers along the flinty face rock of the mountain, including emplacements for tanks. The White Mountain, already dusted by the early snows of autumn, had to be taken. Mohaqeq and Dostum attacked it for a month, starting in mid-September.

  Some 2,000 men on horses tried riding up the sloped face, rising 7,000 feet, but they were cut down by walls of small-arms and tank fire. They had no choice but to skirt the back side and picket the horses and begin climbing the rock by hand, their battered AK-47 rifles flopped over their shoulders on ragged slings made from twined duct tape. On the way up, step by step, this was hard, vicious, hand-to-hand fighting, often in knee-deep snow. Mohaqeq’s men did not have combat boots; they wore scuffed men’s dress shoes, or scrabbled along barefoot. Several thousand heavily armed Taliban soldiers stood at the top, firing down at them as they climbed. Their bullets punched the snow around the climbing men with sickening thuds.

  Supplies dropped so low among Mohaqeq’s men that each was given just five bullets before a gunfight. To compensate, the under-supplied fighters started setting ambushes at night. When they captured a Taliban bunker, they scooped up precious grenades and stuffed their suit coat pockets full of stray rounds. They drove the captured Taliban tanks off the mountainside and cheered when they crashed at the bottom. They did not want the Taliban to recapture them, and they did not have the expertise to keep them running. A Taliban general on the mountaintop was so convinced of his invincibility that he told Mohaqeq over his walkie-talkie: “If you take this mountain from us, I will give you my wife.”

  After thirty days of fighting, in mid-October, the men took the mountain.

  Mohaqeq’s aide called out on his radio, “What do you think now, brother? We have come for your wife.”

  “We have been ordered to retreat!” came the harried reply.

  The Taliban soldiers fled the White Mountain en masse, an exodus of tanks, old Russian armored personnel carriers, and fleets of battered black Toyota pickups, sending a plume of dust and diesel smoke across the horizon, the army appearing and disappearing over rolling hills as it ran.

  About fifteen miles north of Safid Kotah, the Taliban army stopped and turned, swinging its turrets and rifle barrels back down the valley, resetting for a next battle with Mohaqeq and his men.

  Mohaqeq had halted the Northern Alliance’s rout near the village of Dehi, a lonesome, windswept settlement of low adobe storefronts and hitching rails for horses lining a muddy main street. Dehi was the end of the road, so to speak, the farthest south Taliban tanks had been able to travel in pursuit of Alliance fighters. Mohaqeq and his cohorts had lurked in the shadows of the granite cliffs, amid the sound of the jade shallows of the Darya Suf River, just out of range of the Taliban guns.

  But now Mohaqeq faced a dilemma that had plagued him for seven years. Whenever the Northern Alliance soldiers took new ground, a Taliban tank would roll into view over the next rocky ridge and charge down the slope at the ragged horsemen, who were bent over their horses’ necks, firing their AKs wildly over the tops of the steady animals’ ears, before wheeling suddenly in retreat and hightailing out of harm’s way.

  Mohaqeq knew they would need something to stop those tanks. Something the Taliban had never expected.

  At Dostum’s camp in Dehi, the Americans introduced themselves as “Baba Daoud,” or Brother Dave (actually Dave Olson), who was tall, broad-shouldered, and sported a sparse, black beard; “Baba J.J.” (J. J. Sawyer), who seemed the oldest, with his striped beard and haggard, concerned squint; and “Baba Mike” (Mike Spann), who appeared to be the youngest—thin, pale, muscular, with short sandy hair, an intense man.

  These men, Mohaqeq learned, worked for the American CIA. Mohaqeq was disappointed there weren’t soldiers among them; these men had guns, but they were
n’t military fighters, Mohaqeq knew that much. He had seen that they spent a lot of time typing on computers, which they connected to small black foldable antennas that looked like spiderwebs spun from strange plastic. They also carried brick-sized stacks of American bills in nylon duffel bags; this money, Mohaqeq guessed, was part of the bounty to be paid to Atta Mohammed Noor, Fahim Khan’s subcommander. With it, Atta was to buy food and ammunition for his men. Khan himself was encamped at his headquarters 210 miles south, near Kabul, in the village of Barak.

  Two days earlier, a man named Gary Schroen, the leader of another CIA team recently arrived in Khan’s village, had handed over $1.3 million in cash to the recalcitrant warlord. (There were two separate CIA teams in Afghanistan; the team lead by Baba J.J. and Baba David in Dehi reported to Schroen’s headquarters.) Schroen had plopped the cash down on a table in a nylon bag, and none of Khan’s men had immediately moved to take possession, as if the money did not matter.

  When one of the men did pick it up, the minion’s eyes widened in surprise, and he gave an extra tug on the straps to lift it. Schroen looked on, amused.

  The wily Khan did not have high regard for American soldiers; after several decades of fighting with Ahmed Shah Massoud, he did not believe there was anything an American could teach an Afghan about killing and repelling invaders on his soil. The money, however, would go a long way toward changing his mind. Atta, on the other hand, grudgingly wanted American bullets, blankets, and bombs. But most of all, the fiery guerrilla fighter wanted the respect of the United States military.

  In early October, when the American bombs had started hitting around the country—hitting at nothing, really, but sand and the occasional Taliban bunker—Atta had become so angry that he announced he was immediately ending the war until the Americans discussed their plan with him.

  Atta was sure that the errant bombing had only boosted the Taliban’s morale. He could hear them laughing about it on their radios. At the same time, it had made his soldiers question the seriousness of the Americans.