Horse Soldiers

  Some of his soldiers, part of the Tajik force formerly under Massoud’s commmand in the north, had been poised in a village twenty miles from Mazar-i-Sharif. Atta was convinced they could capture the city if only the Americans would drop bombs on targets he had identified. The Pentagon ignored Atta Mohammed Noor and his men.

  In early October, the Americans were strictly fighting an air war. Without U.S. troops on the ground to spot and identify Taliban positions as bona fide targets, the Pentagon was not going to take the word of a lone Tajik fighter. At one point, without any air support, Atta’s troops were overrun and five men were captured by the Taliban. The men were beaten and nooses placed around their necks. They were dragged from the bumper of a pickup truck until dead. Atta, a pious man who prayed to Allah five times a day, was troubled by these deaths, which he felt could have been avoided with the Americans’ assistance. He was embarrassed that he had failed to convince America to turn its might in support of his struggling men.

  But he had learned something several days earlier that had brightened his mood. The American government had decided to bring to Afghanistan highly trained men who were used to operating behind enemy lines. He believed they would know how to spot Taliban targets on the ground. Atta was anxious to meet this special breed of men.

  What Atta learned next infuriated him: he would not be working with any of these men in his camp. Instead, they were going to work for Dostum in his. For over twenty years, since the Soviets’ invasion in 1979, he and Dostum had been perennial enemies. Atta believed the Uzbeki was a rank opportunist.

  During the Soviet occupation, Dostum had actually fought for the Russians by guarding the oil and gas fields in his birthplace of Sheberghan from guerrilla attack. Dostum loved drink, women, and song; he was not pious. The atheism of the Communists did not bother him. He followed power. From it flowed safety and prosperity in an uncertain, violent land.

  But when Dostum saw that the Soviets’ puppet government was going to fold, he had abandoned his patron and taken up arms with Massoud against the collapsing presidency in Kabul. Now, when Atta heard that he himself would not be receiving American assistance in his fight against the Taliban, he threatened to attack an imminent air drop of supplies meant for Dostum’s troops. Atta meant this threat with every ounce of his tall, wiry frame, although he knew it could bring about his death.

  This brewing contretemps between the two warlords had caused no end of consternation for Baba J.J. at the Alamo and his boss, Gary Schroen. Trying to salvage the situation, Dostum, ever the diplomat, assured Atta that he would share fifty-fifty any assistance he received from the Americans.

  He seemed to be telling the truth, Atta thought. His feelings were further soothed when J.J. presented him with a package. A grateful Atta opened it and discovered inside $250,000 in American bills. He announced that the money would useful in feeding, clothing, and arming his men.

  He added that he would call off the attack on the supply drop. He and Dostum would fight together, against the Taliban.

  About 250 miles to the north, in Uzbekistan, at K2, Colonel John Mulholland gathered Mitch Nelson’s team—twelve somber, burly guys in tan camo and black watch caps—at the helicopter’s side and told them, “You might not come back from this mission alive.”

  Nelson was just glad to be leaving K2, which he and the team had come to see as a cesspool. Puddles of multicolored goo, like ruby-tinted antifreeze with cold coffee splashed in, lay glistening outside his tent, which had flooded in the recent rains. The ground was literally regurgitating its polluted past, left there by the Soviets when they invaded Afghanistan. (Somebody in command headquarters would later guess that some of the liquid was “nuclear” in nature, which meant the place was possibly radioactive.) The camp needed to be lifted about six inches off the ground and drained.

  Colonel Mulholland looked the men in the eye when he told them they might not come back to this camp alive, and everyone on Nelson’s team appreciated that. At least he’s got the balls to tell us this might be suicide, thought medic Scott Black. No bullshit and no kidding here. Black’s grandfather had been a paratrooper in World War II, a member of the 101st Airborne, the Screaming Eagles, made famous by The Band of Brothers television show, which had been on TV back at Fort Campbell just as Black was leaving for Afghanistan. He wondered if Granddad back in southern Michigan had ever done anything as daring as this, landing in enemy country with just a handful of guys, ready to gut it out over a long winter’s campaign…. He knew the answer was yes. Talking to his grandfather, Black felt that he had a bridge to the past. He also felt like he was walking a tightrope into the future.

  Standing at the side of the helo, Mulholland asked that the men bow their heads and pray. It was October 19, 2001. Go time.

  The Army chaplain, a tall, taciturn kid, a recent graduate of Wake Forest, drawled a few words asking God’s protection, and that they should vanquish their enemies, and be fine men in this hour of war, and come back home. The reverend had carted boxes of Bibles, Korans, the Talmud, even Buddhist texts, into the camp to better serve all the faiths of the men in his charge. So far, the makeshift chapel, a mud-spattered tent with a plywood pulpit, had remained empty. But now the men prayed.

  Cal Spencer reached down the front of his black fleece jacket and drew up the medallion hanging there on its silver chain, St. Michael, the patron saint of paratroopers. He recited his favorite verse from the Bible, “A greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down his life for his friends,” and dropped the medallion back down his jacket front. When the chaplain was done, Spencer said to all of the guys, “All right then, brother,” and with his M-4 rifle in one hand, he reached up with the other to the helo’s side and climbed the rear ramp, where inside it was dark and smelled of old canvas, rubber hoses, and aviation fuel; he could feel the thrum of the helo’s rotors spinning overhead, coming at him through the thin skin of the airframe in cold, metallic waves.

  Spencer stood up in the cramped quarters. The interior was dimly lit by several bare lightbulbs in their own cages of wire. Overhead ran a maze of silver hydraulic lines and red and green electrical wires stretching the length of the ship, with the interior measuring about thirty feet by almost eight feet across. The interior walls were padded with gray quilting for insulation. Web seats, six on a side, lined each wall. The insulation did nothing to deaden the thump of the rising engines. The helo rattled and hummed under Spencer’s feet.

  He started moving around the gear stacked in the middle of the metal deck—thick plastic crates, filled with ammo, extra food, radios, winter clothing, each weighing 120 pounds. These were stacked chest-high, provisions to get them started on the ground until Spencer could coordinate resupply drops in Afghanistan.

  He and the team would be kept fed, clothed, and armed by matériel depots located in Germany, where the gear and food would be packed by Air Force personnel in bundles about the size of VW Beetles, and then flown to Incerlik, Turkey, where they would be unloaded and wheeled onto MC-130 Combat Talon transport jets. From Turkey they would be flown another seven hours over mountains into Afghanistan and kicked out the door at 20,000 feet over drop zones often no bigger than a football field. Twenty thousand feet seemed awfully high to Spencer to kick anything out of an airplane with the hope it would hit the bull’s-eye, but he filed this worry among many he had at the moment. He was most worried about surviving the helicopter flight into Afghanistan.

  Intel was scant on what to expect. The pace of the U.S. bombing, which had begun October 7, had proceeded so quickly that the 160th Nightstalker pilots hadn’t received any briefing from the CIA on the effectiveness of the campaign. Spencer knew the Taliban had in their possession Stinger missiles, which locked onto the heat trail thrown by an aircraft. One of the team’s missions, once they were on the ground, was to look for these missiles and buy them back from friendly Afghans or from easily bribed warlords looking to make a buck.

  The war effort was so new that the CIA had li
ttle else to tell Spencer and the pilots. Military planners at the Pentagon believed that Spencer and his team would spend the bitter winter training the ragtag Northern Alliance soldiers for a spring offensive, which wouldn’t commence until seven months after they had landed. Mulholland had little faith that more than two towns could be captured before winter’s thaw. Time and weather were on the Taliban’s side. If the Taliban could kill enough soldiers through the winter, the Americans would lose heart in the effort. Spencer would be locked in a siege scenario, eating boiled goat and keeping his head down around a dung fire, battered by winter blizzards. The operating idea was that the entire war would take a year and a half before Kabul fell.

  Spencer did not look forward to spending the winter in such austere conditions, but he knew he probably would have to. The team’s planning tent had sat across the muddy road from the CIA’s own well-kept hovel, but even if the CIA officers possessed a treasure of information, they didn’t have the authority to pass any of it on to Spencer. In essence, he and the Special Forces team were about to fly into Afghanistan blind. Medic Scott Black thought it was like the guys in Normandy having to hit the beach without any idea of the German gun emplacements in the surrounding hills.

  Spencer reasoned that if they were going to be shot at by Stinger missiles, there was nothing he or any of the guys could do about that. Worrying wouldn’t stop a rocket from coming up from the ground and hunting the aircraft like a dog chasing a rabbit.

  Soon he was sweating under layers of polypropylene underwear as he grabbed more gear from the rest of the guys as they walked up the ramp. Nobody was saying a word. Just the shuffle and grunt of men moving in synchronized grimness.

  On top of the pile, packed in their own duffel, were six bottles of vodka for General Dostum. Back in Special Forces training ten years earlier, Spencer and the men had learned the value of ingratiating oneself with the warlord at hand. Also stacked up were about a dozen white nylon bags of oats, apparently for the general’s animals. Horses? Spencer thought. I’ll be damned. Horses.

  He looked at the bags of feed and gave them no more thought.

  Master Sergeant Pat Essex, Spencer’s teammate, fully expected to die when he landed, the victim of gunshot or mortar attack. He’d taken part in dangerous infils before. On a training mission, he’d watched as Nightstalker pilots cut their own landing zone using the rotors of the helicopter as giant hedge clippers. They’d been landing in a pine forest and he marveled as the helo dropped into the hole of its own making—pine boughs, pinecones, pine bark flying all over the cabin. Essex now accepted the fact of his upcoming death with a breathtaking resignation that seemed to imply that he would, in fact, survive the helicopter landing. He had become like one of those Kung Fu warriors on late night TV, men who can’t be killed because they are already dead.

  Even more so, the very thought of being shot at when he landed pissed Essex off. If he was dead, he’d never get the chance to become a park ranger for the National Park Service, one of his lifelong ambitions, beyond soldiering. His attitude to the business of war was simple. “We got food on the table, a house to live in, clothes to wear,” he liked to say, explaining the meaning of his military career to himself and his family.

  Beyond that, he didn’t know what his career meant. He said history would have to take care of that. He knew one thing: he would not tell his own kids to find a life in the Army. He wanted them to be able to spend more time at home, and to see the world from more places than behind a gun.

  This devil-may-care attitude hid his tremendous drive to achieve competence. Essex had a near-photographic mind, able to absorb details about a warlord’s past battles, family life, feuds, triumphs, curlicues of personality. With the jut of his squared chin, straight blond hair, and gold wire-rimmed spectacles, Essex generally glowed with a can-do attitude without coming off as a know-it-all. He didn’t consider himself an authoritarian, but he got people to work for him and he got people to believe in him. He was part news reporter, part diplomat, part angel of death. He could look at a topographic map of a chunk of ground and pretty quickly intuit where the strongpoints were, where the ambushes were likely to occur. He didn’t have to look at a map twice.

  In fact, that the team had this mission, their raison d’être for sitting in this bird at this very moment of liftoff, had largely to do with Essex’s stubbornness. He had heard that another team at K2 might be getting this very job, and that Essex’s team was in danger once again, as it had been back at Fort Campbell, of being broken up and every one of them—Nelson, Spencer, Diller, all of them—being turned into liaison officers, desk jockeys, stapler apes.

  Essex and the team had been put to work with shovels and picks digging ditches, erecting tents, and hauling gravel for the base’s roads. Shortly after they arrived at K2, their combat search and rescue mission was canceled. One night, the worst sandstorm in fifty years blew up and pelted the tents with biblical gusts. When it wasn’t blowing bitter dust, it was raining. Ankle-deep water coursed over the tents’ plywood floors, which bowed under the sagging weight of the men and their gear. Computers, printers, radios, all had to be stashed up on tables to keep them from shorting out in the flood. For a while, it had looked like they wouldn’t get to do anything but build roads and tents while U.S. bombers, flying at 15,000 feet, threw shrapnel around the country and failed to hit Taliban troops.

  When Essex heard that the first team had blown an opportunity to prove their pre-battle worthiness during a briefing session with Colonel Mulholland, all by complaining about the mission’s uncertainty and danger, Essex had walked into the Old Man’s office practically strutting. He had been building tents all day, pounding metal rods into the ground, and untangling miles of heavy rope. He was sick of that crap, for sure.

  The first team chosen for the job had complained to Mulholland that “the communications plan for this mission stinks.” This was true: there weren’t enough radios to go around for an entire team. Communications were going to be dicey—at times they might be nonexistent. The implication was that if you got into trouble, you might not be able to call anybody to help get you out. “Well, how can we go in-country with a commo plan like that?” the other team had whined. Mulholland had quickly shown them the tent door.

  When Essex walked in, he said, “Communications are a problem, sir. We’ll make it work.”

  Essex knew that the other team had also been asked, “Have you ever called in close air support with a B-52?” Essex had thought to himself, Well, shit. Nobody has ever called in close air support with a B-52, not even the U.S. Air Force, because it’s a strategic bomber.

  Essex answered Mulholland, “Well, sure, I can call close air with a B-52. Have I ever done it? No. But could I do it? Yeah.”

  The colonel appreciated this attitude. The air campaign had so far been ineffective and various U.S. press reports were already questioning the prospect of its success.

  With each passing day that American planes bombed but did not kill any Taliban—not enough of them, at least—the locals grew angry and dismissive of the Americans, who had been cowed in places like Vietnam and Somalia when dead and wounded U.S. soldiers began coming home.

  The town of Karshi-Khanabad sat about two miles from the camp, on the other side of a thirty-foot-high berm meant to keep the place secure from enemy attack. And there were enemy around, terrorist cells of the IMU—the Islamic Militant Union—operating within the country in hopes of returning the former Soviet republic to a fundamentalist state. The Americans were forbidden to go beyond the berm, or to fraternize with any of the local workers and suppliers who streamed in and out of the place in cargo vans. Fear of mortar attack loomed in the camp.

  In a matter of a few weeks, the air control tower had been swept and rewired, a hospital was built, and food, clothing, ammunition were cached in newly built warehouses, and the communications tents quickly sprouted bouquets of satellite antennas. (In less than a month, sixty C-17 transport planes would offload several
thousand tons of supplies.) The place, in the words of one Army historian, “looked like a gold-rush boom town.”

  The entire cantonment was approximately a half mile long and a quarter mile wide. It took five minutes to walk down a dirt service road to reach the Chinook helicopters on the taxiway. Next to them sat the Black Hawks, the Chinooks’ security escorts, bristling with rockets and door guns, and looking in the bronze light of morning and evening like an ancient army of insects rearing on ash-black legs.

  Colonel Mulholland’s Joint Operations Center, or JOC (pronounced “Jock”), consisted of twenty tents made of heavy green vinyl, each about the size of a two-car garage, and joined end to end, making a long, fluorescent-lit tunnel. The soldiers in camp nicknamed the place “the Snake.” It was filled with the latest space-age gear—satellite communications, computers, display screens, miles of wire, and hundreds of blinking lights. All of this was powered by tall banks of diesel-run generators that roared day and night throughout the camp.

  The JOC sat next to an aircraft taxiway and the concrete bunkers used as living quarters by the 160th SOAR pilots, even grimmer accommodations indeed, to Spencer’s mind, than his own team’s.

  The concrete Quonsets had been used by the Soviets as aircraft hangars during their 1979 invasion of Afghanistan, and they had sloping, bell-curved roofs, which the men, pilots and soldiers alike, used as a makeshift gym. By loading their rucksacks with sixty pounds of rock and strapping them on, they could hike up and down the slope of the roofs until their leg muscles screamed for rest. They made dumbbells out of five-gallon plastic buckets of water balanced on each end of a broomstick, and pulled off countless reps in between mission planning sessions. When they weren’t lifting the buckets, they were using them once a week to shower with. The buckets were painted black and by setting them in the sun, the water inside would heat ever so slightly. They fashioned a hose to run off the bucket that delivered a thin, tepid stream down on their filthy heads. The common latrine was a dark, deep hole in the middle of a barren field, over which you squatted en plein air, unadorned by screening trees or even a scrap-lumber wall.