When Nightstalker mission commander John Garfield had landed at K2 and stepped off the airplane, the first thing he saw was a soldier squatting in the field and casually reading a magazine. I’m in the Stone Age now, he thought. Just one click away from clubbing your own meat for dinner.
The preflight briefing, which had taken place earlier that morning, had been about as freewheeling as Essex had ever seen. Mulholland got right to the point. Their mission: link up with the warlord General Rashid Dostum at a village called Dehi. Three CIA officers had arrived there the week before to prepare the way by familiarizing themselves with the warlord’s capabilities and intel network. If they survived this, they were to capture the city of Mazar-i-Sharif, about sixty miles north of Dehi. How they accomplished any of this was up to them. Trust no one, warned Mulholland. Not Dostum—not any Afghan. No one in this country is clean, he said.
Nelson had next stood up in the cramped tent and launched into their mission plan. Gaunt, bow-legged, with short blond hair, Nelson spoke in a high, reedy voice and looked very much like a windswept son of the American High Plains, which he was. “Sir,” he began, “we are a-goin’ to win.”
He had drawn arrows with a red Sharpie pen on a wide roll of paper fed through an easel, marking the team’s sure, solid advance. The arrows bulldozed through miles of sand, scree, rock, pomegranate, blue chicory and sweet acacia, pine tree and poplar, over riverbeds, up cliffsides, across forlorn, twilit plateaus, and kept pushing for the horizon, where at night the stars would come up out of the singed cauldron of the autumn night and wheel overhead and smear the sky with ancient phosphorescence.
The briefing took about five minutes. When it was over, Mulholland looked at all of them—he was deeply moved by their earnestness, their belief that they could win. He really didn’t know what would happen to them. He really didn’t know if they would be killed as soon as they landed.
This mission, this war, had the air of a lark, a deadly one—it all sounded so simple on paper as Nelson explained it, but they all knew the first rule: that the plans for war were the first things to be thrown out once the war started. From that moment, you lived minute by minute.
“You guys got the job,” said Mulholland. “Good luck.”
It had been a long day for the hard-as-nails, forty-six-year-old Mulholland. Towering at six foot five, with hands large as oven mitts, he was not a man easily cowed. But Mulholland had been on the phone for most of the morning getting his ass chewed by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. “Why in the hell aren’t there American soldiers on the ground in Afghanistan?” the SecDef had asked.
The weather, was all Mulholland could say, deeply exasperated.
And this was true. The weather was spooky, something right out of a child’s dark fairy tale. For the past three nights, Mulholland had been trying to put Essex, Spencer, Nelson, and the rest of the team into Dostum’s camp, about 250 miles to the south of K2, but the helicopters had been blown back by freak sand-and snowstorms that hadn’t shown up in any of the U.S. Army’s weather forecasts.
The Nightstalker pilots ferrying the guys over the mountains were tearing their hair. On the first night’s attempt, they had returned to base after nine hours of flying in total whiteout, unable to discern any difference between the ground and sky. They made a name up for this: flying into the Ping-Pong ball. Afterward, the 160th Nightstalker pilots walked back from the flight line to the dank, bat-infested Quonset bunker they called home, completely white-faced. They sat on their cots and stared at the floor, like terrified mimes.
“You couldn’t have shoved a hot buttered pin up my ass,” said one of them, the otherwise surly and battle-hardened Greg Gibson, who just weeks earlier had been driving his jeep to work at Nightstalker headquarters when he heard the news of the attacks in New York. Back then, he thought he was the man for the job. A veteran of the world’s worst wars for the past thirty years, he had been ready to kick some Al Qaeda ass. Now he was finding this flying over Afghanistan’s mountains the scariest flying he’d ever done.
And that was the problem: the mountains. They soared from what seemed the loneliest-looking valley floor on the face of the earth, a place that more resembled the bottom of a drained ocean at the end of time, straight up to 16,000, 18,000, 20,000 feet, draped in frozen garlands of snow.
Back home, the highest Gibson and the guys usually flew in the Chinook, the Special Operations workhorse of a helicopter, was around 3,000 feet, in Colorado on training missions. On the occasion they hit 10,000 feet, they felt like they’d flown to the top of the world. In Afghanistan, low altitude started at 10,000 feet. Gibson and his men were literally flying their helicopters into no-man’s-sky. Nobody, and he meant nobody, in the history of U.S. Army aviation, had ever flown a helicopter this high, this far.
And they were trying to do it at night. But that wasn’t the part that bothered them. Flying “blacked out,” as they called it, with no lights on inside the aircraft or on the exterior, and using state-of-the-art avionics, was done for security’s sake. These pilots feared daylight flights the way vampires fear a noon sun. Hard to see, harder to hit. The Nightstalkers own the night! The problem was that they couldn’t get the goddamn weather forecast right.
On the second night, they returned to base equally demoralized and freaked out by their inability to punch through the cloud layer (It just wouldn’t quit…. There was no cloud layer…. It was all awhite fuzz!), and Gibson, along with his mission commander, John Garfield, practically grabbed the poor weatherman by the ear and dragged him to the Nightstalkers’ bunker.
“All right,” said Garfield, a normally affable fellow, a former Delta soldier with over three hundred combat jumps to his name. “Tell us what we’re finding up there at ten thousand feet. If we run into it again, we’re taking you up with us!”
The weatherman hurried back to his table of charts, graphs, and computer models and started rethinking the problem. And the problem was that he was relying too much on technology. When he broke the satellite photos out of their video display and examined each image individually, he discovered something that shocked him. Hidden except in this static view was a mass of…sand, snow, and God knew what else. Amazingly, the blob measured hundreds of miles across, and materialized not from the ground up but in midair, at around 10,000 feet. And it was completely undetectable except under the naked eye, after thorough and anxious study. He gave this freakish weather formation a new name, “the Black Stratus.”
Now, on the third night, as the Nightstalkers prepared for liftoff, they were ready for the Black Stratus. Just knowing what this thing was comforted them.
Essex settled into one of the Chinook’s web seats in the back, on the right. There was just enough room for his legs if he sat with them bent to his chest, hiking boots touching the gear in the middle. Beside him was his rucksack, his new home away from home, for what he figured would be a year’s trip into the void. Fighting and shooting. Killing strangers and making new friends. His tan shirt pockets were stuffed with the fussy lagniappe of a neatnik: one of the Garmin GPSs that the guys back at Fort Campbell had FedExed to him at the last minute; five unsharpened pencils; a writing notebook that could double as a journal; reference cards called “TA [tactical air] cards” with directions on how to call in close air support, calculate distances, recon ambush sites, and fire mortars; dog tags; a couple of hundred bucks in American currency; and something called a blood chit, which was a kind of Get-Out-of-Jail-Free card to be presented to any Afghans he met should he be trapped behind enemy lines and need assistance. Essex drolly reflected that there would little time in his journey during which he would not be behind enemy lines, seeing that he was a guerrilla fighter and all. The blood chit offered a cash reward to anyone who gave assistance to the American soldier in distress.
In his rucksack he carried ammo for his long rifle, the M-4 carbine; clothes; and enough food for five days—one meals-ready-to-eat (MRE) a day—plus purification tablets for drinking water. H
is mesh, many-pocketed load-bearing vest resembled in cut and style a fly-fisherman’s; only Essex’s was filled with grenades, more ammo for his 9mm pistol, compass, water bottle, an emergency MRE, and batteries for an interteam, handheld radio. On top of his rucksack, in its own duffel, sat the gift of vodka for his warlord-to-be, General Dostum.
Because he fully expected to be killed in the first five minutes after he hit the ground, he kept busy alongside Spencer, helping the rest of the team load its gear. There’s nothing I can do now, he reasoned. I’m just a chunk of cargo. If something goes bad, I’ll just have to deal with it then.
He watched as the guys marched up the ramp and slung their heavy rucksacks on the pile in the center of the deck.
Captain Nelson was squeezed in his seat up front, on the left side, behind lead pilot Alex McGee. Nelson was already wired into the ship’s headphones, pulled down over his ears atop his black cap, nervously listening to the cross-talk and chatter between McGee and his co-pilot, Jim Zeeland, going through their preflight checks.
Sitting next to him, imperious and wry, was Sam Diller, the senior intel officer on the team, and at forty, the oldest. Earlier in the day, he had been sitting in his tent drinking coffee when a staff officer poked his head inside and said, “Hey, it’s going down tonight. The weather is fair, and you’re going.” They’d loaded their gear onto a truck and rode the quarter mile out to the helo, plopped it down on the ground, and waited. The aircrew had come out about the same time as they did. Diller was wedged in his seat next to his buddy, the jovial, bearded senior medic Bill Bennett. He and Bennett had been on the team in 1991 to help oust Saddam from Kuwait, and Bennett had rejoined the crew several days after September 11. Back home, Bennett—a quiet, handsome, unassuming thirty-three-year-old with fifteen years of service—had a wife and teenage son with whom he liked to kayak and hike on the weekends in the Tennessee foothills. But all that was now a million miles away.
Like most everybody on the team, Bennett spoke Arabic and had been trained in the art of sniper fire, mortar launch, and high-altitude parachute jumps from 25,000 feet, during which he would breathe from a minitank of oxygen strapped to his arm. He and Diller were keeping an eye on an eager group of younger gunfighters, average age thirty-two, each with about eight years in SF. “This is your first rodeo,” Diller had told junior weapons specialist Sean Coffers, who had joined the unit from the 101st Airborne. “You’re sticking with me.” Nearly everybody was married and had children; there were more than a few broken marriages in the rearview mirror. Sitting next to Bennett was Vern Michaels, the good-humored senior communications officer, and junior engineer Patrick Remington. These six guys were the A-Team, the Alpha cell, of the twelve-man detachment.
On the other side of the aircraft, the right side, Chief Warrant Officer Cal Spencer was running herd on the six-man Bravo cell. Spencer was sitting near the ramp, next to Pat Essex, his coleader. Crammed in beside them were junior engineer Charles Jones and weapons specialist Ben Milo, a burly, affable thirty-year-old weapons sergeant from the suburbs of Chicago.
Milo was usually the motormouth of the team, the one guy they always had to keep away from the press (not that the press ever came around, but still they worried). But now Milo was sitting there in his tiny web seat not saying anything, and Spencer was trying to think of something to say, some joke to crack, to perk him up. Milo was a devout Catholic, an amateur artist (he loved drawing 1970s vintage record album covers, like those of Pink Floyd and The Grateful Dead), whose beefy appearance disguised the restless high-speed spirit of an overachiever. Several weeks earlier, the announcement that he would be deploying on this mission had gone off like a bomb in his family and caused Milo’s wife, Karla, to start crying. The mother of four, including two teenagers, and herself a nursing student at night school, Karla had not been prepared for Ben’s departure. They went to their youngest son’s grade school to pick him up and spend time with him before his father left. Ben was angry. He wanted to kill those involved with his bare hands. He couldn’t understand why they had hurt civilians on American soil. If they’d hit a military target, he felt he could’ve grasped the reasoning. A few days before leaving, Milo was driving with a friend, another weapons sergeant on the team, and finally lost his temper. They piss me off, and they pissed my wife off! he started yelling. He ranted so long about the jihadis and what he was going to do to them that his teammate had to pull over and stop laughing before driving on.
“Oh, I’m serious now,” Ben was muttering. “Those motherfuckers are gonna feel my pain, ’cause I’m one pissed person. Oh, I’m very serious now!” But sitting in the helo, he was wondering what it would mean, what it would feel like, to kill a man. What would his priest back home think? He figured he hadn’t the slightest idea. But he did know that he’d just have to keep pulling the trigger when he got in a fight. Milo crossed himself and prepared for liftoff.
Next to Milo was Scott Black, who as a junior medic was more worried about saving lives than ending them. The intel he’d gotten on General Dostum was that the warlord was overweight, a heavy drinker (hence the housewarming gift of vodka), that he had diabetes and didn’t have use of his right arm; that he tired easy and his eyesight was failing; that the ruthless codger was a footstep from the grave. This man, this raconteur, this bon vivant, a former plumber and peasant’s son, would be Black’s new best friend, and clearly he was a walking medical emergency. It was Black’s thankless job to make sure the weakened, forty-seven-year-old Uzbeki didn’t die on his watch. How embarrassing would that be? Black figured Dostum’s own militia would probably try to kill him if Dostum died under his care. Black was ready to hit the ground and begin CPR on the guy immediately.
Sitting next to Black was the team’s comedian, a tall, gangly soul named Fred Falls, a junior commo officer. Like Spencer, Falls delighted in dry, corny humor. The previous night the two of them had sat in their tent watching the 1985 Chevy Chase/Dan Aykroyd movie Spies Like Us (using a laptop propped open on a table made from sawhorses), a screwball comedy about two hapless Americans who get lost in Afghanistan and are captured by mujahideen fighters. At one point, Chevy Chase and Dan Aykroyd are strung up by their ankles, ready to be tortured, and they try cajoling their captors into letting them go. Spencer and Falls thought the movie was hysterical, while the rest of the team just rolled their eyes.
In reality, everyone had already decided that they would not be taken alive, if a gun battle came to that. They’d sat on their cots and written what they called their “death letters”—last missives home to wives and family about last thoughts. One Special Forces soldier had poured his heart out. He truly expected not to come home at all. “If you are reading this letter,” he wrote to his family, “things are not well for me. And I [had] so many things I wanted to do with you both. I love you and think of you as often as possible. You made me the happiest man in the world.” He had told his fellow soldiers, “Look, we’re in this together. And we need to know that coming back isn’t really an option for us. If we get killed in the process, we get killed. I don’t want [us] to shy us away from what we have to do.”
After writing their letters, the men removed wedding rings and emptied wallets of any possibly incriminating photos of family and friends (images and information that could be used against them in a torture session), and dropped these tokens of identity in large manila envelopes provided for the occasion. These were sealed and handed for safekeeping to the chaplain.
On Nelson’s team, the Bravo cell’s job in Afghanistan would be supporting the Alpha cell by running the “log train” (short for logistics), which meant making sure that everybody had enough “beans, bullets, and blankets” to fight another day. This job was not as glamorous as being on the A-Team, but the distinction went unspoken here. As Spencer reminded everyone, there were no “small” jobs in the business of war—just dead egomaniacs.
Tonight, they were going “in single ship.” This meant that the entire group was flying into Afg
hanistan on one helicopter. Usually, half the twelve-man team flew on one bird, while the other half followed behind on a second. This way, if either one of the helicopters was shot down, the entire group would not be wiped out. Within Special Forces doctrine, the team was to resemble an amoeba, dividing and thriving in even the most austere environments.
This was why the group had two of everything: two medics (Bennett and Black); two commo officers (Michaels and Falls), whose job it was to run the radios and communications within the team and with headquarters back at K2; and two weapons specialists (Coffers and Milo), tasked with the mind-boggling challenge of memorizing weapons and ammo used around the world and training the teams in their use. Engineers Pat Essex and Charles Jones kept the teams supplied, organized, and operating swiftly like a mini-corporation whose business was handcrafted violence. Sam Diller, as the intel chief, was point man for information flowing among the CIA, the Pentagon, or headquarters in K2, and the two teams.
The leanest level Nelson had taken the group to in training was three guys to a cell. This meant that from an organism of twelve guys, he could split the team into four pieces. “We train like the terrorists do,” Nelson was always reminding everybody. “We fight like terrorists.” Sam Diller believed that “each SF trooper ought to be able to shoot all the bad guys, bomb them, know how to use the radio to report what happened, and do the necessary medical care afterward.”
“You know,” Diller liked to say, “the whole man concept.”
In his shirt pocket, alongside his toothbrush, Diller carried a dog-eared edition of the poet and warrior Sun Tzu’s favorite aphorisms. Diller had memorized many of them and quoted at will in his West Virginia drawl: “When on offense, strike like lightnin’ from the clouds. All war is deception.” Diller further liked to paraphrase Steve McQueen in The Magnificent Seven when describing the team’s esprit de corps: “Mister, we deal in lead.”