Horse Soldiers Read online

  Also by the Author

  In Harm’s Way:

  The Sinking of the USS Indianapolis

  and the Extraordinary Story of Its Survivors

  SCRIBNER

  A Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

  Copyright © 2009 by Reed City Productions, LLC

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information, address Scribner Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.

  SCRIBNER and design are registered trademarks of The Gale Group, Inc., used under license by Simon & Schuster, Inc., the publisher of this work.

  ISBN-13: 978-1-4165-8823-8

  ISBN-10: 1-4165-8823-X

  Certain names and identifying characteristics have been changed.

  Insert photographs are courtesy of FOB-53 (Forward Operating Base 53) unless otherwise noted.

  Visit us on the World Wide Web:

  http://www.SimonandSchuster.com

  This book is dedicated to the men and women

  of Fifth Special Forces Group and their families.

  And to my family,

  Anne, John, Kate, and Will;

  and my parents,

  Bonnie and Derald Stanton;

  and Deb, Tony, Genessa, and Wylie Demin.

  And, finally, Grant and Paulette Parsons.

  I also wish to acknowledge a heartfelt debt of gratitude to

  Sloan Harris, Colin Harrison, and Blake Ringsmuth. None finer.

  Without their unwavering support,

  this book would not have been written.

  I am the kit fox,

  I live in uncertainty.

  If there is anything difficult,

  If there is anything dangerous to do,

  That is mine.

  —Sioux warrior’s song

  CONTENTS

  Author Note

  Key Players

  Prologue: Uprising

  Part One Going to War

  Part Two Horsemen, Ride

  Part Three Danger Close

  Part Four horsesoldiers.htmlates of Mazar

  Part Five Ambush

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments and Sources

  Bibliography

  Photograpic Insert

  AUTHOR NOTE

  The events recounted in this book are based on more than one hundred interviews of Afghan soldiers, Afghan civilians, U.S. soldiers, and U.S. civilians. These interviews, some of which were in-depth and stretched over a series of days, took place in Afghanistan and in the United States. Most dwelled on the subjects’ firsthand recollections of events related in this book. In addition, the author traveled in the region described in these pages and in particular inspected the Qala-i-Janghi Fortress. The author’s research also included examination of personal journals, previously published media accounts, contemporaneous photography, and voluminous official U.S. military logs and histories.

  Many of the events described in Horse Soldiers transpired under extreme circumstances, some of them traumatic to those who experienced them. For these reasons and perhaps because memory is often imperfect, the recollections of some of the participants conflicted at times. While the author has made every attempt to present an accurate portrait of the events involved, he has related the version that seemed most consistent with other accounts.

  KEY PLAYERS

  AFGHAN GENERALS

  Abdul Rashid Dostum

  Atta Mohammed Noor

  Naji Mohammed Mohaqeq

  CIA PARAMILITARY OFFICERS

  Mike Spann

  Dave OlsonJ. J. Sawyer

  Garth Rogers

  U.S. SPECIAL FORCES COMMANDERS

  Major General Geoffrey Lambert, United States Special Forces Command, Fort Bragg

  Colonel John Mulholland, Fifth Special Forces Group, Fort Campbell and K2, Uzbekistan

  Lieutenant Colonel Max Bowers, Third Battalion, Fifth Special Forces Group, Fort Campbell and Mazar-i-Sharif, Afghanistan

  CAPTAIN MITCH NELSON’S TEAM (RIDING WITH DOSTUM)

  Captain Mitch Nelson, team leader

  Chief Warrant Officer Cal Spencer, assistant team leader

  Sergeant First Class Sam Diller, intelligence operations

  Sergeant First Class Bill Bennett

  Sergeant First Class Scott Black

  Sergeant First Class Sean Coffers

  Sergeant First Class Ben Milo

  Master Sergeant Pat Essex

  Staff Sergeant Charles Jones

  Staff Sergeant Patrick Remington

  Sergeant First Class Vern Michaels

  Staff Sergeant Fred Falls

  Staff Sergeant Sonny Tatum, Air Force combat controller

  Staff Sergeant Mick Winehouse, Air Force combat controller

  TURKISH SCHOOLHOUSE, MAZAR-I-SHARIF, AFGHANISTAN

  Admiral Bert Calland, III, Special Operations Command Central

  Lieutenant Colonel Max Bowers

  Major Kurt Sonntag, executive officer

  Major Mark Mitchell, ground commander

  Major Steve Billings

  Captain Paul Syverson

  Captain Kevin Leahy

  Captain Craig McFarland

  Captain Andrew Johnson

  Captain Gus Forrest

  Sergeant Major Martin Homer

  Master Sergeant Roger Palmer

  First Sergeant Dave Betz

  Sergeant First Class Pete Bach

  Sergeant First Class Bob Roberts

  Sergeant First Class Chuck Roberts

  Staff Sergeant Jerome Carl

  U.S. Army Staff Sergeant Jason Kubanek

  Sergeant First Class Ted Barrow

  Sergeant First Class Ernest Bates

  Staff Sergeant Malcolm Victors, Air Force combat controller

  Master Sergeant Burt Docks, Air Force combat controller

  Captain Don Winslow

  CAPTAIN DEAN NOSOROG’S TEAM (RIDING WITH ATTA)

  Captain Dean Nosorog, team leader

  Chief Warrant Officer Stu Mansfield, assistant team leader

  Sergeant First Class Darrin Clous, intelligence operations

  Master Sergeant Brad Highland

  Staff Sergeant Jerry Booker

  Sergeant First Class James Gold

  Sergeant First Class Mark House

  Staff Sergeant Brett Walden

  Sergeant First Class Martin Graves

  Staff Sergeant Evan Colt

  Staff Sergeant Francis McCourt

  Sergeant First Class Brian Lyle

  Staff Sergeant Donny Boyle, Air Force combat controller

  SBS (SPECIAL BOAT SERVICE)

  Chief Petty Officer Steph Bass, U.S. Navy (deployed with SBS)

  MEMBERS OF U.S. ARMY TENTH MOUNTAIN DIVISION WHO TOOK PART IN THE RESCUE AT QALA-I-JANGHI BOMBING

  Staff Sergeant Thomas Abbott

  Private First Class Eric Andreason

  Private First Class Thomas Beers

  Sergeant Jerry Higley

  Private First Class Michael Hoke

  First Lieutenant Bradley Maroyka

  Specialist Roland Miskimon

  Sergeant William Sakisat

  Specialist Andrew Scott

  HELICOPTER PILOTS AND CREW, 160TH SPECIAL OPERATIONS AVIATION REGIMENT (SOAR), K2, UZBEKISTAN

  Aaron Smith

  Jim Zeeland

  Greg Gibson

  Carson Millhouse

  John Garfield

  Ron White

  Larry Canfield

  Donald Pleasant

  Dewey Donner

  Will Ferguson

  Carl Macy

  Kyle Johnson

  Tom Dingman


  Bill Ricks

  Jerry Edwards

  Ron Mason

  Steve Porter

  Barry Oberlin

  Vic Boswell

  Ross Peters

  Alex McGee

  HORSE SOLDIERS

  PROLOGUE

  UPRISING

  Qala-i-Janghi Fortress

  Mazar-i-Sharif, Afghanistan

  November 24–25, 2001

  Trouble came in the night, riding out of the dust and the darkness. Trouble rolled past the refugee camp, past the tattered tents shuddering in the moonlight, the lone cry of a baby driving high into the sky, like a nail. Sunrise was no better; at sunrise, trouble was still there, bristling with AKs and RPGs, engines idling, waiting to roll into the city. Waiting.

  These were the baddest of the bad, the real masters of mayhem, the death dealers with God stamped firmly in their minds. The city groaned and shook to life. Soon everyone knew trouble had arrived at the gates of the city.

  Major Mark Mitchell heard the news at headquarters nine miles away and thought, You’re kidding. We got bad guys at the wire?

  He ran downstairs, looking for Master Sergeant Dave Betz. Maybe he would know what was happening.

  But Betz didn’t know anything. He blustered, “One of the Agency guys came down and told us we got six hundred Taliban surrendering. Can you believe that?”

  Surrendering? Mitchell couldn’t figure out why. He thought the Taliban had fled from the approaching forces of the Northern Alliance to Konduz, miles away. American Special Forces and the Northern Alliance had been beating them back for weeks, in battle after battle, rolling up territory by coordinating airstrikes from the sky and thousands of Northern Alliance soldiers on the ground. They now stood on the verge of total victory. Konduz was where the war was supposed to go next. Not here. Not in Mazar. Not at Club Mez.

  Besides, these guys didn’t surrender. They fought to the death.

  Die fighting and you went to paradise.

  Mitchell stood at the dirty plate-glass windows and watched. Here they came, a motley crew of the doomed, packed into six big trucks, staring out from the rancid tunnels of their scarves. Mitchell could see their heads over the barricade that ringed his headquarters, a former schoolhouse at the junk-strewn edge of the city. The prisoners—who surely included some Al Qaeda members—were still literally in the drivers’ seats, with Northern Alliance soldiers sitting next to them, their AKs pointed at the drivers’ heads. The prisoners turned and stared and Mitchell thought it was like looking at hundreds of holes punched in a wall.

  “Everybody get away from the windows!” said Betz.

  Major Kurt Sonntag, Captain Kevin Leahy, Captain Paul Syverson, and a dozen other Special Forces soldiers knelt behind the black and white checked columns in the room, their M-4 rifles aimed at the street. Behind them, in the kitchen, the local cook was puttering—the air smelled of cooked rice and cucumber—and a radio was playing more of that god-awful Afghan music that sounded to Mitchell like somebody strangling a goose.

  He had been looking forward this morning to overseeing the construction of the medical facility in town, and the further blowing up of mines and bombs that littered the area like confetti. Each day, a little bit more of the war seemed to be ending. Mitchell had even started to wonder when he would get to go home. He and a team of about a dozen Special Forces soldiers had moved into the schoolhouse only forty-eight hours earlier. Their former headquarters inside the Qala-i-Janghi Fortress, nine miles off, in Mazar’s western quarter, had given them the shits, the croup, and the flu, and Mitchell was glad to have moved out. It seemed a haunted place. Known as the House of War, the fortress rose like a mud golem from the desert, surrounded by struggling plots of wind-whipped corn and sparse cucumber. Its walls towered sixty feet high and measured thirty feet thick under the hard, indifferent sun.

  The Taliban had occupied the fortress for seven years and filled it with weapons—grenades, rockets, and firearms, anything made for killing. Even Enfield rifles with dates stamped on the bayonets—1913—from the time that the Brits had occupied the area. Before their hurried flight from the city two weeks earlier, the Taliban had left the weapons and smeared feces on the walls and windows. Every photograph, every painting, every rosebush had been torn up, smashed, stomped, ruined. Nothing beautiful had been left behind.

  After three years of Taliban rule, there were old men in Mazar with stumps for hands. There were women who’d been routinely stoned and kicked on street corners. Young men who’d been imprisoned for not wearing beards. Fathers who’d been beaten in front of their sons for the apparent pleasure of those swinging their weapons.

  The arrival of Mitchell and his soldiers on horseback had put an end to that. The people of Mazar-i-Sharif, the rugmakers and butchers, the car mechanics and schoolteachers, the bank clerks and masons and farmers, had thrown flowers and kisses and reached up to the Americans on their horses and pulled affectionately at the filthy cuffs of their camo pants. The locals had welcomed the balding, blue-eyed Mitchell and two dozen other Special Forces soldiers in a mile-long parade lining the highway that dropped into town out of the snowy mountains. Mitchell had felt like he was back in World War II, his grandfather’s war, riding into Paris after the Nazis fled.

  Now thirty-six, Mitchell was the ground commander of the Fifth Special Forces Group/Third Battalion’s Forward Operating Base (FOB). It had been a distinguished nearly fifteen-year career headed for the top of the military food chain. His best friend, Major Kurt Sonntag, a thirty-seven-year-old former weekend surfer from Los Angeles, was the FOB’s executive officer, which technically meant he was Mitchell’s boss. In the tradition of Special Forces, they treated each other as equals. Nobody saluted, including less senior officers like Captain Kevin Leahy and Captain Paul Syverson, members of the support company whose job it was to get the postwar operations up and running, such as providing drinking water, electricity, and medical care to the locals.

  Looking at the street now, Mitchell tried to figure out why the Taliban convoy was stopping. If anything went bad, Mitchell knew he was woefully outnumbered. He had maybe a dozen guys he could call on. And those like Leahy and Syverson weren’t exactly hardened killers. Like him, these were staff guys, in their mid-thirties, soldiers who had until now been largely warless. He did have a handful of CIA operators living upstairs in the schoolhouse and eight Brits, part of a Special Boat Service unit who’d landed the night before by Chinook helicopter, but they were so new that they didn’t have orders for rules of engagement—that is, it wasn’t clear to them when they could and could not return fire. Doing the math, Mitchell roughly figured that he had about a dozen guys available to fight. The trained-up fighters, the two Special Forces teams that Mitchell had ridden into town with, had left earlier in the day for Konduz, for the expected fight there. Mitchell had watched them drive away and felt that he was missing out on a chance to make history. He’d been left behind to run the headquarters office and keep the peace. Now, after learning that 600 Taliban soldiers had massed outside his door, he wondered if he’d been dead wrong.

  The street bustled with beeping taxis; with donkeys hauling loads of handmade bricks to the city-center bazaar; with aged men gliding by on wobbling bicycles and women ghosting through the rising dust in blue burkhas. Afghanistan. Never failed to amaze him.

  Still the convoy hadn’t moved. Ten minutes had passed.

  Without warning, a group of locals piled toward the trucks, angrily grabbing at the prisoners. They got hold of one man and pulled him down—for a moment he was there, gripping the battered wooden side of the truck, and then he was gone, snatched out of sight. Behind the truck, out of sight, they were beating the man to death.

  Every ounce of rage, every rape, every public execution, every amputation, humiliation—every ounce of revenge was poured back into this man, slathered on by fist, by foot, by gnarled stick. The trucks lurched ahead and when they moved on, nothing remained of the man. It was as if he’d
been eaten.

  The radio popped to life. Mitchell listened as a Northern Alliance commander, who was stationed on the highway, announced in broken English: The prisoners all going to Qala-i-Janghi.

  Remembering the enormous pile of weapons cached at the fortress, Mitchell didn’t want to hear this. But his hands were tied. The Afghan commanders of the Northern Alliance were, as a matter of U.S. strategy, calling the shots. No matter the Americans’ might, this was the Afghans’ show. Mitchell was in Mazar to “assist” the locals in taking down the Taliban. He figured he could get on a radio and suggest to the Afghan commander presiding over the surrender that the huge fortress would not be an ideal place to house six hundred angry Taliban and Al Qaeda soldiers. But maybe there was a good reason to send them there. As long as the prisoners were searched and guarded closely, maybe they could be held securely within the fort’s towering mud walls.

  And then Mitchell thought again of the weapons stockpiled at Qala-i-Janghi, the piles and piles of rockets, rifles, crates of ammo—tons of violence ready to be put to use.

  Not the fort, he thought. Not the damn fort!

  Belching smoke, grinding gears, the convoy of prisoners rumbled past the fortress’s dry moat and through the tall, arched entrance. The prisoners in the trucks craned around like blackbirds on a wire, scanning the walls, looking for guards, looking for an easy way out.

  In deference to the Muslim prohibition against men touching other men intimately, few of the prisoners had been thoroughly searched. No hand had reached deep inside the folds of their thin gray gowns, the mismatched suit coats, the dirty khaki vests, searching for a knife, a grenade, a garrote. Killer had smiled at captor and captor had waved him on, Tashakur. Thank you. Tashakur.

  The line of six trucks halted inside the fort, and the prisoners stepped down under the watchful eye of a dozen or so Northern Alliance guards. Suddenly one prisoner pulled a grenade from the belly-band of his blouse and blew himself up, taking a Northern Alliance officer with him. The guards fired their rifles in the air and regained control. Then they immediately herded the prisoners to a rose-colored, plaster-sided building aptly nicknamed “the Pink House,” which squatted nearby in the rocks and thorns. The structure had been built by the Soviets in the 1980s as a hospital within the bomb-hardened walls of the fortress.