Horse Soldiers Read online

  Diller was traveling so light that he had even cut down his pencils to three inches each, to shave off ounces. He carried a pair of heavy-duty mittens bought at Wal-Mart in a back pants pocket. He was lean, broad-shouldered, with a face like carved oak.

  He had come a long way from the battered house-trailer on the West Virginia hillside that he’d shared with Lisa, his wife, before joining the Army in 1986. Diller had played football in college and gotten a degree to become a history teacher. He loved teaching and he loved working with kids. He was a study in contrasts, with his high-holler voice and quick mind. He spoke deliberately, slow and methodical as lug nuts dropping in an oil pan. He was a man of few outside interests, except gun collecting. He’d spent at least half his life sleeping outdoors as a soldier, yet he hated camping. He kept his own counsel. During Desert Storm, his sergeant had asked him to maintain the team’s diary, a daily record of events. At the end of a month, Diller had written one terse sentence: “We trained, it was hot, and I got sick.” His sergeant told him to quit keeping the diary.

  But Diller was crazy like a fox. His father had been the editor of a West Virginia daily newspaper, and an aficionado of musical theater, an erudite man who wore bow ties and loved his rough son unconditionally. Diller was headed for a career in academia when one night, shortly after getting his degree, his life took an unexpected turn.

  He was at a bar and he got into a fight, a bad one, which is to say the other guy, the poor, unlucky sonofabitch, didn’t win. Even as the cops were hauling him away, Diller realized his teaching career was finished before it began. He pled to a misdemeanor, and was sentenced to three years’ probation. “Schools don’t hire teachers who tend to wrap other guys around their fist,” he realized.

  He and Lisa moved into the trailer up on the hillside crowded around by kudzu, chickens, and car parts, and Sam got the only job he could find, mixing cement for a construction company twelve hours a day. It was backbreaking, god-awful work, but there was a part of Diller that felt he deserved this as penance. He had a brother who was in the Army, and one weekend the man came to visit Diller while he was on leave. His brother told him that he was actually getting paid to be on vacation. Diller couldn’t believe it. He’d never thought of joining the Army. Within a matter of weeks, he’d enlisted. He and Lisa left the house-trailer and never looked back.

  He went to work in the Second Cavalry Division as a scout, a man trained to sneak into enemy lines as an observer. And then another unexpected thing happened: Diller got bored. The Army had so many rules and regulations, it seemed no one could find their own ass with both hands unless somebody told them how. He grew miserable. He brooded. He spoke even less, which heretofore hadn’t seemed possible. Lisa could barely stand to be around him. One day he met a Special Forces soldier who told him, “Man, you’ll dig what I’m doing, it’s everything you want.” Diller said, “Tell me more.”

  He was a voracious reader and he already knew enough about the history of warfare that he figured he might like being a guerrilla fighter. He liked the odds of being outnumbered, outgunned. He liked the idea of fighting for his life with his back against a wall. He liked being able to think for himself. Within a matter of weeks, he had signed up for Special Forces selection. When the two years of training were over, when he was handed his Green Beret on graduation and could proudly call himself a Special Forces soldier, he discovered that he felt more likable in the SF. He had been sure Lisa was going to divorce him. Now he wasn’t so sure.

  Diller chalked up this life change to something he called “the Big Boy Rules.” The Rules were hard to define, harder to embody, even harder to follow. But they went like this: When you followed the Rules, you agreed to do what you said you were going to do, no questions asked, no excuses given. You agreed to pay for your own mistakes. When you lived by the Rules, though, every man was working for himself; and every man was devoted to the brother on his left and right. The Rules were righteous, they were real, and they seemed to resemble how the universe really worked. Diller grasped them immediately.

  Take the way he helped train the younger guys on the team. Diller always led the way. Every dawn he pushed them through a four-mile run, followed by enough sit-ups and push-ups to make an Olympian god throw up, and then after that came thirty minutes of hand-to-hand combat training, based on the street-fighting techniques of the famed Gracie brothers, the Brazilian brawlers who’d gained notoriety in the 1990s for their bloody Ultimate Fighter matches on pay per view cable TV.

  The Special Forces soldiers called this mode of fighting “grappling.” It was meant to disable and do great bodily harm with an economy of movement—eye-gouging, groin-stomping, arm-breaking, and choking were the order of the day. In training, you could “tap out” when the pain got too great, or when you felt yourself slipping into unconsciousness as your buddy gripped your windpipe. Grappling was what you did when you were out of bullets at last and you’d even thrown the gun itself at your attacker, before diving in and tearing him to bits. It was mean, vicious work, and it made you into a walking human-demolition team. Diller excelled.

  He believed that the everyday SF soldier could survive circumstances that would fry the circuitry of normal men. He was treated like a pro and he trained like one, too. And he did this away from the limelight of reporters and politicians. He got paid decent money (about $4,000 a month for a fifteen-year veteran) to “take on the worst of the bad guys” and to “train the lamest guys on the planet” to be soldiers. He was proud of saying: “We ain’t got ‘hero’ stamped on us, none of us does.”

  Going in single ship tonight was risky. But because Colonel Mulholland had been on the phone all day with Rumsfeld, he felt it was a risk he had to take. Simultaneously, he was launching another team in the east of the country, and this had left him with only one helicopter with which to deliver Nelson’s team to the United States’ primary initiative in the south. Diller oddly saw this bold chance-taking by Mulholland as evidence of the Old Man’s chutzpah. If they were shot down, Diller figured he could fight his way out of the jam, living in the weeds, surviving. But Mulholland? He’d be tarred and feathered. His career possibly might end.

  The Chinook rocked and shifted on its four balloon tires. The blunt nose dipped, and the entire length of the craft swung in the air, and rose.

  At the helicopter landing zone in the Darya Suf River Valley, 250 miles to the south, Ali Sarwar awaited the arrival of Diller and his team.

  He didn’t know these men, but he was hanging his future on them. He closed his eyes and strained to hear the approaching clatter of the huge American machine. Nothing. Not yet. Patience…

  For most of his life, all he had known was war. He had fought back with Massoud, whom he knew as the greatest warrior of the twentieth century; and with Dostum, the opportunist. Ali Sarwar was now a lieutenant in his tribe’s army, the Hazaras, under General Mohaqeq’s command. Fair-skinned and green-eyed, his head wrapped in a green scarf, Ali stood at the landing zone with a dozen other men, all eager as he to attack the Taliban. He was portly, dressed in billowing linen pants and heavy oiled boots. On his left shoulder he carried a leather bullet box he had taken from a Chechen he’d killed a week earlier in the fierce fighting at Safid Kotah. He was tired, hungry, and nearly out of bullets for his battered AK-47 after the month-long battle. He lit a cigarette and exhaled slowly at the sky. His father had been a shopkeeper and provided well for his family. Ali was a good student in school. But as a teenager, his house had been under siege—first by the Soviets, and then by factions of Afghan soldiers fighting for control of the city. Walking to school, the mornings were often traced by the crack of interlocking lines of gunfire. All of the men and boys in his neighborhood eventually picked up guns to protect their homes and families. Ali was shot in the foot and hit by bomb shrapnel in the leg, causing him to limp in cold weather.

  Always the Taliban had more bullets, more jet fighters, more men. He shifted nervously in the gray talc of the landing zone a
nd hoped those odds were finally changing.

  He looked over at the secretive CIA men, Baba Spann, Baba Olson, and the elder, gray-bearded Baba J.J., whose grizzled beard was a sign of wisdom in Ali’s culture. He wondered why the other Americans didn’t have full hair on their own faces. He figured it was not their way. He didn’t care. He was not a fanatic. He liked to smoke, he liked to drink. He only had one wife, even though the Koran told him he could have four. But what kind of man even could have time and patience for four wives? No, one woman was enough for Ali Sarwar.

  Ali and his men had swept the area, but it was impossible to say if they were safe in this stony silence. Who knew if Taliban were lurking in the rocks and cliffs surrounding them? The moon hung overhead, a bleached horn driven into the flank of the night. Ali could hear the gentle pattering of the horses’ hooves in the damp mud of the evening and the burble of men talking quietly in Dari. Everyone was straining to hear the approach of the American machine. One of the men, Baba Spann, his tight, angular face smudged by a sketchy shadow of beard, walked out to the edge of the landing pad, about as big as an American baseball field (Ali had seen pictures on TV, the Yankees of New York playing under bright lights), and the wiry American set something small—about the size of a deck of cards—on the dirt.

  Ali waited for the object to do something, but he saw nothing. It just sat there. He figured it was a gadget whose use he would understand in the future, when the future came. He watched as Baba Spann flipped down heavy rubber glasses over his eyes and stared at the gadget. He seemed to nod, pleased, and then he flipped the glasses back. Ali knew the glasses helped men see at night, which seemed another fantastic thing he did not understand about the Americans. He did understand that the men arriving by helicopter would help him win this war against the Taliban. He hated the Taliban with every drop of his blood.

  When the Taliban captured Mazar-i-Sharif in 1998, Ali had sent his family—his wife, two sons, and three daughters—to the central highlands, to Bamian, the homeland of the Hazaras, for safekeeping. (Ali was horrified and enraged when in March of 2001 the Taliban dynamited the stone Buddhas that had stood watch over the town for centuries. What man had the right to write the future by blowing up the past?) With his family in Bamian, Ali remained behind in Mazar-i-Sharif to fight.

  The city was littered with bodies. The Taliban cut the heads off prisoners and set them on pikes along the streets. Ali was a wanted man. The Taliban announced that if anyone could capture Ali Sarwar, they would set free one Northern Alliance prisoner. Someone—some poor, unlucky man, thought Ali—was snatched up by the villagers and turned in as the criminal Ali Sarwar. The Taliban released a prisoner and then tortured the man they supposed to be Ali. They cut off his head and put it in his lap, and set him by the side of the road, so he could stare at the 10,000 ankles of men, women, and children sleepwalking through the filth and nightmare of their lives.

  That was how Ali Sarwar came to be standing at the landing zone waiting for the American bird to roar in.

  At liftoff, Captain Mitch Nelson was thinking, You could fight your heart out and still lose. That sunk in for Mitch. That really got to him. He steeled himself against the coming blast of cold air as the helo corkscrewed up into the night sky—one thousand feet, two thousand, four thousand, five. It was the most amazing thing, the most amazing feeling. Flying into battle was all Mitch Nelson, from Kansas, had ever dreamed about back on the open range amid the winter wheat, sorghum, and vetch. He had ridden bulls in college on the amateur rodeo circuit, he had stared down bodily harm, but this bucking helicopter ride (even higher now—six thousand, seven thousand, eight thousand) was a new thing. It completed Mitch. Made him new.

  The stench of aviation fuel in the cockpit was overpowering, like burnt caramel. Facing the pilots, he was lined up on the left side, as the long rotors overhead went to work against the frozen air—wham thrum, wham thrum, wham. Nearby sat Ben Milo, who was now stone-cold quiet, brooding. And there was Spencer, with his long shafts of pine-straight legs folded up beneath him, Spencer in his black polyester jacket with the collar shot up and his black watch cap pulled down over his ears, the very picture of cool. Nelson knew that Spencer, Essex, and Diller were keeping an eye on him. He knew he had to walk sharp.

  He was the captain of the team, it was true, but these three, pushing forty and beyond, were damn near senior citizens. Freaking old. Yet they walked tall. Nelson was going to have to hit one out of the park as the team’s leader. He was confident he could do this. Nelson believed there should be two kinds of soldiers: the kind you saw on television news and the kind you didn’t see. Nelson was the man you didn’t see. The Taliban’s goal was to lay waste to them, make them suffer, make them gut it out through a long, painful winter, and then attack them in the spring. Time and shitty weather were on the Taliban’s side. And the only thing Mitch Nelson had was the backing of the entire U.S. Army. And that was a scary thing, to have all that American might at your back…yet if you died, if you got killed, captured, tortured, no one would ever know you had been here except the people back in Kansas standing around the rodeo ring in the twilight, saying between their teeth, “Remember that Nelson kid? Huh, what happened to him? Got killed, I guess.” And so on, until no one remembered that you had been living aboard this very helicopter at this very minute, with this hard wind freezing like enamel at the back of your throat, with the rear ramp down and the snow blowing in, and the side doors open and the wind clawing at the helo’s quilted walls, as you sat there shivering and leaning forward on your M-4 rifle while the metal barrel, about as slim as a pool cue, turned to ice in your gloved hands.

  Nelson looked around. These twelve guys on this helicopter comprised the entire American fighting force striking back at Osama bin Laden. It was just them, he realized. Them alone. It was enough to make you want to crawl under the poncho liner until the crosshairs of history had passed you by. Nelson strained forward to see out the helicopter’s windscreen.

  Piercing reefs of black rock loomed out of the night and passed below the broad, froglike belly of the craft. And then as if shooting over shoal water into the deep, the earth dropped away and there was nothing but darkness—a chasm so black it snapped into focus under Nelson as the essence of eternity. It was one of the most exciting things that had ever happened to him.

  Flying east toward Tajikistan, they were passing over a mountain the pilots had told him they’d nicknamed “the Bear.” As they rose—nine thousand, ten thousand, eleven thousand—the temperature plummeted.

  The ship’s heaters weren’t cranking, for security reasons. Back at K2, mission commander John Garfield had decided that if the pilots ran the heaters, this would change the “thermal signature” of the aircraft. This meant that if they were attacked by a heat-seeking missile, the warhead would lock onto the cockpit and kill the pilots, instead of going after the two turbine engines, which were mounted up and aft of the cockpit.

  Either way, Garfield pointed out, life would suck, but at least if they survived the initial strike, there might be the chance that someone still alive could crash-land the aircraft.

  The doors were open so that the pilots and soldiers could exit in just such an emergency without fumbling with latches and handles. The rear ramp hung down in the night, a ribbed metal tongue measuring about fifteen feet long. As they climbed, Spencer watched frost spider over the exposed metal in the craft, across the deck and up the walls.

  He threw his poncho liner over his head, trying to keep warm. He thought, I’m the old guy here, the young ones are looking to me—am I doing anything weird, anything that would break their confidence? He threw the poncho off. Shredded bits of snow and micro grit swirled in the air. The cabin howled. The cold air hit him immediately. He figured it was time to—Jesus Mother Crisco Oil it’s COLD in this helicopter!—he figured it was time to crack a joke—It is SO freaking cold in this goddamned helicopter!—and try to lighten everybody’s mood, especially Milo’s. Spencer called out, “He
y, Milo?”

  “Yeah, sir?”

  “It’s chilly in here!”

  “What’s that, sir!”

  “I said, it’s pretty goddamn chilly!”

  Milo looked at him like he was crazy.

  “Fuckin’-A, sir! You got that right!”

  And then Milo closed his eyes and tried to go to sleep.

  Ice grew on the barrels of the machine guns mounted in the doors. The Army bastards standing in the doors manning the guns (Spencer didn’t know their names) stood still as ceramic gnomes, bundled in layers of parkas, snowpants, gloves, and heavy boots, their helmeted heads bobbling back and forth as they scanned the far, far distant ground for muzzle flashes, missile fires…. They knew that a Stinger missile lifted off the ground sparkly and twirling; rockets flew up like the lit end of a glowing cigarette in somebody’s hand as they lift it…. It was a helluva ride.

  One of those guys manning the guns was Flight Engineer Carson Millhouse, a ten-year career man from Southern California. With his straight black hair and old-timey, gold-rimmed spectacles, Millhouse looked like someone you’d see on the back of a Lynyrd Skynyrd album. The pilots had nicknamed him “Hippy.” Growing up in a family of eight kids, he’d spent his youth “despising the military.” And then it dawned on him that the easiest way out of the house was to join the Army. Hippy loved the men he worked with and he lived in fear of being promoted out of the unit. If he went up in rank to master sergeant (he was a sergeant first class), he’d find that there were fewer slots available and he’d have to leave and enter the regular Army, where his new pay grade would make life more comfortable, but where the daytime flying and regular routine would bore him to death. This was a terrible thought.