Horse Soldiers Read online

  Without pausing, the sergeant had taken off a ruby ring he was wearing and thrust it out to Lambert.

  “Here, we’ll trade. This damn thing’s been in Bolivia, Panama, Vietnam, Thailand, Pakistan, Belgian Congo, Bosnia, you name it,” he said. Then he smiled. “Now it’s yours.”

  Lambert decided that henceforth the ring would be carried into battle or on a mission during each SF deployment. The only caveat was that the man chosen to wear the ring of war had to bring it home safely. It was a bit of voodoo, military-style.

  As he looked out at the conference room, Lambert remembered one man in particular who had worn the ring five years earlier. The man had appeared to be in excellent health, but then surprisingly failed a routine physical fitness test. Within a week, doctors diagnosed him with Lou Gehrig’s disease. Within days, he couldn’t even use his hands.

  Lambert had arranged for an immediate medical retirement and his fellow soldiers painted the ring wearer’s house, helped him sell it, and moved his family to a new city to be closer to relatives. The ring stayed behind.

  Several months later, Lambert received a phone call from the guy’s wife. She had said he was depressed.

  “Is it okay if I put you on speakerphone?” she asked.

  Lambert, choked up, said sure.

  He hadn’t known what to say at first. He imagined his old friend sitting in his wheelchair, frozen, unable to move or speak. They taught you a lot in Special Forces, but nothing had prepared him for this.

  “You’re a great man,” Lambert had said. “And I admire you.”

  His wife narrated her husband’s reactions. “He’s smiling!” she said. “He seems happier.”

  Lambert spoke for a bit longer, then he hung up, thinking, “I’m going to fix this.” He packaged up the ring and sent it to her. “Tell him to put this on,” he wrote. “I want him to have it.”

  But there was no returning from this mission. The man had put the ring on and sat in his wheelchair and he stared at it, mute, trapped. When he died, he still had it on. His wife gave the ring back to Lambert, telling him, “He would want you to have this.”

  Now, gazing at the men before him, Lambert asked them, “How will you die? I want you to think about that.”

  It was not a rhetorical or even moral question. Part of each team’s mission was to consider the ways in which it could be annihilated, in order to avoid such a fate.

  He handed the ring to the officer in charge of the meeting, and said, “Give this to your best man. Make sure he brings it home.”

  John Bolduc had come home from the prewar planning trip to Uzbekistan on September 22, and Sharon, his wife of seventeen years, and his teenage daughter, Hannah, sat down together and talked about his retirement. Bolduc told Hannah that he felt they didn’t know each other, and he said he was still hoping to change that. But now that chance would have to wait. He was going away, he said. But he promised to come back. It was Bolduc who was given the ruby ring.

  They went to the video store and rented some movies for his last night at home. Husband and wife laid on their bed, with Hannah between them, and stared at the screen. Sharon told him, “You know, I could just jump on your legs and break them, and you wouldn’t have to go.” She was only half kidding.

  Lying in bed, Marcha Spencer looked over and asked her husband if he was awake. Then she asked where he was going tomorrow. Could he tell her? she wondered. She already knew the answer.

  “You know I can’t tell you that,” said Spencer.

  In truth, Marcha didn’t want to know any geographic specifics; all she really wanted to know was whether or not Cal would survive.

  Lying there, Cal next to her, Jake asleep in his room down the hall, it had been a good life, but still…she never said anything, not out loud, you couldn’t. She burned at the lack of recognition—nobody, and she meant nobody—knew exactly what dear Cal Spencer did when he went away on his missions. He came home sunburned, sand in his pants, ready to get back in the swing of family life, walking around with a screwdriver in his hand, looking for things to fix. My God, during their twenty years of marriage, he’d been absent for at least half of it. The sum never failed to stun her. Ten years of No Cal! She and the boys would get along, she knew that. They would grow old together, she and the boys, and Cal would be gone. But who would know what he had done with his life? The Army never let them say anything about their missions—when Cal came home, there was no welcoming party at some sunny airport, with a brass band playing and the TV cameras rolling. What Cal Spencer did when he was away would forever be a mystery. What she and the boys endured remained hidden from everyone.

  In the past, Cal had had dreams of dying in the desert—some desert, any desert—but not tonight. He steered his mind to the sound of the crickets outside. They sang above the whir of air conditioners up and down the block.

  He figured that Death was out there, a black dot on the horizon. Either you would pass it by, or not. Until that time, there was little use worrying.

  He tried not to think about being killed, but he had the feeling that if it was going to happen, it would happen with this deployment. He had read enough intel to know how the Taliban treated their prisoners. The biggest thing was not to get captured. He’d decided he would not be taken alive.

  Cal Spencer fell asleep, knowing he might never again sleep in his own bed.

  The following day, Marcha dropped him off at Fifth Group Headquarters. Cal leaned in the car window and looked at her.

  “I love you,” he said. “And I’ll be back.” He smiled.

  “Okay.”

  Marcha was crying as she drove off.

  The parking lot was the scene of all kinds of turmoil. Ben Milo told his oldest teenage son, “You’re the man of the house. You make sure you make things as easy as possible.” The boy started sobbing.

  Lisa Diller drove away dry-eyed. She’d been cleaning the house the night before, and all day today, right up until it was time to drive Sam to headquarters. Whenever Sam deployed, Lisa cleaned. It was her way of dealing with the stress of her husband’s leave-taking, her way of saying goodbye.

  They had been through just about everything together. Sam had come home from the Battle of Mogadishu in Somalia in 1993, dropped his duffel bag in the living room, and said, shakily, “I’m home.” Lisa took one look and she could tell he was falling apart. She nursed him back. But at least he had returned. As she drove home now, her stoicism melted and she broke down. Coming into the kitchen of the ranch house, she poured a beer and got into the hot tub and soaked in the thick, new silence of the house. It was going to be a long, long winter.

  Late that night, October 5, Spencer crawled on board a converted school bus. The vehicle rolled across the post, the windows blackened so no one could see inside. There were few people to look; the neon of the Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant was dark, the bank sign blinked for no one except the enormous eye of the waning moon. Cold wind blew trash across the street. Few of the guys talked, the bus’s heavy springs squeaking beneath them. Steadily, it rumbled onto the airfield.

  Shouldering his daypack, Spencer stepped off the bus into the roar of the C-130’s four huge engines.

  The plane’s rear ramp was down, its belly palely lit. Together, the men leaned forward through the prop blast, clutched their black watch caps, and trudged up the ramp. They buckled themselves in and the plane shuddered beneath them, its green nose hunting in the dark over the tarmac, hunting speed, lift, release.

  Spencer felt the deck beneath him lighten and drop and knew he was airborne. Aloft, with the sides of the plane cooling in the darkened heavens, he swallowed an Ambien, reached into his pack, and unrolled a foam sleeping mat on the frozen aluminum floor. There in his pack he found the letters Marcha had written him, each one numbered and dated, indicating when he should open them.

  He opened them all at once and started reading hungrily: Dear Cal, I have never told you how much I love you…

  Once done, he placed eac
h letter carefully back in his pack. He lay on the humming deck of the plane and fell asleep, floating over the Atlantic, heading east, into the dawn, to the secret base in Uzbekistan.

  Before Dean took off, he and Kelly went for a drive on a perfect, sunny Sunday afternoon. Winter—and Dean’s departure—seemed an impossible thought. The blue autumn sky looked as if it had been polished with a hank of velvet. Back at their tiny apartment, moving boxes were still stacked to the ceiling.

  They hardly talked as they drove country roads for several hours. At the parking lot next to the church, the scene of so many departures over the years, Kelly finally dropped Dean off. He dragged his rucksack upstairs to the team room, then ran back downstairs and out the door to Kelly. He had to see her again. There she was, still standing beside the car, looking so beautiful, and scared.

  When he’d set his sights on her two years earlier, he’d been a student in the Special Forces Qualification Course at Fort Bragg, and because he couldn’t get enough language study there (he spoke fluent Russian), he decided that once a week he’d drive to Chapel Hill, an hour away, and take a conversational course in Russian at the University of North Carolina.

  One night, a pretty girl with curly red hair had walked into the classroom and taken a seat next to him. Taking one look at her, Dean felt himself turn to jelly. “So,” he stammered, “uh, why are you taking this class?”

  “I’m planning a career in international business,” she said. The way she said this, so confidently, made him think, I am going to marry this woman.

  Their courtship was a whirlwind. Early on, Dean had to leave Fort Bragg briefly and he spent night and day fretting that Kelly would forget him while he was gone. He ordered a florist to send her flowers in his absence. He wrote her letters in advance and arranged for them to be delivered.

  He proposed marriage six months later during a visit to her family’s home in New Hampshire, standing beside her father’s grave. Dean firmly believed that if the old man were alive, he—Dean—would be honor-bound to ask permission to marry his daughter.

  “I wish you could’ve met him,” Kelly said.

  Dean suddenly got down on one knee and turned to her father’s headstone: “Sir, with your permission,” he said, and then he pivoted and looked up at Kelly.

  “Kelly,” he asked, “will you marry me?”

  Now, saying goodbye to her after being married less than a month, he lifted her hands and said, “I love you.” He walked away backward, looking at her. He turned and climbed the steps to his team room, his new combat boots ringing on the metal stairs.

  The entrance door slammed shut behind him.

  Dean paused on the steps to collect himself. Part of him wished that he was good with words so he could have written something for her, letting her know what a lucky guy he was to have met her.

  He jogged to a hallway window on the second floor and looked out, but she was gone.

  He shouldered his gear and walked into Fort Campbell’s prison-like Isolation Facility.

  Dean disliked ISOFAC for its mind-numbing seclusion but also loved it for its promise: To enter ISOFAC was to sit in waiting for your violent birth into war.

  ISOFAC was a closed world within the tightly held universe of the post itself. Guards manned the gate in the chain-link fence, tipped with concertina wire. From the outside, it was a windowless jumble of metal-gray blocks. The ugly architecture suggested that everything important was going on in the inside, which was no doubt true.

  The building was divided into two levels, with the sleeping quarters in the top floor. On the first floor, Dean walked through the main planning room, which was sparsely furnished with desks, chairs, and several dry-erase boards mounted on cinder-block walls. The walls pulsed a dazzling white under banks of fluorescent lights. Each team was allotted two rooms—one for planning its mission and another for sleeping. Each planning room contained chairs and desks, a fifteen-foot-long chalkboard, and a continuous roll of four-foot-wide butcher paper that fed through an easel. The Spartan sleeping room consisted solely of twelve bunks—topped with thin, brown plastic mattresses—squared smartly along the walls.

  Down the hall was another room for hand-to-hand combat training, with padded walls and wrestling mats on the floor. At the end of the hall was the arms room, where weapons were locked up, and a gym with weights, and the cafeteria. It was as spare as a new prison. The odd-looking tower that rose from the clutter of metal, lending the air of a defunct chimney, was used to rig and pack parachutes.

  No talking was allowed in the hallways.

  There were six other teams in the Isolation Facility, including John Bolduc’s. (Among various teams, OD-A 555, “Triple Nickel,” would land near the Panshir Valley shortly after Nelson’s touchdown in Dehi, making Nelson and his men the first U.S. soldiers to enter Afghanistan.) Because the teams were not supposed to talk with each other, they sat elbow to elbow at cafeteria tables during meals, drinking the gritty Kool-Aid (the cooks could never get the stuff mixed right), pretending the others were not in the room. They were forbidden to speak in order to maintain a separation among the teams’ missions. If one of the teams was captured and tortured, they would have little to tell the enemy.

  CIA analysts appeared and visited some team rooms and not others, though they had little to share this early in the war. A few days earlier, on October 7, the U.S. Air Force had started bombing Taliban soldiers dug in throughout Afghanistan. As Dean studied maps of the country, measuring roughly the size of Texas, he saw that it was a surreal contradiction of 17,000-foot mountain peaks, vast desert, and squiggles of green rivers flowing through forested valleys. He learned from intel reports that the bombing campaign was proving to be a challenge. Flying at 20,000 feet over snowcapped mountains and expansive khaki-colored plains, it was difficult for the pilots to designate their targets (the threat of antiaircraft fire prevented lower-altitude flights). It was clear to Pentagon officials that the pilots needed boots on the ground to guide the way—sooner rather than later. They needed guys like Dean.

  Dean would hear one of the CIA guys pad down the hall, knock on a team’s planning room door, and close it gently behind him with a soft click. Dean burned with the desire to hear that knock on his team’s door. He studied whatever he could get his hands on about Afghanistan, including Ahmed Rashid’s book Taliban, and scraps of classified intel about a warlord named Abdul Rashid Dostum, who reputedly was tolerant of both prostitution and opium production in his camp, and with whom the CIA was hoping to do business. Another warlord was named Atta Mohammed (unrelated to the hijacker, with whom Atta Mohammed, because of name simliarity, was sometimes confused). In comparison to Dostum, Atta Mohammed was a pious Muslim.

  Using his laptop in the team’s planning room, Dean searched for more information about these two shadowy men, as well as whatever he could find about bin Laden and Al Qaeda. But there wasn’t much hard intel immediately available. One day, an ISOFAC staffer dropped off an armload of tattered National Geographic magazines and a few Discovery Channel television shows on VHS tape about the history of Afghanistan, and when Dean asked, “What’s that stuff?” the guy replied, “Consider it more intel.”

  It dawned on Dean that the U.S. government was woefully under-prepared to send him and his men into Afghanistan. The country had not been lately in anyone’s intelligence bull’s-eye. When Dean finally did hear the CIA analyst knock on his door, the briefing was anticlimactic and he learned little that he didn’t already know. Thankfully, someone had gotten the idea of phoning the publisher of a book called The Bear Went Over the Mountain, about the Soviet experience in Afghanistan, and asked that they send 600 copies. The publisher no longer even stocked the book and had to scramble and send an electronic version to a printing plant, from which fresh copies were express-shipped to the ISOFAC. Dean was pleased when it arrived. He went to sleep each night plugged into his earphones listening to a Barry White CD and poring over the tome.

  After a week in isolation, h
e felt he was as ready as he ever would be. On October 13, he was asleep in his bunk when the lights in the room snapped on. Dean sat up, swearing and rubbing his eyes.

  “Hurry up!” yelled an ISOFAC staff member. “You guys are moving out! The plane is here!”

  “Well, that plane didn’t just fall out of the sky,” groused Dean. “Who’s the genius who didn’t call ahead and say, ‘I am about to land’?”

  An hour later, he was airborne.

  They left in quick succession. The day before his departure, Mark Mitchell had stayed up until 2 a.m. writing a list of things for Maggie to do in his absence—“Pay $300 to this credit card every month until it’s paid. If it gets paid off and I’m still gone, add the $300 a month to the savings account.” He’d spent the last few days getting the carpets cleaned, fixing the garage door, tightening the loose faucets in the bathroom. Nothing was left to chance. Maggie freely admitted she couldn’t fix anything and Mark was happy to oblige. “I may not be handsome,” he joked with her, “but I sure am handy.” She thought he was the handsomest, most honest man in the world.

  She’d met him at Fort Stewart in Georgia, where she was teaching grade school and he was a lieutenant in the Army. They dated for a month, and Mark asked her to accompany him to a family wedding in Milwaukee. While they were dancing, he proposed. Maggie, surprised, said, “You’re drunk, aren’t you?”

  “Yes, but will you marry me?”

  “Ask me again in the morning when you’re sober.”

  He did, and she accepted.

  Married now for ten years, she loved it that he still had something interesting to say. He’d graduated from the Jesuit Marquette University in Milwaukee, with a degree in engineering. As a teenager, he’d gotten up at four in the morning to deliver his paper route and then clean the bar of an Irish pub in downtown Milwaukee. By eight o’clock he was in school.