Horse Soldiers

The Extraordinary Story of a Band of Special Forces Who Rode to Victory in Afghanistan

Doug Stanton

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster UK
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781847398239
• eBook ISBN: 9781471108334
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

On September 11th, 2001 the world watched in terror.
On September 12th, 2001 they volunteered to fight.
Twelve soldiers gave us a reason to hope. THE DECLASSIFIED TRUE STORY OF THE HORSE SOLDIERS. This is thedramatic account of a small band of Special Forces soldiers who entered Afghanistan immediately following September 11, 2001 and, riding to war on horses, defeated the Taliban. Outnumbered 40 to 1, they capture the strategic Afghan city of Mazar-e Sharif, and thereby effectively defeat the Taliban throughout the rest of the country. They are welcomed as liberators as they ride on horses into the city, the streets thronged with Afghans overjoyed that the Taliban have been kicked out. The soldiers rest easy, as they feel they have accomplished their mission. And then, the action takes a wholly unexpected turn. During a surrender of Taliban troops, the Horse Soldiers are ambushed by the would-be P.O.W.s and, still dangerously outnumbered, they must fight for their lives in the city's ancient fortress known as Qala-I Janghi, or the House of War... Praise for Doug Stanton: -
'A thrilling action ride of a book.' New York Times
'As gripping as the most intricately-plotted thriller.' Vince Flynn
'A riveting story of the brave and resourceful American warriors who rode into Afghanistan after 9/11 and waged war against Al Qaeda.' Tom Brokaw
'This reads like a cross between an old-fashioned Western and a modern spy thriller.' Parade Magazine
'Spellbinding...action-packed prose. The book reads more like a novel.' USA Today

PART ONE

GOING TO WAR

Comfort Inn Airport Motel South Portland, Maine

September 11, 2001

Little Bird woke.

Beside the motel bed was a small nightstand, a radio alarm clock, a Bible. Beyond that, beyond the dirty window, a parking lot filled with the cars of commuters, of people on vacation, heading to work, to their families, to the rest of their lives. It had been a peaceful night for Little Bird at the end of a long, restless year. This morning, he was going to heaven.

There is no god but one God and Muhammad is his messenger.

His real name was Mohammed Atta, the nickname given to him by his father, a stern and dour lawyer who saw Atta as soft and overly sensitive, as too frail, too lazy, too fretful. Hadn’t he even timed the young Atta’s three-minute walks home through the streets of Cairo, after school, finding fault if he were seconds late? Little Bird, you take too long! Why?

Arrivals, departures. There is no god but one God and Muhammad is his messenger.…

He rose.

Wearing jeans and a blue polo shirt, the floral bedspread smooth and shiny beneath his delicate hands, he looked like another harried tourist eager to start his day. Overhead, jet airliners roared away, taking off.

Ten minutes later Atta stood at the South Portland, Maine, airport, holding a ticket he had purchased on the Internet two weeks earlier in Las Vegas. He’d gone there for a final organizational meeting. Four days earlier, he’d celebrated his birthday in a place called Shuckum’s Oyster House, in Hollywood, Florida. Through the night, he played pinball and drank cranberry juice and watched his fellow assassin, Marwan al-Shehhi, drink liquor and look at the women and nod to the music. He hated their touch, women. Their smell. Their sex. He had five days to live. He was thirty-three years old and he’d just planned the largest attack on American soil in world history. Still, everything bored him. Eating bored him. Sleeping. Breathing. The only thing worth living for was dying.

As Atta walked through the metal detector at the Portland airport, he carried a four-page note in his pocket that read:

“When you get on the aircraft…think of it [your mission] as a battle for the sake of God…. Do not forget…the true promise is near and the zero-hour had arrived. Always remember to pray if possible before reaching the target or say something like, There is no god but one God and Muhammad is his messenger.”

By 5:45 a.m., he was through security, along with another assassin, Abdul Aziz al-Omari. Fifteen minutes later, Atta’s plane took off, and swung out over the Atlantic headed for Boston. There, Atta was to switch planes for a flight to Los Angeles on American Airlines Flight 11.

At 6:52 a.m., inside Boston’s Logan International Airport, seven minutes after he landed, his cell phone rang. It was Marwan, also in the airport, calling from a nearby terminal. The two men must’ve spoken quickly—Is everything ready? Yes, brother, everything is ready. There is no god but one God and we are his messengers.

And then they hung up.

By 7:40 a.m., Atta and his team of four others were seated comfortably, the jet pushing back from the gate. Thirty-four minutes later, United Flight 175, with Marwan al-Shehhi and his four comrades on board, also took off from Logan Airport in Boston.

At the same time—8:14 a.m.—Atta proceeded to take control of American Airlines Flight 11. He and his compatriots sprayed Mace and yelled they had a bomb on board in order to move the passengers to the rear of the plane. At 8:25, air traffic control in Boston heard a voice say: “Nobody move. Everything will be okay. If you try to make any moves, you’ll endanger yourself and the airplane. Just stay quiet.”

In first class, where the hijackers had been sitting, one man lay slumped with his throat cut. Two flight attendants had been stabbed. They were still alive, one with an oxygen mask pressed to her face, the other with minor wounds.

At 8:44 a.m., the plane dipped low over New York City.

A flight attendant on board, Madeline “Amy” Sweeney, was talking on a cell phone to an air traffic controller when she looked out the window and said, “Something is wrong. We are in a rapid descent…. We are all over the place.” And then, before the line went dead: “We are flying low…. We are flying way too low!” A few seconds passed. “Oh my God, we are way too low!”

At 8:46 a.m., American Flight 11, racing at the speed of nearly 500 miles per hour, rammed into the north tower of the World Trade Center. Ten thousand gallons of aviation fuel exploded, with the force of 7 million sticks of dynamite.

Fourteen minutes later, on board United Flight 175, which was now under Marwan’s control, a young man named Peter Hanson was making a phone call to his father, Lee, back in Easton, Connecticut.

“It’s getting bad, Dad,” he said. “A stewardess was stabbed. They seem to have knives and Mace. They said they have a bomb. It’s getting very bad on the plane. Passengers are throwing up and getting sick. The plane is making jerky movements. I don’t think the pilot is flying the plane. I think we are going down. I think they intend to go to Chicago or someplace else and fly into a building. Don’t worry, Dad. If it happens, it’ll be very fast. My God, my God.”

At 9:03 a.m., United Flight 175 hit the south tower.

Thirty-four minutes later, American Flight 77 dove into the Pentagon.

At 10:03 a.m., United Flight 93 exploded in a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania.

Cal Spencer had just gotten out of the Cumberland River and was pulling the Zodiacs onto the boat trailers when somebody in the truck said, “Jesus, can’t anybody turn up the heat?” Spencer shook off the morning’s cold, grumbled, reached over, and punched a few buttons on the dash. Then he wheeled the truck for home through the lush Tennessee countryside, the trees along the interstate painted with the first, faint brush of autumn.

Spencer ticked off the day’s tasks: hurry back to the team room, finish up the avalanche of paperwork that always fell on your desk when you finished a training mission, get home, help Marcha make dinner, check in with Jake about his homework, go to bed. Get up. Repeat.

Sandy-haired, wry, with the lanky build of a baseball player, Spencer was usually ready with a sly quip to liven up any dreary moment. But not this morning. The night had been miserable. He’d led eight Special Forces soldiers up the Cumberland River in the dark, using night vision goggles and a GPS. The work wasn’t hard—Spencer had done this kind of thing hundreds of times, and he was bored. They had delivered their “package,” a second Special Forces team traveling with them, to the predetermined infiltration point on the river, shut down the outboard motors, and waited.

They didn’t have long. Seconds later, the large shadow of a Chinook helicopter appeared over the trees, floated downward, and hovered just feet above the water, a metal insect descended from the heavens, louder than hell, the twin rotors sending mountains of cold spray into the air. The helo was flown by the top-notch pilots of the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment (SOAR). SOAR’s guarantee was that they would arrive thirty seconds on either side of their scheduled time, no matter what, and they had kept their promise. Created in the wake of the 1980 rescue attempt of U.S. Embassy workers in Iran (the Army had determined that poor air support had caused the mission’s failure), the SOAR pilots lived a secretive existence flying exquisitely planned missions in the world’s hairiest places. They operated from a base situated behind acres of barbed wire in a remote corner of Fort Campbell, a twenty-minute drive down cracked, two-lane blacktop from Spencer’s own team room. Spencer never knew any of the pilots’ names and they didn’t know his. It was better that way: in case the real thing ever happened—if they ever went to war—nobody could compromise anyone’s identities. Spencer’s team completed the linkup and he and his men yanked the outboards to life and roared back upriver. Their job was over. Time to get back to the boat landing.

And then they ran into fog. They had to stop the boats because some in the group were blindly bumping into the riverbank. Suddenly, a barge came steaming out of the dark—the big vessel was headed straight for them.

They all sped for the riverbank, where—better safe than sorry—they tied up to some low-hanging tree branches and prepared to spend the night.

Spencer hadn’t dressed for the cold weather. He sat in the bottom of the boat wrapped in a poncho, teeth chattering, trying to pretend the chill didn’t matter. Sergeant First Class Sam Diller found a bunch of life jackets and piled those on top of himself, eight in all, yet still he lay on the boat bottom shivering.

When they pulled up at the boat ramp the next morning, Cal Spencer wanted nothing more than to be curled up at home, martini in hand, watching TV.

He thought that maybe at age forty he was getting too old for this kind of work. As a chief warrant officer, Spencer was the senior man on the team. He was a father figure to the younger guys, and a brother to Diller and Master Sergeant Pat Essex, who had served with him in Desert Storm. Essex was thin, and stern, of good Minnesota stock (he had grown up in California), and wanted to spend his retirement years bird-watching. Sam Diller was from a holler in West Virginia that Cal thought probably didn’t even exist anymore. He was also, Cal thought, one of the smartest guys on the team.

They were all good men, and someday, Spencer mused, they might just get a real mission. As he pondered all of this, news of the first plane hitting the World Trade Center broke over the truck’s radio.

Marcha Spencer was still at home in bed at Fort Campbell when the phone rang. It was her best friend, Lisa, Diller’s wife.

“Turn on the TV!” she said. Lisa sounded freaked out, and that wasn’t like her. She was one of the most poised people Marcha knew, tough as nails.

Marcha flipped on the set and couldn’t believe what she was seeing. The first plane had hit the north tower and the building was in flames. Marcha stared at the screen, not comprehending the picture.

“Those people,” she murmured. And then she thought: Cal. He’ll be leaving soon.

“They’re going,” said Lisa, on the other end, reading her mind.

The two women immediately tried to figure out where their husbands would be deployed. What country? Who had done this? Cal had a deployment scheduled in a few weeks to Jordan, a training mission with the Jordanian army. Marcha knew that’d be canceled now.

As they were talking, the second plane hit.

“Oh my God!” the two friends screamed at each other into the phone. “Oh my God!”

Looking at the TV, Marcha said to her friend, “This one really scares me, Lisa. This one feels different.” Something, they knew, had just ended, and something had just begun.

Hearing the news of the attacks, Spencer floored the big five-ton truck, double-timing it to Fort Campbell, headquarters of the U.S. Army’s Fifth Special Forces Group. The huge post consists of over 100,000 scrubby acres of buckled hills, scorched firing ranges, and humid tangles of kudzu, sixty-one miles northwest of Nashville. The third largest post in the United States, it actually sprawls between two states, the majority of it located in Tennessee, near Clarksville. Fort Campbell’s post office sits in Kentucky, outside the farming burg of Hopkinsville. The entire area is ringed and quilted by strip malls, franchise steakhouses, discount furniture stores, and cornfields. Spencer imagined Marcha at home watching the news on TV. He knew she was tough, but he didn’t know how she’d react to the terrible images.

As he drove, he felt sick to his stomach, confused. He was pretty sure that as soon he got back to base, they’d begin packing to leave. Beyond that, everything was a question mark.

The banter in the truck was nonstop.

Can you believe this?

Who the hell did this?

We’re going to war, right?

Spencer could only imagine what was going on in those planes. He’d been in firefights, he had seen people killed and torn up and blown away, but this was different. These were civilians.

On September 11, 2001, Dean Nosorog had been a married man for exactly four days, a fact that continued to surprise him. He, Dean Nosorog, from a hardscrabble farm in Minnesota, married to the prettiest girl on the planet!

At the moment the planes hit, he and Kelly were in Tahiti, asleep in their hotel room overlooking a black crescent of beach dotted by palm trees. They got up, had breakfast on their balcony, and decided to go mountain-biking. Dean, madly in love, felt a world away from his real life. The best part was that he had two weeks of this easeful living left. They walked out of the hotel hand-in-hand, oblivious to the first news reports of the attacks playing out on a TV in a corner of the lobby.

As they pedaled up a mountain road, no one passing by would have guessed Dean was a secret soldier in a part of the Army most Americans knew little about, the U.S. Army Special Forces. Sunburned, freckled, with unruly red hair, dressed in cargo shorts and T-shirt, Dean resembled a young pharmaceutical salesman on holiday. He kicked off and sped the bike toward town, yelling to Kelly to catch up.

At the bottom of the hill, they pulled into a tiny French pizzeria and ordered. An American woman quickly walked up out of breath and said, “Have you heard?” She was in tears.

“A plane,” she blubbered. “A plane just ran into a building in New York.”

Dean looked at Kelly, cocking an eyebrow. What?

“And there was a second plane,” she went on. “A second plane hit another building.”

Dean’s face dropped. “Hurry,” he told Kelly. The two of them raced back to the hotel.

The lobby was now filled with Americans, all of them, it seemed, also on their honeymoon. Dean pushed up to the TV: everybody huddled close, in shock. Dean watched for several minutes and then he turned to Kelly.

“I’ve got to make a phone call,” he said.

He started back toward their room and along the way paused at the front desk, picking up a copy of the International Herald Tribune.

The newspaper’s headline stopped him cold.

Massoud was dead. The leader of the Afghan people in their fight against the Taliban. The great man had been at war for more than twenty years—the ultimate survivor. Now he was dead.

Not Massoud. Assassinated: September 9, 2001. In Afghanistan. Dean felt that the timing could not be an accident.

All week, the Lion had been close to dying—he just hadn’t known it.

Handsome, graying at the temples, with a sharp smile and eyes like black enamel, the Lion had been restless. He had decided he would attack the Taliban that night, September 9. In the camp, men had been loading AK-47 magazines with ammo, sorting and counting RPGs, feeding their exhausted, shaggy horses, whose neighing and snorting caromed off rock walls scoured by cold mountain winds.

Massoud had been fighting the Taliban for seven years and—he had to admit—they were about to win. He was boxed into a tiny slice of the Panjshir Valley, his boyhood home, a verdant swath of hills and violet escarpments, facing death. Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters, with the help of foreign Arabs, were pummeling his resistance forces...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Author Note
• Key Players
• Prologue: Uprising
• Part One: Going to War
• Part Two: Horsemen, Ride
• Part Three: Danger Close
• Part Four: Gates of Mazar
• Part Five: Ambush
• Epilogue
• Acknowledgments and Sources
• Bibliography
• ABOUT THE AUTHOR
• Photographic Insert