Men's Journal

Nearly six weeks after 9/11, a dozen members of the U.S. Special Forces embarked on a secret, critical, and highly unusual mission behind enemy lines. Riding horses too small for them, and aided by an inscrutable warlord, they led the first charge against the Taliban — and won. Here, in an exclusive excerpt from Horse Soldiers, is their story.

By Doug Stanton

Click here to hear an excerpt from the Horse Soldiers audiobook (scroll down to click play).

 

General Abdul Rashid Dostum sat atop his white stallion, a red pom-pom braided in the coarse ivory hair at its forehead. Dostum, one of the Northern Alliance’s three factional leaders, or “warlords,” had returned from exile in Turkey in late 2000 to raise a guerrilla force of several thousand men in Afghanistan and to drive the Taliban from power. He’d been in a series of fierce firefights throughout the summer and fall, but in the last few weeks, he and his men had been holed up in his mountain headquarters above the Darya Suf River Valley. Now, on October 20, 2001, a little less than six weeks after the September 11 attacks, he had been joined by a team of elite American soldiers, a 12-member U.S. Special Forces team that had flown in secretly from Fort Campbell, Kentucky, hours earlier. With his new American allies — who were offering to call in air strikes against their common enemy — he was preparing to lead his men out of an ancient mud fort where they’d met and spent the night. Their mission: Capture the city of Mazar-i-Sharif, a crossroads and resupply route essential to the Taliban’s continued control of Afghanistan.

Midday, under a bright sky that looked polished with velvet, Dostum looked up and down his line of a dozen or so men. Some were barefoot; others wore sandals, men’s dress shoes, or tennis shoes with no laces. The youngest was in his late teens, the eldest in his 50s. Their chapped faces were crowned with colorful scarves, brilliant as peonies, wrapped tight on their heads. Their beards were wild and thick. Their horses stamped the ground, raising and dropping their heads like hammers.

“He’s fixing to leave without us,” said Captain Mitch Nelson, standing in the musty fort. The leader of the American team, Nelson, 32, tall, blond-haired, competent, if not flashy, had met Dostum for the first time earlier that morning. “We better goddamn hurry up.”

Nelson and his men, as well as a handful of CIA paramilitary officers, comprised the United States’ first and, at the time, entire ground-force response to the attacks that had recently shocked the country.

The preflight briefing back in Kentucky had been about as freewheeling as anyone on the team had ever seen. Their commander, Colonel John Mulholland, had gotten right to the point. They were to meet up with General Dostum near the village of Dehi. If they survived, they were to take Mazar-i-Sharif, about 60 miles north of the village. How they accomplished this was up to them. Trust no one, warned Mulholland. Not Dostum. Not anyone. No one in this country is clean.

Because the U.S. did not have a ready plan of attack for Afghanistan, the soldiers had to improvise, starting with their equipment. Before leaving Fort Campbell they’d bought combat boots and GPS’s from camping stores online, then drove to a nearby mall and bought every battery they could find in an electronics store.

After flying for several hours from K2, a secret base in Uzbekistan, the team landed by helicopter just south of Dehi, on a small dirt pad in complete darkness. From there they set out to find Dostum, for whom they’d brought several bottles of Russian vodka as a custom. For the past 12 days a U.S. bombing campaign had failed to dislodge the Taliban from its entrenched positions between Dehi and Mazar-i-Sharif. For the U.S. air strikes to work, Nelson and his men needed to get close enough to provide more precise coordinates for the bombers. But they weren’t even certain they could trust Dostum; the warlord, or his men, could kidnap them for ransom, or worse, kill them.

Dostum touched his stallion’s flanks with his boots, rode over to the men, and stopped. He looked off to the distant mountains, then turned to Nelson. “I cannot guarantee your safety in Dehi,” he said. “There are people there who are not happy about your arrival.” He was suggesting that while some of his comrades-in-arms welcomed American support, others did not, and that Taliban fighters might also be lurking on the route.

Before Nelson could protest Dostum leaving without them, the warlord spurred his horse. Nelson watched as he and his men clattered through the fort gate. Once outside its walls, they let out a whoop, and Nelson listened to the hooves pound. Then, silence. An Afghan soldier came walking up the courtyard leading six horses.

Nelson tried to put Dostum’s warning out of his mind. Concentrate. He’s messing with you.

“Who’s ridden before?” Nelson asked the six-member Alpha cell. Only two men raised their hands. “At summer camp,” they said. “When we were kids.”

At least Nelson knew how to ride. The son of a Kansas rancher, he had been miserable in a desk job he had been recently promoted to and had practically begged his lieutenant colonel to let him go — even though his wife was pregnant.

At the fort in Afghanistan, Nelson tried to pick out the handsomest, tallest horse from the string, but these mounts were nothing like the quarter horses he rode on his father’s ranch. The one he chose had a sugar-white star whorled on its brown forehead. Its rough-haired legs were knobby at the knees and tapered thin as cypress roots at the ankle. The hooves were cracked, unshod, the color of dishwater. In height it resembled an overlarge pony, the kind children ride at county fairs in a sawdust circle. The horse was so short that Nelson could walk right up and look directly in its eyes. The man leading the horses said its name was Suman. He gave Nelson the reins.

Nelson remembered that the Afghans mounted by swinging up in the saddle. He put his left hand on the stained blanket that formed the saddle seat. It smelled rancid. The saddle was made of three boards hinged together, covered by goatskin. He reached up and grabbed the edge of the stout board underneath the blanket, jabbed his right toe as best he could in the iron-ring stirrup, and kicked up and swung down. He landed with a groan.

“Listen up,” Nelson croaked to the five men who were to leave with him. He was comically too large and heavy for the saddle. “Here’s how you make this thing go.” He heeled the horse in the ribs and it walked a few steps. “Here’s how you turn,” he said, pulling a rein, and drawing the muzzle around. “And here’s how you stop.” He pulled on the reins and sat looking at the guys. “Got it?”

“Now, if your horse runs off,” he went on, “and your boot gets stuck in these stirrups and you get thrown, you’ll get dragged. And you’ll die.

“If that happens,” he announced, “you gotta shoot the horse. You don’t want to get dragged over this rough ground. Just reach out and shoot it in the head.”

His guys were watching him as if he’d lost his mind. “I’m not kidding,” he said.

Several Afghan soldiers walked up to help the men get on their horses. They held the reins with their left hands and reached over with their right to steady the stirrups so the soldiers could slip their boots inside. The horses started trotting in counterclockwise circles, forcing the riders to keep up, with one boot in the stirrup and the other hopscotching in the dirt. About every third hop the guys would try to jump up and swing over the saddle. After several minutes, everybody had managed to scramble up.

Cal Spencer, the team’s second in command, walked up to Nelson sitting on his horse. “I’ve got an air drop scheduled for tonight,” he said. “Medical equipment. I’m requesting blankets for Dostum.”

Nelson nodded.

“Man,” Spencer said, “you look funny on that horse.”

Nelson didn’t say anything.

“We’ll keep in hourly contact,” said Spencer.

“I’ll be on the PRC,” said Nelson. This was the interteam radio.

“Mitch?”

“Yeah?”

“Good luck.”

“Luck won’t have much to do with it.”

“I know.”

—-

Captain Mitch Nelson believed there were two kinds of soldiers: the kind you saw on television news and the kind you didn’t see. He and his guys were the men you didn’t see — and proud of it. (At their request, some names have been changed for this account.) For years they had trained for a mission like this, never expecting they’d actually take part in one.

The team’s intelligence sergeant, the imperious and wry Sam Diller, 40, along with Warrant Officer Spencer, was one of the oldest members of the team. He and senior medic Bill Bennett were together in Desert Storm, and Bennett had rejoined the crew just several days after September 11. Back home, Bennett, a quiet, unassuming 33-year-old with 15 years of service, had a wife and son with whom he liked to kayak and hike on the weekends in the Tennessee foothills. But all that was a million miles away now.

The team was comprised of two of everything: two medics (Bennett and Scott Black); two commo officers (Vern Michaels and Fred Falls), whose job it was to run radios and communications within the team and with headquarters back in Uzbekistan; and two weapons specialists (Sean Coffers and Ben Milo) tasked with the mind-boggling challenge of memorizing weapons and ammo used around the world and training the team in their use. Engineers Patrick Remington and Charles Jones kept the group supplied, organized, and operating swiftly, like a minicorporation whose business was handcrafted mayhem. They would be working under the watchful eye of operations sergeant Pat Essex.

Within Special Forces doctrine, the team was to resemble an amoeba, dividing and thriving as needed. The smallest size Nelson had taken the team to in training was three guys to a “cell.” This meant that from an organism of 12 guys, he could split the team into four pieces. “We train like the terrorists do,” Nelson was always reminding everybody. “We fight like terrorists.”

In his shirt pocket, alongside his toothbrush, Sergeant Diller carried a dog-eared edition of the poet and warrior Sun Tzu’s favorite aphorisms. He had memorized many of them and, among others, quoted at will in his West Virginia drawl: “All warfare is based on 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.”

What they hadn’t counted on was dealing in horses. The U.S. Army did not offer Horsemanship 101 as a matter of course. No one at the Pentagon had imagined that American soldiers would be riding horses to war in 2001.

Nelson kicked his horse in the flanks. “Cho!” he said, remembering what the Afghans had shouted when they’d ridden away. The word meant “giddyap” in Dari. “Cho! Cho!”

The horse lurched and started toward the front gate. Soon the five riders were lined up behind him, and they rode out of the gate, about a half hour behind Dostum.

Nelson hadn’t ridden far when he saw the dust cloud of Dostum’s posse up ahead. Maybe a half-mile away. Dostum was keeping ahead of him, out of range. Nelson didn’t know why. He worried about losing the trail and pushed hard to catch him.

As they rode, they didn’t see a soul. They passed empty settlements that had been decimated by the Taliban. Whole families wiped out, the men and boys dragged away, into the army. The water wells poisoned. The shells of houses standing amid mounds of broken mud wherever the Taliban had driven their tanks up and inserted the cannons through the windows and fired.

The Americans crossed the cold Darya Suf River, the horses plunging in and pulling out the other side, wet up to their chests and the men’s pants dark up to the knees. They rode across a ceramic-hard plain and crossed another braid in the river and came out clopping on the other side and started to climb a mountain. Or a part of it, a shoulder, hunched 6,000 feet high on the thin bank of the river.

They cut in on a trail carved in the rock and started up. The horses put their heads down and didn’t lift them. They climbed higher and higher. On one side was sheer mountain wall, cascading plates of rock frozen in place; on the other, a 1,000-foot drop. The trail was two feet wide. How in hell do these horses know not to step off? The animals ground out each step, the cannon bones in their legs driving like small fence posts on the ground. Ram. Ram. Ram. They rode up the last bit of the hill, and the horses strained beneath them and stood on flat ground.

Dostum was still nowhere in sight.

Nelson saw three trenches on the hill below. In front of each, facing north, earth had been piled to make a protective berm. The trenches were about 30 feet long and five feet deep. A man could lean forward over the berm and rest his rifle on the packed earth and fire. Nelson saw that they were soundly made fighting positions.

At the top of the hill he discovered three caves. Dostum emerged from one of them, the largest. He stepped toward Nelson and with a sweep of his arms said, “Welcome to the mountain headquarters!”

Outside the cave Dostum and Nelson sat cross-legged on a blanket overlooking the valley. Next to them was a tall wooden pole with a radio antenna wire fastened to the top. Dostum sat by the radio itself and a bank of portable solar cells that could be broken down and carted by mule. Nelson thought it was a slick setup. Dostum was running this part of the insurgency on solar power. That had to be a first.

Nelson guessed their elevation to be about 8,000 feet and that the far hills across the valley were 10 miles away. The Taliban hadn’t been able to take this high ground from Dostum while he’d been battling them in the south of the river valley. Now he was going to use this high ground — and American firepower — to bomb them. Dostum despised most of all a tall, bearded Taliban commander named Mullah Faisal, the man who now occupied Dostum’s former headquarters at the fortress in Mazar. Faisal commanded the Taliban’s 18th Corps, some 10,000 soldiers. Next in command was Mullah Razzak, whose 3,000 to 5,000 soldiers of the Taliban 5th Corps controlled the Darya Suf and the adjacent Balkh River Valley. Razzak was joined in the Balkh by the fearsome one-legged Mullah Dadullah (he lost the leg fighting the Soviets and wore a prosthesis). Several dozen subcommanders spread across the country supported these three commanders.

Dostum pointed across the valley and said, “There they are. Taliban soldiers.” These were Mullah Razzak’s men.

Nelson raised his binoculars and cranked down the focus with his forefinger and steadied himself for a clear picture. Nelson couldn’t sight any enemy fighters in the distance, but he didn’t want to say so. It was like hunting deer or catching fish. Part of your standing in camp meant how well you could spot game.

He lowered the glasses. “I’m sorry, general, but I don’t see what you’re looking at.”

Dostum pointed to a far outcropping on one of the distant ridges. My God, that’s miles away, Nelson thought. Does he think we can bomb that from here?

“Okay, I see it,” said Nelson, bringing the dark spot into focus.

“That is the Taliban’s position,” said Dostum. “One of their bunkers. I know, because I have been fighting them.” He asked Nelson, “Can you bomb it?”

“Well, sir, like I said, we can bomb it. But I need to get closer. I can’t accurately target it from here.”

“No,” he said. “You cannot get closer. I cannot let you get killed.”

“I know that, I understand that, but you have to understand I can’t call in bombs from this distance. I’ve got to fix the bunker on a map and call that coordinate to the pilot.”

Dispatched in coordination with the needs of ground forces, B-52s would leave from bases as distant as Diego Garcia, 2,800 miles away, in the Indian Ocean, and arrive “on-station,” ready for men like Nelson’s command to drop JDAMs, short for “joint direct attack munition,” but known informally as a “smart bombs” (as opposed to the “dumb bombs” dropped by the millions over Europe and Japan during World War II). A JDAM is 12 feet long and packs about 1,200 pounds of explosives. It’s tapered at its green nose to a sharp point and can fly 15 miles from drop point to target.

Nelson didn’t like haggling with Dostum about how to do his job. He wanted to ask him why he’d left them in the lurch back at Dehi. But something stopped him. A feeling he had. That he had passed a test by getting to the mountain headquarters.

He thought maybe this argument about dropping bombs was another test. Dostum’s men bowed and curtsied to the general’s every move, and it was clear he was the bull of the woods in these parts. Nelson could see how this arrangement would work: Dostum would be in charge, and Nelson would make him believe that this was true.

“All right,” he said, “we can drop bombs. I’ll set it up.” Dostum smiled.

In fact, Dostum was relieved. He wondered about the Americans’ abilities. Smart bombs were still a rumor in this part of the world. They were reported to fly where you told them to go. By themselves. Like iron birds. This technology had not existed in his long war with the Soviets and then with his fellow Afghans (otherwise, of course, he would have used it). He was hoping the Americans would surprise him again, as they had the night before when he’d learned that they landed so expertly in the dead of night. Dostum had thought it was most incredible to fly helicopters at night with no lights. Unbelievable.

Nelson asked, “And you’re sure these are Taliban, right?”

It was Nelson’s responsibility not to drop anything on anybody unless the target was clearly defined as an enemy position. Those were Nelson’s rules of engagement. Otherwise, various warlords could use the Americans and their “wonder bombs” to take out rival factions. Hell, at this distance, Nelson couldn’t be sure exactly what he was looking at, but he was determined to find out. The fact that the bunker was so far north, in Taliban-held ground, was an indication the Hazara General Mohaqeq or the Tajik General Atta, Dostum’s archrival, didn’t own it. But Nelson wanted more. “You’re sure they’re Taliban?”

Frustrated, Dostum picked up a handheld radio, what looked like a Motorola walkie-talkie. “Come in, come in, come in,” he said, speaking rapidly in Dari. “This is General Dostum.”

The small speaker popped to life. Dostum had raised the Taliban on the radio. Nelson heard shouts and chatter, none of it sounding friendly. “I am here with the Americans,” Dostum said, “and they have come to kill you. What do you think of that?” The radio roared even louder, as if that were possible. Dostum smiled. “See? They are listening to me,’’ Dostum said. “Tell me,” he said, speaking back into the radio, “what is your position?”

This was unbelievable to Nelson — that Dostum would ask such a question and that he seemed so surely to expect an answer. Nelson heard the Taliban talk even more rapidly. Dostum turned to Nelson and explained that, yes, in fact, the bunker they were looking at was the Taliban’s. No doubt about it. And then it dawned on Nelson that the Taliban had no idea what was coming. The Taliban believed they were invulnerable. This in itself was an incredible discovery.

Nelson had a sickening feeling — elation and fear — that he might get ahead of himself if he got too confident in the fight. Like Dostum, the Taliban had never seen what a relatively inexpensive GPS mounted inside a $20,000 bomb could do. The places it could fly. How it could find its target. Dostum signed off by saying, “Thank you, that is all.”

He told Nelson that he talked to the Taliban all the time. Some of his men had brothers or cousins in the army, he said, either by choice or conscription. And sometimes these men came to him and asked, “Sir, could we not attack a certain place so strongly today?” “Why?” Dostum would ask. “Because my brother is there. He is a good man. I do not want him killed.” And if Dostum could afford it, if the position could be determined to be of some minor importance, he would hold the attack. That was the way war worked, Dostum said. Everything was possible. Forestalling death was a negotiation.

He explained that the Taliban had called him on his Motorola after the attacks in the United States. “The Americans will be coming,” they told Dostum. “Who will you fight for?” He had laughed. To his mind the Taliban were fools, ninnies. On top of that they were boring. They did not drink. They hated women. They were a social nightmare.

He described how a few weeks earlier he’d even met with some of them in person to discuss the future. Was he worried about being killed? Not really. He knew he was worth more to them alive than dead. In him they had a known quantity with which to negotiate: a man who would make deals.

“You are a Muslim,” the Taliban scolded him. “Don’t work with the infidels.” They explained that Osama bin Laden himself had proclaimed jihad against the Americans.

Dostum squared himself and looked the Taliban leader in the eye. “Your jihad is useless,” he told them. “Don’t come to me with your talk of jihad.” He practically spat out the words. He grew angrier. “Even the Muslims hate you. You have committed a crime against humanity that is unforgivable.”

He asked the Taliban soldiers how many women they had stoned. “Hundreds? Thousands?” he yelled.

He wanted them to feel some sense of shame. But he could see they did not.

“Here is what I am going to do,” he told them. “I am going to do a ‘hometown thing.’ Pack up your things. Pack your trucks. Leave the north, leave Mazar-i-Sharif. Go back to where you came from. Don’t come face to face with me again. Don’t bother me.

“That,” he said, “is what I will do for you.”

He went on: “But if you stay and fight, I will kill you. I will hunt you and kill you.” The Taliban had been flummoxed by Dostum’s bravado. They didn’t know what to think. The man did not seem to fear them at all.

—-

With the target identified as the enemy, Nelson was eager to get started. The wind whipped dust devils up and down the hill that went spinning into the valley and vanished with a visual pop in the air. He stood at the edge of the trench with his hands on his hips, looking at the valley and the Taliban positions beyond. He jumped into the trench and landed waist-deep in the narrow slit. The Taliban were on the other side of the river. The river ran north and south, but at this particular place it took a bend to the left, or west, so that the Taliban were actually on its north side. Ahead he could see the village of Beshcam about three miles away, several dozen mud houses and no people. And beyond that another village, larger, a tiny brown flare on the horizon through the optics of the binoculars.

The men looked through their lenses again. Even farther north was Chapchal. If Dostum and Nelson could push the Taliban north and reach Chapchal, then they could take Baluch. From there the Taliban would have to fall back up the river. In this way they could drive them north to Mazar-i-Sharif and complete their mission with that city’s capture.

One of Dostum’s men stepped forward and spread a blanket on the trench berm and Nelson turned and said, “Tashakur” (thank you) and leaned forward with his elbows on the blanket, still looking at the country through the binoculars.

He let out a breath and waited for the image to settle and focus before his eyes. A collection of eight Taliban pickups loomed up in the water-clear depths of the binoculars, looking as if they were only a quarter-mile away. Close enough to see the battered black doors. Toyota Hiluxes. In the cramped beds of each, several dozen Taliban soldiers were sitting along the rails with their robed knees touching in the middle. Rifles over their shoulders. His first clear sight of them. He fiddled with the focus wheel to sharpen the image. Their turbans black as crows’ wings.

“We’ll have to get closer,” he said, hoping the older man would relent.

Dostum cut him off. “We will bomb from here.”

Nelson shrugged. So be it.

He reached down his shirtfront, pulled up the GPS hanging by a lanyard on his neck, and read the pixilated numbers in the device’s gray window. These were the latitude and longitude coordinates that marked his position. He read them twice to make sure he was not making a mistake.

He wrote the numbers down in a green hardback notebook he kept in an oversize pocket on his shirtsleeve and circled them to keep them separate from the rest of the numbers he would be writing down. He did not want to mistakenly give them to the pilot, who might confuse his position with the enemy’s.

Nelson asked Dostum to unroll the huge map, and the anxious warlord did so.

“We are here,” Nelson said, pointing at their ridgetop on the paper, one of thousands of elevation lines on the map. He reached into his rucksack, lifted his range finder to his eyes like a mariner’s spyglass, and shot the distance to the pickups: They were eight kilometers, or about five miles, away.

Nelson looked down at the map and counted the grid squares from his ridgetop until he’d marched out eight squares with his finger (each grid square equaling one kilometer) and found the Taliban’s approximate position on the far hill. He set the range finder in the dirt beside him and looked up at the position across the valley with his naked eye. The Taliban were dug into the hillside, and their trucks were parked below the bunker about 100 yards off. A small path led up from the hill and into the mouth of the bunker. The doorway was framed up by thick timbers.

Nelson studied the scene. He wanted to absorb the rawness of it. When he felt he had done so, he looked down at the map and translated the image onto the elevation lines fanned on the paper. He did this several times, looking back and forth between map and hill until he felt he’d found the position on the paper that corresponded to the features of rock and slope across the valley. He now had a fix on the Taliban’s position. He wrote the position’s grid coordinates in the notebook and scribbled “Enemy CP” (command post) beside them. These were the numbers that he would radio up to the B-52 overhead.

He looked up, squinting. There the jet was, thousands of feet above, barely visible. It looked like the silver nub on the screen of an Etch A Sketch scoring a wide oval in the sky, about 20 miles long and 10 miles across. The pilots called this the plane’s “race track.” All Nelson had to do was pick up the radio and relay the numbers. He hoped to God he didn’t screw it up.

The satellite radio was heavy and boxy like a home stereo receiver. A long cable snaked from the radio across the dirt to a spindly black antenna pointed in the direction of government satellites circling overhead.
Nelson keyed the mike and read off the coordinates. Up in the cockpit, the pilot reached over with a gloved hand to a console and typed in the numbers. He then pressed “Send.”

The bomb awoke. It was now armed and targeted.

The pilot announced, “Pickle, pickle, pickle” — the traditional announcement of bombs away — then pushed another button on the console, and the bomb fell from the belly of the plane and started flying to the ground.

Nothing was moving up on the far hills, and it was still, as well, in Nelson’s trench. They stared at the Taliban position.

And then, exactly 30 seconds later: the mushroom cloud.

They saw the explosion before they heard it, and then came the boom. It rolled up the hill and over them on the ridgetop like a train and kept going and receded behind them and faded.

The violence was fearsome. Nelson had called in air strikes before, but never on people. Always in practice. He scanned the Taliban position with the binoculars, anxious to see the damage done.

As the smoke cleared, he saw that something had gone wrong. He scanned the hill again. The bomb had missed the bunker. By a lot. Maybe a mile, maybe more. It had landed between them and the target.

He wondered if Dostum realized the mistake. He was about to explain what had happened when he noticed that one of the general’s most trusted aides, a man named Fakir, was moving up and down the line of Afghan troops slapping high-fives. The men with him were laughing. Dostum himself was grinning. For the moment, Nelson decided that he’d keep his disappointment to himself. As he was thinking this, the second bomb hit.

This explosion was even bigger, and Nelson saw that this one too had fallen short.

The Taliban were filing out of the bunker and looking around — up at the sky and across the desert — unsure of where the big noises were coming from. After a short while they went back inside. Dostum’s men continued laughing at the sight.

Nelson was sure he’d figured the coordinates right. Maybe the B-52’s crew had plugged them in wrong. He got on the radio and told the pilot to correct for elevation.

The pilot dropped again. This third bomb hit closer, but he was going to have to do better.

At the sound of explosions, the air still thick with smoke, the Taliban poured out of the bunker, maybe a hundred men or more. They came running out in a crouch with their weapons at the ready, as if under infantry attack.

As soon as they saw the smoking crater, they stopped. If they saw the B-52 overhead, they didn’t seem to connect its presence with the sudden appearance of the swimming pool-sized crater at their feet. Nelson felt as if he’d traveled back in time. Here he was, riding a horse, loaded with sophisticated electronic gear and ordering bombs to be dropped from planes that took off from 3,000 miles away. As the men on the team would later say, this was like the Flintstones meeting the Jetsons.

The Taliban stood puzzled at the crater’s edge. Then a few of them started walking around inside the smoking hole, shaking their heads, as if to divine its origin. Nelson was getting more frustrated by the minute. He might as well have been standing on Mars and phoning the war in. They didn’t know he was there.

He decided he would recalibrate the drop. Before he could reach the pilot, however, two more bombs exploded. These were even farther off target and landed two miles or more from the bunker. Nelson barked into the radio that the pilot should cease fire.

He turned to Dostum, ready to apologize. He wanted to say, That’s not who I am; I am capable of more. But he knew this would create an irreversible dynamic between them: Nelson, in Dostum’s eyes, would be a man seeking the other man’s approval. It would shift an unspoken balance in Dostum’s favor.

Fakir saw the disappointment in Nelson’s face. “Don’t worry,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“You have made explosions come from the sky. The Taliban are afraid!”

Dostum was speaking happily into his radio with the enemy. “I warned you that I had the Americans here! How do you like me now!”

Nelson saw his opening. “Well, I can do a whole lot better than that.”

Dostum wanted to know how.

“Get me closer to those sonofabitches.”

—-

They turned out of the camp at midmorning and rode down the hill with the sun hot on their backs and the horses rolling beneath them along the path. Then the path got rocky, the riding hard. They climbed several thousand feet across the face of the mountain and descended again. Going where there was little sign of a trail. Where no truck or tank had ever been.

They were headed for the outpost at Cobaki, about two miles from the mountain headquarters, but because of the terrain they rode at least five miles along a crenellated maze of switchbacks, dead ends, precipices. Nelson trusted that Dostum would lead them safely. He knew he was breaking rule number one, which was: Trust no one. He kept his hand near his weapons.

As they rode, the Americans struggled with their horsemanship. At times they could be downright comical. Later in the journey, Fred Falls’s horse, an irascible stallion, would leap off the trail without warning, ignoring the switchbacks, and start running down the mountain face. Falls leaned back in the saddle because he had seen an actor in the movie The Man from Snowy River do the same thing.

His head bouncing up and down on the horse’s butt and his hiking boots flailing up around its ears, Falls yelled at the top of his lungs, “I don’t want to die!” At the bottom of the run the horse spied an eight-foot-wide ravine; Falls saw it too and yanked on the reins. The horse leaped and was airborne, sailing downhill, making a perfect landing, and galloping to the bottom.

Falls sat up, amazed that he’d survived. He had covered so much ground so quickly with his shortcut that it took Dostum and Nelson 10 minutes to reach him.

When they did, Dostum rode up, gazing at Falls. He said something quietly in Dari as he passed and rode on without stopping.

“What’d he say?” Falls asked a translator.

“He said, ‘Truly, you are the finest horseman I have ever seen.’ ”

“Tell the general thank you,” said Falls.

After a four-hour ride, they arrived at Cobaki, an austere, windswept outpost, altitude 4,800 feet. In the distance, tucked on top of a hill, stood about 40 mud houses. The window openings dark and empty. No people about. No animals. The village looked like something recently excavated from the earth. Nelson set to work preparing the bomb strike.

The Taliban had dug a trench line into a hill near the village, which was about two miles off. Nelson saw a collection of brownish-looking pickups that the Taliban had camouflaged, he would later learn, by mixing dirt with gasoline, forming a thick paste they smeared on the body. Water was in precious supply.

Nelson glassed the country and saw several Taliban tanks, what appeared to be late-model Russian war horses, parked on a hill behind the trenches. Each could fire a 100mm shell, at five to seven rounds a minute, more than a mile. On rough ground the 45-ton behemoths could travel 20 mph; on roads they could speed at 30 mph. They would be a formidable opponent for men attacking them on horses.

Nelson also spotted several BMP artillery cannons, called Bimpies. They were designed to protect infantry during an assault, and some were known to be armed with a 100mm gun, a 30mm cannon, and three machine guns bristling from the blunt metal bow. They could hurl fragmenting shells up to two and a half miles.

And there were several ZSU-23s — called Zeuses by the Americans — which, with turrets sprouting four 23mm cannons, were normally used as antiaircraft weapons. The Taliban had learned to back these up a hillside so that the uplifted barrels were tipped parallel to the ground and could be fired at a demonic rate of 200 rounds a minute, creating a furious wall of lead. It was through this wall that men and charging horses would try to ride.

Nelson, having plotted several targets, was ready to attack. Dostum had other ideas. He suggested they wait until later in the afternoon. The sun would set around 6 pm, he said. They would launch the assault at two.

Nelson wanted to know why.

“Because there will only be four hours of daylight left once we are upon them.”

Nelson didn’t understand.

“This means they will not have time to regroup and counterattack.” Dostum’s outgunned men would fight them as darkness fell and use the night as cover.

Nelson called in his first aircraft. Because he was about two miles from the position (the day before he was at least five), he could be more accurate in his plotting. The Taliban pickups disappeared in a cloud of smoke. Twisted steel and human body parts littered the blackened ground. Nelson set up the next strike. This time he took out several of the Bimpies. After that, he went after the tanks. He was setting up targets and knocking them down.

“How many men do you have?” he asked Dostum.

Dostum said he had three groups led by Commanders Ahmed Lal, Kamal, and Ahmed Khan. Fifteen hundred men on horses and an equal number on foot.

That morning, Dostum had sent the first men from the area — about 300 of them — up the cliffside trail, to the top of the gorge, onto the north side of the river. Now, with Nelson’s men and their bombs on their side, the Afghan horsemen had mounted up for a massive charge. The riders had come to the top, turned right, and ridden through a draw, or valley, screened from the Taliban by a tall hill, where they were able to secretly position themselves near the middle of the plain. The Taliban knew Dostum’s men had come out to the battlefield, but they didn’t know their exact location.

Through the binoculars Nelson looked east across the valley and saw the horsemen all carrying weapons, AKs and RPG tubes, glinting belts of ammo wrapped around their shoulders. They milled about the plain, their horses picketed nearby, chewing ravenously at the grass. Nelson thought back to 15 years earlier, when he was commissioned as an officer in a ceremony on the Shiloh Civil War battlefield in Tennessee. He’d studied the cavalry tactics of Jeb Stuart and John Mosby, whose “Mosby’s Raiders” had ridden circles around Union troops in lightning attacks. Now he sat ringside to the first cavalry charge of the 21st century.

The plan was to charge across the battlefield and swarm the Taliban trenches so swiftly that they’d be unable to adjust the long, heavy barrels of their tanks and return fire. The Taliban would be overwhelmed by the charging horsemen, who would be firing their weapons as they rode.

Dostum was yelling in Uzbek; the radio buzzed with anxious voices. Half the men had mounted their horses and were riding in a quarter-mile line on the back side of the hill. They were still hidden from the Taliban. It took at least a half-hour for all horsemen to align properly. They sat on their horses, lifting their callused, scarred hands to their mouths and speaking into their walkie-talkies, with more men joining the line and then being told to ride out and wait behind the screening hill to form the second wave. It was thrilling.

“Charge!” Dostum shouted into his radio.

At this the men bolted. They shot up in their saddles, climbing the back side of the hill. They crested it and let out a yell and then dropped down and vanished, at least from the Taliban’s view. Nelson could watch all of it from the side, in profile. Dostum was beside him, nervously muttering and speaking into the radio and ordering further corrections in the flying mass of thunderous horses and shouting men.

There was about a mile of ground between them and the Taliban line — a hell of a distance to cover, Nelson thought, without getting shot. However, a series of seven ridges, like ocean swells 50 to 100 feet high, allowed the horsemen to disappear for seconds at a time, even as they advanced. When they got about halfway across the field, the Taliban, having waited for them to come within range, opened fire.

The noise was deafening, shells and bullets whistling over the ground at head height. Men would be riding in the saddle and then suddenly fly backward as if yanked and tumble to the ground and lie motionless as more horses approached from behind and leaped over them, charging toward the firing line. Sometimes a wounded man would get up and limp away or hold out a hand and swing up into the saddle of a fighter smashing past at full gallop. The riders leaned out over the stretched necks of the horses, firing as they ran, the long, dark reins clamped in their teeth.

The last four ridges comprised a half-mile stretch of the battlefield, with maybe as much as 1,000 feet of open ground between some of them. The Taliban tanks sat squat and black, belching yarns of smoke on the last ridge.

Nelson could see the enemy raising and lowering the tanks’ barrels, trying to adjust the fire. It was hard, often impossible, as the horsemen swarmed toward them. They were moving fast, growing larger and larger from the Taliban point of view as they approached.

As the riders reached the second to last ridge, they halted and jumped down from their horses. They threw the reins on the ground, stood on them, lifted their rifles, and began firing methodically at the Taliban line. Some of them were frightened and sprayed the line at full auto. Others shouldered RPGs and fired. Smoke trails whizzed over the open ground as the flying grenades exploded among the Taliban.

As they did this, the second wave of horsemen advanced under the covering fire. They were riding hard from behind and overtook the men on the ground and blew past, shouting, galloping straight at the Taliban line. The standing fighters swung back into their saddles and beat their horses to catch up, and the two waves joined in one line as they drew near, within shouting distance of the Taliban.

Standing near Dostum, Fakir was listening to his radio, dialed to the Taliban frequency. He could hear them yelling, “We can’t resist. We have to move!”

As the horsemen charged, many of the Taliban stood up and looked back and then at the horsemen, and they threw down their weapons and started running, their black smocks flapping, the men slipping on rocks in their cracked dress shoes, falling and rising quickly as the horsemen thudded behind them.

The horsemen leaned from the saddles to reach out and club them with their rifles and dismounted to finish them with knives. Or shoot them in the back, the Taliban throwing their arms wide, turbans unraveling, as they fell face-first in the hard orange dirt.

The fight raged as the light failed, the moon coming up. Just before dark Dostum’s men rode back over the plain through dead bodies and parts of bodies, heads sitting upright in the dirt appearing as if buried up to the neck. The faces slack and impassive as the horses’ hooves passed, inches away. The dead eyes brimming with the sudden flare of sunset.

Nelson realized, We can beat these guys. We can win.

Three weeks later, on November 9, 2001, General Dostum and his rival, General Ostad Atta Muhammad Noor, led the Northern Alliance into Mazar-i-Sharif. By November 17, the Taliban were ousted from power in Afghanistan. Nelson’s team was redeployed to Iraq where, on September 12, 2003, Sergeant First Class William Bennett lost his life in a firefight in Ramadi.

—-

Excerpted from Horse Soldiers: The Extraordinary Story of a Band of U.S. Soldiers Who Rode to Victory in Afghanistan, published by Scribner. ©2009 by Doug Stanton

—-

This excerpt originally appeared in the May 2009 issue of Men’s Journal.