Book chronicles secret mission in Afghanistan

Based on rare access to journals, photos, and documents, and interviews with over 100 soldiers and civilians in the U.S. and Afghanistan, "Horse Soldiers" by Doug Stanton tells the story of the small band of Special Forces soldiers who went on a secret mission to battle the Taliban and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan immediately following 9/11. An excerpt.

Prologue: Uprising
Qala-i-Janghi Fortress

Mazar-i-Sharif, Afghanistan, November 24–25, 2001

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

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

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

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

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

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

Besides, these guys didn’t surrender. They fought to the death. Die fighting and you went to paradise.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More from TODAY 293 lbs. lighter, he’s ‘Biggest Loser’ of all time |   Images Stretch holiday dollars: Toys under $20 | More gift ideas Grandma who crashed into swamp still going strong Makeover! Nuclear power plant worker gets hot Animal tracks: Hungry chimp, swimming cow, more

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

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

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

MORE FROM TODAY BOOKS: HISTORY POLITICS

What was the greatest moment in sports history?

What was the greatest moment in sports history? ‘A History of Ghosts’ explores paranormal past David Alan Grier: Is beige the new black? Is price gouging in wake of a hurricane wrong? New book places blame for Pat Tillman’s death Blagojevich tells his side of story in ‘Governor’ Geraldo on Hispanics’ new era of prosperity Ousted Ill. governor explains self in new book Michelle Malkin: Obama’s team is corrupt Book: Obama turning slump into socialism   Add Today Books: History Politics headlines to your news reader: