Horse Soldiers: The Extraordinary Story of a Band of US Soldiers Who Rode to Victory in Afghanistan

Horse Soldiers is one of the most well-written non-fiction books I have read in a long, long time. The narrative is so compelling that I read it almost non-stop over a 2-day period. I can easily understand why it took Doug Stanton 6 years to write this book. The amount of research Stanton did is impressive. He also conducted hundreds of hours of interviews and went into Afghanistan to walk the battlegrounds, meet the Afghans involved in the battles and experience the challenges of the terrain and circumstances.Gaining the trust of Special Forces soldiers (the "Quiet Professionals") necessary to write this account of a major American military success was a feat. Interviews with these highly-trained and skillful warriors, rarely given, allows Stanton to guide his readers know a great deal about these men and their commitment. Stanton's forte' is helping the reader to know the major players--to know how they think, act and feel about their lives, their honor, their families and their countries. Stanton's portrayal of intimate and human details of the people involved -- Afghans and Americans alike. In the end, this book is compelling in its description of a harrowing mission experienced by some of America's finest professional soldiers.Stanton describes the uniqueness of Special Forces like this:"Special Forces trained to do something different from everyone else. They fought guerilla wars. This fighting was divided into phases: combat, diplomacy, and nation-building. They were trained to make war and provide humanitarian aid after the body count. They were both soldier and diplomat. The medics worked as dentists, fixing the teeth of local villagers; the engineers, experts at the orchestrated mayhem of explosives and demolition, were trained to rebuild a village's bridges and government offices. They spoke the locals' language and assiduously studied their customs concerning religion, sex, health, and politics. Their minds liked in the dark corners of the world. Often, they were the senior ranking American officials in a country, hunkered down in the dirt drawing out a water treatment plan with some warlord and acting as America's de facto State Department."Not long after 9/11, the Department of Defense decided to drop two 12-man Special Forces teams into Afghanistan where they would work with the Afghan warlords. These men came by stealth of night, flown in by "Nightstalkers" - helicopter pilots specially trained to fly in the dark over dangerous terrain using sophisticated GPS and other electronic assistance. This was a top-secret mission.The goal of Special Forces soldiers was not to tell the Afghani warlords what to do, but rather, to engage in a diplomatic advisory and military collaboration with them. Using their SF training, these two teams figured out what the Afghanis were thinking. They fought with the Afghanis remaining at all times conscious of how the Afghan Alliance leaders' view of the mission was impacted by their cultural and historical background. In other words, the SF soldiers made no judgment calls and did not insist upon substitution of their judgment for that of the Afghanis.These SF soldiers did not know until they arrived in Afghanistan that they would be riding horses up steep, narrow and dangerous mountain trails, often only a couple of feet wide with a steep mountain wall on one side and an enormous precipice on the other. When it was obvious that this was not only expected, but necessary, they just did it. [Mind you, most of these men had never ridden a horse before.] Saddle sores were a given. Sleeping without much in the way of shelter or comfort, going days without food when the one allotted MRE per day was gone and supplies were hard to come by, these courageous Americans rode into battle and fought in the trenches along with the Afghans. Their secret weapons --GPS and laser-guided bombs ("smart bombs") - were part of what it took to conduct a very short and successful mission over a two-month period.Stanton doesn't dwell on the fact that the amazingly quick recovery of Afghanistan from Taliban rule was not a lasting solution. He gives credit--well overdue--to the military specialists who made it possible. He also notes in the Epilogue:"The epic success of the Horse Soldiers, as they were dubbed, was stunning, by both historical and contemporary standards. The campaign is, in fact, a template for the way the present war [the Iraqi war] - and future ones - should be fought. Instead of large-scale occupations, we should rely on small units of Special Forces who have proved it's infinitely more effective to work with a country's soldiers and citizens at eye level."Stanton notes that "it took fewer than fifty U.S. military personal like Nelson and Dean [SF soldiers] on the ground. They accomplished in two months what Pentagon planners had said would take two years."The concept used by the horse soldiers is simple. As Stanton explains:"By entering Afghanistan with a small force, and by aligning themselves with groups that had once been battling each other and pointing them in one direction at the Taliban, U.S. forces found robust support among Afghans. They proved the usefulness of understanding and heeding, the `wants and needs' of an enemy, and the local population that may support it. Awareness is the soldier's number one too in his kit, besides his M-4 rifle. To win wars against enemies like the Taliban, which are often stateless in their affiliation, you adapt."You eat what they eat, sleep where they sleep, and think like they think. The information and insight gained from this was the essence of the Special Forces soldier's training and experience."As Stanton relates in his Epilogue, he received a phone call in May 2003 after Ambassador Paul Bremer, the director of reconstruction and humanitarian assistance in Iraq, "fired" the Iraq National Army, disbanded it and sent those 500,000 people home with their weapons: "We just lost Iraq," said his caller.Stanton's caller told him that by telling 500,000 Iraqis to "go home and let us do it" and by letting them take their weapons with them, America made the Iraqis feel as though the Americans were imperialists. Stanton says (and of course the subsequent course of events in Iraq) this decision has proven to be a costly and serious mistake.Could America learn from this? One can only hope.One last comment in this very long comment: What possessed me--a woman opposed to war--to read this book, almost non-stop, was this: Doug Stanton really makes you care about the people he is writing about - real people. People in peril. And I think I finally understand how he did that. In the last paragraphs of the Acknowledgments, Stanton writes about how he was finally able to convince one of the SF soldiers to talk to him. It was because he conveyed to this man that he (Stanton) understood the essentially human elements of what SF and the SF approach to situations like this Afghanistan insertion. Stanton went looking for a particular soldier. A suspicious man walked up to him and asked him what he wanted. When told that Stanton was writing a book, the man was unresponsive.Stanton then writes:"Then I threw a Hail Mary. I told him that I wanted to know what it was like to wake in the predawn hours on a tree-lined street in the middle of American and leave for war . . . Children's toys fill the cracked driveways of the neighbors' houses up and down the street . . ."A man steps outside, walks to his car, and turns for a last look. He may not see this place again."This was the face I wanted to see, [he] said to the soldier--the face of that man in those private hours."And that, Stanton said, led to this stranger opening his heart and his life to Stanton to talk about his experiences with the SF soldiers dropped by Nighthawks into Afghanistan. It was this essential putting of a human face upon the persons who took part in this amazing expedition that made this a book I could not put down.

I am a book reviewer for BookPleasures. I am also a Special Forces veteran --Vietnam era. Following is my review of "Horse Soldiers" The full title of this book on Amazon is "Horse Soldiers: The Extraordinary Story of a Band of US Soldiers Who Rode to Victory in Afghanistan" I will agree with that title and subtitle, but there's more. Horse Soldiers is the story of an extraordinary group of men who went into Afghanistan with little more than their personal equipment, superb training and courage. The U.S. Army Special Forces (Green Berets) soldiers were deployed within weeks of 9/11 as a direct response to the terrorist attack. They were the literal "tip of the spear," the first American soldiers with boots on the ground. In their briefings, just prior to being inserted into Afghanistan, they were warned that they might be captured by the very people they were to advise and be held for ransom, or killed. Their mission was to contact two of the major warlords of the Northern Alliance; develop a relationship of trust; advise them on tactical matters when necessary and provide overwhelming firepower by calling on U.S. Air Force assets to bomb and destroy Taliban positions and armor. From this reviewer's point of view, the story told in Horse Soldiers is the first truly doctrinal deployment of the Special Forces, in their primary role, since WW II. True, the Special Forces has been engaged in antiterrorist activities; direct intervention (such as MACV SOG in Vietnam) and countless--highly classified--missions. But the primary mission of the unit has always been: link up with guerilla forces; establish rapport with them; advise and provide logistical support; acting as a "force multiplier" destroy the enemy from behind his own lines. Special note: The term, special operations has been bandied about--in publications and in public parlance--until many take it to mean many different units. There is only one Special Forces, with capital letters. These are U.S. Army units whose headgear includes the Green Beret. The two, 12-man, Special Forces "A" Detachments (SFODs) that rode horseback with the Afghan warlords Dostum and Atta in 2001, were from the 5th Special Forces Group, headquartered in Fort Campbell, Kentucky. After these units were on the ground and their mission was well underway, additional command and control personnel were deployed to join them. Captains Mitch Nelson and Dean Nosorog commanded the SFODs. The book tells their stories compellingly, but also details the activities of the superb Warrant Officers and Noncommissioned Officers (NCOs) who made up their teams. In order to fulfill the first element of their mission; creating rapport and gaining trust, the teams had several special gifts to give the warlords--including vodka. They also had to eat, sleep and ride with the Afghan troops. Ride. Many of the troops had never ridden a horse. Some had only slight experience. They learned soon, and painfully, how the local troops traveled. The "saddle" was wooden boards, covered with sheepskin. The "stirrups" were iron rings set too high for the large Americans to relax their legs. Some of the troops bled through their trousers after long rides that included navigating trails three feet wide--on one side a sheer rock wall, on the other, a thousand-foot chasm. Doug Stanton puts his "literary feet" down as carefully as the little horses. He moves through the stories of the men on the mission; the story of the wives who waited for them at home; to the story of the "American Taliban," John Walker Lindh; and the tragic story of the first American killed in Afghanistan, Johnny (Mike) Spann a CIA paramilitary officer. Stanton's story switches scenes to give the reader an overview of the terrain on the battlefield, in the homes of the deployed soldiers and even in the mind of Lindh, without confusing the stories. At the beginning of the book, there are listings of the major players in the story. I advise the reader--since a story of this scope necessarily contains so many characters--to mark those pages for reference as you read. This is a superb book, told with clear language and fresh imagery. The story is even better--because it is true. It is a book that will make Americans proud of the men who call themselves "Quiet Professionals."

Horse Soldiers: The Extraordinary Story of a Band of US Soldiers Who Rode to Victory in AfghanistanThis book was recommended by a friend an I did enjoy the read. What was good for me is that I had not heard or read anything about this subject other that I do recall the evening news telling us about Mike Spann's death and the American Taliban or Al Qaeda captive, John Walker Lindh back in 2001. However, this author has put it all together for me in a well written book. Fascinating is all I could think of when the author described how our Special Forces team had to buy their supplies through retail stores and then how they were literally dropped into and area and basically told good luck. These guys were and are extremely brave and I am so thankful there are citizens that are willing to sacrifice their life for our country with no questions ask. Also, being a person that loves and rides horses, the fact that most of these highly trained men were put on horses as their sole means of transportation without having ever ridden a horse. I can't imagine riding the long hours they endured without the knowledge of knowing out to adjust one's weight or adjusting the stirrups to make the trip a little more comfortable. With that being said there were parts of the book that seemed to lag on a bit, but clearly not the ending. Again I found it fascinating that Afghan soldiers would arrive at a battle field in a taxi, then participate in a old time Calvary charge while being covered by laser guided bombs from aircraft that couldn't be seen. I do recommend this book, you will get through the slow parts and you will find yourself saying, I cannot believe this actually happened while I was home watching television with my family.

Suspense non stop, ist hard to put the Book away. Exzellent Research by the author. Mistrust between the regular Military and the Special Forces is still a topic. Why do military leaders ignore the obvious, Special Forces are the basis of success for the future? This book endorses why former President John F. Kennedy was a substantial promoter of Special Forces.

Having watched the film the book gives more detail. It is well- written, very readable and (one hopes) very accurate.

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This book began as a story about 12 soldiers honoring their military formation and progress to a story about 12 lives trying to help Afghans get a better country. The fiercest fight in the Fortress only happened because the Afghans and 12 heroes had had something that the Taliban never had: respect for human lives and respect for the differences that exist among us all. It has been an honor to know a little bit more about this...