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

22 of 29 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars Puts human faces to the few who prepared the way for an unpopular war. Thoughtful and riveting., May 18, 2009
By Timothy J. Bazzett “ReedCityBoy” (Reed City, MI USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Horse Soldiers: The Extraordinary Story of a Band of US Soldiers Who Rode to Victory in Afghanistan (Hardcover)
Doug Stanton was born in the Reed City Public Library. In fact I have heard him say this. Of course at the time it was the Reed City Hospital, but it still makes a great opening line for a review of Doug’s newest book, HORSE SOLDIERS, recently released by Scribner. Because Stanton writes like he was born to it. Here is history that reads like the best fiction of the action-adventure type.

Now a resident of Traverse City where he grew up, Doug is a product of the Interlochen Arts Academy and the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. His first book, IN HARM’S WAY (2001), was an international bestseller. After reading HORSE SOLDIERS, I strongly suspect it will enjoy similar success.

The subtitle of Stanton’s new book may be problematic for some. It reads: The Extraordinary Story of a Band of U.S. Soldiers Who Rode to Victory in Afghanistan. And, in a nutshell, it’s a good description of the book’s content. Because the soldiers described in these pages are indeed extraordinary people who deserve to be recognized. The problem for some more politically oriented readers, however, will be the word “victory.” They will argue that the U.S. has not achieved victory in Afghanistan and probably never will.

But this is not a book about politics. This is a book about ordinary people, military men and officers, who have trained hard and dedicated their lives to safeguarding the security of our nation, both here and abroad. They are not political people. They were given a mission, and they carried it out to the best of their abilities, despite extreme hardships and unbelievably primitive conditions. They suffered hunger, thirst, cold, exhaustion, sickness and wounds incurred in battle. Against what appeared to be insurmountable odds, these Special Forces soldiers and Special Ops pilots (and a few CIA paramilitaries) persevered and were indeed successful in carrying out their mission, the taking of the town of Mazar-e-Sharif from the Taliban forces. Working in concert with the combined forces of several Afghan warlords of the Northern Alliance, the SF teams lived in caves or in the open, and ate what their Afghan allies ate - often little or nothing. They traveled on horseback, even though many of them had never been on a horse before. This initially prompted some rather comical scenes reminiscent of episodes from F Troop. But despite the too-small wooden saddles, too-short stirrups, and bleeding sores, they quickly adapted. And once mounted, these few dozen courageous soldiers became the first Americans of the twenty-first century to participate in a cavalry charge, racing up and down ridges against vastly superior Taliban forces as they marched steadily north to their objective of Mazar-e-Sharif. In a strange combination of spaghetti western and Star Wars, the Americans, packing radios, GPS devices and laser sights, called in gunships and pinpointed bomb strikes to put the fear of Allah into their numerically superior black-turbaned enemies.

The story told here covers no more than a couple of months’ time shortly after the 9/11 bombings of New York. But, sticking to the style that earned him such success in his first book, Stanton fleshes out the narrative with personal details on all the principals involved, having interviewed the men, their friends, families and superior officers. He was able to do this by gaining unprecedented access to the lives of soldiers who are ordinarily very silent about their activities. Stanton logged literally thousands of miles of travel in the six years he spent researching his story, not just here in the U.S., but also in Afghanistan, where he interviewed some of the warlords involved in the operation, as well as various citizens and shopkeepers of Mazar-e-Sharif, the town liberated from the Taliban in November 2001. You will meet men - and their families - from Alabama, Kentucky, Minnesota, West Virginia, California, Kansas, Texas and Michigan. Any one of them could be your neighbor.

The story reaches a horrific climax in the closing chapters when several hundred Taliban prisoners being held in the ancient mud fortress of Qala-i-Janghi rise up and attack their Northern Alliance jailers, and the SF soldiers are caught in the middle of the ensuing siege and resulting bloodbath.

I am sure HORSE SOLDIERS will have its detractors, people who will argue that invading Afghanistan was not the proper response to the 9/11 attacks. And I would not completely disagree with them. And perhaps neither would Doug Stanton, judging by his epilogue critique of the war as it has been waged since 2001. Stanton’s intent, however, was not to justify the war, but to honor the men who followed orders and prepared the way, at great cost to them and to their families. In this he has succeeded admirably.

Here is how Stanton explains his motives, at least in part, for writing this book about a period of just a few weeks which may one day be no more than a blip on history’s radar -

“... I wanted to know what it was like to wake in the predawn hours on a tree-lined street in the middle of America and leave for war ... Children’s toys fill the cracked driveways of the neighbors’ houses up and down the street ... This was the face I wanted to see ... the face of that man, in those private hours.”

Stanton found that man - those men - who left for war, and he is Everyman. Yet he is unique, apart. And we owe him.

- Tim Bazzett is the author of the Cold War memoir, Soldier Boy: At Play in the ASA. He lives in Reed City, MI.
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