Of all the places I've been while talking to audiences about the U.S. Army's 5th Special Forces Group and their story in Afghanistan, one of the most rewarding was an appearance before the 5th Group soldiers themselves at Ft. Campbell, their home, and the place from which they had launched their historic mission in Afghanistan in 2001. I was returning to the source of the story. Colonel Mark Mitchell, with whom I would later appear on stage in several different places to talk about the story, and the Special Forces soldiers' deployment in Afghanistan in 2001, had helped arrange the visit. Back in 2001, Mitchell was a major in Fifth Group; this year, he will take command of it.
At Ft. Campbell, Fifth Group Deputy Commander Lieutenant Colonel Kevin "Duke" Christie introduced me to about 150 soldiers in a small auditorium-- it resembled a college lecture hall. The soldiers sat dressed in their battle dress uniforms, alongside some of the helicopter pilots and crew of the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment-- the same pilots featured in Black Hawk Down. These guys did incredible things flying into Afghanistan, and I'm sure they are doing equally amazing things today, as I write this, as fighting heats up in southern Afghanistan. These are soldiers who do not normally talk to reporters.
I wanted to give them my civilian's perspective about the parts of their story that resonated with the larger American reading public, many of whom had never given soldiers or soldiers' lives a second thought, or even any thought at all. Women, especially, had written me that liked the book, a group of readers who may not generally pick up a "war book."
I should point out that I had never thought of Horse Soldiers as being a "war book" but rather a dramatic story about survival, and about men at work-- doing the work of staying alive-- while back at home their wives and children are engaged in a self-same kind of battle against worry, work and school schedules, the bits and pieces of daily life that can seem so commonplace (but are not) when contrasted to the drama of combat.
As Dean Nosorog, one of the Special Forces captains in the book, said to me, "This is a book about relationships-- between the men themselves, and with the Afghans, and with their families back home."
We had been sitting in a coffee shop in a big city, Dean dressed in sandals and hiking shorts, looking very different from the hard-core and highly educated soldier whose face had populated so many of the pictures on my desk as I wrote Horse Soldiers. After the 2001 battle in Afghanistan, Dean had gone on to teach in a counter-terrorism program at West point. I thought this was an astute point from Dean-- that this was a story about relationships. I hadn't actually thought of the book in this way.
Before Ft. Campbell, I'd addressed the officers and NCO's at United States Army Special Operations Command at Ft. Bragg. You never know when you write something, how the people involved will respond, and you can't worry. You need to be honest and true-- you need to burrow down to the heart of the story and if you write it true then the people will see themselves, and while they might not like it, they will appreciate the honesty. In this case, the soldiers had told me I'd gotten it right with Horse Soldiers. So far, the reach of their story has surprised even me.
At Ft. Bragg, I presented Lieutenant General John Mulholland with a copy, and spent an hour talking about Afghanistan in 2001 and today, 2009. Much of the credit for the first campaign should go to Mulholland, and to his then commanding officer, Major General Geoffrey Lambert, now retired, for getting it off the ground. At Ft. Campbell, I asked the soldiers to raise their hands who had been in high school when 9/11 happened. More than a few hands went up, surprising some of the older soldiers in the audience -- the men who had taken part in the 2001 campaign against the Taliban. Deputy Commander Duke Christie had asked me to come to Ft. Campbell and talk about the book because so many of the of the new Special Forces soldiers didn't know much about what their older colleagues had done eight years earlier, to oust the Taliban. That was hard to believe at first, until you realize that history is also handed down by newspapers and books, even to the soldiers who are making it. That is the power of story-telling, and of history.