Afghanistan “horse soldier” author vists Edgar school

In a Veterans Day presentation on Thursday, Edgar Public School students were introduced to the heroic exploits of a member from the Army 5th Special Forces Group who supported the Northern Alliance in its civil war battle against the Taliban and Al Qaeda during the early days of the war in Afghanistan.

The students heard from Mark Mitchell, a member of that 15-member elite team, and Doug Stanton, who chronicled the team’s tour of duty in a New York Times best selling book, “Horse Soldiers.” Mitchell recalled how the U.S. Army in the early days after the Sept. 11 attacks used MH47 Chinook helicopters to fly his team deep into Afghanistan where they used John Deere gators to motor across that country’s dusty, mountainous terrain. In time, the team worked with a warlord, General Abdul Rashid Dostum, who gave the soldiers white stallions fitted with wooden saddles to ride across the rocky desert. The soldiers used donkeys to carry their 120-pound ruck sacks full of food, clothes and supplies.

The special forces team journey into Afghanistan was perilous. The United States had no diplomatic relations with that country. The soldiers had no communication with their families for months. They were told to write letters to their family members that could be delivered in the event they did not return home.

“We didn’t know if any of us would come back alive,” Mitchell told his student audience.

The special forces assisted the Northern Alliance in the liberation of Mazar-e-Shaif, Afghanistan’s fourth largest city and the capital of Balkh Province.

The forces helped General Dostum put down a prison riot in a 600 by 300 yard wood, mud and straw fort, Qala-Jangi, that the Taliban took from pro-Soviet Afghan soldiers in 1994. The fort held John Walker Lindh, an American who converted to Sunni Islam and went to Afghanistan to aid the Taliban in their fight against the Northern Alliance.

For his valor as a special forces member, Mitchell received the Distinguished Service Cross. Mitchell later would be named commander of Combined Joint Special Operation Forces-Arabian peninsula. He worked as Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations/Low Intensity Conflict and Interdependent Capabilities. He served as director of counterterrorism for the Obama administration’s National Security Council.

Mitchell told the Edgar students that while the Afghans spoke a different language and had different manners (always eating food with the right hand, never the left), they wanted the same things that Americans want, including safety and education for their children.

“Down deep, they are like us,” he said.

Stanton told students that the Afghanistan war was a complicated situation where warring tribal factions tried to assert control after the Soviet Union retreated in 1979.

He said the conflict boiled down to a simple human problem. “It’s a problem of relationships,” he said. “How do you resolve the differences among us?”