Horse Soldiers
The Extraordinary Story of a Band of US Soldiers Who Rode to Victory in Afghanistan
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4.5 • 411 Ratings
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
The inspiration for the major motion picture 12 Strong from Jerry Bruckheimer, starring Chris Hemsworth and Michael Shannon.
From the New York Times bestselling author of In Harm’s Way comes a true-life story of US Army Special Forces soldiers overcoming great odds to achieve a stunning military victory in the Afghanistan War.
Horse Soldiers is the dramatic account of a small band of Special Forces soldiers who secretly entered Afghanistan following September 11 and rode to war on horses against the Taliban. Outnumbered forty-to-one, they pursued the enemy army across the mountainous Afghanistan terrain and, after a series of intense battles, captured the city of Mazar-i-Sharif, which was strategically essential to defeat their opponent throughout the country.
The bone-weary American soldiers were welcomed as liberators as they rode into the city, and the streets thronged with Afghans overjoyed that the Taliban regime had been overthrown.
Then the action took a wholly unexpected turn. During a surrender of six hundred Taliban troops, the Horse Soldiers were ambushed by the would-be POWs. Dangerously overpowered, they fought for their lives in the city’s immense fortress, Qala-i-Janghi, or the House of War. At risk were the military gains of the entire campaign: if the soldiers perished or were captured, the entire effort to outmaneuver the Taliban was likely doomed.
Deeply researched and beautifully written, Stanton’s account of the Americans’ quest to liberate an oppressed people touches the mythic. The soldiers on horses combined ancient strategies of cavalry warfare with twenty-first-century aerial bombardment technology to perform a seemingly impossible feat. Moreover, their careful effort to win the hearts of local townspeople proved a valuable lesson for America’s ongoing efforts in Afghanistan.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
There’s both horror and heroism in Doug Stanton’s book, which tracks the early days of the U.S. war in Afghanistan, when American forces comprised a handful of men on horseback riding into “the crosshairs of history.” This was how the war was initially envisioned: small bands of Special Forces soldiers working with the Northern Alliance and demonstrating, it was hoped, the American gift for light-footed improvisation. But the war would soon become something else, and Stanton provides both an adventure story and, between the lines, a eulogy for an idea that got buried somewhere in the rubble of Mazar-i-Sharif.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this absolutely riveting account, full of horror and raw courage, journalist Stanton (In Harm's Way) recreates the miseries and triumphs of specially trained mounted U.S. soldiers, deployed in the war-ravaged Afghanistan mountains to fight alongside the Northern Alliance-thousands of rag-tag Afghans who fought themselves to exhaustion or death-against the Taliban. The U.S. contingent, almost to a man, had never ridden horses-especially not these "shaggy and thin-legged, and short... descendents of the beasts Genghis Khan had ridden out of Uzbekistan"-but that was not the only obstacle: rattling helicopters, outdated maps, questionable air support and insufficient food also played their parts. Stanton brings each soldier and situation to vivid life: "Bennett suddenly belted out: 'It just keeps getting better and better!' Here they were, living on fried sheep and filtered ditchwater...calling in ops-guided bombs on bunkers built of mud and wood scrap, surrounded by Taliban fighters." In less than three months, this handful of troops secured a city in which a fort had been taken over by Taliban prisoners, a tangle of firefights and mayhem that became a seminal battle and, in Stanton's prose, a considerable epic: "Dead and dying men and wounded horses had littered the courtyard, a twitching choir that brayed and moaned in the rough, knee-high grass."
Customer Reviews
Horse soldiers
A must read in order to know what our service people are dealing with
Great Book
I read this book when it first came out and really liked it. Gives you a good look into how we got into the war following 9/11.
Fiction…
…described as fact. Stanton owes Mark Nutsch and Bob Pennington a lot of money. They wrote the real horse soldiers story in Swords of Lightning.