Elite Air Force scouts brave friendly fire, runaway horses

Mike's Afghan odyssey began in early November, when his special forces team infiltrated Afghanistan by helicopter 30 miles south of Mazar-eSharif to work with a Northern Alliance general.

"At first we stayed in caves," says Mike. By day, the Americans worked on battle plans with Afghan commanders.

At night, temperatures plunged, and they bundled in sleeping bags on cave floors. Soon, Mike's group of US and Afghan troops broke camp, heading out to capture a string of Taliban villages leading to Mazar-e Sharif. Mike, however, faced a more immediate challenge: learning to control the large white horse the Afghans had heaved him on.

"It was pretty intimidating," said Mike, whose training included free-fall parachuting, escapes from sinking helicopters, and "drownproofing" with bound hands and feet – but no equestrian course. In open fields, the horse would run off with him in the saddle, but the airman was relieved to learn it "was basically on auto-pilot" on narrow mountain paths.

On the battleground, success came more smoothly. The Northern Alliance general would climb a hill with the US team and point out the Taliban-ruled villages below. "We would bomb-strike it, and once the NA [Northern Alliance] general felt there was nothing more they could do with air power, he would call on his radio and the [Afghan] troops would rush the town on horseback...and push out or wipe out the Taliban," recalls Mike.

The series of defeats hastened the fall of Mazar-e Sharif. "The Taliban knew we were coming ... and as we got closer, they pretty much hopped in their cars and left," says Mike. The victory was followed in mid-November by the pell-mell retreat of the Taliban from cities across the north, including Kabul.

But for Mike, the most intense combat was yet to come.

Late on the night of Nov. 25, his commander told him that several hundred Taliban and Al Qaeda prisoners had broken out of a holding cell at the nearby fort of Qala-e Jhangi. They had killed a CIA agent who was interrogating prisoners, taken over an ammunition dump, and were wiping out many Northern Alliance troops. Mike and his team were tasked with recovering the agent's body.

Early the next morning, as they approached the dusty fort in Toyota pickups, Mike could hear gunshots and mortar rounds exploding. Taking up a position on the fort's northwest wall, he set up his radios as other team members fired their M-4 machine guns.

Quickly, they began to draw heavy enemy fire, and Mike's commander decided it was too risky for the team to enter the fort.

"There were mortar rounds dropping all over us," recalls Mike. "We had to do something big or we were going to get hit."

"Something big" meant air power – more specifically "close air support," the riskiest kind. Something went badly wrong. Instead of striking the enemy grouped at the south end of the fort, the satellite-guided missile hit a Northern Alliance tank, killing five Afghan fighters, and injuring five members of Mike's team.

WHEN Mike hit the ground, he was buried in dirt and surrounded by rubble. As light pierced the dust he found himself and his injured comrades inside the fort, vulnerable to Taliban fire. The group scrambled back over the north wall – carrying an unconscious Army captain – and drove to safety. Mike was evacuated the same day, and later awarded the Purple Heart.

Recovering now at Hurlburt Air Force Base in Florida, where he is a member of the 23rd Special Tactics Squadron, the young combat controller is awaiting his next assignment.

He says he's ready, but admits Afghanistan sobered him. "Being in a combat zone," he says, "... is a big eye-opener to see how real war is."

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