-ABC News. As for team leader Mark Nutsch, the real-life counterpart to the film's main character portrayed by Chris Hemsworth, he had no actual combat experience prior to the mission. It was right at dark. Where you from? The man finally answers. As the Hespan drips into his veins, I fire up the video camera, and the man begins to tell his story. The deadline is noon. In between conflict there was time to celebrate. To this day the war continues and Dostum as First Vice President remains a staunch ally of America. Here, the 12 Strong movie and the true story match up. Some stayed behind to handle logistics and supplies. These soldiers, I soon realize, come from much the same background as Dostums: sons of miners, farmers, and factory workers; some are men whose only way out of poverty is the military. In an effort to trim Dostums control the CIA would insist that rival commander Ustad Atta Mohammed get his own Green Beret escort several weeks later as he raced Dostum to claim Mazar. 12 Strong tells the story of the first Special Forces team deployed to Afghanistan after 9/11; under the leadership of a new captain, the team must work with an Afghan warlord to take down the Taliban. Support Dostum. What made working with him particularly dangerous was that he was known for switching sides during several conflicts with Afghanistan. I watch a fighter go up to the top, then crumple into a black pile of rags. They just cant figure it out. Staying off the roads and in the wilds, they could swoop down andattackthe Taliban but could not hold the ground. I get off the horse and say, Screw this; Im walking.. The first monument to CIA officer Mike Spann, the first casualty in the war on terror was erected by General Dostum. The movie tells the hitherto little known story of a U.S. Army Special Forces unit sent on a dangerous mission into Afghanistan mere days after 9/11. His men rounded up vehicles that the Taliban had left behind, and Heavy D entered the city as a conquering hero, standing through the sunroof of a Toyota Land Cruiser. If one was to look for the roots of Dostums warlord reputation it began when he was the direct and most successful enemy of the CIA-backed insurgency of fundamentalist warlords based out of Pakistan. We were at the right place at the right time, says Steve. Its three weeks after the madrasah bombing, and word has come down that 3,000 Taliban are still occupying the city and environs of Balkh, Alexander the Greats old walled capital, a few miles west of Mazar. July 22, 2018. But coordination soon improved, and the improbable allies fell into a rhythm: The Americans would bomb; Dostums men would attack. Not exactly. If there is no enemy, then bureaucracy is the enemy, he says. In response to the September 11, 2001 attacks, the elite U.S. Special Forces unit, Operational Detachment-Alpha 595 (ODA 595 for short), was one of three teams of Special Forces soldiers sent into Afghanistan. Then the morphine begins to kick in. ODA 555 was inserted next in the east in the Panjshir Valley, with the mission of working with ethnic Tajik fighters. Also, there was hardly any assurance that the team would be safe with the Afghan fighters they were working alongside. Soldiers run up to the bite in the wall, shoot into the fort, and then scurry back down. There were roughly 200 paid Afghan soldiers under General Dostum's command and an undetermined number of part-time militia. You see the village; you see the bunkers, says a second Steve, one of the two Air Force men attached to the team to help coordinate air strikes. Headstrong and known to get into fights,was adept at the game of buzkashi, in which horsemen attempt to toss the headless carcass of a calf into a circle. Each member had an average of eight years experience and most had combat experience in either Desert Storm, Kosovo or Somalia. They told us, If Dostum wants to go to Kabul, you are going with him. Yes. Dostum, portrayed brilliantly by Navid Negahban, comes off as a kind of Obi Wan Kenobi, the ancient-wisdom-dispensing warrior. Starring Chris Hemsworth, Michael Shannon, Michael Pea, Copyright 2023 HistoryvsHollywood.com, CTF Media, Horse Soldiers Documentary & Related Videos, Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile. We called in a couple of bomb strikes. You know: You better not show any weakness. The dirty gray mushroom cloud slowly bends in the wind. The info I had was that he was MIA, Mark says. In the bewildering matrix of Afghan politics, Dostum has frequentlyand nimblyswitched allegiances. Robert Young Pelton, all rights reserved. "We think they got it, they got the spirit of the Special Forces team in the post-9/11 moment in American history," said team leader Mark Nutsch, portrayed by Chris Hemsworth in the movie. Based on the novel Horse Soldiers by Doug Stanton, 12 Strong offers a realistic depiction of what the unit went through, the inner workings of military culture, and the effect on both Afghan civilians and the units families back home. (19 Dec 2001) 1. Later on he had a dark premonition. I tell the prisoner where he is and who hes talking to. DP hats, so I dig them out of my bag and pass them around. He takes me to the hilltop above the village. All I see is grass growing beside abandoned trenches. The crowds quickly grew; people threw money in the air for good luck. He rose through the ranks quickly becoming a paratrooper in 1973, an armored unit in 1978 and Battalion 734 KhAD by 1983. Power is not given to anyone forever. I had jumped a train in Tajikistan, snuck into Uzbekistan and remained holed up in a dusty border town. Biography Mitch Nelson was born in Alma, Kansas, and he married a Hispanic woman and had a daughter. Note that there is strong language throughout, as well as violence. After our time in country, I became friends with the men and defended them when they were accused of war crimes by the media. General Abul Rashid Dostum Robert Young Pelton, all rights reserved. Again he began integrating mujahideen into the political military ranks among them his number two against the Taliban Lal Kamadan. Each night, Dostum would sit down with the Americans and lay out the battle plan for the next day. The only sign that something is about to happen is a white contrail high in the sky. The enemy was 700 meters out and moving quickly. . Its a helluva thing we do, isnt it? They were all quitting demanding to be sent to other units rather than put up with new commander ideas on what soldiering was. Not everything goes to plan during a raid on a village Robert Young Pelton, all rights reserved. I saw this look in Fakirs eyes, says Mark, like, Why didnt you help?, Dostum, triumphant on a return to the simple village of his brith. Abdul Rashid Dostum - Wikipedia 12 Strong: The Declassified True Story of the Horse Soldiers Like in the film (available to watch here), at first they tried giving him horse feed but General Dostum wasn't impressed. An event and a man I will never forget. Dostum points to the fresh dirt of new graves in the cemetery. Both are awake, both unwilling to break the silence as their young child sleeps nearby. His name, he says, is John Walker. Planning a one-day live-ammo training exercise can require six months of paperwork. At 16, he started working as a laborer in the government-owned gas refinery in nearby Sheberghan, where he dabbled in union politics. Hemsworth plays Capt. Sidelined, and in exile in Turkey, In 2009, Dostum was begged by President Karzai to come back from exile to reelect him and again in 2014 Dostum engineered the victory ofPresidentGhani.only to go back into exile. The old creed is that we never leave a guy behind. The Regulators wanted to find the prisoners who had killed Spann and attacked a second CIA man who was questioning the Taliban. Then, here is Dostum, says Will, a guy trained in tanks whos using tactics developed in Genghis Khans time.. He refused to talk to his parents and he was takenback to our guesthouse for his protection. The trapped Taliban volunteers, it seems, remain hungry for martyrdom. Afghans in a blue truck are scavenging for parts. And I believe it will mean a lot to the Afghan people because it shows their service in that conflict.. Although I spoke out on behalf of the team the media, didntpublish my eyewitness photos and testimony because it would go against a narrative thata Pashtun backed by a European-backed central government must rule Kabul, not a coalition of regional leaders.We did not want the Taliban voting themselves back into power, yet we restrained the grass roots power of the ethnic minorities. As we drive through a drought-ravaged wasteland, he points out battlefields and the sites of ambushes and skirmishes. That heavy reliance on tanks and trucks meant the Taliban wound up fighting a defensive, Russian-style war. It is rated R for violence and language throughout. Then the war began. He ended up in the Takhar Province, in the northeastern part of the country. I was full of emotions. Mullah Faizal and Mullah Nuri soon surrendered Kunduz to Dostum, and Walker was imprisoned with the other foreign volunteers in the bunker at Qala Jangi. Yes. You can bomb it until there is no resistance, or you bomb and, as soon as the bomb goes off, you charge. They chose not bullets or grenades but ordnance that ranged from Maverick missiles to laser-guided bombs. It took a few hours for bombers to arrive from their carriers. Now we hope that America will not be cruel to the Afghan people.. (Within a week, he will be named deputy minister of defense for the new interim government of Afghanistan.) In the last two semi-wars we have been in, every time American soldiers get killed we pull out. They have been blowing themselves up with grenades. "12 Strong": The Inside Story of the Making of a (Refreshingly Accurate In exploring how accurate 12 Strong is, we learned that some members of the ODA 595 Special Forces team had been involved in a nighttime training exercise along the Cumberland River. Then he rides up on horseback with one pant leg untucked, looking like Bluto.. Its an important part of our countrys history and an amazing story of courage, brothers in arms, and the reasons we ended up in Afghanistan in the first place. The new graves belong to those who were fighting terrorists. He is silhouetted against the slate-blue sky, the long tails of his silver turban whipping in the wind. What we are doing now has not occurred since Vietnam. It is also rumored that there are many dead and at least two live prisoners holed up in the subterranean bomb shelter. He talked for half an hour. -Horse Soldiers book, The movie finds the soldiers being told that there is a good chance they won't survive the mission. Three or four bombs hit right in the middle of the enemy position, says Will. The Taliban are running. In contrast to the Americans high-tech warfare, some of Dostums tactics would have seemed familiar to the British troops who tried and failed to pacify this region in the 19th century. Twenty Urgan missiles point toward the village. In 1996, when the Taliban rolled into Kabul, Dostum was forced to retreat to his stronghold in Mazar as the mullahs instituted their version of a pure Islamic state. Dostums men kick the corpses into the trenches and cover them with the tan dirt, not bothering to count the dead. Their home base is Fort Campbell, Kentucky, but they spend only a few months of the year there. How Accurate is 12 Strong? The True Story of the Real Horse Soldiers vs We fought with nothing but hope.. Over the next few weeks I privately coin for him a nickname based on the medias fear and his in person good humor: I call him Heavy D, after the 1980s rapper. This article on ODA 595, General Dostum, John Walker Lindh and the battle at Qali-i-Jangi was originally published in the March 2002 edition of National Geographic Adventure, THE LEGEND OF HEAVYAND THE BOYS By Robert Young Pelton. It feels like a scene out of a bad Mexican movie. Privacy Policy The prisoners were not properly searched by members of the Northern Alliance before they were crammed onto trucks and the troops had not realized the American Lindh was among them. They had to kill their horses for food. "When I went to Afghanistan, I reported to Lieutenant Colonel Max Bowers. They didnt have enough cloth for shrouds, so they had to bury dead comrades in burqas. The team cleared him for immediate re-attack, but the pilot radioed back that he had hung a bomba bomb had not released.