This is a book that puts you into the middle of the first boots-on-the-ground in Afghanistan after 9-11 and the bombing of the Twin Towers. Doug Stanton is a very intuitive writer who has a lot of insight and who has learned a lot about soldiers and the lives they lead, day-to-day, while protecting our country. Horse Soldiers is a moving narrative of what these soldiers go through, their lives and leisure. I read this book with tears in my eyes and pain in my heart because these are men who are always on the ready and always ready to give their lives for ours. The battle that these men lived through is astounding in every way. The book details it all: the brutal conditions, the depth of circumstances, the true strength needed to stay alive both before and during the battle with the Taliban in Mazar-I-Sharif and the surrounding countryside. The weather is an anomaly, the countryside is formidable, and the winter is early. The men are totally dedicated to their effort, and they are the best that there are. Our own Special Forces consists of a very unique set of units that have been put together for this exact type of mission. The CIA comes in handy with much information that is useful and those Special Forces guys put it all to good use in working with the Northern Alliance Forces to retake the northern part of Afghanistan from the Taliban, whom they had been trying to push out of the country for about 10 years, during the prior war against Russian troops and Taliban.

There is a bit of true history in this narrative, given by the soldiers themselves, and there is a lot of "Soldier Romantic Lore" put in about the bravery of the Special Forces men. You have to forgive the writer for this, however, because he is dealing with a part of world history that has yet to be resolved today, long after that battle took place in October of 2001. There are still many Taliban in Afghanistan, and they are once again rearing their ugly heads, as we have seen recently in the news. We still have a presence in Afghanistan, working to stop the Taliban from taking over the whole country. Whether or not it was worth it in the long run, only the future will tell. It is still a bloody place today, and there is a long way to go to make it a hospitable country.

Stanton puts a lot of stock in his interviews with the men he writes about. He relies heavily on their memories and the actual documentation by the military personnel who served there. Men like team leader Captain Mitch Nelson, SFC Ben Milo, Major Mark Miller, Abdul Rashid Dostrum, Atta Mohammed Noor, Mike Spann, and even John Walker Lindh, who was a rather infamous American Taliban captive, gave very insightful interviews to Stanton. Well worth the read, captivating, interesting, it will make you go back to your own memories of the things that we were told and shown about during that time in our history in Afghanistan. Read Horse Soldiers, it will hold you captive... no matter what your political persuasion, or how you view our presence there. You will live that war through the experiences of those men, and all the rest who were there then and are still there now.