Horse Soldiers Quotes

“Later, Dean would see Atta’s fighters show up carrying AK-47s, and there with them would be their sons, carrying spare magazines. Behind the sons walked even younger sons, carrying nothing. Dean understood that in this kind of fighting, the sons who carried nothing would pick up either a gun or a magazine if the fathers or brothers were killed. The look on the faces of the kids seemed to indicate to Dean that they expected to die.”
― Doug Stanton, Horse Soldiers: The Extraordinary Story of a Band of US Soldiers Who Rode to Victory in Afghanistan

“This was Special Forces’ rule number one: let men experience failure so they never fail again. And by failing, they will learn how to be successful soldiers.”
― Doug Stanton, Horse Soldiers: The Extraordinary Story of a Band of US Soldiers Who Rode to Victory in Afghanistan

“Together, they wanted to return the Middle East to the fourteenth century, into a golden age ruled by Islamic law.”
― Doug Stanton, Horse Soldiers: The Extraordinary Story of a Band of US Soldiers Who Rode to Victory in Afghanistan

“Before their hurried flight from the city two weeks earlier, the Taliban had left the weapons and smeared feces on the walls and windows. Every photograph, every painting, every rosebush had been torn up, smashed, stomped, ruined. Nothing beautiful had been left behind.”
― Doug Stanton, Horse Soldiers: The Extraordinary Story of a Band of US Soldiers Who Rode to Victory in Afghanistan

“On November 5, to kick off the final, coordinated assault on Baluch, Stu Mansfield, positioned with Atta at the warlord’s mountaintop compound, ordered the drop of a bomb called a BLU-82, which Mansfield called “the Motherfucker of All Bombs.” A few minutes after dawn, barreling toward earth was the largest non-nuclear explosive device in the United States’ arsenal.”
― Doug Stanton, Horse Soldiers: The Extraordinary Story of a Band of US Soldiers Who Rode to Victory in Afghanistan

“On a training mission, he’d watched as Nightstalker pilots cut their own landing zone using the rotors of the helicopter as giant hedge clippers. They’d been landing in a pine forest and he marveled as the helo dropped into the hole of its own making—pine”
― Doug Stanton, Horse Soldiers: The Extraordinary Story of a Band of US Soldiers Who Rode to Victory in Afghanistan

“(Ali was horrified and enraged when in March of 2001 the Taliban dynamited the stone Buddhas that had stood watch over the town for centuries. What man had the right to write the future by blowing up the past?)”
― Doug Stanton, Horse Soldiers: The Extraordinary Story of a Band of US Soldiers Who Rode to Victory in Afghanistan

“In this way, the story recounted here is also a flag raised against the brute visage of fundamentalism, in all its forms, here and abroad. The book is, I hope, an account of religious and cultural hubris and misanthropy. What struck me during my research was learning the degree to which violence had often been a third or fourth choice in resolving conflict. Indeed, some men in this book never fired their weapon, even when doing so would have put an “end” to a problem. Instead, the crisis of a particular moment was fixed by crouching in the dirt with a stick, opposite the “opponent,” and scratching out a solution.”
― Doug Stanton, Horse Soldiers: The Extraordinary Story of a Band of US Soldiers Who Rode to Victory in Afghanistan

“Wars, as the earlier military thinker Carl von Clausewitz pointed out, are not fought to kill people; they are fought to effect political change. They are violent, expensive, and represent one of the universe’s great rifts in the social contract.”
― Doug Stanton, Horse Soldiers: The Extraordinary Story of a Band of US Soldiers Who Rode to Victory in Afghanistan

“Taliban dynamited the stone Buddhas that had stood watch over the town for centuries. What man had the right to write the future by blowing up the past?) With”
― Doug Stanton, Horse Soldiers: The Extraordinary Story of a Band of US Soldiers Who Rode to Victory in Afghanistan