Summary

This section begins with a description of the challenges of flying the Chinook helicopter including the pilot having to drop fuel to get over the mountain and then refuel from a fuel tanker midair. After the refuel, the pilot nosed the helicopter down almost vertical. Mike Spann, a member of the CIA’s paramilitary, waited on the ground. The narrator describes Spann’s life up to this point.

Next it is described how the Taliban arose after the soviets were defeated and differing factions were fighting against one another for power. A group of anti-Soviet fighters who “dreamed of making Afghanistan a purely Islamic state guided by the laws of the Koran” (97) banded together. Their leader, Mohammed Omar caught, tortured, and killed two men who had raped two teen girls and left them to die by the road. The people began to...