HORSE SOLDIERS: The Extraordinary Story of a Band of U.S. Soldiers Who Rode to Victory in Afghanistan. Doug Stanton. Scribner. 393 pages. $28.

Horse Soldiers tells the important story of the Special Forces soldiers who first put American boots on the ground in Afghanistan in 2001. Fighting alongside the Northern Alliance, the troops, often riding on horseback, achieved several important victories against the Taliban. But their accomplishments lose significance in this account by Doug Stanton, a men's magazine writer and author of the bestseller In Harm's Way, who reduces all the players to stock types. Hollywood will not have to work hard to produce the adaptation: A ''hard-as-nails'' colonel leads troops who do ''enough sit-ups and push-ups to make an Olympian god throw up.'' Jaws flare, muscles ripple, eyes burn like hot coals -- all that stuff.

Unlike Sean Naylor's Not a Good Day to Die, an eyewitness report of early U.S. combat in Afghanistan that put the operations within their institutional context, Horse Soldiers is a superficial account that only appears to be that of a bystander. As Stanton explains in the author's note, the book is based on interviews, journals, ''previously published media accounts, contemporaneous photography, and voluminous official U.S. military logs and histories.'' Stanton also visited many of the sites he writes about in the book but not during the time the events he describes were unfolding.

Nonetheless, his book is written as if he were there. To wit: An Afghan warlord lights a cigarette and is said to have ''exhaled slowly at the sky,'' listening for helicopters under a moon that ''hung overhead, a bleached horn driven into the flank of the night.'' A soldier at a base in Uzbekistan walks outside at night and drives a golf ball off the berm at the edge of the camp: ''The ball soared, a white orb sinking in the dirty pond of the night sky.'' A medic treats a wound from a land mine, ''the jellied flesh dark as a ruby.'' Approach these sorts of details with skepticism.

Special Forces soldiers walk around with ''fingers curled around triggers'' without having identified anything to shoot. Six troops ride for hours through Taliban country, trailed only by a small and indifferent group of Northern Alliance soldiers for security; then, as they prepare to enter a village, the team commander tells them for the first time to ''lock and load.'' And so on.

In short, Stanton has written a book that may interest a general audience but has little to offer military professionals.

Chris Bray reviewed this book for The Washington Post.

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