Rob Riggle plays then-Lieutenant Colonel Max Bowers, 3rd battalion commander, 5th Special Forces Group. Riggle, a Marine, actually served directly under the real Bowers during the same time period the movie is based on. According to Riggle, Bowers "loved" his representation in the film.
Chris Hemsworth and Elsa Pataky play a couple in the movie. They are married, with kids, in real life.
"Dostum", the last name of the Uzbek general, means "my best friend" in Uzbek and many other Turkic and Indo-European languages.
Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum was quoted as saying, "I asked for a few Americans, they brought with them the courage of a whole Army", according to Robert Young Pelton in his March 2002 "National Geographic Adventure" article "The Legend of Heavy D and the Boys". Pelton was the only journalist with the Green Beret and CIA team whose story is featured in "Horse Soldiers"
The film is based on Doug Stanton's non-fiction book "Horse Soldiers", which tells the story of CIA paramilitary officers and U.S. Special Forces personnel in addition to USAF Combat Controllers, sent to Afghanistan immediately after the 9/11 attacks. Among the events covered in the book but not in the film is the Qala-i-Jangi prison uprising, one of the bloodiest battles in the early period of the War in Afghanistan.