by Mark Bowden
“Not yet,” Foreman said.
So Howe took his four men up to the second floor.
It was a big house by Somali standards, whitewashed cinder-block walls and windows with no glass in them. At the top step Howe called for one of his men to toss a flashbang grenade into the first room. It exploded and the team burst in as they were trained to do, each man covering a different firing lane. They found only a mattress on the floor. As they moved around the room, a volley of machine-gun fire slammed into the ceiling and wall, just missing the head of one of Howe’s men. They all dropped down. The rounds had come through the southeast window, and had clearly come from the Ranger blocking position just below the window. One of the younger soldiers outside had evidently seen someone moving in the window and fired. Obviously some of these guys weren’t clear which building was the target.
It was what he had feared. Howe was disappointed in the Rangers. These were supposed to be the army’s crack infantry? Despite all the hype and Hoo-ah horseshit, he saw the younger men as poorly trained and potentially dangerous in combat. Most were fresh out of high school! During training exercises, he had the impression that they were always craning their necks to watch him and his men instead of paying attention to their own very important part of the job.
And the job demanded more. It demanded all you had, and more ... because the price of failure was often death. That’s why Howe and the rest of these D-boys loved it. It separated them from other men. War was ugly and evil, for sure, but it was still the way things got done on most of the planet. Civilized states had nonviolent ways of resolving disputes, but that depended on the willingness of everyone involved to back down. Here in the raw Third World, people hadn’t learned to back down, at least not until after a lot of blood flowed. Victory was for those willing to fight and die. Intellectuals could theorize until they sucked their thumbs right off their hands, but in the real world, power still flowed from the barrel of a gun. If you wanted the starving masses in Somalia to eat, then you had to outmuscle men like this Aidid, for whom starvation worked. You could send in your bleeding-heart do-gooders, you could hold hands and pray and sing hootenanny songs and invoke the great gods CNN and BBC, but the only way to finally open the roads to the big-eyed babies was to show up with more guns. And in this real world, nobody had more or better guns than America. If the good-hearted ideals of humankind were to prevail, then they needed men who could make it happen. Delta made it happen.
They operated strictly in secret. The army would not even speak the word “Delta.” If you had to refer to them, they were “operators,” or “The Dreaded D.” The Rangers, who worshiped them, called them D-boys. Secrecy, or at least the show of it, was central to their purpose. It allowed the dreamers and the politicians to have it both ways. They could stay on the high road while the dirty work happened offstage. If some Third World terrorist or Columbian drug lord needed to die, and then suddenly just turned up dead, why, what a happy coincidence! The dark soldiers would melt back into shadow. If you asked them about how they made it happen, they wouldn’t tell. They didn’t even exist, see? They were noble, silent, and invisible. They did America’s most important work, yet shunned recognition, fame, and fortune. They were modern knights and true.
Howe did little to disguise his scorn for lower orders of soldiering, which pretty much included the whole regular U.S. Army. He and the rest of the operators lived like civilians, and that’s what they told you they were if you asked—although spotting them down at Fort Bragg wasn’t hard. You’d meet this guy hanging out at bar around Bragg, deeply tanned, biceps rippling, neck wide as a fireplug, with a giant Casio watch and a plug of chaw under his lip, and he’d tell you he worked as a computer programmer for some army contract agency. They called each other by their nicknames and eschewed salutes and all the other traditional trappings of military life. Officers and noncoms in Delta treated each other as equals. Disdain for normal displays of army status was the unit’s signature. They simply transcended rank. They wore their hair longer than army regs. They needed to pose as civilians on some missions and it was easier to do that if they had normal haircuts, but it was also a point of pride with them, one of their perks. A cartoon drawn by a unit wit showed the typical D-boy dressed for battle with his hip holster stuffed, not with a gun, but a hair dryer. Every year they were obliged to pose for an official army portrait, and for it they had to get Ranger-style haircuts. They hated it. They’d had to sit for buzzes before this trip to better blend in with the Hoo-ahs, and the haircuts had just made them stick out even more; the sides and backs of their heads were as white as frog bellies. They were allowed a degree of personal freedom and initiative unheard of in the military, particularly in battle. The price they paid for all this, of course, was that they lived with danger and were expected to do what normal soldiers could not.
Howe wasn’t impressed with a lot of things about the regular army. He and others in his unit had complained to Captain Steele, the Ranger commander, about his men’s readiness. They hadn’t gotten anywhere. Steele had his own way of doing things, and that was the traditional army way. Howe found the spit-and-polish captain, a massive former University of Georgia football lineman, to be an arrogant and incompetent buffoon. Howe had been through Ranger school and earned the tab himself, but had skipped straight over the Rangers when he qualified for Delta. He disdained the Rangers in part because he believed hard, realistic, stair-stepped training made good soldiers, not the bullshit macho attitude epitomized by the whole Hoo-ah esprit. Out of the 120 men who tried out for Delta in his class (these were 120 highly motivated, exceptional soldiers), only 13 had made it through selection and training. Howe had the massive frame of a serious bodybuilder, and a fine, if impatient, analytical mind. Many of the Rangers found him scary. His contempt for their ways colored relationships between the two units in the hangar.
Now Howe’s misgivings about the younger support troops were confirmed. They were shooting at their own men! Howe and his team left the room with the mattress and then moved out to clear the flat roof over the front of the house. It was enclosed by a three-foot concrete wall with decorative vertical slats. As the Delta team fanned out into sunlight, they saw the small orange fireball of an AK-47 erupt from a rooftop one block north. Two of Howe’s team returned fire as they ducked behind the low wall for cover.
Then another burst of machine-gun rounds erupted. There were inch-wide slits in the perimeter wall. Howe and his men crouched and prayed a round didn’t pass through an opening or ricochet back off the outside of the house. There were several long bursts. They could tell by the sound and impact of the rounds that the shots were being fired by an M-249, or SAW (Squad Automatic Weapon), this time from the northeast Ranger blocking position. The Rangers were under fire, they were overeager and scared, so when they saw men with weapons, they fired. Howe was furious.
He radioed Captain Scott Miller, the Delta ground commander down in the courtyard. He told him to get Steele on the radio immediately and tell him to stop his men from shooting at their own people!
6
Specialist John Stebbins ran as soon as his feet hit the ground. Just before boarding the helicopter, Captain Steele had tapped him on the shoulder.
“Stebbins, you know the rules of engagement?”
“Yeah, roger, sir. I know ’em.”
“Okay. I want you to know I’m going to be on the fast rope right after you, so you better keep moving.”
The prospect of the broad-beamed commander fully laden with battle gear bearing down on his helmet had haunted Stebbins the whole flight in. After roping down, he scrambled so fast from the bottom of the rope that he collided with Chalk One’s M-60 gunner, and they both fell down. Stebbins lay there for a moment, waiting for the dust to clear, and then spotted the rest of his team up against a wall to his right.
He was scared, but thrilled. He couldn’t shake the feeling that this was all too good to be true. Here he was, an old-timer in the Ranger company at age
twenty-eight, having spent the last four years of his life trying to get into combat, to do something interesting or important, and now, somehow, through an incredible chain of pleading, wheedling, and freakish breaks, he was actually in combat—him, stubby Johnny Stebbins, the company’s chief coffee maker and training room paper-pusher, at war!
His trip to this Mogadishu back alley had started in a bagel shop at home in Ithaca, New York. Stebbins was a short, stocky kid with pale blue eyes and blond hair and skin so white and freckly it never turned even the faintest shade darker in the sun. Here in Mog it had just burned bright pink. He had gone to Saint Bonaventure University, majoring in communications and hoping to work as a radio journalist, which he had in fact done for minimum wages at a few mom-and-pop stations in upstate New York. When the bagel shop offered to make him head baker, the hourly wage was enough to chuck his infant broadcasting career. So he made bagels and dreamed of adventure. Those “Be All You Can Be” commercials that came on during football games spoke straight to his soul. Stebbins had gone to college on an ROTC scholarship, but the army was so flooded with second lieutenants when he got out that he couldn’t get assigned to active duty. When Desert Storm blew up in 1990, as his luck would have it, his National Guard contract was up. He started looking for a way out of the kitchen and into the fire. He put his name on three volunteer lists for Gulf service and never even got a response. Then he got married, and his wife had a baby, and suddenly the hourly wage at the bagel shop no longer covered expenses. What he needed was a medical plan. That, and some action. The army offered both. So he enlisted as a private.
“What do you want to do in the army?” the recruiter asked him.
Stebbins told him, “I want to jump out of airplanes, shoot a lot of ammo, and shop at the PX.”
They put him through basic training again—he’d done it once in the ROTC program. Then he had to do RIP (the Ranger Indoctrination Program) twice because he got injured on one of the jumps toward the end and had to be completely recycled. When he graduated he figured he’d be out there jumping and training and roping out of helicopters with the younger guys, except somebody higher up noticed that his personnel form listed a college degree and, more importantly, typing ability. He was routed instead to a desk in the Bravo company training room. Stebbins became the company clerk.
They told him it would just be for six months. He got stuck in it for two years. He became known as a good “training room” Ranger, and fell prey to all the temptations of office work. While the other Rangers were out scaling cliffs and jumping out of planes and trying to break their records for forced marches through dense cover, old man Stebby sat behind a desk chain-smoking cigarettes, eating donuts, and practically inhaling coffee. He was the company’s most avid coffee drinker. The other guys would make jokes: “Oh yeah, Specialist Stebbins, he’ll throw hot coffee at the enemy.” Ha, ha. When the company got tapped for Somalia, no one was surprised when ol’ Stebby was one of those left behind at Fort Benning.
“I want you to know it’s nothing personal,” his sergeant told him, although there was no way to disguise the implied insult. “We just can’t take you. We have a limited number of spots on the bird and we need you here.” How more clearly could he have stated that, when it came to war, Stebbins was the least valuable Ranger in the regiment?
It was just like Desert Storm all over again. Somebody up there did not want John Stebbins to go to war. He helped his friends pack, and when it was announced the next day that the force had arrived in Mogadishu, he felt even more left out than he had two years before as he watched nightly updates of the Gulf action on CNN. At least he had company. Sergeant Scott Galentine had been left behind, too. They moped around for a few days. Then came a fax from Somalia.
“Stebby, you better grab your stuff,” his commanding officer told him. “You’re going to war.”
Galentine got the same news. Some Rangers had received minor injuries in a mortar attack and they needed to be replaced.
On his way to the airport Stebbins stopped by his house to say a quick good-bye to his wife. It was the tearful scene you’d expect. Then when he got to the airport they told him he could go home, they wouldn’t be leaving until the next day. A half hour after their emotional parting, Mr. and Mrs. Stebbins were reunited. He spent the night dreading a phone call that would change the order.
But it didn’t come. A little more than a day later, he and Galentine were standing on the runway in Mogadishu. In honor of their arrival they were ordered to drop for fifty push-ups, a ritual greeting upon entering a combat zone. Stebby was thrilled. He’d made it!
There weren’t enough Kevlar vests (Ranger body armor) to go around so he got one of the big bulky black vests the D-boys wore. When he put it on he felt like a turtle. He was warned not to go outside the fence without his weapon. His buddies briefed him on the setup. They told him not to sweat the mortars. Sammy rarely hit anything. They had been on five missions at that point, and they were all a piece of cake. We go in force, they told him, we move quickly, the choppers basically blow everybody away from the scene, we let the D-boys go in and do their thing. All we do is provide security. They told him to watch out for Somalis who hid behind women and children. Rocks were a hazard. Stebbins was nervous and excited.
Then he got the news. See, they were glad to have him there and all, but he wouldn’t actually be going out with the rest of the guys on missions. His job would be to stay back at the hangar and stand guard. Maintain perimeter security. It was essential. Somebody had to do it.
Who else?
Stebbins took out his ire on the folks trying to get past the front gate. He took the guard job as seriously as it was possible to be taken. He was a major pain in the ass. Every Somali got searched from head to toe, every time, in and out. He searched trucks and trunks and carts and climbed up under vehicles and had them open their hoods. It annoyed him that he couldn’t figure out a way to search the big tanks on the back of the water trucks. Intel had said the Skinnies were smuggling heavy weapons across the border from Ethiopia. They were told that the Ethiopians checked out all trucks. Stebbins doubted they were checking the water trucks. You could put a lot of RPGs (rocket-propelled grenades) in the back of one of those things.
He finagled his way onto the helicopters for the profile flights, fastening the chin strap on his helmet tight as they zoomed low and fast over the city, cheering like kids on a carnival ride. He figured that was about as close to action as he was going to get ... and compared to manning the coffeemaker in the training room back at Benning, it wasn’t bad.
Then, this morning, just as the runner from the JOC showed up to shout, “Get it on!” one of the squad leaders strode up with news.
“Stebbins, Specialist Sizemore has an infected elbow. He just came back from the doc’s office. You’re taking his place.”
He would be the assistant for 60-gunner Private First Class Brian Heard. Stebbins ran through the hangar, trading in his bulky tortoise-shell vest for a Kevlar one. He’d stuffed extra ammo in his pouches, and gathered up some frag grenades. Watching the more experienced guys, he discarded his canteen—they would only be out an hour or so—and stuffed its pouch with still more M-16 magazines. He picked up a belt with three hundred rounds of M-60 ammo, and debated trying to stuff more in his butt pack, where he kept the goggles and the gloves he needed for sliding down the rope. He decided against that. He’d need someplace to put them when he took them off. He was trying to think through everything. Trying to stay calm. But damn! it was exciting.
“Talk to me, Steb. What you got? What’s on your mind?” prodded Staff Sergeant Ken Boorn, whose cot was alongside his. Boorn could see his friend was in a state. He told him to relax. Keep it simple. His job was to secure whatever sector they asked him to point his rifle at, and give ammo to the 60 gunners when they needed it. They probably wouldn’t even need it.
“Okay, fine,” said Stebbins.
Just before heading out to the Black Hawk, Stebbins
was by the front door of the hangar sucking on a last cigarette, trying to get his nerves under control. This was finally it, what he’d been aiming for all this time. The guys all knew this was a particularly bad part of town, too. This was likely to be their nastiest mission yet, and it was his first! He had the same feeling in his gut that was there before his first jump at airborne school. I’m gonna live through this, he told himself. I’m not gonna die. One of the D-boys told him, “Look, for the first ten minutes or so you’re gonna be scared shitless. After that you’re going to get really mad that they have the balls to shoot at you.” Stebbins had heard the stories about the other missions, how the Somalis were hit-and-run fighters. There was no way they’d get in a real shitfight. Up on the profile flights, they’d never seen any big weapons. This was going to be an urban small-arms deal. I’m surrounded by guys who know what they’re doing. I’m gonna be okay.
Now, hitting the street outside the target building and hearing the pop of distant gunfire, he knew he was in it for real. After untangling himself from the 60 gunner, he ran to the wall. He was assigned a corner pointing south, guarding an alley that appeared empty. It was just a narrow dirt path, barely wide enough for a car, that sloped down on both sides from mud-stained stone walls to a footpath at the center. There were the usual piles of random debris and rusted metal parts strewn along the way, in between outcroppings of cactus. He heard occasional snapping sounds in the air around him and assumed it was the sound of gunfire a few blocks away, even though the noise was close. Maybe the air was playing tricks on him. He also heard a peculiar noise, a tchew ... tchew ... tchew, and it dawned on him that this was the sound of rounds whistling down the street. That snapping noise? That was bullets passing close enough for him to hear the little sonic boomlet as they zipped past.
Up the street from Stebbins, Captain Steele spotted a likely source for most of the rounds coming through their position. There was a sniper one block west on top of the Olympic Hotel. It was the tallest structure around.