by Mark Bowden
“Goddamn, Nelson!” said Waddell. “Goddamn!”
8
At the front door of the target house, Staff Sergeant Jeff Bray, an air force CCT (Combat Control Technician), shot a Somali man who came running at him wildly firing an AK-47. Bray was part of a four-man air force special operations unit made up of experts at coordinating ground/air communications, like himself, and parajumpers (PJs), daredevil medics who specialized in rescuing downed pilots. The other CCT in the unit, Sergeant Dan Schilling, was with the ground convoy. The two PJs were aboard the CSAR Black Hawk, along with about a dozen Rangers and D-boys. Bray was assigned to the Delta command element that had roped in from a Black Hawk about a block west of the target house. The man he shot had just come blazing straight at him from up an alley. What was he thinking? How could anybody be such a bad shot?
Behind Bray in the target house, the Delta assaulters were assembling the Somali prisoners. They were laid out prone in the courtyard and were being flex-cuffed. In addition to the two primary targets, in the group was Abdi Yusef Herse, an Aidid lieutenant. It was an even better haul than they had hoped for. Checking out other rooms in the house, Sergeant Paul Howe pumped a shotgun blast into a computer on the first floor. Sergeant Matt Rierson, whose men had taken the prisoners, would be responsible for moving them out to the vehicles. Howe, Sergeant Norm Hooten, and their teams went back up to the second floor to help provide cover from the windows and roof.
Back at the JOC, watching images from the aerial cameras, General Garrison and his staff knew the D-boys’ work was done when they saw Howe’s team move back out on the roof. Other than the Ranger who had fallen, things had gone like clockwork. The Rangers were holding their own at the blocking positions. It was 3:50 P.M. The whole force would be on their way back inside of ten minutes.
9
After the helicopters had lifted off from the Ranger compound, Sergeant Jeff Struecker had waited several minutes in his Humvee with the rest of the ground convoy, engines idling just inside the main gate. His was the lead in a column of twelve vehicles, nine Humvees and three five-ton trucks. They were to drive to a point behind the Olympic Hotel and wait for the D-boys to wrap things up in the target house.
Struecker, a born-again Christian from Fort Dodge, Iowa, had more experience with the city than most of the guys. His vehicle platoon had gone on water runs and other details daily. He had been in on the invasion of Panama, so he thought he’d seen the Third World. But nothing prepared him for Somalia. Garbage was strewn everywhere. They burned it on the streets, that and tires. They were always burning tires. It was just one of the mysterious things they did. They also burned animal dung for fuel. It made for a potent olfactory stew. The people here, it seemed to Stuecker, just lounged, doing nothing, watching the world go by outside their shabby round rag huts and tin shacks, women with gold teeth dressed in brightly colored robes, old men wearing loose cotton skirts and worn plastic sandals. Those dressed in Western clothes wore items that looked like Salvation Army handouts from the disco era. When the Rangers stopped and searched the men they’d usually find a thick wad of khat stuffed in their back pockets. When they grinned their teeth were stained black and orange from chewing the weed. It made them look savage, or deranged. To Struecker it was disgusting. It seemed like such a purposeless existence. The abject poverty was shocking.
There were places in the city where charitable organizations handed out food daily, and the Rangers had been warned not to drive near those places during business hours. Struecker had come close enough to see why. There were not just thousands but tens of thousands of people, throngs who would mob those feeding stations, waiting for handouts. These were not people who looked like they were starving. Some of the Somalis fished, but most had apparently forgotten how to work. Most seemed friendly. Women and children would approach the Rangers’ vehicles with smiles and their hands out, but in some parts of town the men would shake their fists at them. A lot of the guys would throw an MRE (Meal Ready to Eat) to kids. They all felt sorry for the kids. For the adults they felt contempt.
It was hard to imagine what interest the United States of America had in such a place. But Struecker was just twenty-four, and he was a soldier, so it wasn’t his place to question such things. His job today was to roll up in force on Hawlwadig Road, load up prisoners and the assault and blocking forces, and bring them back out. Directly behind him was the second Humvee of his team, driven by Sergeant Danny Mitchell. Behind that was a cargo Humvee manned by D-boys and SEALs, who would proceed straight to the target building to reinforce the assault team already there. Behind the SEAL vehicle was another Humvee, three trucks, and then five more Humvees, including one carrying Lieutenant Colonel Danny McKnight, who was commanding the convoy. In the front seat of the Humvee with Struecker was driver Private First Class Jeremy Kerr. In back were machine gunner Sergeant Dominick Pilla, a company favorite; Private First Class Brad Paulson, who was manning the .50-caliber machine gun up in the turret; and Specialist Tim Moynihan, an assistant gunner.
Dom Pilla was a big, powerful kid from New Jersey—he had that Joy-zee accent—who used his hands a lot when he talked and was just born funny. He loved practical jokes. He had bought these tiny charges that he stuck in guys’ cigarettes that would explode halfway through a smoke with a startling pop! Pilla would just crack up. Some people who tried that kind of thing were annoying, but not Pilla. People laughed with Pilla. The most famous outlet for his comedic gifts were the little skits he and Nelson put on, poking fun at their commanding officers. The skits had become such a big hit that Nelson and Pilla found themselves pressed into repeat performances on just about every deployment. One of the running favorites was their spoof of “Coach” Steele.
Like any tough commanding officer, Steele had a complex relationship with his men. They respected him, but sometimes he annoyed the hell out of them. Steele had been a blocker, an offensive guard, on a national championship Georgia Bulldog team under Coach Vince Dooley in 1980. Football had been the shaping experience in the thirty-two-year-old officer’s life. Some of the guys were bugged by his outspoken Christian fervor and fondness for the football metaphor. He’d call the big guys in his platoon his “defensive tackles,” and the little skinny guys were his “wide receivers” or “running backs.” He was fond of huddling up the guys and having them all put their hands to the center for a bonding cheer, and would quote from the pregame speeches of great NFL coaches. He’d also been infected with the fervent jock Christianity so much a part of the football subculture. Steele would stop guys and ask them, “You go to church on Sundays, son?” Some of the guys found it all a bit much. They never called him Coach to his face, except during the skits. Then it was no-holds-barred.
Nelson was the writer, but Pilla was the star. He was tall and had a weightlifter’s build, but he still needed a few layers of extra undershirts to approximate Steele’s girth. They would improvise something goofy for the helmet and paint it with a Bulldog, and Pilla would take it from there. He had a natural comic presence. The skit would open with Pilla/Steele alone in his office practicing his blocking and tackling, and go downhill from there. Steele laughed along good-naturedly most of the time. But in one of the skits Nelson and Pilla had suggested, with gratuitous locker-room hilarity, that there might be something of a don’t-ask-don’t-tell thing going on between the captain and his ever loyal second-in-command, Lieutenant Perino. That had the guys rolling in the aisle, but this time Coach didn’t laugh. He later chewed out Nelson and Pilla for “portraying alternative lifestyles.” It was so funny, in retrospect, Nelson and Pilla thought, that it might make a perfect scene for their next skit.
Struecker and the rest of the column timed their departure so they wouldn’t arrive out behind the Olympic Hotel before the assault had begun. They had watched the armada move out over the ocean, and left the base only after the helicopters radioed that they had turned back inland. Struecker, who was supposed to lead the convoy, took a wrong turn. He had stud
ied the photomap back in the hangar, and thought he had it down, but once out in the city things tended to get confusing. Every street looked the same, and there were no signs to help. They were moving fast. They went northeast on Via Gesira to the K-4 circle and then north on Via Lenin to the old reviewing stand. There they would turn right on National Street, proceed east, and then turn north on a street that paralleled Hawlwadig heading toward the target house. But when Struecker took an early left and Mitchell’s vehicle followed, the rest of the convoy didn’t.
— Hey, where the hell are you guys? came the voice of Platoon Sergeant Bob Gallagher over the radio.
“We’re coming,” assured Struecker. “We turned wrong. We’re on our way.”
It was embarrassing. Struecker managed to steer his and Mitchell’s Humvees back through the maze of streets, and rejoined the rest of the convoy at the hotel.
Before the convoy reached the holding point, Signalman Chief John Gay, a SEAL in the left rear seat of the third Humvee, heard a shot and felt a hard impact on his right hip. Stunned and in pain, he shouted that he’d been hit. They drove straight on, as planned, to the target building, where Master Sergeant Tim “Griz” Martin, the Delta operator who was sitting beside Gay, jumped out and came around to have a look. The remainder of the team fanned out around the vehicles. Martin tore open Gay’s pants and examined his hip, then gave Gay good news. The round had hit smack on the SEAL’s Randall knife. It had shattered the blade, but the knife had deflected the bullet. Martin pulled several bloody fragments of blade out of Gay’s hip and quickly bandaged it. Gay limped out of the vehicle, took cover, and began returning fire.
Struecker was assigned to evacuate Blackburn, the Ranger who had fallen from the helicopter. Sergeant Joyce had fetched help for Blackburn and the men carrying his litter. The SEAL Humvee, driven by Master Sergeant Chuck Esswein, had driven up Hawlwadig and the wounded Ranger was lifted in through the back hatch. Two medics climbed in with him. Delta Sergeant John Macejunas took the shotgun seat alongside Esswein. Struecker’s Humvee, with its .50 cal in the turret, took the lead, and Mitchell’s Humvee, which had a Mark-19 rapid-fire grenade launcher in the turret, brought up the rear.
— This is Uniform Six Four, McKnight radioed up to the command bird. I’ve got a critical casualty. I am going to send three out, with one in the cargo that has a casualty in it.
Struecker told McKnight, “I’ll have him back there in five minutes.”
The lieutenant colonel said the rest of them would be coming along soon. The mission was almost over.
The three vehicles began racing back to base through streets now alive with gunfire and explosions. This time Struecker knew which way to go. He had mapped a return route that was simple. Several blocks over was National Street. They could follow that all the way back down to the K-4 traffic circle, and from there they would bear right back to the beach.
Except things had gotten a lot worse. Roadblocks and barricades began to appear. They drove around and through them. One of the medics, Private Good, was holding up the IV bag for Blackburn with one hand while shooting his CAR-15 with the other. Up in Struecker’s Humvee, turret gunner Paulson was frantically trying to swivel his .50 cal to engage shooters firing from both sides. So Struecker instructed his M-60 gunner, Pilla, to concentrate all his fire to the right, and leave everything on the left to Paulson. They didn’t want to drive too fast, because a violently bumpy ride couldn’t do Blackburn any good.
Pilla was shot as they turned on National. He was killed instantly. The bullet entered his forehead and the exit wound blew out the back of his skull. His body flopped over into the lap of Moynihan, who cried out in horror, covered with his friend’s blood and brain.
“Pilla’s hit!” he screamed.
Just then, over the radio, came the voice of Sergeant Gallagher.
— How things going?
Struecker ignored the radio, and shouted back over his shoulder at Moynihan.
“Calm down! What’s wrong with him?” He couldn’t see all the way to the back hatch.
“He’s dead!”
Moynihan was freaking out.
“How do you know he’s dead? Are you a medic?”
Struecker turned for a quick look over his shoulder and the whole rear of his vehicle was covered with blood. Pilla was in Moynihan’s lap.
“He’s shot in the head! He’s dead!” Moynihan said.
“Just calm down,” Struecker pleaded. “We’ve got to keep fighting until we get back.”
To hell with driving carefully. Struecker told his driver to step on it, and hoped Esswein would follow. He could see RPGs flying across the street now. It seemed like the whole city was shooting at them.
Then Gallagher’s voice came across again.
— How’s it going?
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
Gallagher didn’t like that answer.
— You got any casualties?
“Yeah, one.”
Struecker tried to leave it at that. Nobody on their side had gotten killed, so far as he knew, and he didn’t want to be the one to put news like that on the air. He knew radio operators all over the battlefield could hear their conversation. There were speaker boxes in some of the vehicles and the birds could all listen in. The radio operators on the ground monitored all the bands. Men in battle drink up information like water—it becomes more important than water. Unlike most of these guys, Struecker had been to war before, in Panama and the Persian Gulf, and he knew soldiers fought better when things were going their way. Once things turned, it was hard to reassert control. People panicked. It was happening to Moynihan right now. Panic was a virus in combat, a deadly one.
— Who is he and what’s his status? Gallagher demanded.
“It’s Pilla.”
— What’s his status?
Struecker held the microphone for a moment, debating with himself, and then reluctantly answered:
“He’s dead.”
At the sound of that word all the radio traffic, which was busy, stopped. Long seconds of silence followed.
10
Ali Hussein was minding the Labadhagal Bulal Pharmacy, well south of all the shooting.
He went to the front steps of the store and saw many men with guns, Aidid militia, running toward the fight. Some were militia and some were just neighbors who had fetched their own guns.
Hussein wanted to see what was happening, but he was afraid the shop would be looted if he left it untended. He just stood and listened as the sound of shooting crept down closer and closer to his street.
Then American army vehicles, three of them, came racing down his street. The big guns in the back were shooting. He jumped into the shop and slammed shut the metal door just as bullets rang off it. He rolled against a side wall that he knew from previous fighting was the safest place in the house, and bullets sprayed through windows into the shop as the vehicles raced past.
Then they were gone and the shooting stopped.
11
The little convoy sped out to the main road and for a stretch the firing abated and in the distance was the ocean. But as they approached the port area, there were thousands of Somalis in the streets. Struecker’s heart sank. They were no longer taking heavy fire, but how was he going to get his three vehicles through that?
His driver slowed down to a crawl and leaned on the horn as they entered the throng. Struecker told the driver not to stop moving. He threw flashbangs out in front of his vehicle, which chased some of the people away, and then told his .50-cal gunner to open up over the crowd’s head. The ocean was on the other side.
Struecker tried to raise the doctors on the radio, and couldn’t get anyone to pick up, so he broke in on the command radio net.
“I need the doc right away,” he said.
The sound of the big gun scattered most of the people and the vehicles sped up again. The Humvee may have run over some people. It was either that or stones and debris in the road. Struecker didn’
t look back to see. He then came up on a slow-moving pickup truck with people hanging off the back. It would not get out of their way and there wasn’t enough room to go around it, so Struecker told his driver to ram it. A man with his leg hanging off the back screamed with pain as the Humvee hit, and then rolled into the back of the truck, which finally steered off the road.
Struecker radioed, “Can you have the doc waiting for us out there by the gate, over?”
They entered the compound with a tremendous sense of relief and exhaustion. They had run the gauntlet. Several of the Rangers in his and the other Humvees had been injured. Pilla was dead. But, for them, at least, it was over.
His bloodstained crew piled out looking dazed. Struecker was startled by what he saw at the base. He had expected to step out into calm and safety. Instead, everyone around him seemed frantic.
He heard a commander’s voice on the speaker box, shouting at someone, “Pay attention to what’s going on and listen to my orders!”
Something had happened.
The medical crews descended on their vehicles. One of the doctors reached in and started to turn Pilla over.