by Mark Bowden
“Don’t worry about him,” Struecker said. “He’s dead.”
So the doctor moved on to Esswein’s Humvee to get Blackburn. Struecker grabbed one of the orderlies as he went past.
“Look, there’s a dead in the back of my vehicle. You need to get him off.”
The sergeant watched as they pulled Pilla from the back of the Humvee. The top of his head was gone. His face was white and distorted and puffed up so bad it looked round. It didn’t look anything like Pilla any more.
12
Private Clay Othic shot a chicken. When it was time for all the vehicles to move up and start loading prisoners, all hell broke loose on Hawlwadig. There were people racing in all directions, men with AK-47s shooting at them, RPGs zipping smoke trails through the air and detonating with ear-popping explosions ... and in the midst of all this a panicked flock of chickens came hurtling out in front of Othic’s gun. One of the birds turned to a puff of feathers when hit by a round from his .50 cal. “Little Hunter” had bagged yet another species.
Othic was the smallest guy in the company, and looked about thirteen, so he was assigned (per standard operating procedure) to the biggest gun, a “Ma-Deuce,” the Browning M-2 .50-caliber machine gun, which was mounted in the roof turret of his Humvee. Othic had made a bit of a name for himself early on in the deployment by inadvertently stealing General Garrison’s personal Humvee. The turret on his own kept sticking and his sergeant told him to trade it in for another one “over there,” pointing toward the motor pool. So Othic had just picked out the one that looked cleanest. They got it back before the general found out.
They called him “Little Hunter” because back home while other guys would head for the bars of Auburn and Atlanta when they had time off, sometimes during hunting season Othic, a country boy from Missouri, would vanish into the woods around Fort Benning with his rifle and come back with wild turkey or deer, which he would clean right there in the barracks and deliver up to the mess. He had that rare capacity of being able to enjoy himself anywhere. He even enjoyed standing guard duty out front of the compound, where the most interesting thing was confiscating film from the bozos who ignored signs forbidding them to take pictures, which turned out to be just about everybody with a camera. He had a collection of unrolled strips of it on the razor wire outside, draped like brown tinsel.
Othic had been keeping track of the days in Mog in a small journal he had stashed in his rucksack. He addressed each entry to his parents, and planned to just give it to them when he got back. In regard to confiscating film, he wrote this entry, borrowing some atmospherics from Star Trek:
“Log Entry, Star Date 3 Sept. 1993 1700 hours. Just got off guard duty at the main gate again, it was a pretty interesting one though. We confiscated 1 videotape & three rolls of film in 2 hrs., people aren’t allowed to take pictures of the stuff we have & boy do they have a case of the ass when they do have it taken away. It’s funny ’cause we have signs up, but they try to be sneaky about it anyway. Ha! You lose, sucker!”
Othic’s fondness for writing made it particularly galling that he didn’t get as many letters as the other guys, and, most particularly, that he didn’t have a girlfriend to correspond with. Guys without girlfriends were so forlorn they looked forward to reading the letters their buddies got from women. Not that all woman letters were good. Sergeant Raleigh Cash, this guy from Oregon, had gotten a Dear John letter while he was in Mog. It was a crusher. The girl sent him a shoebox filled with his stuff, CDs, tapes, pictures, and other detritus of a dead relationship, a real double-barreled dump, right there in the hangar. They teased Cash about it mercilessly, but in a way that made it easier to take. Still, the feeling was that any letter from a woman was better than none. Specialist Eric Spalding, a guy from Missouri who was his best buddy, got some good ones and let Othic read them. This was nice, but it made Othic feel pathetic. He was thinking about getting his sister to write him a real sexy letter just so he’d have something of his own to show off.
He and Spalding had become good buddies and made a plan to drive back to Missouri together in Othic’s pickup truck when they got home. Othic’s dad worked as an agent for the Immigration and Naturalization Service, and he planned to try for a job there when he got out of the army. He told Spalding his dad might help fix him up, too. They were hoping to get back to Missouri in time for fall deer season.
Both were jealous of the D-boys. The Rangers had spent their down time in Mog flying out to shooting ranges, going on five-mile “fun” runs, pulling guard duty, etc., while the operators had serious fun. Take the pigeons. When the force had first moved in, the pigeons had owned the hangar, crapping at will all over people, cots, and equipment. When one of the D-boys got nailed while sitting on his cot cleaning his weapon, the elite force declared war. They ordered up pellet guns. The birds didn’t have a prayer. The D-boys would triangulate fire and send a mess of blood and feathers plopping down on somebody’s cot. Did these guys know how to kill time on a deployment or what? They all had custom-built weapons with hand-rifled barrels and such. Gun manufacturers outfitted them the way Nike supplies pro athletes. Some days Delta would commandeer a Black Hawk and roar off to hunt wild boar, baboons, antelope, and gazelles in the Somali bush. They brought back trophy tusks and game meat and held cookouts. They called it “realistic training.” Now there was a fucking deal and a half. One of them, Brad Hallings, had been strutting around the hangar with a necklace made of boar’s teeth. Stocky little Earl Fillmore had taken the tusks and glued them to a helmet, and he’d strutted around naked striking poses like some Mongolian warlord.
There was no big game on the horizon for Othic and Spalding, so they had found something of their own to hunt. Spalding was a sharpshooter, and most nights his job was to squat up in a hide high in the rafters, peering out over the city with a night-vision scope through a grapefruit-sized hole in the wall. Othic would spend time up there with him, talking to pass the time. Up in the hide they’d gotten a closer look than most of the guys at the rats that were always scampering across the rafters. Mogadishu was rat heaven; there hadn’t been a regular trash pickup in recorded history. Othic and Spalding rigged an ingenious snare out of two Evian water bottles, some trip wire from their booby traps, and the contents of an MRE. Othic recorded success in his journal:
“... Good news, The Great White Hunters (me & Spalding) caught a big nasty ole rat in one of our traps (his really, but this is a joint operation). The capture of the rat brought cheers from all.”
What Othic wanted most, more even than to go home, were more missions. They had come to fight. There had been a flurry of action in the beginning, but by late September the pace had slacked off. Othic wrote:
“1830 hours. Another day without a mission & I’m starting to get pissed. We did go out to the range & shoot though, as if that’s any kind of consolation for us. We also blew more demo, so I’m starting to become pretty adept at making different charges & firing systems. ... We get mail tomorrow (knock on wood!). I know these entries have been getting more & more boring, but everything is starting to get too familiar, which is bad because it will lead to laxness that can be dangerous. It’s hard to keep sharp when everything gets routine, you know?”
On the night of September 25, the Skinnies shot down a 101st Division Black Hawk. Three crew members were killed when the downed chopper burst into flames, but the pilot and copilot escaped. They exchanged fire with gunmen on the street until friendly Somalis steered them to a vehicle and got them out.
Othic had been on guard duty that night.
“When I came on guard duty at 2 am me & another guy saw a flaming orange ball moving across the sky, it went down & there was a big explosion & there was a secondary explosion,” he wrote. “Today the flag was at half mast for 3 101st pilots who died in the crash, they were shot down by an RPG. ... Later they had a ceremony for our fallen comrades as they loaded their bodies on the bird home, makes you realize your mortality.”
Eight days la
ter, in a Humvee turret behind his .50 cal, Othic didn’t have time to ponder his mortality. He was waiting around the corner a block south of the target building, listening to the escalating gunfire and itching to get his big gun into the fight. But his vehicle was the last one in the ground convoy, so he was pulling rear security, with his gun facing down the road away from everything. He was mostly worried about missing out on the shooting. Then the convoy started moving. As his Humvee made the turn onto Hawlwadig, he bagged the chicken.
There was so much confusion it was hard for Othic to orient himself. There were lots of unarmed people in the streets, so he started off trying to be careful. He hit a Somali with a gun in the doorway to the hotel. He blasted another down the alley looking west from the hotel. The man stopped in the middle of the street and looked over his shoulder, locking eyes momentarily with Othic. The big .50 cal rounds, which could punch head-size holes in cinder block, tore the man apart. Othic aimed a few more rounds at the man’s gun in the dirt, trying to disable it. Down the street to the south he saw people dragging out tires and debris for a roadblock, so he swung his turret and put a few rounds down there. They ran.
There was just too much shooting from all directions for Othic to sort out what was going on. Bullets were zinging around him and RPGs had started to fly. He would see a cloud of smoke and a flash and then track the fat arc of the grenade as it rocketed home. Brass shell casings were piling up around him in the turret. A Somali round hit the pile and one of the casings flipped up and stung him in the face. When two more rounds hit ammo boxes right next to him, Othic was alarmed. Somebody had a bead on him. He began shooting everywhere. There was a Ranger saying that went, “When the going gets tough, the tough go cyclic.”
Othic’s Missouri buddy Eric Spalding was in one of the five-ton trucks farther up the line. The truck had sandbags on the floor in back to shield those riding back there from mines, but other than that it wasn’t armored. In the passenger seat, Spalding figured his best defense was a good offense, so he started shooting as soon as the convoy rounded the corner toward the target building. He shot a man with a gun on the steps of the Olympic Hotel, and after that targets just kept on coming as fast as he could line them up and shoot. There wasn’t any time to reflect on what was happening. The gunfight started fast and accelerated.
For Sergeant John Burns, riding in a Humvee behind Spalding’s truck, it was hard at first to grasp the severity of the fight. He and the rest of the Rangers had expected what they usually found on these missions, a Somali gunman or two taking potshots and running. So when he saw a Somali man fire an RPG from behind a crowd of women, Burns leapt from the Humvee to give chase, catching his foot on the lip of the door and falling flat on his face in the dirt. He scrambled up and ran after the man with the RPG tube, and when he had a clear bead on him he dropped to one knee and shot him. The Somali fell and Burns, completely caught up in his own little chase, ran out and grabbed the wounded man by the shirt, figuring they’d haul him back with the other prisoners. But as he began dragging the man he became aware of how much shooting was going on, and then, to his horror, spotted ten armed Somalis around the corner of the hotel.
It dawned on Burns that he was in the middle of a much bigger fight. He released the wounded man’s shirt and sprinted back to his Humvee, where the rest of the men, hunkered down and firing, eyed him with amazement.
One Humvee back, Private Ed Kallman felt a rush of adrenaline as he drove around the corner into the melee. He had joined the army searching for excitement after getting bored with high school in Gainesville, Florida. You started off in the army dreading the prospect of actual combat, but little by little the hard training and discipline of Rangering made you start wishing for it. And here it was. War. The real thing. From behind the wheel, watching through the windshield, Kallman had to remind himself that this wasn’t a movie, and the realization filled him initially with a dark boyish glee. The smoke trail of an RPG caught the corner of his eye, and he followed it as it zipped past his vehicle and exploded into one of the five-tons in front. When the smoke cleared he saw Staff Sergeant Dave Wilson, one of the only two black guys in the Ranger company, propped against the wall of a house alongside the truck. Wilson’s legs were stretched stiff in front of him and were splashed with bright red blood. Kallman was horrified. One of his guys! He gripped the steering wheel and focused on the vehicle in front of his, suddenly eager to get moving again.
From his turret in the rear Humvee, Othic had seen the flash of the RPG tube. He swung his .50 cal around and blasted the spot, mowing down a small crowd that had been standing in front of the shooter.
Then what felt like a baseball bat came down on his right forearm. It felt just like that. He heard the crack! and felt the blow and looked down to see a small hole in his arm. The bone was broken.
He shouted, “I’m hit! I’m hit!”
He really did go cyclic on the .50 cal then, just fired continually for maybe as long as a minute, taking down trees and walls and anyone in, around, or behind them, before Sergeant Lorenzo Ruiz stood up in the turret and took the gun.
13
At Sergeant Eversmann’s intersection, things continued to go badly for Chalk Four. First Blackburn had fallen out of the helicopter, then they’d roped in well off target, then they’d been pinned down so they couldn’t get in the right position. He had sent five guys with the litter carrying Blackburn, and none of them had come back yet.
Then Sergeant Galentine got hit.
Galentine was a kid from Xenia, Ohio, who had spent six months operating a press at a rubber-molding plant after high school before deciding there was more that he could be. He’d enlisted on the day the Gulf War started and it was over before he was out of basic training. He’d been waiting for a chance at a real fight ever since. He’d been crushed when he and Stebbins had gotten left back on this deployment. But now, here he was, finally in battle. It had a strange effect on him. He turned giddy. He and his buddy, Specialist Jim Telscher, sat behind two cars as rounds kicked up dirt between them. Telscher had been smacked in the face by his own rifle coming down the rope and had blood all over his mouth. Gunfire methodically shattered the windows on both cars and blew out the tires. Galantine and Telscher sat behind the rear bumpers making stupid faces at one another.
Galentine did not feel frightened. It didn’t register that he could get killed. He just pointed his M-16 at someone down the street, aimed at center mass, and squeezed off rounds. The man would drop. Just like target practice, only cooler.
When they started catching rounds from a different direction, he and Telscher ran to an alley. There, Galentine came face-to-face with a Somali woman. She had chosen that moment to dash across the alley, and now stood staring in horror at Galentine and trying to open a door to get inside. His first instinct had been to shoot her, but he hadn’t. The woman’s eyes were wide. It startled him, that moment. It cut through his silliness. This wasn’t a game. He had come very close to killing this woman. She got the door open and stepped inside.
He had next taken cover behind another car on the main road, his rifle braced against his shoulder, the strap slung around his body. He was picking targets out of a crowd of hundreds that had massed up the road and was moving toward their position. As he fired, he felt a painful slap on his left hand that knocked his weapon so hard it spun completely around him. His first thought was to right his gun, but when he reached he saw his thumb flopped on his forearm, attached only by a strip of skin.
He picked up the thumb and pressed it back to his hand.
“You all right, Scotty? You all right?” asked Telscher.
Eversmann had seen it, the M-16 spinning and a splash of pink by Galentine’s left hand. He saw Galentine reach for the hand, then look across the road at him.
“Don’t come across!” Eversmann shouted. There was withering fire coming down the road. “Don’t come across!”
Galentine heard the sergeant but started running anyway. For some reason,
the lanky chalk leader across the road meant safety. He ran but seemed to be getting nowhere, like in a dream. His feet were heavy and slow and if there were bullets flying around him he didn’t hear or see them. He dove the last few feet, rolled over, and leaned up against the wall alongside Eversmann.
The sergeant was still contending with the crowd. Down the street behind him there were Humvees in front of the target building. Up ahead it looked like half the city of Mogadishu was massing and closing in on them. Men would dart out into the street and shoot off bursts from their AKs and then take cover. He could see the telltale flash and puff of RPGs being launched their way. The grenades would smoke on in and explode with a long splash of flame and a pounding concussion. From across the street the heat of the blast would wash over and leave a trace of acrid powder smell in his mouth and nose. At one point so many rounds came flying down the road, kicking up dirt and chipping the sides of buildings, they created a wave of noise and energy that the sergeant could actually see coming. One of the Black Hawks flew over and Eversmann stood and stretched his long arm in the direction of the fire. He watched the crew chief in back sitting behind his minigun and then saw the gun spout lines of flame at targets up the street and, for a short time, all shooting from that direction stopped. That’s our guys.
To Eversmann’s left, Private Anton Berendsen was lying out on the ground firing his M-203, a grenade-launcher mounted under the barrel of his M-16. Berendsen was aiming east at Somalis who would pop out and spray bullets from behind the rusty tin shacks that protruded at intervals from the stone walls. Seconds after Galentine dove in, Berendsen grabbed his shoulder.
“Oh, my God, I’m hit,” he said. He looked up at Eversmann.
Berendsen scooted over against the wall next to Galentine with one arm limp at his side, picking small chunks of debris from his face.