Black Hawk Down

by Mark Bowden

  Eversmann squatted down next to both men, turning first to Berendsen, who was still preoccupied, looking down the alley east.

  “Ber, tell me where you’re hurt,” Eversmann said.

  “I think I got one in the arm.”

  Berendsen began fumbling with his good hand with the breech of his grenade launcher. He couldn’t get it open with one hand. Eversmann impatiently opened the breech for him.

  “There’s a guy right down there,” Berendsen said.

  Eversmann was too busy with the wound to look. As he struggled to lift up Berendsen’s vest and open his shirt to assess the wound, the private shot off a 203 round one-handed. The sergeant turned to look. It occurred to him he probably should have fired the round, instead of having Berendsen attempt it one-handed. He watched the fist-sized shell spiral through the air toward a shack about forty meters away. It flattened it in a great flash of light, noise, and smoke. The shooting from that place stopped.

  Berendsen’s injury did not look severe. Eversmann turned to Galentine, who was wide-eyed, like he might be lapsing into shock. His thumb was hanging down below his hand.

  The sergeant grabbed it and placed it in the palm of Galentine’s hand.

  “Scott, hold this,” he said. “Just put your hand up and hold it, buddy.”

  Galentine gripped the thumb with his other fingers.

  “Hold it up. You’ll be all right.”

  A medic came running up to tend the wound. When he saw the severed thumb he dropped the field dressing to the road. Galentine reached into the medic’s kit with his good hand, removed a clean dressing, and handed it to him. The injured hand stung. It felt the way it did on a cold day when you hit a baseball wrong.

  “Don’t worry, Sergeant Galentine, you’re gonna be okay,” said Berendsen, bleeding beside him.

  Now Eversmann had only Specialist Dave Diemer, a SAW gunner, facing east. Diemer was doing the work of three men, so the sergeant moved over to help him. Eversmann lifted his M-16, found an armed Somali down the street, and squeezed off a round. It occurred to him that this was the first shot he’d fired since roping in.

  It was hectic, Eversmann thought, but things were not too bad just yet. He wrestled to stay calm, keep track of all these events piling in on him. He took a knee behind a vehicle alongside Diemer. His mind raced. He had three Rangers injured, only one critically, and he’d managed to get him out. Galentine’s was not life-threatening, nor was Berendsen’s.

  Glass shattered, showering bits over him and Diemer. A Somali had run out to the middle of the street just a few yards away and blasted the car. Diemer dropped behind the rear wheel on the passenger side and shot him with a quick burst. The Somali was thrown backward hard to the street and lay in a rumpled heap.

  Eversmann radioed to Lieutenant Perino that he had taken two more casualties, but they weren’t urgently in need of evacuation.

  “Sergeant Eversmann,” called Telscher, who was across the road. “Snodgrass has been shot.”

  Specialist Kevin Snodgrass, the machine gunner, had been crouched behind a car and a round had evidently skipped off the chassis or ricocheted up from the road. Eversmann saw Telscher stoop over Snodgrass. The machine gunner was not screaming. It didn’t look dire.

  Then Diemer tapped his shoulder.

  “Sergeant?”

  Eversmann turned wearily. Diemer wore a panicked expression.

  “I think I just saw a helicopter get hit.”

  BLACK HAWK DOWN

  1

  Mohamed Hassan Farah heard the helicopters approaching from the north. They came as always, low and loud. Usually they came at night. You would hear only the thrum of their rotors. You never saw them unless they stopped over your block. Then they would come down so low the noise beat at your ears and the wash from their rotors pulled trees out of the sandy ground and sucked tin roofs right off houses, sending them flipping and groaning through the air. Even then you could see the helicopters only in dim outline against a dark sky. They flew black on black, like death.

  This time was different. It was daylight, midafternoon. At the sound of them, Farah felt a twinge of panic and anger. He walked outside and watched them pass swiftly overhead, stirring the trees and quaking the rooftops. He knew they were Rangers because Rangers always dangled their boots from the open doorways. He counted about a dozen, but they moved too fast for him to be sure. The soft dry earth under his sandals vibrated.

  He had deep wounds that were still healing from an American helicopter attack three months earlier, on July 12—months before the Rangers had come. Farah and the others in his clan had welcomed the UN intervention the previous December. It promised to bring stability and hope. But the mission had gradually deteriorated into hatred and bloodshed. Farah believed the Americans had been duped into providing the muscle for UN Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali, a longtime enemy of the Habr Gidr and clan leader General Mohamed Farrah Aidid. He believed Boutros-Ghali was trying to restore the Darod, a rival clan. Ever since July 12, the Habr Gidr had been at war with America.

  On that morning, the American QRF helicopters, seventeen in all, had encircled the house of Abdi Hassan Awale, who was called Qeybdid. Inside the house, in a large second-floor room, were nearly one hundred of his clansmen, intellectuals, elders, and militia leaders. There was urgent business to discuss. The Habr Gidr had been under UN siege for four weeks, ever since a bloody clan ambush killed twenty-four Pakistani soldiers.

  Life had grown hard for the clan, but they were used to that. The Habr Gidr was an age-old rival of the Darod, the clan of former dictator Mohamed Siad Barre, who had ruled Somalia with terror for twenty years. As an Egyptian diplomat, Boutros-Ghali had worked against Aidid’s revolutionary forces. Barre had been overthrown in 1991, but the Habr Gidr had been unable to consolidate political power. Now the same Boutros-Ghali, through the UN, was again trying to defeat them. This is how they saw it. So they were living as they had for many years, hiding from those in power, biding time, and looking for chances to strike.

  That day in July, the leadership had gathered to discuss how to respond to a peace initiative from Jonathan Howe, the retired American admiral who was then leading the UN mission in Mogadishu. Men of middle age were seated at the center of the room on rugs. Elders took chairs and sofas that had been arranged around the perimeter. Among the elders present were religious leaders, former judges, professors, the poet Moallim Soyan, and the clan’s most senior leader, Sheik Haji Mohamed Iman Aden, who was over ninety years old. Behind the elders, standing against the walls, were the youngest men. Many of those present wore Western clothing, shirts and pants, but most wore the colorful traditional Somali wraparound cotton skirts called ma-awis.

  They were the best-educated members of the clan. Ever since the collapse of order and government in Somalia there was little work for intellectuals. So a meeting like this was a big event, a chance to argue over the direction of things. Aidid himself was not present. In the weeks since the UN searched and leveled most of the buildings in his residential compound, he had been in hiding. Qeybdid and some of the others present were his close advisers, hard-liners, men with blood on their hands. Some were responsible for attacks on UN troops, including the massacre of the Pakistanis. There were also moderates in the crowd, men who saw themselves as realists. Ruling impoverished Somalia meant little without friendly ties with the larger world. The Habr Gidr were enthusiastic capitalists. Many of the men in this room were businessmen, eager to resume the flood of international aid and trading ties with America and European powers. They were troubled by the obstructionist and increasingly dangerous game Aidid was playing with the UN. In Mogadishu’s present atmosphere of confrontation, their arguments were unlikely to prevail, but some in the crowd at Abdi House were there to argue for peace.

  Farah was one of the moderates, a garrulous balding man in his thirties. He was eager for some kind of normalcy in his country, and for friendly ties with nations that could help Somalia. Farah was
an engineer, educated in part in Germany. He saw opportunity in the terrible ruins of Mogadishu. Before him lay a lifetime of important and lucrative rebuilding. But he also believed the man who deserved to lead the country—and the only one who would steer valuable engineering contracts his way—was his clansman Aidid. The UN wanted to treat all the warlords and clans as equals when they were not equal.

  Farah was on the perimeter of the room with the younger men, but instead of standing, he had set himself down on one knee between two sofas, which probably saved his life.

  The TOW missile is designed to penetrate the armored hull of a tank. It is a two-stage forty-pound projectile with fins at the middle and back that trails a copper wire as thin as a human hair. The wire allows the TOW to be steered in flight so that it will follow precisely the path of a targeting laser. Equipped with a shaped charge inside its rounded tip, on impact it spurts a jet of plasma, molten copper, which burns through the outer layer of its target, allowing the missile to penetrate and deliver its full explosive charge within. The explosion is powerful enough to dismember anyone standing near it, and hurls deadly sharp metal fragments in all directions.

  What Farah saw and heard was a flash of light and a violent crack. He stood and took one step forward and heard the whooosh! of a second missile. There was another flash and explosion. He was thrown to the floor. Thick smoke filled the room. He tried to move forward but his way was blocked by bodies, a bloody pile of men and parts of men a meter high. Among those killed instantly was the eldest, Sheik Haji Iman. Through the smoke, Farah was startled to see Qeybdid, bloody and burned, but still standing at the center of the carnage.

  At another part of the room, Abdullahi Ossoble Barre was momentarily dazed by the blasts. To him, it looked liked the men closest to the flash had just evaporated. As soon as he recovered his wits, he began looking for his son.

  Those who had survived the first blast were feeling along the wall, groping for the door, when the second missile exploded. The air was thick with dark smoke and smelled of powder, blood, and burned flesh. Farah found the stairs, stood, and had taken one step down when a third missile exploded, disintegrating the staircase. He tumbled to the first floor. He sat up stunned, and felt himself for broken bones and wet spots. He saw he was bleeding from a thick gash in his right forearm. He felt a burning there and on his back, which had been punctured in several places with shrapnel. He crawled forward. There was another explosion above him. Then another and another. Sixteen missiles were fired in all.

  Still trapped upstairs, Barre found his son alive beneath a pile of mangled bodies. He began pulling men off, and parts of their bodies came off in his hands. After a great struggle he managed to free his son, who was semiconscious, jerking him free by the legs. Then they heard Americans from the helicopters storming the house, so he and his son lay still among the bleeding and played dead.

  Farah crawled until he found a door to the outside. He saw one of his clansmen running from the house, and in the sky he saw the helicopters, Cobras mostly, but also some Black Hawks. The sky was full of them. Red streams poured from the Cobras’ miniguns. The men with Farah in the doorway had a quick decision to make. Some had blood running from their mouths and ears. They could stay in the burning house or brave the helicopters’ guns outside.

  “Let’s go out together,” one of the men said. “Some of us will live and some will die.”

  His wounds had nearly healed in the three months since. Now, as the armada of American helicopters roared overhead he was reminded of the shock, pain, and terror. The sight filled him and his friends with rage. It was one thing for the world to intervene to feed the starving, and even for the UN to help Somalia form a peaceful government. But this business of sending U.S. Rangers swooping down into their city killing and kidnapping their leaders, this was too much.

  Bashir Haji Yusuf heard the helicopters as he relaxed with friends at his house, chewing khat and embroiled in fadikudirir, the traditional Somali afternoon hours of male discussion and argument and laughter. Today they had been talking about The Situation, which is about all they ever discussed anymore. With no government, no courts, no law, and no university there was no work for lawyers in Mogadishu, but Yusuf never wanted for argument.

  They all stepped out to see. Yusuf, too, saw the legs dangling and knew it was the Rangers. They all despised the Rangers, and the Black Hawks, which seemed now to be over the city continually. They flew in groups, at all hours of day and night, swooping down so low they destroyed whole neighborhoods, blew down market stalls, and terrorized cattle. Women walking the streets would have their colorful robes blown off. Some had infants torn from their arms by the powerful updraft. On one raid, a mother screamed frantically in flex cuffs for nearly a half hour before a translator arrived to listen and to explain that her infant had been blown down the road by the landing helicopters. The residents complained that pilots would deliberately hover over their roofless outdoor showers and toilets. Black Hawks would flare down on busy traffic circles, creating havoc, then power off leaving the crowd below choking on dust and exhaust. Mogadishu felt brutalized and harassed.

  Yusuf was disappointed in the Americans. He had been partly educated in the United States, and had many friends there. What troubled him most was, he knew they meant well. He knew his friends back in South Carolina, where he had attended the university, saw this mission to Somalia as an effort to end starving and bloodshed. They never saw what their soldiers were actually doing here in the city. How could these bloody Ranger raids alter things? The Situation was as old and as complicated as his life. Civil war had destroyed all semblance of the old order of things. In this new chaotic Somalia, the shifting alliances and feuds of the clans and subclans were like the patterns wind carved in the sand. Often Yusuf himself didn’t understand what was going on. And yet these Americans, with their helicopters and laser-guided weapons and shock-troop Rangers were going to somehow sort it out in a few weeks? Arrest Aidid and make it all better? They were trying to take down a clan, the most ancient and efficient social organization known to man. Didn’t the Americans realize that for every leader they arrested there were dozens of brothers, cousins, sons, and nephews to take his place? Setbacks just strengthened the clan’s resolve. Even if the Habr Gidr were somehow crippled or destroyed, wouldn’t that just elevate the next most powerful clan? Or did the Americans expect Somalia to suddenly sprout full-fledged Jeffersonian democracy?

  Yusuf knew the bile on Aidid’s radio station was nonsense, about how the UN and the Americans had come to colonize Somalia and wanted to burn the Koran. But in the months since the Abdi House attack he had come to share the popular anger toward American forces. On September 19, after a bulldozer crew of engineers from the 10th Mountain Division was attacked by a band of Somalis, Cobra helicopters attached to the QRF launched TOW missiles and cannon fire into the crowd that came to see the shooting, killing nearly one hundred people. The helicopters had become an evil presence over the city. Yusuf remembered lying in bed one night with his wife, who was pregnant, when Black Hawks had come. One hovered directly over their house. The walls shook and the noise was deafening and he was afraid his roof, like others in the village, would be sucked off. In the racket his wife reached over and placed his hand on her belly.

  “Can you feel it?” she asked.

  He felt his son kicking in her womb, as if thrashing with fright.

  As a lawyer who spoke fluent English, Yusuf had led a group of his villagers to the UN compound to complain. They were told nothing could be done about the Rangers. They were not under UN command. Soon every death associated with the fighting was blamed on the Rangers. Somalis joked bitterly that the United States had come to feed them just to fatten them up for slaughter.

  Yusuf saw the armada slow about two kilometers away to the north, over by the Bakara Market. If they were going into Bakara, there would be big trouble. The helicopters circled around the Olympic Hotel.

  Right away, he heard the shoot
ing start.

  2

  Most of the Rangers saw Super Six One going down.

  Chalk Two’s SAW gunner, Specialist John Waddell, had started to relax, more or less on, the northeast corner. He could hear the pop of gunfire at the other chalk locations around the target block, but after 60-gunner Nelson had cut down that crowd of Somalis things had quieted at their position. Waddell heard Lieutenant DiTomasso say over the radio that they were getting ready to move to the vehicles, which meant the D-boys must be finished in the target house. He’d be back at the hangar with an hour or two of sunlight left, enough time for him to find a sunny spot on top of a Conex and finish that Grisham novel.

  Then there was an explosion overhead. Waddell looked up to see a Black Hawk twisting oddly as it flew.

  “Hey, that bird’s going down!” shouted one of the men across the street.

  Nelson screamed, “A bird’s been hit! A bird’s been hit!”

  Nelson had seen the whole thing. He had seen the flash of the RPG launcher and had followed the smoke trail of the grenade as it rose up at the tail of Black Hawk Super Six One, which was directly overhead.

  They all heard the thunderclap. The tail boom of the bird cracked in the flash and its rotor stopped spinning with a horrible grinding sound, followed by a coughing chug-chug-chug. The chopper kept moving forward but shuddered and started to spin. First slowly, then picking up speed.

  3

  Ray Dowdy felt a jolt, nothing too dramatic, but hard enough to make him bounce in his seat behind the minigun on the left side of Super Six One. Dowdy had been maintaining and flying in army choppers for a third of his life. He knew the Black Hawk about as well as anybody in the world, and the hit didn’t sound or feel too bad.

  It was probably an RPG. Ever since they roped in their load of D-boys, the air had been thick with smoke trails. This had been a growing concern. The QRF Black Hawk that had gone down the week before had been hit by an RPG. It had burst into flames on impact. That incident started everybody rethinking the way they’d been doing things, even though the task force’s six missions had gone without a hitch. Some of the pilots began agitating for more flexibility, but their commanders wanted them to stick with the template.