Black Hawk Down

by Mark Bowden

  When the chalkboard came around, Wilkinson was immediately hungry for more information. Where had Six One gone down? Was it burning? How many people were on board? For him, apart from the physical danger (in this case being shot at), rescues were a mental challenge. People’s lives depended on how well he could think on his feet. He carried two heavy bags, one for medical supplies and the other containing tools for cutting open the helicopter and prying men loose. Training had taught him to cope with stress and how to handle the tools. The rest was all improvisation.

  Specialist Rob Phipps, the “Phippster,” was the youngest of the Rangers on board. He was twenty-two. To the more experienced men, battle was a grim necessity, part of their jobs. They had weighed the risks and for various reasons had accepted them. For Phipps, the prospect of going in was just thrilling. His pulse raced and his senses seemed twice as alert. The only thing he could compare it to was a drug. He could hardly sit still. He had been a hellion of a teenager growing up in Detroit, drinking and partying, breaking all the rules, running completely out of control. The Rangers had taken all that fearless exuberance and pointless bravado and channeled it. That was the secret core of all the Hoo-ah discipline and esprit. You would be given permission, in battle, to break the biggest social taboo of all. You killed people. You were supposed to kill people. It wasn’t often talked about in just that way, but there it was. Phipps didn’t consider himself bloodthirsty, but he’d been groomed and primed for a moment just like this, and he was eager. He had his CAR-15, which could fire upward of six hundred rounds per minute, and he’d been trained to hit what he aimed at. Part of him never believed he’d actually be asked to do it. Now he reminded himself: This is for real! He was frightened, excited, and nervous all at once. He had never felt this way.

  As pilot Dan Jollata called back, “One minute,” the men checked weapons, chambered rounds, and passed along whatever bits of information were offered by the crew chiefs and those at the doors, who could see below. They moved over Wolcott’s downed Black Hawk exactly eight minutes after it crashed. Jollata flew in from the north, flared, and then hovered about thirty feet over the street. The Little Bird that had gone in to rescue the two wounded D-boys had landed right on Marehan Road, but the Black Hawk was much too big to go all the way down.

  From his middle spot, Wilkinson couldn’t see anything. He was taking his cues from Master Sergeant Scott Fales, his team leader. They made eye contact and nodded. This is it. Then Jollata said it was time, the ropes were kicked out, and men started sliding out. When it was his turn, Wilkinson noticed that the essential kit bags, which were supposed to be kicked out first, had been left behind. So he and Fales waited until the men before them had cleared the rope and then kicked out the bags themselves. They made one last check around inside the now-empty bird before they jumped.

  The delay was costly. As Jollata held his hover these few extra seconds, an RPG exploded on the left side of his airframe. It rocked the Black Hawk like a roundhouse punch. Jollata instinctively began to pull up and away.

  “Coming out. I think we have been hit,” Jollata radioed. Confirmation was already coming from nearby Little Birds.

  —You have been hit.

  —Behind your engines.

  —Be advised you are smoking.

  “We still have people on the ropes!” one of his crew chiefs shouted.

  Jollata could hear his rotor blades whistling. Shrapnel from the blast had peppered them with holes. The aircraft sloshed from side to side. The blast had damaged the main rotor housing and had destroyed the engine cooling system. Instinct and training both dictated that he move out, fast, but Jollata eased the Black Hawk back down to a hover for the remaining seconds Wilkinson and Fales needed to finish sliding down the ropes.

  Stretched out on the rope, Wilkinson heard the explosion above, but he was so intent on negotiating his descent through the brown dust cloud that he never felt the bird jerk forward and up, and didn’t learn until much later how Jollata’s cool had saved his life.

  —You had better set it down pretty quick somewhere, came advice for Jollata from one of the helicopters above. You have a big hole on top.

  “All systems are normal right now, just a little whine in the rotor system. I think I can make it back to the field,” said Jollata.

  —Be advised you’ve got smoke coming out of the very top of the rotor. I suggest you go down to the new port. Put it down now.

  —Let Six Eight make his call, said Matthews from the C2 Black Hawk. He looks all right.

  Once Wilkinson and Fales were on the ground, Super Six Eight limped low and slow across the city trailing a thin gray plume. Jollata struggled in the cockpit to fly it. It was like maneuvering a truck on a sheet of ice. The Black Hawk could survive without oil for a time, but losing the cooling system meant the gears would burn. He looked for an open field near the port.

  “I’ve got the field in sight. All systems normal. I am losing transmission pressure right now.”

  The sturdy Black Hawk kept going. They flew past the open field and then slipped over the fencing to the airport base. Jollata still faced the challenge of putting it down. He knew the chopper couldn’t hold a hover, so he warned the crew chiefs in back to brace themselves for a hard landing. He radioed for emergency crews on the ground to be ready, and then just slammed the bird down with a quick roll at sixty knots. He put it right on the wheels. They hit with a jolt, but the Black Hawk stayed upright and intact.

  2

  Wilkinson heard the snap of rounds passing nearby as soon as he hit the street. It was hot and in the cloud of dust he couldn’t see. He ran to a wall on the right side of the street and waited for the dust to settle.

  He was carrying a small medical pack and his CAR-15, sidearm, rounds, radio, canteen, and body armor. Instead of a K-pot (the standard U.S. Army Kevlar helmet), Wilkinson was wearing the lightweight plastic Pro-Tech hockey helmet preferred by most of the D-boys. Their specialized work called for them to move fast in and out of small places, so their primary concern was bumping their head, not taking a bullet or shrapnel. Wilkinson preferred the little helmet because he could glue a strip of Velcro to the top, where he could fasten a flashlight.

  Wilkinson had one of the heavy ceramic plates in the front of his body armor, and with all the other gear must have weighed half again his 180 pounds, yet he didn’t feel the extra weight. There had been some learned discussion in the CSAR bird about the pros and cons of wearing the armor plates. They were heavy, and in some cases were so oversized that the top of the breast plate jammed uncomfortably up under the chin of men seated in the choppers. Since so much of their time had been spent just sitting, there was ample sentiment in the bird for leaving the plates out altogether. The Kevlar itself could stop shrapnel and a 9 mm round. Wilkinson figured the standard Somali weapon to be the AK-47, which fires a faster round. So he endured the plate in front, but not in back. It was a reminder of the all-important rule: Never turn your back on the enemy.

  Except, at this intersection of dirt roads and stone houses, the enemy seemed to be shooting from everywhere. He couldn’t see anything. He took his heavy leather fast-roping gloves off and clipped them on his vest, waiting for the cloud to thin enough so he could see where he was.

  They had put down on Marehan Road, a wide dirt road immediately east of the crash, though Wilkinson could not yet see Super Six One. As Mogadishu neighborhoods went, this one was upscale. This wide north-south street was intersected by narrow alleys running east-west. He knew Super Six One was in one of those. There were one- and two-story houses made of either rose-tinted, white, or gray-brown stone, roofed with tin, most arrayed around small inner courtyards. Some of the outer walls were smooth plaster and had been painted, although all were stained with the orange sand of the streets. Most of the walls were uneven. Even the ones made of modern cinder blocks were so sloppily mortared they resembled a hastily stacked pile of stones. It was clear that most of the construction, while in some cases ambiti
ous, was strictly do-it-yourself. There were small trees inside the courtyards and some out on the street.

  He saw some of his team across the road moving west, up a narrow alley. The kit bags and fast ropes were still in the middle of Marehan Road. Alongside was a long shard of Super Six One’s shattered rotors. At impact, pieces of the rotors had been hurled blocks away. Wilkinson ran across the road, still hearing the loud snap of bullets around him, and picked up both bags. As he rounded the corner to the alley, he saw the wreck. He was startled by its size. They were used to seeing Black Hawks in the air or out on spacious tarmacs. In this narrow alley it looked tragic, like a harpooned whale, beached on its left side. The T-shaped tail boom was twisted and bent down. On its side like that, the bird was about eight feet high. There were bits and pieces of rotor, engine, stone, and mortar scattered all over the top of it. Painted on the front end of the bird, under the right cockpit door facing upward, was a crude cartoon of a crooked-nosed Indian with a head feather, and the words, “Sitting Bull.” He remembered that “Bull” Briley was Six One’s copilot.

  Much had already happened. The rescue team’s D-boys and Rangers, including the group from Chalk Two who had run over from the target building, had set up a small perimeter, basically guarding the alley to the front and rear of the downed aircraft. The crushed nose of the bird pointed east. There were a few dead Somalis scattered on the street. People would rush out, often women or children, to retrieve their weapons, and others would step out to pull bodies to cover.

  Sergeant Fales was at the front end of the wreckage stretching up to peer inside when he felt a tug at his left pants leg. Then came the pain. It felt like a hot poker had been stabbed through his calf muscle. Fales, a big, broad-faced man who had fought in Panama and during the Gulf War, felt anger with the pain. Here he was after years of training for a moment like this, and after less than three minutes on the ground he’d been shot. How was he to do his job, direct this rescue, with a big bloody hole in his leg?

  He hopped back from the front of the helicopter with a disappointed grimace. Wilkinson caught up as Fales hobbled back toward the tail of the bird. Delta Sergeant First Class Bob Mabry had him under one arm.

  “What’s up?” Wilkinson asked.

  “I’ve been shot.”

  “What?”

  “Been shot. Rat bastard shot me.”

  Fales and Mabry ducked into the hole the crashing helicopter had knocked in the south wall of the alley. Mabry cut open his pants with his scissors and saw that the bullet had passed through the calf muscle and out the front of his leg. It had apparently not broken the leg bones. By the look of it, with flaps of muscle tissue spilled out of the wound, they figured it ought to hurt badly, but other than that stabbing pain right after he’d been shot, Fales felt nothing. The anesthetic of fear and adrenaline. Mabry stuffed the muscle tissue back into the hole, packed some gauze into it, and then applied a pressure dressing. Both men then crawled back out into the alley, finding cover in a small cup-shaped space behind the main body of the helicopter created by the bent tail boom.

  The injury to his partner heightened Wilkinson’s sense of urgency. He had thought they’d have a few minutes to set up before the pressure came. In the past, it had usually taken ten to twenty minutes for a Somali crowd to gather around any action on the streets. Clearly this time was different. Speed was critical. Going in they had been told that the main body of the assault force would be moving from the target house in vehicles to this crash site, so he expected them at any minute. They had to have the wounded and dead out of the chopper, perform any emergency medicine necessary, and place them on litters by the time the convoy approached. Now he’d lost his team leader.

  Wilkinson moved up to the front. A Delta sniper, Sergeant First Class James McMahon, who had been on Super Six One when it crashed, was already on top of the bird pulling out Bull Briley. McMahon’s face was badly cut and swollen and had already turned black and blue. He looked like he was wearing a fright mask. Briley was obviously dead. On impact something had sliced cleanly through his head, angling up from just under his chin. He was relatively easy to get at because he was strapped in the right seat, which was now on the high side. Wilkinson helped McMahon pull Briley up and out, and then handed his body down. McMahon climbed down into the cockpit and checked on Elvis.

  “He’s dead,” he told Wilkinson.

  The PJ felt the need to see for himself. He told McMahon to get some attention for his face, and then climbed up and into the bird.

  It was eerily quiet inside. There had been no fire, and there was no smoke. Wilkinson was surprised at how intact it all was. Everything inside that hadn’t been strapped down had come to rest on the left side, which was now the bottom. Most had been thrown to the front, and was now piled up against the back of the pilot’s seat. There was a slight odor of fuel inside, and there were liquids draining from places. He ran a finger into some fluid dripping down the side, smelled and tasted it. It wasn’t fuel. It was probably hydraulic fluid. Sunlight came through the wide right-side doors that now faced the sky.

  He observed all this suspended upside down through the right side door. Reaching down, he checked Wolcott’s neck for a pulse. He was dead. Both pilots had taken the brunt of the impact, and Wolcott, because his side had hit the ground, had gotten the worst of it. The whole front end of the helicopter had folded in on him from the waist down. He was still in his seat. His head and upper torso were intact, but the rest of him was wedged tightly under the instrument panel. Wilkinson tried to slide his hand between the panel and the pilot’s legs, but there was no space above or below. He could not be lifted or pulled free. Wilkinson then slid completely into the helicopter and crawled behind the pilot’s seat to see if it could be pulled back or reclined, so he could slide Wolcott out that way, but that vantage looked no better. He then climbed out and got down on the dirt by the smashed left underside of the cockpit, digging to see if there was a chance of creating an opening underneath the wreck out of which Elvis’s body could be extracted. But all the tonnage of the Black Hawk had plowed hard into the soil. There was going to be no easy way to get him out.

  3

  Shortly before the other Rangers came down ropes to the crashed helicopter, Abdiaziz Ali Aden had darted out from under the green Volkswagen. The slender Somali teenager with the head of thick, bushy hair had seen the helicopter clip the roof of his house before falling into the alley. He had helped his family to safety and then returned to protect the house from looters, only to find himself in the middle of a gunfight.

  He saw one of the Americans who roped down pick up an M-16 from a man he had just shot. As the soldier came toward him, Aden panicked. He slid out from under the car and ran back into his house, slamming the door shut. He ran to a small storage room in the front that had two windows, one that faced out over the alleyway where the helicopter lay, the other that looked out at Marehan Road where more Rangers were descending. The intersection and alley then swarmed with American soldiers, and the shooting was loud, constant, and accelerating. The walls of his house were built of heavy stone, so he had a safe, ringside seat.

  Aden watched the American soldiers climb hurriedly in and out of the wrecked helicopter. They pulled a pilot out and carried him to the tail end of it. The pilot had a deep and terrible cut across his face and he looked eerily white and was clearly dead. Two of the Rangers placed a big gun on top of the Fiat across the street, which struck Aden as funny. It turned the little car into a kind of technical. Another of the soldiers crawled right into the trash hole. Aden’s family and their neighbors disposed of trash by digging holes or ditches in the street outside their house, and filling it with their dumpings. When it was full, they burned it. This soldier just dug himself into the trash. Only his head and rifle stuck out from the debris. He was shooting steadily.

  4

  Sergeant First Class Al Lamb was grateful for the hole. He didn’t care what was in it. They were taking fire from all directions, a
nd there wasn’t much to hide behind. Sammies were sticking their AK-47s down over the top of the walls. Lamb had gone to the end of the alley at the front of the chopper with a Delta operator, Ranger Sergeant Mark Belda, and eager young Specialist Rob Phipps.

  Phipps had roped down to the street with Specialist John Belman, and the two had immediately knocked in a door to get off the street. They barged in on a woman in a turban and scarlet checkered robe who was missing a front tooth. She screamed. Phipps saw five or six small children hiding under a bed. The woman dropped to her knees and put her hands up, begging them with words they didn’t understand. The Rangers backed out the door and then ran down to the alley, where they saw the tail of the helicopter. Standing there was Sergeant McMahon, who just shouted at them through his swollen, bruised face, “The twelve! The twelve!” meaning they needed more covering fire at the twelve o’clock position.

  Phipps took a spot by the stone wall the chopper had fallen against. There was a small intersection about twenty feet ahead where another sandy alley crossed. On the opposite two corners were stone walls and behind them clumps of trees. Directly behind him, jutting up from under the wreck and growing halfway to the corner, was a big cactus bush. That and the downed chopper hid his position from anyone behind him. He stayed back from the corner so that he didn’t present a target from the alley in front of him. At first he was there by himself. He got jumpy, so he called Sergeant Lamb on his handheld radio and asked for help. Then Staff Sergeant Steven Lycopolus moved up and crouched on the other side of the alley, just past the hole the Black Hawk had knocked in the south wall. His rear was protected by the heap of stone and mortar from the pulverized concrete. They were mainly looking to pick off gunmen to the east who were sending a steady flow of rounds up the alleyway, and to prevent any Sammies from approaching the crash from that direction. It didn’t take long for one to try. A man in a loose white cotton shirt, baggy pants, and sandals came creeping up the alley right toward them with an AK, walking at a crouch with the weapon held forward. Phipps shot him and he fell sideways into the alley. Then another man ran out to retrieve the gun. Phipps shot him. Then another man ran out. Phipps shot him, too. Then Lamb, Belda, and Specialist Gregg Gould moved up to join Phipps and Lycopolus. Belda joined Phipps on his side of the alley, Gould went over by Lycopolus, and Lamb dug into the hole.