Black Hawk Down

by Mark Bowden

  The Chalk Two Rangers who had been first to arrive had the six o’clock position covered. They’d fanned out to take all four corners of the big intersection west of the crash. The five men at the twelve o’clock spot dug in as best they could, covering the smaller intersection to the east. They stayed close to the helicopter. Lamb felt that moving his men across the intersection might break down the perimeter and risk getting them cut off.

  It appeared as though many of the shots coming their way were from the clump of trees about twenty yards over, behind a high wall at the southeast corner across the intersection. Rounds were chipping stone and earth around Phipps and he could hear them puncturing the Black Hawk’s thin metal hull.

  Lycopolus and Gould were closest to the wall, and at Lamb’s direction they began throwing their grenades over it. One by one they exploded, but the shooting continued. So Belda shot up the trees with his SAW while Phipps tossed his own grenades to Lycopolus. The staff sergeant threw them, and these, too, exploded, again without effect. So Belda tossed Lycopolus his grenades. The staff sergeant threw the first, which exploded, and then tossed the second. This time there was no blast. Instead, seconds later, what looked to be the same grenade came flying back over the high wall at them. Either Lycopolus had not removed the safety strap on the last grenade he threw, or that one had been a dud and the Somalis behind the wall had an American grenade of their own.

  Phipps dove forward as several voices shouted, “Grenade!” The blast was like a gut punch. It just sucked all the air out of him. He felt like he was on fire and his ears rang from the blast and his nose and mouth were filled with a bitter stabbing metallic taste. When the initial ball of fire was gone he still felt terrible burning on both legs and on his back. The explosion had clobbered him. His face was blackened and beginning to swell and his eyes were puffing shut. As Phipps regained his senses, he lifted his head and looked back over his shoulder. Gould had also been hit and was bleeding from the buttocks. A Somali had run into the roadway and picked up the AK from the pile of dead and wounded where he had been shooting earlier. The man was taking aim when one of the D-boys back by the hole in the wall dropped him with a quick burst. The man’s head just popped apart.

  The operator waved at Phipps, shouting, “Come on! Come on!”

  Phipps tried to stand but his left leg gave out. He tried again and fell again.

  “Come on!” shouted the D-boy.

  Phipps crawled. The burning sensation was fierce now and his left leg wasn’t working right. When he got close enough the D-boy grabbed his face and pulled him the rest of the way in.

  Phipps was panicked.

  “Holy shit! I’m hit! I got shot! I got shot!”

  “You’re all right,” the D-boy reassured him. “You’ll be all right.”

  He tore open his pants and applied a field dressing.

  The wind was out of young Phipps’s sails. He was out of the fight.

  5

  Across the city about a mile southwest, Black Hawk pilots Mike Goffena and Jim Yacone circled over Durant’s wrecked bird worriedly. The men in Super Six Four had been lucky. Most of this part of the city consisted of stone houses, hard structures, but the spot where Durant and his copilot Ray Frank had gone down was just rag shacks and tin huts, nothing hard enough to flip the chopper over. The bird was built with shock absorbers to withstand a terrifically hard impact so long as it landed in an upright position, which the Black Hawk had.

  In other ways they were less lucky. The CSAR team had already fast-roped in at Wolcott’s crash site. No one had anticipated two choppers going down. Durant and his copilot Ray Frank and their crew would have to be rescued by ground forces, which meant there was going to be a dangerous wait. Watching now from above, Goffena and Yacone could already see Somalis spilling into alleyways and footpaths, homing in on the downed helicopter.

  A company of the QRF (2nd Battalion, 14th Infantry, 10th Mountain Division) had been summoned to help. Under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Bill David, 150 soldiers on nine deuce-and-a-half trucks and a dozen Humvees were making their way toward the Ranger base by a roundabout route that took them out of the city. Nobody was sure exactly how to find Durant’s crash site. They could see it all too clearly on the screens in the JOC, but the picture couldn’t tell them exactly where the downed chopper was. Instead of just waiting for the QRF to arrive, Garrison ordered up another emergency convoy with whatever force could be assembled at the base. Leading it out would be the Rangers and D-boys who had evacuated Private Blackburn, and joining them would be dozens of support personnel—armorers, cooks, ammo handlers, and communications specialists, including an air force air traffic controller—who volunteered to join the fight.

  Even as this emergency convoy was leaving the base, it was apparent to the pilots over Durant’s crash site that help would not come fast enough for the downed crew of Super Six Four. They were minutes from being overrun by a violent, angry Somali mob.

  Trying to hold the crowds back were two Little Birds and Goffena’s Black Hawk, Super Six Two. In addition to the two crew chiefs on Six Two, there were three D-boys, snipers Sergeant First Class Randy Shughart, Master Sergeant Gary Gordon, and Sergeant First Class Brad Hallings. With Sammy closing in, the Delta operators told the pilots they could be more effective on the ground. They might be able to hold off the mob until help arrived. Yacone requested permission to insert them.

  “Hey, wait, we don’t even know if anybody’s alive yet,” answered Colonel Matthews, the air commander sitting alongside Harrell in the C2 bird.

  Hearing nothing from the crew on the radio, Goffena made a low pass and caught a glimpse of Durant sitting in the cockpit pushing at a piece of tin roof that had caved in around his legs. So he was alive. Yacone saw Ray Frank moving. Goffena flew low enough to catch the frustrated look on his friend’s face. Frank had been in a tail-rotor crash just like this one several years before on a training mission. A number of men in that aircraft had been killed. Frank had broken his leg and crunched his vertebrae. He had been involved in a drawn-out legal battle over it ever since. To Goffena, the look on his friend’s face said, Shit, I can’t believe this happened to me again! In the back of the aircraft they discerned some movement, which meant either Bill Cleveland or Tommy Field had survived, perhaps both.

  Yacone informed Matthews that there were survivors. The colonel told him to hold on.

  So Shughart, Gordon, Hallings, and the crew chiefs of Super Six Two did what they could from the air. There were plenty of targets. The RPG gunners especially, it seemed, had been emboldened by success. When Goffena flared the Black Hawk in low, the wash from his rotors would literally blow thickening crowds back. As the crowd retreated, they exposed those with RPG tubes, who seemed determined to hold their ground. This made them easy targets for the snipers. Trouble was, once the snipers dropped them, others would dart out and pick up their weapons.

  Goffena also noticed that every time he dropped low now he was drawing more fire himself. He and Yacone heard the tick of bullets puncturing the metal walls of the airframe. Now and then they saw a glowing arc out ahead, where rounds would clip their rotor blades and spark, tracing a bright line out in front of the cockpit. Goffena began flying faster and tried to keep to the south side of the crash site, where the fire didn’t seem to be as heavy. But this was hazardous, too. He knew that immediately to the south was a neighborhood called Villa Somalia, which was known to have a sizable Aidid militia.

  They worked the radio, urging immediate help.

  —Alpha Five One [Matthews], this is Super Six Two [Yacone], we’re going to need more friendlies to secure crash site number two.

  They were repeatedly assured that rescue was imminent.

  One of the Little Bird pilots reported:

  —We’ve got to get some ground folks down here or we’re not going to be able to keep them off. There are not enough people left onboard the aircraft to do it.

  —Roger, standby, we’re working on it. ..
. Okay, listen, this is Adam Six Four [Garrison], we’ve got a small Ranger element departing here in just a minute headed for the second crash site. Someone needs to vector him in.

  6

  Dale Sizemore had been going nuts listening to the radio. These were his brothers, his Ranger buddies out there pinned down, and they were getting hammered. He heard screams of pain and fear in the voices of hardened men. This was the big fight they’d all been preparing for all these years, and here he was, pacing around the radio with a fucking cast on his arm!

  Some days earlier, Sizemore had banged his elbow goofing off in the hangar. The task force officers had challenged all the NCOs to a volleyball match, but before the contest the lower ranks had ambushed their commanders and bound them to stretchers with flex cuffs and duct tape. They then carried them out to the volleyball court and poured water on them and humiliated them in various ways. Not all the brass had gone quietly. Ranger commander Steele put up the fight you’d expect from a former lineman on Georgia’s national championship football team, and several of the Delta officers were even harder to take down. Sizemore was the first guy to hit Harrell, the Delta lieutenant colonel, and it had been like hitting a cliff. Sizemore was a thickly muscled kid, with legs like pilings, and he’d been a decent wrestler in high school, but Harrell just tossed him to the concrete like a flyweight. The fall dinged his elbow pretty good, but Sizemore hadn’t given it a second thought. He and five other Rangers finally got Harrell tied down. The next day, in a chopper on a signature flight over the city, Sizemore had brushed the elbow on something again and noticed it was tender and had gotten pretty big.

  He woke up on his cot under the bug net early Friday morning, two days before the raid, to find his elbow so swollen and painful he couldn’t sleep. He swallowed four Motrins and dozed the rest of the night sitting up. At dawn he was flown up to the hospital at the old U.S. embassy, where they pronounced cellulitis and bursitis and made a four-inch incision to drain the joint. Then they stitched him back up, slapped a cast around it, put him on an IV antibiotic drip, and told him he would be flying home to Fort Benning on Monday.

  Sizemore was crushed. He had sat alone on the hospital bed looking out the window at another bright African morning, amazed at how much he would miss this place. This was Sizemore’s first real combat zone, and he loved it. The big blond SAW gunner from Illinois had both the Ranger tab and scroll tattooed on his bulging left deltoid. His buddies were his family.

  And the hangar? Man, life in the hangar was a blast. They still had daily P.T. (physical training) and had to pull guard duty and other shit details, but ever since they hit Mog not even regular army mickey mouse could fill the available time. They played endless volleyball. An empty storage room with concrete walls and a high ceiling turned out to be a perfect Ping-Pong arena. The Romanians would come over and make the ball dipsy-doodle like it had an IQ. There was a running game of gin rummy (wily little Private Othic had accumulated a pile of winnings) and long sessions of board games like Risk, Scrabble, and Stratego. When they weren’t training or on some other detail, guys passed time reading books, playing Gameboy, watching videotapes, writing home, or just hanging out. Sizemore liked to retreat to a hallway out behind the main hangar where there was a steady ocean breeze, clap on headphones, and just zone out for an hour now and then. Then there was the beach. Even though the ocean had sharks ... a beach was a beach. With sand and dust everywhere and showers rationed every few days, beach mode more or less prevailed, at least compared to the usual Ranger standards.

  To anybody but Rangers, the accommodations were austere. Each man had only about a four-by-eight-foot rectangle of space to call his own. An informal protocol had developed about that space; guys would ask permission before stepping in or walking across. Each cot had thin wooden poles sticking up from the corners from which, during the night, they could drape the netting to keep out Somalia’s ferocious mosquitoes. The hangar itself was filthy. It had that musky Third World odor to it. The tarmac with all the choppers was right outside the big open front doors so the steady salt-air breeze that came through was scented sweetly with jet fuel and oil. Guys had to keep their weapons wrapped to ward off the fine dust and sand that accumulated on everything. The roof leaked in about a dozen spots. There were massive gaps here and there in the tin walls, so when it rained, water poured in from all directions. Some of the units sandbagged off their space to keep the floodwaters at bay, which broke up the cavernous space into warrens that had a more homey feel. The air force guys had built themselves a nifty clubhouselike enclosure toward the back. Before the rear wall was a big American flag draped from the rafters, alongside a homemade poster showing their 3rd Battalion, 75th Regiment crest. The chopper crews were just inside the front door, the D-boys had the corner of the hangar off to the left as you entered, and the rest were Rangers, Sizemore’s buddies. His bunk was right in the middle toward the back. He could prop his boots on his rucksack and watch the rats scurry along the intricate interlace of rafters overhead, or watch the hawks who were raising chicks in a tree outside swoop in and nail pigeons in midflight.

  And what could be cooler than living with the Delta operators, the “Dreaded D”? They were the pros, totally squared away. On the eighteen-hour flight aboard the giant C-141 Starlifter, when the air force blueshirts insisted that they all stay in their seats, the D-boys just blew them off. Right after takeoff they unrolled thermal pads (the shiny metal floor of the bird turns ice cold at altitude) and insulated ponchos, stuck earplugs in their ears, donned eye patches, swallowed “Blue Bombers” (Halcyon tablets), and racked out. They taught little tricks like wrapping tape around the pins of their grenades to make sure none accidentally snagged and pulled on a piece of equipment. They wore knee pads when they went into a fight, which made it easy to quickly drop and shoot, and stay there for hours if necessary. If it was hot, they didn’t walk around in full battle gear. They wore T-shirts or no shirts at all, and shorts and flip-flops. They all had sunglasses. If they’d been up until all hours, they slept in a little in the morning. When they went out on a mission, they took the weapons they thought they’d need and left behind the stuff they didn’t. With the D-boys, all of whom were ranked sergeant first class or higher, rank meant nothing. They all, officers and noncoms, called each other by their first names or nicknames. They were trained to think and act for themselves. Nothing was done by the book for its own sake; they were guided by their own experience. They knew their weapons and tactics and business better than anyone, and basically ran their own lives, which was an extraordinary thing in the U.S. Army.

  Some of the operators, like blond Norm Hooten or short, stocky Earl Fillmore or the massively built Paul Howe, held training sessions with them, imparting the finer points of death-dealing and mayhem. Hooten showed Specialist Dave Diemer how to better shoot his modified SAW from the hip, and got one of the Delta armorers to fit out a custom grip for him. They supplied some of the guys custom-made black canvas bags to slip over a SAW, which kept the drum of the grenade launcher from getting knocked off when descending the rope (as often happened). Useful things. Fillmore, who was one of the youngest of the operators at twenty-eight, showed them how it was possible to knock a guy unconscious by delivering a hard kick to the thigh, shocking the femoral artery. Howe showed them techniques for using cover in urban terrain, and how to take down a room. It was great.

  Delta operator Dan Busch had been a Ranger just a few years back before he’d vanished into the deeply covert. Some of the guys had known him before. Busch had changed a lot. He was Dan now, for one thing, not Sergeant Busch. A few of the guys in Bravo Company had known him as a hell-raiser. Busch had always been up to something fun. He’d surfaced here in Mog a changed man. The wild man was now quietly religious and real mellow, a totally different person. He spent a lot of time back on his cot just quietly cleaning his weapons, and whipping all comers at Scrabble.

  Some were legendary soldiers, like the easygoing veteran Tim Martin, who
had a quick dry wit, a big red blotch birthmark on his face, and a nickname, “Griz,” that fit. Griz was over forty and had fought in nearly every conflict, open and secret, since Vietnam. He had been in the army for more than twenty years. Nothing fooled or fazed him. He had a wife and three daughters at home and talked about his plans of retiring the following year and starting up a business. But the coolest of all was “Mace,” John Macejunas, a cheerful, unpretentious former Ranger with a bright blond flattop and a leathery tan that made him look like a surfer. Mace wasn’t as burly as the other guys but his physique redefined the concept of being in shape. He had so little body fat and was so buff that he looked like a walking atlas of male musculature. In contrast to the easygoing Griz, Mace’s engine throttle was stuck in high gear. He worked out so much, doing push-ups, sit-ups, leg lifts, chin-ups, and tormenting himself in ways of his own devising, that the Rangers regarded him as some sort of mutant strain. Even the other D-boys held Mace in awe. He was said to be absolutely fearless.

  The Rangers had never had a chance to be around these guys before, even though they’d trained together once or twice. It was like an ongoing tutorial on soldiering from the best in the business.