by Mark Bowden
“You have a weapon and some ammo?”
“Yeah.”
“Go ahead, get in the backseat.”
Other volunteers were piling on vehicles down the convoy. Specialist Peter Squeglia, the company armorer, had pulled on fighting gear and climbed into a truck. He had injured his ankle playing rugby in the sand with some guys from New Zealand a few days before and had been relegated to guard duty at the hangar. There was no way he could use a sore ankle as an excuse to stay out of this. So now he sat with his M-16 pointed out the passenger-side window of a five-ton truck, wondering what he had had gotten himself into. You joined the army and volunteered for the Rangers ostensibly because you were willing to go into combat, but in this day and age you didn’t really expect them to call your bluff. Squeglia considered himself more realistic about battle than most of his Ranger buddies, even though he had never gotten close to one. He had been put off by some of the bravado he’d seen in the previous weeks. He would caution his friends, “This is real stuff. One of us is probably going to get killed one of these times out.” And they all laughed at him. Well, now at least one of them had definitely been killed—he’d seen them unload Pilla’s body—and here he was in the thick of it. Here it was, a Sunday afternoon in early fall, the kind of day back home where he and his buddies would spend the afternoon watching football on TV and then head out to the bars of Newport, Rhode Island, trying to pick up girls, and here he was, smart-guy twenty-five-year-old Peter Squeglia, riding shotgun in a truck out into the streets of Mogadishu with what appeared to be the entire indigenous population trying to kill him. He felt the truck start to move.
As Struecker steered out the east gate he waited for guidance from the C2 Black Hawk above.
—You need to turn left and then move to the first intersection and take another left.
Struecker made the left turn on Tanzania Street, but as he approached the intersection gunfire erupted all around. They weren’t more than eighty yards out the back gate.
In a Humvee behind Struecker’s, Sergeant Raleigh Cash screamed, “Action left!”
His turret gunner swung around to face five Somalis with weapons, and Cash, who was in the front passenger seat, heard the explosion of gunfire and the zing and pop of rounds passing close. Cash had been taught that if you heard that crack it meant the bullet had passed near your head. A zing, which sounded to him like the sound made when you hit a telephone-pole guy wire with a stick, meant the bullet had missed you by a far margin. The shots were answered by a roaring fusillade.
In another of the rear Humvees, reluctant Steve Anderson heard the eruption of gunfire and felt his stomach turn. Then he realized most of what he heard were Ranger guns. Any Somali with a weapon faced a crushing wave of American lead, .50 cals on three of the Humvees, SAWs and all those M-16s massed on the trucks.
Anderson tried to shoot his SAW, too, but the weapon jammed. He pulled and pulled on the charging handle, trying to get it unjammed, but it wouldn’t budge. So he picked up the driver’s M-16 and took aim out the back of the moving vehicle. An instant before he took aim he saw a Somali with a rifle dart through a doorway, but it was too late for him to take a shot.
The lead vehicles were taking the brunt of it. An RPG skipped across the top of Struecker’s Humvee with a screech of metal on metal and exploded across the street against a concrete wall with a concussion that lifted the wide-bodied vehicle up on two wheels. Then his .50 gunner returned fire to a massed burst of AK-47s. It occurred to the sergeant that Sammy was unschooled in the art of ambush. The idea was to let the lead vehicle pass and suck in the whole column, then open fire. The unarmored flatbed trucks in the middle loaded with cooks and clerks and other volunteers would have made fat, vulnerable targets. By opening up on the lead vehicles, it gave the convoy a chance to back out before things got worse.
Struecker shouted for his driver to throw the Humvee in reverse. Those following would just have to figure it out. They slammed into the front of the Humvee behind them, and then that driver threw his vehicle in reverse and backed into the first truck. Eventually they all got the message.
“You need to find a different!” route!” he told his eyes in the sky.
—Go back where you came from and turn right instead of left. You can get there that way.
Struecker got the whole column back up to the gate, and this time turned right. Looming ahead was a roadblock, a big one. While a lot of the people shooting at them were clearly amateurs, it was obvious there were some experienced military minds among them. This roadblock was nothing spontaneous. They had anticipated the routes a convoy might take from the Ranger base and had thrown up barriers of dirt, junk, furniture, vehicle hulks, chunks of concrete, wire, and whatever else was at hand. There were tires burning on it that threw churning clouds into the darkening sky. Struecker could taste the sting of the burning rubber. The convoy knew Super Six Four was down less than a mile away, directly ahead.
Durant would say later that he heard the sound of a .50 cal, which almost certainly was from Struecker’s Humvee. The pilot believed deliverance was at hand. But the convoy could advance no closer. Beyond the roadblock, between where they sat and Durant’s crippled Black Hawk, was a concrete wall surrounding the sprawling ghetto of huts and walking paths. Struecker knew his Humvees could roll over the roadblock, but there was no way the trucks behind him would make it. And even if they did, there wasn’t going to be any way through the concrete wall.
—See where those tires are burning? That’s where the crash is. Go in one hundred meters past it.
“You’ll have to find us another route,” Struecker responded.
—There ain’t another route.
“Well, you need to find one. Figure out a way to get there.”
—The only other route is to go all the way around the city and come in through the back side.
“Fine. We’ll take it.”
Struecker knew every minute mattered. Durant and his crew wouldn’t last long. It seemed like it took forever for the five-tons to turn around on the narrow street. The trucks weren’t delicate about it. They rammed into walls and ground gears. As the trucks fought their way around, most of the men moved out into the street to defend the convoy. On one knee in the dirt, Sergeant Cash took a whack on his chest that almost knocked him over. It felt like someone had punched him up near the shoulder. He ran his hand inside his shirt, looking for blood. There was none. The bullet had skimmed off the front of his chest plate, tearing the straps of his load-bearing harness so that it was now hanging by threads.
Squeglia saw a round clip off the side-view mirror of the truck on the driver’s side, and reached his M-16 across the chest of the driver to return fire. Sizemore unloaded on everything he saw, venting his pent-up rage. Anderson kept his head down, looking for specific targets. He shot a few times, but didn’t think he’d hit anyone.
When they all got pointed at last in the right direction, the convoy sped out along a road that skirted the city to the southwest, driving through an occasional hail of AK-47 fire. From the peak of one rise they could see Durant’s crash site. It was down in a little valley, but there seemed no easy way to get there.
8
Up in their Black Hawk, Goffena and Yacone could see both convoys in trouble. Lieutenant Colonel McKnight’s battered main convoy was steering back toward the K-4 circle, away from both crash sites, and the emergency convoy of cooks and volunteers wasn’t getting close.
They again asked to insert their Delta snipers. They were down to just two now. Sergeant Brad Hallings had manned one of Super Six Two’s miniguns after one of the crew chiefs was injured. They would need him there.
Captain Yacone turned around in his seat to discuss the situation with the two Delta operators.
“Things are getting bad now, guys,” Yacone told them, shouting over the chopper’s engines and the sound of the guns. “The second convoy is taking intensive fire, and it doesn’t sound like it’s gonna make it to the crash sit
e. Mike and I have ID’ed a field about twenty-five to fifty yards away from where they’re down. There are lots of shacks and shanties in between. Once you get there, you could either hunker down and wait for the vehicles, or try to get the wounded to an open area, where we could come back in and get you.”
Shughart and Gordon both indicated they were ready to go down.
Up in the command bird, Harrell pondered the request. It was terribly risky, maybe even hopeless. But one or two properly armed, well-trained soldiers could hold off an undisciplined mob indefinitely. Shughart and Gordon were experts at killing and staying alive. They were serious, career soldiers, trained to get hard, ugly things done. They saw opportunity where others could see only danger. Like the other operators, they prided themselves on staying cool and effective even in extreme danger. They lived and trained endlessly for moments like this. If there was a chance to succeed, these two believed they would.
In the C2 bird, seated side by side, Harrell and Matthews weighed the decision. Their entire air rescue team was on the ground already at the first crash site. The ground convoy wasn’t going to get to Durant and his crew fast enough. But dropping in Shughart and Gordon would most likely be sending them to their deaths. Matthews turned down the volume on their radios momentarily.
“Look, they’re your guys,” he said to Harrell. “They’re the only two guys we’ve got left. What do you want to do?”
“What are our choices?” Harrell asked.
“We can put them in or not put them in. Nobody else is going to get to that crash site that I can see.”
“Put them in,” said Harrell.
So long as there was even a tiny chance, they felt obliged to give it to the downed crew.
When Goffena’s crew chief, Master Sergeant Mason Hall, passed word to the men that it was time to jump, Gordon grinned and gave an excited thumbs-up.
There was a small opening behind one of the huts. It was bordered by a fence and covered by some debris, but it might do. Goffena made a low pass at it, flaring up near the ground to blow over the fence and scatter the debris. He couldn’t get rid of enough of it to land, so he held a hover at about five feet as Shughart and Gordon jumped.
Shughart got tangled momentarily on the safety line connecting him to the chopper and had to be cut free. Gordon took a spill as he ran for cover. Shughart stood motioning with his hands, indicating confusion. They’d gotten disoriented jumping down, and were crouched in a defensive posture in the open trying to get their bearings. Goffena dropped the chopper back down low, leaned out his door, and pointed the way. One of his crew chiefs flung a smoke grenade in the direction of the crash.
The operators both turned thumbs up and began moving that way.
9
More than a mile to the northeast, back at Chalk Two’s original blocking position by the target building, the war had slowed down for Sergeant Ed Yurek. After stumbling into the small Somali schoolhouse and coaxing the teacher and children to the floor, Yurek had been left in charge of the remnants of his chalk when Lieutenant DiTomasso and eight other Rangers had sprinted down to help out at the first crash site. Yurek had seen the ground convoy drive off. As the fighting shifted to the Black Hawk crash site three blocks east, things grew so quiet on Yurek’s corner he got spooked. With the lieutenant and his radioman gone, he had no contact with the command radio net. He was worried the whole force had forgotten them.
He used his personal radio to call DiTomasso.
“What’s up, Lieutenant?”
—You need to find your way to me.
“Roger, sir. Where are you?”
—Take that big alley three blocks east, then turn left. Go about two hundred meters. You can’t miss us.
“Roger.”
It was and it wasn’t good news. It felt like they’d finally gotten this small corner of Mogadishu tamed. They’d grown familiar with angles of fire and potential danger spots and had found what seemed to be adequate cover. The kids in the little tin schoolhouse had been quiet as mice. Yurek had been keeping an eye out for them. Out in this very dangerous city, with bullets and RPGs flying, he was loathe to give up what seemed to have become a safe and quiet corner. They could hear heavy shooting over by the crash site, and once they were up and moving down the road, they’d have no cover. DiTomasso and the first men down the road had at least had the element of surprise. Yurek’s would be the second team to pass through the same gauntlet. He had no doubt Sammy would be waiting.
“Come on, guys. We gotta go!” he reluctantly informed the men.
They began moving east down the alley. They walked fast, weapons aimed and ready, in single file spread out down the south side of the alley. They stayed a few steps off the stone walls on that side of the street. The natural inclination was to get as close to the wall as possible. The wall suggested at least a margin of safety. But Sergeant Paul Howe, one of the D-boys, had advised them against it. Bullets follow walls, he’d explained. The enemy can concentrate fire down an alleyway, and the walls on either side will act as funnels. Some rounds would actually ride the walls for hundreds of feet. Standing tight against a wall was actually more dangerous than being in the middle of the street.
At the intersections they would stop and cover each other. Yurek ran while his men laid suppressive fire north and south. Then he covered for the next man, and so on. They leapfrogged across.
It didn’t take long for the shooting gallery to open. Sammies would pop up in windows or doorways or around corners and spray bursts of automatic fire. Most were clearly amateurs. The kick of the weapon and their own desire to stay behind cover meant they were unlikely to hit anyone. Yurek figured these were guys just trying not to lose face with their group. They would let a burst fly with their head turned away and eyes closed, fling the weapon, and run. Yurek didn’t even bother returning fire for some of these. But some of the men who popped up in windows were different. They didn’t shoot instantly. They took aim. They meant business. He figured these were Aidid’s militia guys. There was usually one militia guy for every four or five who shot at them.
Yurek and his men invariably shot first. During the long boring weeks before this mission, they had trained almost daily. Captain Steele had insisted on it. They had unlimited ammo to work with, and out in the desert they had set up a variety of shooting ranges, including this very drill. In practice, targets would pop out unexpectedly. They had different shapes and colors. The rules were, shoot if you see the blue triangle, but hold your fire if it’s a green square. Yurek felt the benefit of all that practice. He and his men engaged in a running series of gunfights. He shot one man in a doorway just ten feet away. The man stepped out and took aim, a bushy-haired, dusty man with baggy brown pants and a lightweight blue cotton shirt with an AK. He didn’t shoot instantly, and that’s what killed him. Yurek’s eyes met his for a split second as he pulled the trigger. The Somali just fell forward out into the alley without getting off a shot. He was the second man Yurek had ever shot.
Specialist Lance Twombly blasted at one man with his SAW, shooting the big gun from his hip. The Sammy had stepped out from a corner with an AK and started shooting. Both he and the Ranger blasted away at each other not more than fifteen yards apart. Twombly saw his rounds— there must have been forty of them—chipping the walls and spitting up dirt all around his target, and he never hit the man. Nor did the Somali hit Twombly. The Sammy ran off. Twombly just kept on moving, cursing himself for being such a bad shot.
Yurek could not believe it when they made it the entire three blocks without any of his men being hit. But there was no respite. At the intersection of the main road he looked downhill and saw Waddell against the wall on his side of the street. Across the street at the opposite corner, behind a big tree and car, were Nelson and Sergeant Alan Barton, who’d roped in from the CSAR bird. Twombly moved down that side of the street and crossed the road to add his SAW to Nelson’s M-60. There were two dead Somalis stretched out on the ground by the car. Across the st
reet from them, diagonally from Waddell, was a little green Volkswagen. DiTomasso and some men from the CSAR bird were crouched there.
Yurek ran across the road to the car to link up with DiTomasso. He passed the alley and saw the downed helicopter to his right. Just as he arrived, the Volkswagen began rocking from the impact of heavy rounds, thunk thunk thunk thunk. Whatever this weapon was, its bullets were poking right through the car. Yurek and the others all hit the ground. He couldn’t tell where the shooting was coming from.
“Nelson! Nelson, what is it?” he shouted across the street.
“It’s a big gun!” Nelson shouted back.
Yurek and DiTomasso looked at each other and rolled their eyes.
“Where is it?” he shouted across to Nelson.
Nelson pointed up the street, and Yurek edged out to look around the car. There were three dead Somalis on the street. Yurek stood and pulled them together, stacking them, which enabled him to slide out to his left a few feet behind cover. He saw two Somalis stretched out on the ground up the street north behind a big gun mounted on a tripod. From that position the gun controlled the street. Behind the tree across the street, they couldn’t see Nelson, and he’d have been a fool to expose his position.
Yurek had a LAW (Light Antitank Weapon) strapped to his back that he’d been carrying around on every mission for weeks. It was a lightweight disposable plastic launcher (it weighed only three pounds). He unstrapped it, then climbed up and leaned forward on the car, taking aim with the weapon’s flip-up crosshairs. He guessed they were two hundred meters away. The rocket launched with a punch of a back blast, and Yurek watched it zoom straight in on his target and explode with a flash and a loud woom! The gun went flipping up in the air.
He was accepting congratulations on his shooting when the thunk thunk thunk resumed. The rocket had evidently landed just short, close enough to send the weapon flying and kick up a cloud of dirt, but evidently not close enough to destroy it or stop its shooters. He saw them up the street now kneeling behind the weapon, which they’d righted again on its bipod. Yurek picked up a LAW that someone had discarded nearby, but it looked bent and crushed. He couldn’t get it to open up. So he loaded a 40 mm 203 round into the grenade launcher mounted under the barrel of his M-16. This time his aim was better. You could actually see the fat 203 round spiral into a target, and this one spun square into the center. The two Sammies just fell over sideways in opposite directions. He presumed the gun was destroyed. When the smoke cleared he could see it just lying there between the two men. No one else came out to get it. Yurek and the others kept a good eye on that gun until nightfall.