Black Hawk Down

by Mark Bowden

  10

  Barton and Nelson were behind a tree on the northeast corner of the big intersection directly west of the crash. A little Fiat was parked against the tree. It looked like the driver had left it with the gas cap wedged tightly against the tree to prevent Mogadishu’s alert and enterprising thieves from siphoning the gas. Nelson had his M-60 machine gun propped on the roof of the car with belts of ammo draped over the side. From the two dead Somalis on the street alongside the car, blood formed red-brown pools in the sand.

  “It can’t get much worse than this,” Barton said.

  Just then an RPG exploded against the opposite wall with a brilliant flash and a chest-wrenching blast. This made them laugh. Laughter was a balm. It held panic at bay and it seemed to come easily. In these extreme circumstances it became unbearably funny just to act normal. If they could still laugh they were all right. This was definitely more fire than they’d ever expected to experience in Mogadishu. Nobody had anticipated a serious fight from these characters. Nelson wondered where his friends Casey Joyce and Dom Pilla and Kevin Snodgrass were and how they were faring.

  It was raining RPGs. They would drop down from the north and hit the side of the stone buildings and splash along the walls, great streaking explosions, like someone throwing fireballs.

  “Goddamn, Twombly, this is unreal,” Nelson said.

  He crouched down behind a two-foot concrete ramp between the tree and the wall and was fiddling with his M-60 when a Somali ducked out from behind a tin shed about ten feet up the street and fired at him and Twombly. Nelson knew he was dead. Rounds hit between his legs and he felt them passing next to his face. Twombly dropped the man.

  Nelson saw Twombly mouth the words, “You okay?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Twombly had fired his SAW about two feet in front of Nelson’s face, so close that his cheeks and nose had been singed by the muzzle heat. The blast had hammered his eardrums, blinded him, and his head was still ringing.

  “That hurt,” Nelson complained. “I can’t hear and I can’t see. Don’t you ever fucking shoot your weapon off that close to me again!”

  Just then another Somali took a shot at them and Twombly returned fire with his rifle directly over Nelson’s head. After that, Nelson wouldn’t hear a thing for many hours.

  11

  Sergeant Paul Howe and the three men of his Delta team had still been back on the target house roof when they saw the CSAR team roping down from a Black Hawk about a quarter mile northeast. They watched while the Black Hawk took the RPG hit with men still on its ropes, and were amazed at how the pilot held the bird steady after being hit until the last men were down. Howe knew something was going on over there, but since he had no radio link to the command net and had been too busy inside the target house to notice that a Black Hawk had been shot down, he didn’t know why the CSAR team was roping in.

  He got the full story when he was summoned downstairs by the Delta ground commander, Captain Scott Miller.

  “We’re going to move over there and secure it,” Miller said. He explained that the ground convoy, which was loading the Somali prisoners out front, would drive over to the crash site. The rest of them were going to move there on foot. Ranger Chalk One, led by Captain Steele, would take the lead. The operators would follow, and Ranger Chalk Three on the south end of the target, led by Sergeant Sean Watson, would bring up the rear.

  Howe knew the fight was bad and worsening out on the streets. The idea of moving on foot over to where he’d seen the CSAR bird rope its crew in was daunting. He thought, This is going to be fun.

  Captain Steele saw the operators come spilling out of the courtyard, moving east toward him. This posed a novel situation for the Ranger commander. He and his men had trained to provide protection for Delta, but the two units didn’t mix. Each had its own chain of command, its own separate radio links, and, most importantly, its own way of doing things. Now they were being thrown together for this move over to the downed Black Hawk. Steele and Miller conferred briefly about how to proceed, and agreed that the Rangers should take front and rear positions.

  This column of about eighty men would set off on foot just minutes after Lieutenant Colonel McKnight’s ill-fated convoy departed the target building. While that convoy wandered hopelessly lost through the city, getting hammered, and while Durant’s Black Hawk was crashing about a mile southwest, this force of D-boys and Rangers were having their own tragic difficulties moving on foot to the first crash site.

  They hadn’t run more than a block when Sergeant Aaron Williamson got hit. He had been shot earlier, the round had taken off the tip of his index finger, but Williamson had kept fighting. Lieutenant Perino heard someone scream, and turned to see Williamson rolling on the street, writhing and screaming, holding his left leg.

  “I’ve got a man down,” Perino radioed up to Steele.

  “Pick him up and keep on moving,” Steele said.

  As Howe and his team ran past Williamson, there were five Rangers stooped around the wounded man.

  “Keep moving and let the medic handle it!” Howe shouted at them.

  Williamson was carried back up the street to one of the Humvees in the ground convoy, which was about ready to roll.

  Specialist Stebbins, the company clerk along for his first real mission, was out in front. His blocking position had been at the southeast corner, and they were moving east now. He trotted crouched and careful, staying away from the walls as the D-boys had advised. Every few feet down the road a doorway would open into a small courtyard. As Stebbins came upon one door, a Somali came running out of the building into the courtyard and Stebbins fired. It was instinctive. The man startled him. Bang bang. Two rounds. The man dropped to a sitting position, clutching his chest and looking amazed. Then he slumped over forward and began to rock and moan. He was a big man with short hair. He was wearing this disco-style bright blue shirt with long sleeves and a big collar. Most of the Sammies were dusty and wore shabby clothes but this man was dressed nicely, and he was clean. He had on corduroy bell-bottom pants and his belt had a big die-cast metal buckle. He seemed completely out of place. Stebbins had just shot him. He had never shot anyone before.

  This all took place in seconds but it seemed much longer. Stebbins was readying to shoot the man again when his weapon was grabbed by Private Carlos Rodriguez.

  “Don’t waste your rounds on him, Stebby,” he said. “Just keep moving.”

  Steele, who had a radio strapped to his broad back, fell further and further behind Lieutenant Perino and the rest of Chalk One. The idea was to stay spread out and provide covering fire for each other as they went through intersections. But right away, to Steele’s dismay, the formation broke down. The D-boys ignored the marching orders and just kept moving forward. These were men trained to think for themselves and act independently in battle, and now they were doing it. Each of the operators had a radio earpiece under their little plastic hockey helmets—Steele called them “skateboard helmets”—and a microphone that wrapped around to their mouth. So they were usually in constant touch with each other. When the radios were not working or when the noise level was too high, as it was now, the D-boys communicated expertly with hand signals. Steele’s Rangers relied on shouted orders from their officers and team leaders. They were younger, less experienced, and terrified. Some tended to just follow the operators instead of staying with their teams. Steele saw a complete breakdown of unit integrity before they’d moved two blocks.

  It was typical of the problems he’d had with Delta from the start. For better or worse, the attitudes and practices of the elite commandos started to rub off on his Rangers when they began bunking together in the hangar. Before long, everywhere you looked was a teenage soldier in sunglasses with rolled-up shirtsleeves. Privates would pull guard duty in helmet, flak vest, gym shorts, and their regulation brown T-shirts. Younger soldiers began showing more and more impatience with what they saw as meaningless robot-Ranger formality.

 
; When Steele cracked down, a lot of them thought it was because their captain felt threatened by the D-boys. In the year before this deployment, the broad-beamed former lineman moved through his men like muttering Jove through his hinds, the meanest, manliest man in the army. When Specialist Dave Diemer had defeated all comers in an arm wrestling contest, Steele took him on and beat him—leaving Diemer whining that the captain had cheated. Steele gave the unapologetic impression that he could break you with his bare hands if it weren’t for his strict devotion to Jesus and army discipline. He was unbending even when his senior noncoms thought it was time to bend, like the time back at Fort Bragg when he’d ordered all the men awakened after midnight because they’d collapsed, with permission from their platoon sergeants, into bunks without cleaning their weapons after a days-long grueling training mission. But no matter how tough Steele was, of course, it was the D-boys who occupied the absolute pinnacle of the macho feeding chain. Most of them were NCOs, and not only did their very presence deflate any of the standard displays of gruff manhood, they were serenely and rather obviously unimpressed with Steele’s captaincy.

  The disdain was mutual. Steele accepted that these operators were good at their jobs, but he wasn’t in awe of them. He found their civilian manner and contemptuous attitude toward Ranger discipline hard to take. Sure, it was a good idea to encourage individual initiative and creative thinking in combat, but some of these guys had strayed so far from traditional army norms it seemed unhealthy. They could be comically arrogant. When they’d gotten a list of potential target sites, for instance, the D-boys had divvied them up among different teams. Each was assigned to draw up an assault plan. Since his men were involved, Steele had sat in on the meeting when the various schemes were presented. The captain’s experience with such a planning session was like this: You sat there and took notes and asked questions only to make sure you got things down correctly and then saluted on your way out. The D-boys’ meeting was a free-for-all. One group would present its plan and somebody would pipe up, “Why, that’s the stupidest thing I ever heard,” which would provoke a sturdy “Fuck you,” which quickly degenerated into guys screaming at each other. It looked to Steele like they were about to assume Kung Fu stances and have it out.

  Steele could imagine what would happen if a company of Rangers operated that way. Some of his men were still boys. As far as the captain could tell, most had just emerged from a lifetime of lounging on sofas eating Fritos and watching MTV. Basic and Ranger training had shaped most of them up reasonably well, but the average private in Bravo company still had a long way to go before qualifying as a professional soldier. There were good, time-tested reasons for Hoo-ah discipline.

  It was easy to see why Steele was destined for the losing end of a popularity contest with the D-boys. Most of his men didn’t think through the causes. They saw it all as an ego conflict.

  Like the time Steele was standing in line with his men at mess, and spotted Delta Sergeant Norm Hooten carrying a rifle with the safety off. Ranger rules required that any weapon, loaded or unloaded, have the safety on at all times when at the base. It was an eminently sensible rule, a basic principle of handling weapons safely.

  He tapped the blond operator on the shoulder and pointed it out.

  Hooten had held up his index finger and said, “This is my safe.”

  Showed Steele up right in front of his men.

  Now the very breakdowns the captain had feared were happening when it mattered most. There was nothing he could do about it. As his men passed by helter-skelter, Steele fell back near the middle of the pack. They’d sort things out at the crash site. If they could find it. Nobody was sure exactly where it was.

  In short order, Howe and his Delta team were in front of the force. Howe saw bullets skipping off the dirt and skimming down the walls, chipping the concrete. He was way past worrying about staying in formation. The street was a kill zone. Survival meant moving like your hair was on fire. It was time to lead by example. The goal was to punch through to the downed helicopter, and every second mattered. If they failed to link up, then there would be two weak forces instead of a single strong one. Two perimeters to defend instead of one. So they moved quickly but also smartly. As Howe moved he thought about making every one of his shots count, and keeping his back to a wall at all times. They were in a 360-degree battlefield, so keeping a wall behind him meant one angle he couldn’t be shot from. At each crossroads he and his team would pause, watch, and listen. Were bullets hitting walls? Bouncing off the streets? Were the shots going left to right or right to left? Every bit of experience and practical knowledge was useful now for staying alive. Were they machine-gun bullets or AKs? An AK only has twenty-five to thirty rounds in a magazine, so if you waited for the lull, Sammy would be reloading when you ran. The most important thing was to keep moving. One of the hardest things in the world to hit is a moving target.

  He and his team had spent years training with each other, had fought together in Panama and other places, and moved with confidence and authority. Howe felt that they were the perfect soldiers for this situation. They’d learned to filter out the confusion, put up a mental curtain. The only information that came fully through was the most critical at that moment. Howe could ignore the pop of a rifle or the snap of a nearby round. It was usually just somebody shooting airballs. It would take chips flying from a wall near him to make him react. As they moved down the street it was one fluid process—scan for threats, find a safe place to go next, shoot, move, scan for threats. ... The key was to keep moving. With the volume of fire on these streets, to stop meant to die. The greatest danger was in getting pinned down.

  The Rangers followed as well as they could, leapfrogging across the intersections. Stebbins and 60-gunner Private Brain Heard kept up with them, reassured just to be close to the D-boys. These guys knew how to stay alive. Stebbins kept telling himself, This is dangerous, but we’ll make it. It’s okay. At the intersections he would take a knee and shoot while the man in front of him ran. Then the man behind him would tap his shoulder and he would take off, just closing his eyes and praying and running for all he was worth.

  Sergeant Goodale, who had once bragged to his mother how eager he was for combat, felt terrified. He was waiting for his turn to sprint across a street when one of the D-boys tapped him on the shoulder. Goodale recognized him: it was the short stocky one, Earl, Sergeant First Class Earl Fillmore, a good guy. Fillmore must have seen how scared Goodale looked.

  “You okay?” he asked.

  “I’m okay.”

  Fillmore winked at him and said, “It’s all right. We’re coming out of this thing, man.”

  It calmed Goodale. He believed Fillmore.

  By the time they were three blocks over, Howe’s team was way out front. With them were Stebbins, Heard, Goodale, Perino, Corporal Jamie Smith, and a few other Rangers. They turned left onto Marehan Road, where the alley ended. The wide dirt road sloped uphill slightly and then downhill for several blocks, so when they made the turn they were just shy of the crest of a hill. Downhill to the south they could see Sammies running every which way. Over the crest of the hill to the north, Howe saw signal smoke from what must have been the crash. They were about two hundred yards away.

  There was a blizzard of fire at that intersection. Automatic rifle fire and RPGs from all directions. Howe felt the force was in peril of getting stuck and cut to ribbons. He shouted back down the street to Captain Miller, “Follow me!” and plunged straight down the left side. Stebbins and several other Rangers followed. Perino, Goodale, Smith, and some others followed Hooten’s Delta team across the street and started down the right wall. Immediately behind them was Sergeant First Class John Boswell’s Delta team.

  An RPG exploded on the wall near Howe and his men. Howe felt the wallop of pressure in his ears and chest and dropped to one knee. One of his men had been hit on the left side with a small piece of shrapnel. Howe abruptly kicked in the door to a one-room house on his left. He and his t
eam had learned to move like they owned the world. Every house was their house. If they needed shelter, they kicked in a door. Anyone who threatened them would be killed. It was that simple. No one was inside. They caught their breath and reloaded their weapons. Running with all that gear was exhausting. The body armor was like wearing a wet suit. They were sweating profusely and breathing heavily. Howe drew his knife and cut away the back of his buddy’s shirt to check the wound. There was a small hole in the man’s back with about a two-inch swollen, bruised ring around it. There was almost no blood. The swelling had closed the hole.

  “You’re good to go,” Howe told him, and they were out the door and moving again.

  Moving up in front of Perino, Goodale saw the familiar desert uniforms down the street and inwardly rejoiced. They’d made it! Once they’d linked up, the convoy would arrive and they could all roll out of this hell. The sun was getting low in the sky. Goodale had promised his fiancée, Kira, that he’d call tonight. He had to get back in time to make that call.

  Goodale ran up behind Sergeant Chuck Elliot, who was squatting at the corner of the first intersection on the slope, shooting east. Goodale pointed his gun down Marehan Road. He saw Howe and his team pushing on ahead across the street, in shadow. The low sun still lit Goodale’s side of the street brightly. Because they were on a slope, he could shoot over the heads of the men down the street at Somalis moving three or four blocks north. It was a long shot, but he had no other targets. It occurred to him that no one was shooting to the left, the alley west. It blinded him to look that way. Goodale turned to squint into the light and pop off a few suppressive rounds when he felt a shooting pain. His right leg seized up and he fell over backward, right into Perino.