Black Hawk Down

by Mark Bowden

  He said, “Ow!”

  A bullet had entered his right thigh and passed through him, leaving a big exit wound on his right buttock. What immediately flashed into Goodale’s mind was a story he’d heard about this 10th Mountain Division guy who had lost his hand the week before when a round detonated the grenade in the LAW he was carrying. He struggled to get the LAW off his shoulder.

  Perino couldn’t tell what Goodale was doing.

  “Where are you hit?” he asked.

  “Right in the ass.”

  Goodale dropped the LAW and yelled to Elliot, “There’s a LAW right there!”

  Elliot obligingly picked it up.

  Perino got back on the radio to Steele, who was now trailing the column.

  “Captain, I’ve got another man hit.”

  “Pick him up and keep moving,” Steele insisted.

  Instead, Perino moved on across the intersection with some of the other Rangers from Chalk One, and left Goodale with Sergeant Bart Bullock, the same Delta medic who had earlier in the fight helped patch up Ranger Todd Blackburn after his fall from the Black Hawk. Both Bullock and medic Kurt Schmid had rejoined their Delta units at the target house after sending Blackburn back to base in the three-Humvee convoy (the one on which Sergeant Pilla had been killed). Schmid was now moving a block north with Perino and several other Rangers. Goodale lay back on the dirt as Bullock looked him over.

  “You got tagged,” Bullock said. “You’re all right though. No problem.”

  Goodale was disgusted. Game over. It was the same feeling he’d had getting injured in a football game. They carried you off the field and you were done. It was disappointing, but if the going had been particularly rough it could also be a relief. He took off his helmet, then saw an RPG fly past no more than six feet in front of him and explode with a stupendous wallop about twenty feet away. He put his helmet back on. This game was most definitely not over.

  “We need to get off this street,” Bullock said.

  He dragged Goodale into a small courtyard, and the Delta team headed by Sergeant Hooten hopped in with them. Goodale asked Bullock for his canteen, which the medic had taken off when removing his gear. Bullock fished it out of Goodale’s butt pack and discovered a bullet hole clean through it from the same round that had passed through his body. There was still water in the canteen.

  “You’ll want to keep this,” Bullock said.

  With the men at the rear of the column, Captain Steele’s overriding goal was to consolidate his Ranger force and reestablish some order. Time was essential here. Steele had been told the convoy would probably reach the crash site before he and his men did. He had just heard on the radio that another Black Hawk had gone down (Durant’s), which meant things were that much more urgent. From the C2 bird, Harrell explained:

  —We are going to try to get everyone consolidated at the northern site and exfil everyone off the northern site and move to the southern crash site, over.

  Steele had about sixty men to account for when those vehicles arrived, and right now he had only a vague idea where they all were.

  As he arrived at the intersection at the top of the rise, he ran across to the right side of the street with Lieutenant James Lechner and several other Rangers. Sergeant Watson and the remainder of Chalk Three were the last to turn the corner.

  Steele moved over the slight rise and started down the hill. He had gone only about ten yards when a burst of fire forced him and those with him to drop. He was on his belly, with his wide face nearly in the sand. Alongside to his left was Sergeant Chris Atwater, his radioman. Prone to Atwater’s left was Lieutenant Lechner, Steele’s second-in-command. Atwater and Steele, both big men, were trying to take cover behind a tree with a trunk only about one foot wide.

  About three strides to their right, Delta team leader Hooten was in a steel doorway to the small courtyard where Bullock had dragged Goodale. Steele was watching another team of operators working their way up the street ahead of him. He intended to follow, but just then one of the D-boys, Fillmore, went limp. His little helmet jerked up and back and blood came spouting out of his head. It was obviously fatal. Fillmore just crumpled.

  An operator grabbed Fillmore and began dragging him into a narrow alley. Then he was shot, in the neck.

  Steele felt the gravity of their predicament hit fully home. This is for keeps.

  12

  Mohamed Sheik Ali moved swiftly around his neighborhood. Ali had been fighting in these streets already for a decade, since he was fourteen years old and had been drummed into Siad Barre’s army. He moved mostly in crowds, darting from hiding place to hiding place, usually staying far enough away to make himself a hard target, but occasionally stealing close enough to fire off a few well-placed rounds from his AK. If the Americans spotted him, they saw a short, dusty little man with nappy hair whose teeth were brownish orange from chewing khat and whose eyes were wide with the effects of the drug and adrenaline.

  Sheik Ali was a professional gunman, a killer, a man who had fought for and against the dictator, and then had put himself and his weathered weapon up for hire. Most Somalis had come to regard Sheik Ali and men like him as a plague. They were feared and despised. Now, with the Rangers to fight, men like him were valued again. To him, the Americans were just a new enemy to shoot at, and not a particularly brave one. Ali believed if the Rangers didn’t have the helicopters helping them from above, he and his men would surround and kill them with ease, with their bare hands.

  He relished the fight. There was no quarter given on either side. The black vests who came with the Rangers were especially ruthless killers. When they had come to Bakara Market they had come into his home uninvited and they would have to accept his punishment. Sheik Ali believed the radio broadcasts and flyers printed up by the Aidid’s SNA. The Americans wanted to force all Somalis to be Christians, to give up Islam. They wanted to turn Somalis into slaves.

  When the helicopter was shot down he rejoiced, and began running toward it. Unlike most of the crowd he did not run directly to the crash. He knew there would be armed men around it and that the Rangers would move to it. It would not be easy to get close.

  Sheik Ali was part of a large number of irregular militia moving in the crowds that had begun to form a wide perimeter in the neighborhood around the crashed helicopter. He ran up a street parallel to the moving Rangers. He would run to a corner, wait by it, and shoot as the Rangers came across, then he would sprint to the next street and be waiting for them again. He was not weighted down with armor and gear, and he was not being shot at from all directions, so he could move faster and more freely than the Rangers. When he got to the perimeter around the crash site there were crowds, fighters like himself but mostly people who just came to see, women and children. The Americans were firing down the streets at everyone. Sheik Ali saw women and children fall.

  He and several of the men in his band lay down behind a tree and shot at the Americans as they came down the slope toward the alley where the crashed helicopter was. There he saw a Ranger shot in the head, one of the black vests with the little helmets. His buddy tried to pull him to safety and he, too, was shot, in the neck.

  Then Sheik Ali and his men moved on. They circled around the neighborhood where the helicopter was down, and crept back down toward it on Marehan Road. Sheik Ali found a tree and lay flat on his stomach behind it. There were Americans on his side of the street about two blocks south, hiding behind a car and a tree and a wall. There were more at the same intersection across the street. Between him and the Americans were more fighters, most of them crazy people with guns who didn’t know how to fight. Sheik Ali waited behind his cover for a clean shot.

  He was there for almost two hours, trading shots with the Americans, before his companion, Abdikadir Ali Nur, was shot. An American down the street behind an M-60 hit Nur with several shots that nearly tore off the left half of his body. Sheik Ali himself was hit by some shrapnel in the face when an M-203 round exploded nearby.


  He then helped carry his friend to a hospital.

  13

  The odor of spent gunpowder had always been sweet for Private David Floyd. It reminded him of home. Out hunting with his father as a boy in South Carolina—which was not that long ago; he was just nineteen—he would pick up shotgun shells just to sniff them.

  Now that odor, which was all around, meant something else. He ran with the others through the gunfire on the street, rounded the corner just behind a team of D-boys, and then jumped for whatever cover he could find on the left side of the street. He tucked himself into a corner by some roofing tin, facing south, disbelieving.

  It had been an effort to keep moving. There was a big part of Floyd that just wanted to crawl into a little ball and hide somewhere. He knew it would be suicide to stop fighting, but he was that scared. He was scared enough to piss his pants. I’m in it now. It was like a movie only it was real and he was in the middle. He couldn’t believe he was in actual combat and people were shooting at him, trying to kill him. I’m gonna die on this dirty little street in Africa. It was much too frantic a moment to be thinking about such things but it occurred to Floyd anyway, a sudden image in his mind’s eye of a late summer Sunday morning at home with his parents sitting down to breakfast without the slightest notion that their precious son David was here, a million miles away, fighting for his life in this insane city they’d never even heard of, much less cared about. What in the hell am I doing here? The D-boys’ presence helped keep those impulses under control. They encouraged the opposite impulse, that was there, too, which was to fight like hell, use every round and grenade and rocket at hand, use all the training he’d been given to inflict as much punishment as possible. Because it made him mad. To see one of his Ranger brothers shot down right beside him—he had seen Williamson go down, screaming—it just ... well, it pissed Floyd off. So warring with the urge to crawl under a rock was this fury, this cornered-animal rage, like, you motherfuckers asked for it now you’re gonna get it.

  Then he saw Fillmore get hit. This was not supposed to happen. These guys knew how to stay alive. Ho-oly shit. If the D-boys were getting killed, what odds would you give Private First Class David Floyd for coming out of this alive?

  He was against the west wall firing his weapon south pretty rapidly now down Marehan Road and realizing that the pile of tin around him was no real shelter at all. In the middle of the street, right in the middle, Specialist John Collett had crawled behind a hump in the road and was providing superb covering fire to the south with his SAW. Across the street was Sergeant Watson with a group of other Rangers.

  Watson led the group with his own grim sense of humor. When a barrage of bullets slammed into a wall directly over his head, Watson turned to the men with his eyes open comically wide. “Oh, this sucks!” he said, in a way that made the others smile. His attitude was, we’re-in-the-shit-now-but-what-the-fuck!

  Sergeant Keni Thomas was closest to Fillmore when he got hit.

  “Can you call for a medevac?” shouted Hooten.

  Thomas ran back to Watson, who only heard the last part of what Thomas said. Watson knew there was no way they were going to be able to get Fillmore out, but he didn’t have the heart to tell Thomas.

  “Go ahead and ask the captain,” he said.

  So Thomas ran as far as he could in Steele’s direction, then shouted, “We’ve got a head wound. We have to get him out!”

  Steele gestured for Thomas to wait a second as he talked on the radio. Then he called back, “Is he one of ours?”

  Weren’t they all one of ours?

  “A Delta guy,” Thomas shouted.

  Thomas was distressed. He’d never seen a man shot in the head.

  “Just calm down,” said Watson when Thomas returned. The sergeant said maybe they could get him on a vehicle. Where the hell were those vehicles anyway? When they left for the crash site, the convoy had been on the street right behind them.

  Thomas ran back to Hooten.

  “We can’t land a bird in here,” Thomas said, “but maybe we can get a Humvee.”

  “It’s all right,” said Hooten. “He’s dead.”

  Thomas felt oddly emotionless about it. He felt angry at Captain Steele for asking, “Is he one of ours?” He also felt like a failure.

  Collett was feeling good about his spot at the center of Marehan road. It didn’t look like much. Guys on both sides of the street thought he was crazy. But Collett had deduced by the rounds cracking over his head that the hump was excellent cover. It looked to him as if it was the guys who were up and moving who were getting shot. He had good angles, but there was only room for one man. When Private George Siegler started crawling out toward him, Collett shouted, “Siegler, get back over there!” Siegler didn’t argue. He just scooted around and crawled back to the wall.

  Rounds poked through Floyd’s tin shelter. Because the sun was low in the sky, when he heard the popping noise he saw shafts of light suddenly appear through the metal. It was like somebody was shooting at him with a laser. Then he saw Private Peter Neathery get hit across the street against the same wall where Fillmore had been shot. Neathery had been down on the ground working his M-60 machine gun when he screamed and rolled away clutching his right arm. Private Vince Errico took over the big gun, and seconds later let out a yelp. He, too, had been hit in the right arm. Both Neathery and Errico were now down, moaning. It was clear that the right side of the wall approaching the intersection, the place where Fillmore had been killed and where all these other men were being hit, was like a focal point for enemy fire. Walking through it was asking to be shot.

  The bullet that hit Neathery had torn through his bicep. There was a lot of blood. Doc Richard Strous calmly examined it as Neathery looked up at Thomas.

  “Damn, Sergeant, I hope they send me home for this.”

  “Does it hurt?” Thomas asked.

  “Hell yeah! I’m all right, though. I do believe in God.”

  “That’s okay,” said Thomas. “He believes in you, too.”

  Thomas took over the M-60. He was squinting west, desperately looking for the shooter who had such a bead on them. Floyd and Specialist Melvin DeJesus were doing the same from their low vantage point in the shade. Floyd was feeling hopeless. We’re gonna buy it here. Then a single brass cartridge plopped on the street right in front of them. It had to have rolled off the tin roof of the house they were up against. Whoever was up there would have a clear shot at the men along the sunny east wall. Floyd stood. He wasn’t tall enough to see up on the roof, but he could reach it with his SAW. He placed the gun roughly parallel to the rooftop and squeezed a long burst. He heard a loud thumping and a shout. The shooting from that direction stopped.

  Someone else was shooting from a courtyard to the south. Thomas had used up all the 60 ammo that was left, and he’d already tossed a grenade in that courtyard, and Floyd and DeJesus sprayed rounds toward it to no effect. They could see big muzzle flashes splash out from behind a low masonry wall backed with bushes.

  “Use the LAW!” Floyd shouted.

  Thomas had one of the disposable rocket launchers strapped to his back, but it was so lightweight and rarely used it was easy to forget about it.

  He looked back at Floyd quizzically.

  “The LAW! The LAW! On your back!” Floyd gestured to his shoulder.

  Thomas’s eyebrows went up theatrically, as if to say, Oh yeah!

  He unstrapped the tube, extended it, and flipped up the sight. The rocket turned the courtyard into a ball of fire. Sergeant Watson saw Thomas exulting over the shot, the same man who had been so upset about Fillmore minutes before. He solved his problem. It was inspiring for Watson to see how determined and resilient men could be.

  * * *

  Specialist Mike Kurth was helping to bandage Errico when he saw a grenade drop and roll out past him. Its smoke trail first caught his eye, then he saw the pineapple shape on the ground, right next to the hump in the road hiding Collett.

  “GRENADE!�
�� sounded several voices together.

  The men, Kurth, Errico, Neathery, and Doc Strous, all flopped to the sand and rolled as fast as they could. Private Jeff Young reached back to grab Strous and pull him away, and the explosion ripped the medic from his hands.

  When it blew, Kurth felt himself driven hard into the ground and felt a flash of heat and light behind him. He was in just the right spot. The force of the explosion passed over him. He felt the shock and heat of it, and tasted its bitter chemical ignition, but in the frantic instants after the blast he moved his arms and legs and saw that he hadn’t been hurt. The rest of the guys could not have been so lucky. Collett, for sure, was dead. Kurth sat up hesitantly, before the smoke had cleared.

  “Doc, you good?” he asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Neathery?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Errico?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Young?”

  “I’m okay.”

  He waited to name Collett last.

  “Yeah, dude, I’m okay,” his friend answered. The hump in the road had directed the blast up and away from him.

  Strous got some shrapnel in one leg and Young caught a small piece in his boot, but otherwise everyone was intact.

  Further down the slope on the sunny side of the street, just beyond a tin shack that jutted out from one of the houses, Captain Steele was still on the ground with his second in command, Lechner, and Atwater, his radioman. Sergeant Hooten was in the doorway to a courtyard about ten feet to Steele’s right. It looked like he was trying to get the captain’s attention.