by Mark Bowden
Floyd saw the barrel of an M-16 protrude from behind the corner down his side of the street, pointing at the two Ranger officers.
14
What Hooten was trying to tell Steele was that he’d chosen a bad place to stop. Fillmore and one of the other operators had just been shot in that spot.
Steele motioned with his hand for Hooten to wait. He was talking on the radio. He wondered where in the hell the vehicles were. At the same time Steele’s Rangers and the Delta operators had been running through the streets making their way to the first crash site, the ground convoy was wandering lost and taking terrible casualties. But Steele didn’t know this. All he knew was that they had left the target house at the same time. Steele and some of his men had been pinned down now for about ten minutes. If those vehicles would show up they could all roll out of this mess.
Beside Steele, Lechner and Atwater were working out some fire support. They had trouble at first because the signal from Atwater’s UHF radio was being overridden by the UHF emergency beacon from the downed Black Hawk a block away. Lechner was finally able to get through to one of the attack Little Birds on his FM radio. The pilot, Chief Warrant Officer Hal Wade, told Lechner to put out some big orange panels marking their positions. Lechner passed the word.
Once the panels were placed on the road, Wade came roaring down Marehan Road just above the low rooftops. Collett ducked his helmet into his chest. Gunfire erupted from all directions as the Little Bird flashed past, but the helicopter didn’t fire. Wade was braving the fire to make sure he knew where his own forces were before shooting back. His chopper flew up and swept into a turn and came roaring back down the road again. There was another rattling explosion of gunfire, but once again Wade didn’t shoot. He now had a pretty good fix on where his people were on the ground. Wade’s Little Bird made another sweeping turn. This time when he came down his miniguns were blazing.
It was just after that first shooting run that a bullet sprayed sand into Steele’s eye. Lechner turned left. He thought the shot came from across the road, but Steele rolled to his right and looked at the tin wall behind him. The shot had rung so loud he was certain it had come from there. His first thought was that one of the wounded Rangers behind him was shooting through the wall. He kept rolling away, which wasn’t easy with the big radio strapped to his back.
Then two more holes poked through the tin with loud bangs and dirt flew and Lechner screamed.
He first felt a whipping sensation and then a crushing blow, as if an anvil had fallen on the lower half of his leg. The pain was unbearable. He gripped his upper leg and looked down at a gaping hole in his leg. The bullet had exploded his shinbone and traveled on down his leg and exited at his ankle, shredding the foot beneath the hole.
There had been three rounds. Steele and Atwater had reacted to the first by rolling away, but Lechner had not. Steele was rolling when he heard Lechner scream. There was more shooting. Hooten gesticulated wildly in the doorway, waving Steele in. Atwater was between Lechner and him and the doorway was close, so Steele got up and ran for it. There was a lip around the base of the entrance and he tripped over it. The big captain came sprawling into the courtyard. Atwater came flying in after him.
Steele saw Atwater and shouted, “We’ve got to get Lechner!”
He stood to run back out but saw the howling lieutenant, his leg a mess, being dragged toward the door by Bullock, who had run out to the street to help.
Steele took the radio mike from Atwater. Shouting, his words delivered in gasped phrases, his voice contrasted sharply with the even, cool voices of the pilots and airborne commanders, reflecting the drama on the ground.
—Romeo Six Four, this is Juliet Six Four. We’re taking heavy small arms fire. We need relief NOW and start extracting.
Harrell responded evenly but with impatience.
—This is Romeo Six Four. I UNDERSTAND you need to be extracted. I’ve done EVERYTHING I CAN to get those vehicles to you, over.
Steele spoke wearily.
—Roger, understand. Be advised command element [Lechner] was just hit. Have more casualties, over.
Sergeant Goodale, who had been pulled into the same courtyard earlier after being shot through the thigh and buttock, had heard Lechner howl. It was a horrible sound, the worst sound he’d ever heard a man make. His own wound, oddly, didn’t hurt that bad. Lechner’s looked horrific. He was still screaming when they got him inside. Goodale helped to pull the lieutenant’s radio off. Minutes before, after his injury, Goodale had radioed Lechner to tell him he would be unable to continue calling in air support. That’s why Lechner had been calling Wade. Now here the lieutenant was, screaming in agony, the upper part of his right leg normal, but the bottom half from just below the knee flopped grotesquely to one side. He was ghost white. Goodale sickened more as he saw a widening pool form under the leg. Blood flowed from Lechner’s wound like it was pouring from a jug.
15
At roughly the same time, one and a half miles southwest, his helicopter pancaked into a squalid village of cloth and tin huts, Black Hawk Super Six Four pilot Mike Durant came to. There was something wrong with his right leg. He and his copilot, Ray Frank, had been knocked cold for at least several minutes, they weren’t sure how long. Durant was upright, leaning slightly to the right. The windshield was shattered and there was something draped over him, a big sheet of tin. The Black Hawk seemed remarkably intact. The rotor blades had not flexed off. His seat, which was mounted on shock absorbers, had collapsed down to the floor. It had broken in the full down position and was cocked to the right. He figured that was because they had been spinning when they hit. The shocks had collapsed and the spin jerked the seat to the right. It must have been the combination of the jerk and the impact that had broken his femur. The big bone in his right leg had snapped on the edge of his seat.
The Black Hawk had flattened a flimsy hut. No one had been inside, but in the hut alongside a two-year-old girl, Howa Hassan, lay unconscious and bleeding. A hunk of flying metal from the helicopter had taken a deep gouge out of her forehead. Her mother, Bint Abraham Hassan, had been splashed with something hot, probably oil, and was severely burned on her face and legs.
The dazed pilots checked themselves over. Frank’s left tibia was broken.
Durant did some things he later could not explain. He removed his helmet and his gloves. Then he took off his watch. Before flying he always took off his wedding ring because there was a danger it could catch on rivets or switches. He would pass the strap of his watch through the ring and keep it there during a flight. Now he removed the watch and took the ring off the strap and set both on the dashboard.
He picked up his weapon, an MP-5K, a little German 9 mm submachine gun. The pilots called them SPs, or Skinny-poppers.
Frank tried to explain what happened during the crash.
“I couldn’t get them all the way off,” he said, explaining his struggle to reach up and pull the power control levers back as they fell. Frank said he had reinjured his back. He had hurt it first in the crash years before. Durant’s back hurt, too. They both figured they had crushed vertebrae. All this happened in the first moments after they came to.
Durant realized that with his leg and back broken, he would be unable to pull himself out of the chopper. He pushed the piece of tin roof away from him and resolved to defend his position through the broken windshield. They looked like they were in some little opening, a yard between huts. There was a hut facing him pieced together with irregularly shaped pieces of corrugated metal, and a small dirt alleyway alongside it. To his side was another flimsy wall pieced together like the house. Durant remembers seeing Frank sitting in the doorway opposite, about to push himself out. It was the last time he saw him.
That’s when Shughart and Gordon showed up. Durant was startled. They were suddenly standing there. He’d either been out for a while or they’d come amazingly fast. He didn’t know either of the Delta operators well, but he recognized their faces. Seeing
them gave him an enormous sense of relief. It was over. He figured they were part of a rescue team. His next thought had been to get the radio up and operating, but now, with his rescuers already on the ground, there was no need. Shughart and Gordon were calm. There was gunfire, mostly from the choppers overhead. The D-boys reached in and lifted Durant out of the craft gently, one lifting his legs and the other grabbing his torso, as if they had all the time in the world, and set him down on his side by a tree. He was not in great pain. With the airframe and a wall joined behind him, and a wall to his left that ran all the way back behind the tail of the chopper, Durant was in a perfect position to cover the whole right side of the aircraft.
He could see that his crew chiefs had taken the brunt of the impact. There were no shock absorbers in back like the ones he and Frank had up front. He watched the operators lift Bill Cleveland from the fuselage. Cleveland had blood all over his pants and was talking but making no sense.
Then the D-boys moved to the other side of the helicopter to help Field. Durant couldn’t see feet moving under the fuselage because the landing gear had been crushed on impact. The belly of the bird was on the dirt. He assumed they were setting up a perimeter over there, looking for a way to get them out, maybe looking for a place where another helicopter could set down and load them up. Skinnies were starting to poke their heads around the corner on Durant’s side of the chopper. Just an occasional one or two. He’d squeeze off a round and they’d drop back behind cover. His gun kept jamming so he’d eject the round and the next time it would shoot okay. Then it would jam again. He could hear more and more shooting now from the other side of the airframe. It still hadn’t occurred to him these two D-boys were it, and that there was no rescue team.
16
When Mo’alim got to the neighborhood where the second helicopter had crashed, the paths leading toward it were already littered with bodies. There were choppers shooting from above and, as Mo’alim had expected, there were still Americans around the crash capable of fighting.
There was only one direct approach, and Mo’alim could tell it was covered. He kept trying to hold the crowd back but they were angry and brazen. The slender, bearded militia leader squatted behind a wall and waited for more of his men to catch up so that they could mount a coordinated attack.
17
On each of his passes over the wreck, Mike Goffena in Super Six Two found the encircling mob larger. Shughart and Gordon had arrayed themselves and the chopper crew in a perimeter around the downed bird. Clearly, they had decided against trying to move the crew to open ground. They were dug in awaiting help. On the radio Goffena could hear the desperate problems the rescue convoys were having.
The ticking of bullets puncturing his airframe had accelerated, and he was flying through regular RPG airbursts. With two Black Hawks down already, his fellow pilots were warning him away.
—Just had an airburst about two hundred meters behind ya.
—RPG passed right under, Super Six Two.
But Goffena was absorbed with the drama unfolding below, and trying to get something done about it.
“This place is getting extremely hot,” his copilot, Captain Yacone, pleaded on the radio. “We need to get those folks out of there!”
—Roger, Six Two, can you tell what the situation is?
“Taking fairly regular RPG fire and they’re all close.”
Yacone continued to direct support fire from the smaller attack helicopters, pointing them where the Somali mobs were thickest. Air commander Matthews didn’t like what he was seeing from the C2 Black Hawk. RPG smoke trails were arcing up regularly now from the crowd pressing in around Durant’s crash site. He had Little Bird pilots hovering over the scene, with copilots trying to pick off targets with M-16s.
—Knock that shit off, he said. You’re going to get yourselves shot down.
The battle was at its most confusing point. There were now two crash sites. A rescue team had made it to the first, Cliff Wolcott’s, and the entire assault force and original ground convoy had been directed to move there. A second hastily assembled rescue convoy had left the Ranger base and not gotten far. They were probing around the vicinity of this crash site, but not getting close. The first crash site had a fighting chance, but Durant’s, even with the two D-boys they’d dropped in, wouldn’t last long without more help.
Goffena flew a low orbit over Durant’s downed Black Hawk. Every time he swung west he was blinded by the sun. He wished it would hurry and set. He and the other Night Stalkers felt most comfortable flying at night. In the darkness, with their technology, the chopper pilots and crew could see while the enemy could not. If Goffena’s Black Hawk and the Little Birds could hold off the mob until nightfall, the men on the ground had a chance.
The mob below now filled all the footpaths back out to the main road. Every time Goffena made a low pass some of the crowd would scatter, but it would close back up behind him. It was like running his hand through water. He could see RPGs now flying past his helicopter very plainly. He saw one of the D-boys get shot.
“This is Six Two,” copilot Yacone radioed. “Ground element crash site number two has no security right now. They have one guy on the ground.”
Then, moments later, another plea.
“Are there any ground forces moving to crash site two at this time?” Yacone asked.
—Negative, not at this time.
On one of his turns back into the slowly setting sun Goffena’s helicopter collided with what felt like a freight train. A resounding crash. It felt like the sky had caved. He had been banking in a steep turn to the right, about thirty feet off the rooftops, going about 110 knots, and the next thing he knew the airframe was perfectly level. He saw in front of him what looked like a big piece of a rotor blade, but when his eyes focused he saw it was a crack in his windshield. He wasn’t sure for a moment if he was still flying or on the ground. All the screens in his cockpit were blank. There was a beat of silence. Then he heard all the shrieks and beeps of the chopper’s alarm systems gradually sounding louder and louder, like somebody was slowly turning up the volume (he realized later that the initial RPG blast had deafened him, and that it wasn’t the volume turning up, it was the gradual recovery of his hearing). The alarms were telling him that his engines were dead and that his rotors had stopped ... but it felt like they were still flying.
Goffena realized he had been hit by an RPG on the right side. He couldn’t tell if it had been in front or in back. He didn’t know if he had anybody left in back (his crew chiefs, Sergeants Paul Shannon and Mason Hall, had not been hurt by this blast, but Sergeant Brad Hallings, the Delta sniper, had his leg almost completely shorn off and was riddled with shrapnel). Captain Yacone, Goffena’s copilot, hung limp in his seat, head slumped straight down. He didn’t know if Yacone was dead or just injured. They were definitely still flying, and Goffena was alert enough to realize that this was a crash sequence. He had practiced this in simulators. They were aloft but going down fast.
He saw a street below, an alley, really. If he could keep the bird heading toward that alley they might be able to slide down into it. It was so narrow it would shear off the rotors but they might impact upright, which was the key. Keep it upright. He saw hard buildings to the left and the street was fairly wide but there was a row of poles on the right and he wasn’t going to clear the poles ... maybe only the right rotor system would impact and maybe it would just shear the rotors. Goffena saw the poles out the right side window and he was just twenty feet over them when Yacone came back to life and shouted into the radio that they were going down and gave grid coordinates. As they cushioned themselves for impact, Goffena began instinctively pulling back on his control stick trying to keep the nose of the bird up, and he realized suddenly that the helicopter was responding! It wasn’t dead! The controls weren’t working properly but he did have some pitch control, enough to keep it in the air. They flew right on over and past the alley and the poles. Goffena held the nose of the bird up an
d it continued flying. He had no idea how long they would stay up. Were the engines unwinding? How long would his controls hold out? But the bird stayed fairly level, and the power stayed on. The road beneath them abruptly ended and what opened in front of him in the distance was what Goffena recognized as the new port facility, friendly ground! The helicopter was slowing and he was now in a gradual descent. He crossed low over the fence around the port and aimed the bird down. They touched ground at about fifteen knots and Goffena was about to congratulate himself on a perfect landing when the bird, instead of rolling to a stop, just keeled over to the right, crunching metal on sand. The right main landing wheels had been blown off. The chopper skidded and Goffena worried they would flip, but instead it just came to a stop and he shut everything down.
As he climbed out of the cockpit to check on the fate of the men in back he saw the familiar shape of a Humvee racing toward them.
18
Mike Durant still thought things were under control. His leg was broken but it didn’t hurt. He was lying on his back, propped against a supply kit by a small tree, using his weapon to keep back the occasional Skinnie who poked his head into the clearing. There was just about a fifteen-foot space between the wall to his left and the tail of the chopper. Durant admired the way the Delta guy had positioned him.
He could hear firing over on the other side of the helicopter. He knew Ray Frank, his copilot, was hurt but alive. And there were the two D-boys and his crew chief, Tommy Fields. He wondered if Tommy was okay. He figured there were at least four men on the other side of the bird and probably more from the rescue team. It was only a matter of time before the vehicles showed up to take them out.
Then he heard one of the operators—it was Gary Gordon—cry out that he was hit. Just a quick shout of anger and pain. He didn’t hear the voice again.