by Mark Bowden
The other one—it was Randy Shughart—came back to Durant’s side of the bird.
“Are there weapons on board?” he asked.
There were. The crew chiefs carried M-16s. Durant told him where they were kept, and Shughart stepped into the craft and rummaged around and returned with both. He handed Durant Gordon’s weapon, a CAR-15 loaded and ready to fire.
“What’s the support frequency on the survival radio?” Shughart asked.
It was then, for the first time, that it dawned on Durant that they were stranded. The pilot felt a twist of alarm in his gut. If Shughart was asking how to set up communications, it meant he and the other guy had come in on their own. They were the rescue team. And Gordon had just been shot!
He explained standard procedure on the survival radio to Shughart. There was a channel Bravo. He listened while Shughart called out.
“We need some help down here,” Randy said.
He was told that a reaction force was en route. Then Shughart wished him luck, took the weapons, and moved back around to the other side of the helicopter.
Durant felt panicked now. He had to keep the Skinnies away. He could hear them talking behind the wall, so he fired his weapon into the tin. It startled him because he had been firing single shots, but this new weapon was set on burst. The voices behind the wall stopped. Then two Somalis tried to climb over the nose end of the chopper. He fired at them and they jumped back. He didn’t know if he had hit them or not.
A man tried to climb over the wall and Durant shot him. Another came crawling from around the corner with a weapon and Durant shot him.
Then there came a mad fusillade on the other side of the helicopter that lasted for about two minutes. Over the din he heard Shughart cry out in pain. Then it stopped.
Overhead, worried commanders were watching.
—Do you have video over crash site number two?
—Indigenous personnel moving around all over the crash site.
—Indigenous?
—That’s affirmative, over.
The radio fell silent.
Terror washed over Durant. He heard the sounds of an angry mob. The crash had left the clearing littered with debris and he heard a great shuffling sound as the mob pushed it away like some onrushing beast. There was no more shooting. The others must be dead. Durant knew what angry Somali mobs could do, gruesome, horrible things. That was now in store for him. His second weapon was empty. He still had a pistol strapped to his side but he never even thought to reach for it.
Why bother? It was over. He was done.
A man stepped around the nose of the plane. He seemed startled to find Durant. The man shouted and more Skinnies came racing around. It was time to die. Durant placed the empty weapon across his chest, folded his hands over it, and just turned his eyes to the sky.
19
Hassan Yassin Abokoi had been shot in the ankle by a helicopter as he stood with the crowd around the crashed helicopter. He now sat beneath a tree watching. His ankle stung at first and then had gone numb. It was bleeding badly. He hated the helicopters. His uncle that day had his head blown off by a cannon shot from a helicopter. It removed his head neatly from his shoulders, like it had never been there. Who were these Americans who rained fire and death on them, who came to feed them but then had started killing? He wanted to kill these men who had fallen from the sky, but he couldn’t stand.
From where he sat, Abokoi could see the mob descend on the Americans. Only one was still alive. He was shouting and waving his arms as the mob grabbed him by the legs and began pulling him away from the helicopter, tearing at his clothes. He saw his neighbors hack at the bodies of the Americans with knives and begin to pull at their limbs. Then he saw people running and parading with parts of the Americans’ bodies.
* * *
When Mo’alim ran around the tail of the helicopter he was surprised to find another American, a pilot. The man did not shoot. He set his weapon on his chest and folded his hands over it. The crowd surged past Mo’alim toward him and began kicking and beating him, but the bearded fighter felt suddenly protective. He grabbed the pilot’s arm and fired his weapon in the air and shouted for the crowd to stay back.
One of his men struck the pilot hard in the face with his rifle butt, and Mo’alim pushed him back. The pilot was injured and could not fight anymore. The Rangers had spent months capturing Somalis and holding them prisoner. They would be willing to trade them, perhaps all of them, for one of their own. The pilot was more valuable alive than dead. He directed his men to form a ring around the pilot to protect him from the mob, which was hungry for revenge. Several of Mo’alim’s men stooped and began tearing Durant’s clothing away. The pilot had a pistol strapped to his side, and a knife, and they were afraid he had other hidden weapons and they knew the American pilots wore beacons in their clothing so that the helicopters could track them, so they stripped the layers away.
20
Durant kept his eyes on the sky as the mob closed over him. They were screaming things he couldn’t understand. When the man struck him in the face with a rifle butt it broke his nose and shattered the bone around his eye. People pulled at his arms and legs, and then others began tearing at his clothes. They were unfamiliar with the plastic snaps of his gear, so Durant reached down and squeezed them open. He gave himself over to them. His boots were yanked off, his survival vest, and his shirt. A man half unzipped his pants, but when he saw that Durant wore no underwear (for comfort in the equatorial heat) he zipped the trousers back up. They also left on his brown T-shirt. All the while he was being kicked and hit. A young man leaned down and grabbed at the green ID card Durant wore around his neck. He stuck it in Durant’s face and shouted, “Ranger, Ranger, you die Somalia!”
Then someone threw a handful of dirt in his face, which went into his mouth. They tied a rag or towel over the top of his head and eyes, and the mob hoisted him up in the air, partly carrying and partly dragging him. He felt the broken end of his femur pierce the skin in the back of his leg and poke through. He was buffeted from all sides, kicked, hit with fists, rifle butts. He could not see where they were taking him. He was engulfed in a great wave of hate and anger. Someone, he thought a woman, reached out and grabbed his penis and testicles and yanked at them.
And in this agony of fright suddenly Durant left his body. He was no longer at the center of the crowd, he was in it, or above it, perhaps. He was observing the crowd attacking him. Apart somehow. And he felt no pain and the fear lessened and then he passed out.
THE ALAMO
1
Air force parajumper Tim Wilkinson climbed back into the wrecked helicopter looking for a way to get more leverage to free pilot Cliff Wolcott’s body. Maybe there was some way he hadn’t seen at first to pull the seat back and get more room and a better angle. But it was hopeless.
He climbed back out. Kneeling on top of the wreck in the shattering din of automatic weapons fire, he peered down through the open right side doors into the rear of the aircraft. He thought they had accounted for everyone on board. He knew some of the men had been rescued earlier by the Little Bird that landed right after the crash. So Wilkinson was looking for sensitive equipment or weapons that would have to be removed or destroyed. PJs are trained to quickly erase the memory banks of any electronic equipment with sensitive data. All of the avionics equipment and every piece of gear that hadn’t been strapped down had come to rest at the left side of the aircraft, which was now the bottom.
In the heap he noticed a scrap of desert fatigues.
“I think there’s somebody else in there,” he told Sergeant Bob Mabry, a Delta medic on the CSAR crew.
Wilkinson leaned in further and saw an arm and a flight glove. He called down into the wreck and a finger of the flight glove moved. Wilkinson climbed back into the wreckage and began pulling the debris and equipment off of the man buried there. It was the second crew chief, the left side gunner, Ray Dowdy. Part of his seat had gotten slammed and broken off the h
inges but it was still basically intact and in place. When Wilkinson freed Dowdy’s arm from under the pile, the crew chief began shoving things away. He still hadn’t spoken and was only half conscious.
Mabry slithered down under the wreck and tried without success to crawl in through the bottom left side doorway. He gave up and climbed in through the upper doors just as Wilkinson freed Dowdy. The three men stood inside the wreck as a storm of bullets suddenly poked through the skin of the craft. Mabry and Wilkinson danced involuntarily at the sharp burst of snapping and crashing noises. Bits of metal, plastic, paper, and fabric flew around them like a sudden snow squall. Then it stopped. Wilkinson remembers noting, first, that he was still alive. Then he checked himself. He’d been hit in the face and arm. It felt like he’d been slapped or punched in the chin. Everyone had been hit. Mabry had been hit in the hand. Dowdy had lost the tips of two fingers.
The crew chief stared blankly at his bloody hand.
Wilkinson put his hand over the bleeding fingertips and said, “Okay, let’s get out of here!”
Mabry tore up the Kevlar floor panels and propped them up over the side of the craft where the bullets had burst through. Instead of braving the fire above, they tunneled out, digging through the dry sand at the rear corner of the left side door. They slid Dowdy out that way.
Then the two rescuers climbed back inside, Wilkinson looking for equipment to destroy, Mabry handing out Kevlar panels to be placed around the tail of the aircraft where they had established a casualty collection point. Fire was coming mostly up and down the alley. They were still expecting the arrival of the ground convoy at any moment.
Wounded Sergeant Fales was too busy shooting to take notice of the Kevlar pads. He had a pressure dressing on his calf and an IV tube in his arm and he was lying out by the broken tail boom looking for targets.
Wilkinson poked his head out the top. “Scott, why don’t you get behind the Kevlar?”
Fales looked startled. He had been so absorbed firing he hadn’t seen the panels go up behind him.
“Good idea,” he said.
Bullet hole after bullet hole poked through the broken tail boom.
Wilkinson was reminded of the Steve Martin movie The Jerk, where Martin’s moronic character, unaware that villains are shooting at him, watches with surprise as bullet holes begin popping open a row of oil cans. He shouted Martin’s line from the movie.
“They hate the cans! Stay away from the cans!”
Both men laughed.
After patching up a few more men, Wilkinson crawled back up into the cockpit from underneath, to see if there was some way of pulling Wolcott’s body down and out. There wasn’t.
2
A grenade came from somewhere. It was one of those Russian types that looked like a soup can on the end of a stick. It bounced off the car and then off Specialist Jason Coleman’s helmet and radio and then it hit the ground.
Nelson, who was still deaf from Twombly’s timely machine-gun blast, pulled his M-60 from the roof of the car and dove, as did the men on both sides of the intersection. They stayed down for almost a full minute, cushioning themselves from the blast. Nothing happened.
“I guess it’s a dud,” said Lieutenant DiTomasso.
Thirty seconds later another grenade rolled out into the open space between the car and the tree across the street. Nelson again grabbed the gun off the car and rolled with it away from the grenade. Everyone braced themselves once more, and this, too, failed to explode. Nelson thought they had spent all their luck. He and Barton were crawling back toward the car when a third grenade dropped between them. Nelson turned his helmet toward it and pushed his gun in front of him, shielding himself from the blast that this time was sure to come. He opened his mouth, closed his eyes, and breathed out hard in anticipation. The grenade sizzled. He stayed like that for a full twenty seconds before he looked up at Barton.
“Dud,” Barton said.
Yurek grabbed it and threw it into the street.
Someone had bought themselves a batch of bad grenades. Wilkinson later found three or four more unexploded ones inside the body of the helicopter.
The American forces around Wolcott’s downed Black Hawk were now scattered along an L-shaped perimeter stretching south. One group of about thirty men was massed around the wreck in the alleyway, at the northern base of the “L.” When they learned that the ground convoy had gotten lost and delayed, they began moving the wounded through the hole made by the falling helicopter into the house of Abdiaziz Ali Aden (he was still hidden in a back room). Immediately west of the alley (at the bend of the “L”) was Marehan Road, where Nelson, Yurek, Barton, and Twombly were dug in across the street at the northwest corner. On the east side of that intersection, nearest the chopper, were DiTomasso, Coleman, Belman, and Delta Captain Bill Coultrop and his radio operator. The rest of the ground force was stretched out south on Marehan Road, along the stem of the “L,” which sloped uphill. Steele and a dozen or so Rangers, along with three Delta teams, about thirty men in all, were together in a courtyard on the east side of Marehan Road midway up the next block south, separated from the bulk of the force by half a block, a wide alley, and a long block. Sergeant Howe’s Delta team, with a group of Rangers that included Specialist Stebbins, followed by the Delta command group led by Captain Miller, had crossed the wide alley and was moving down the west wall toward Nelson’s position. Lieutenant Perino had also crossed the alley and was moving downhill along the east wall with Corporal Smith, Sergeant Chuck Elliot, and several other men.
As Howe approached Nelson’s position, it looked to him as though the Rangers were just hiding. Two of his men ran across the alley to tell the Rangers to start shooting. Nelson and the others were still recovering from the shock of the unexploded grenades. Rounds were taking chips off the walls all around them, but it was hard to see where the shots were coming from. Howe’s team members helped arrange Nelson and the others to set up effective fields of fire, and placed Stebbins and machine-gunner Private Brian Heard at the southern corner of the same intersection, orienting them to fire west.
Captain Miller caught up with Howe, trailing his radioman and some other members of his element, along with Staff Sergeant Jeff Bray, an air force combat controller. With all the shooting at that intersection, Howe decided it was time to get off the street. There was a metal gate at the entrance to a courtyard between two buildings on his side of the block. He pushed against the gate, which had two doors that opened inward. Howe considered putting a charge on the door, but given the number of soldiers nearby and the lack of cover, the explosion would probably hurt people. So the burly sergeant and Bray began hurling themselves against the gate. Bray’s side gave way.
“Follow me in case I get shot,” Howe said.
He plunged into the courtyard and rapidly moved through the house on either side, running from room to room. Howe was looking for people, focusing his eyes at midtorso first, checking hands. The hands told you the whole story. The only hands he found were empty. They belonged to a man and woman and some children, a family of about seven, clearly terrified. He stood in the doorway with his weapon in his right hand pointing at them, trying to coax them out of the room with his left hand. It took a while, but they came out slowly, clinging to each other. The family was flex-cuffed and herded into a small side room.
Howe then more carefully inspected the space. Each of the blocks in this neighborhood of Mogadishu consisted of mostly one-story stone houses grouped irregularly around open spaces, or courtyards. This block consisted of a short courtyard, about two car-lengths wide, where he now stood. There was a two-story house on the south side and a one-story house on the north. Howe figured this space was about the safest spot around. The taller building would shelter them from both bullets and lobbed RPGs. At the west end was some kind of storage shack. Howe began exploring systematically, making a more thorough sweep, moving from room to room, looking for windows that would give them a good vantage for shooting west down the
alley. He found several but none that offered a particularly good angle. The alley to the north (the same one that the helicopter had crashed into one block west) was too narrow. He could only see about fifteen yards down in either direction, and all he saw was wall. When he returned to the courtyard, Captain Miller and the others had begun herding casualties into the space. It would serve as their command post and casualty collection point for the rest of the night.
As he reentered the courtyard, one of the master sergeants with Miller told Howe to go back out to the street and help his team. Howe resented the order. He felt he was, at this point, the de facto leader on the ground, the one doing all the real thinking and moving and fighting. They had reached a temporary safe point, a time for commanders to catch their breath and think. They were in a bad spot, but not critical. The next step would be to look for ways to strongpoint their position, expand their perimeter, identify other buildings to take down to give them better lines of fire. The troop sergeant’s command was the order of a man who didn’t know what to do next.
Howe was built like a pro wrestler, but he was a thinker. This sometimes troubled his relationship with authority—especially the army’s maddeningly arbitrary manner of placing unseasoned, less-qualified men in charge. Howe was just a sergeant first class with supposedly narrower concerns, but he saw the big picture very clearly, better than most. After being selected for Delta he had met and married the daughter of Colonel Charlie A. Beckwith, the founder and original commander of Delta. They had met in a lounge by Fort Bragg and when he told her that he was a civilian, Connie Beckwith, a former army officer then herself, nodded knowingly.
“Look,” she said. “I know who you work for so let’s stop pretending. My dad started that unit.”