Black Hawk Down

by Mark Bowden

  One of the D-boys stripped down and climbed back into the helicopter and fished out some extra SAW ammunition for Waddell and Barton and found a pair of NODs, which Waddell got. With the night vision on he could see all the way out past the big intersection west and use the laser-aiming device, which gave him a much better feeling. The little green Fiat that had so ably served as cover across the intersection for Nelson, Barton, Yurek, and Twombly was shot full of holes. Waddell could hear the radio keep promising to send out the rescue column. They were going to be there in twenty minutes. Then, an hour later, in forty minutes. After a while it got to be a joke. “They’re on their way!” guys would say, and laugh. When the big column did start to move across the city about a half hour before midnight, with its tanks and armored personnel carriers, trucks and Humvees, he could hear them miles away. The convoy must have either been in terrific fighting or was basically lighting up everything in their path, because Waddell could track its movements by the sound of gunfire and by the way the sky lit up over it. He didn’t think about the danger or the chances of being overrun and killed. He thought about stupid things. He was scheduled to take a physical fitness test the next day and wondered if, when they got back, they’d still make him take it. He asked Barton.

  “Hey, Sergeant, am I going to have to take a P.T. test tomorrow?”

  Barton just shook his head.

  Waddell thought about the Grisham novel he’d been reading before they left. He couldn’t wait to finish that book. Wouldn’t it be just his luck to get killed and never finish the last few pages?

  Every thirty minutes or so during the night Barton would call over quietly, “You okay?” If Waddell hadn’t heard from him in a while he’d call over to him, “Sergeant, you okay?” Like either of them was going to go to sleep. Toward the middle of the night the shooting stopped and during certain stretches the Little Birds weren’t making runs and it got very still. That’s when he could hear the relief column off in the distance. Waddell was one of the few Rangers who had actually brought a canteen full of water with him instead of stuffing his pouch with ammo, so he handed over his canteen and it was passed around greedily.

  * * *

  When are we gonna get the fuck out of here? That was what Specialist Phipps wanted to know. He was in a small, smoky, dusty back room with the rest of the wounded in the building adjacent to the crashed helicopter, his back and his right calf aching from shrapnel wounds, listening to the sounds of shooting and blasts outside, wondering when some wild-eyed Sammy was going to bust in and blow him away. He had no idea what was going on. Specialist Gregg Gould was in there with him. Gould has taken some shrapnel to his butt, so he looked pretty ridiculous with his bandaged ass stuck up in the air, talking on and on about his girlfriend and how much he missed her and how he couldn’t wait to see her again when he got home ... all of which further depressed Phipps, who had no girlfriend.

  “Everything is gonna be cool. Man, when we get out of here I’m gonna drink me some beer,” Phipps said, trying to move Gould off the topic. It didn’t work.

  Specialist Nick Struzik was in there. He’d been shot in the right shoulder. Phipps had seen him bleeding up against the stone wall outside earlier, not long before he’d been hit, and remembered being shocked by it, as though somebody had slapped him. Struzik was the first of his buddies he saw injured. Staff Sergeant Mike Collins was in really bad shape. He’d gotten tagged with a round in his right leg that had shattered both fibula and tibia. The bullet had entered just below the kneecap and come out the back side of his leg, mangling it. Collins was in some serious pain and had bled a lot. Phipps figured sadly that ol’ Sergeant Collins probably wouldn’t make it. He couldn’t believe they’d all left their NODs behind. The NODs had always given them that cocky we’re-here-to-kick-ass feeling on previous night missions because it’s one hell of an advantage when you can see the motherfuckers and they can’t see you. Talk about an awesome lesson learned. They all took sips from the IV bags because they were so thirsty, just to wet their mouths. It tasted slimy but at least it was wet. Then, after the resupply bird came in, they all got a few sips of water.

  When it was clear they would be staying longer, Sergeant Lamb took Sergeant Ron Galliette with him and explored all the doors around the inner courtyard. Behind one door they kicked open were two women, one very old, and three babies. The younger woman wanted to leave. She was just a teenager, maybe sixteen, and looked too tiny and thin to have borne the baby she clutched so tightly. She wore a brilliant blue robe with gold trim. The baby was wrapped in the same colors. She kept moving toward the door. Lamb told Sergeant Yurek to keep watch on her. Every time Yurek looked away she would move to the door again. He would hold up his rifle and she would sit back down. Yurek tried to talk to her.

  “Look, if we were going to do anything to hurt you we would have done it by now, so just calm down,” he said, but it was clear that she understood not a word.

  Yurek talked to her anyway. He told her that she was far safer for the time being indoors than out. All she had to do was sit tight. As soon as they could leave, they’d be gone. When she made another move to the door he used his rifle to push her back into the corner.

  “No, no, no! You need to stay here,” he said, trying to frighten her into staying put. The woman argued back with him with words he didn’t understand.

  There was a spigot on the wall with the top broken off, and water was dripping steadily from it. Yurek collected some in his dry canteen and handed it to her. She turned her head and refused to take it from him.

  “Be that way,” he said.

  Lamb counted fifteen wounded, along with the body of Super Six One copilot Donovan Briley. They needed more space, so they placed a small charge on a wall in the back. The stone and mortar were so flimsy that most walls you could just push down, so this charge blew a nice big hole about four feet high and two feet wide. It scared everyone when it went off, particularly the Somali woman Yurek was guarding. She went apoplectic. It even scared Twombly, who’d set the thing. He thought he had a thirty-second fuse on the charge and it was only twenty seconds, so he’d jumped a foot when it blew. The new hole opened into the room off the block’s central courtyard, where Perino had originally been, so DiTomasso’s unit and Perino’s had finally, inadvertently, linked up. The shock of the explosion sent more of the outside wall tumbling down on Waddell and Barton out by the crashed helicopter.

  Nelson was so deaf he didn’t even hear the blast. His ears just rang constantly, ever since Twombly had fired his SAW right in his face. Nelson surveyed the carnage around him and felt wildly, implausibly, lucky. How could he not have been hit? It was hard to describe how he felt ... it was like an epiphany. Close to death, he had never felt so completely alive. There had been split seconds in his life when he’d felt death brush past, like when another fast-moving car veered from around a sharp curve and just missed hitting him head-on. On this day he had lived with that feeling, with death breathing right in his face like the hot wind from a grenade across the street, for moment after moment after moment, for three hours or more. The only thing he could compare it to was the feeling he found sometimes when he surfed, when he was inside the tube of a big wave and everything around him was energy and motion and he was being carried along by some terrific force and all he could do was focus intently on holding his balance, riding it out. Surfers called it The Green Room. Combat was another door to that room. A state of complete mental and physical awareness. In those hours on the street he had not been Shawn Nelson, he had no connection to the larger world, no bills to pay, no emotional ties, nothing. He had just been a human being staying alive from one nanosecond to the next, drawing one breath after another, fully aware that each one might be his last. He felt he would never be the same. He had always known he would die someday, the way anybody knows that they will die, but now its truth had branded him. And it wasn’t a frightening or morbid thing. It felt more like a comfort. It made him feel more alive. He felt no r
emorse about the people he had shot and killed on the street. They had been trying to kill him. He was glad he was alive and they were dead.

  When they moved the wounded into the bigger room cleared out by Twombly’s charge, Sergeant Collins had to be passed through the hole on a stretcher. To get him through they had to strap him down and tilt the stretcher sideways. Collins protested as they readied him for this move.

  “Guys, I’ve got a broken leg!”

  “I’m sorry,” Lamb told him. “We’ve got to get you through.”

  Collins screamed with pain as they passed him to the men on the other side.

  They moved the body of Bull Briley back on a litter. Nelson had seen Briley playing cards and laughing in the hangar earlier that day. His head had been cut open in the crash, sliced from ear to ear just beneath his chin. His body was still warm and sweaty but it had turned a sickly gray. The slit through his head was an inch wide and had stopped bleeding. When they lifted his short, thick body on the litter the top of his head flopped back grotesquely. Lamb remembered seeing him running wearing Spandex shorts, a powerful man. Jesus, this is a sad day. When they’d worked him through the hole, Lamb climbed through and pulled Briley’s body off the litter and put it up against the wall. The pilot’s head hit the wall with a mushy thud that sickened Lamb. He flattened him out so that when rigor set in the body would not be folded at the waist.

  Abdiaziz Ali Aden waited in darkness. The Rangers moved through his house. Through the small opening the helicopter had smashed in the roof he could see stars. The Rangers had hung red lamps out on the trees and on top of the houses. He had never seen lights like these. Gunfire was still loud out in the streets, coming from all directions. Helicopters swooped down low and rattled the rooftop with their falling shells. He could hear the Americans inside talking to the helicopters on their radios, directing their fire.

  He wasn’t sure which was more dangerous, to stay in the house with all of the Rangers on the other side of the wall, or to risk being shot running away through the night. He debated until the sound of the shooting died off, and decided to leave.

  He pulled himself up to the top of an outer wall and jumped down to the alley. There were four people dead where he landed, two men, a woman, and a child. He ran and had only gone a short distance when a helicopter came roaring down behind him and bullets kicked up the dirt and bounced off the walls. He kept his head down and kept on running and was surprised he was not hit.

  Tim Wilkinson, the PJ, watched over the wounded men off Captain Miller’s courtyard across Marehan Road. Wilkinson sat in the doorway to the yard with a handgun. There were only occasional pops of gunfire. Now and then a Little Bird would come roaring down and light up the sky out the window.

  Stebbins lit a match for a cigarette and Wilkinson, startled, wheeled around with his handgun.

  “Just lighting a butt, Sergeant.”

  There was a moment of silence, then both men grinned, thinking the same thought.

  “I know, I know,” said Stebbins. “It could be hazardous to my health, right?”

  12

  Late in the night, Norm Hooten and the other D-boys, teams led by Sergeants First Class John Boswell and Jon Hale, along with a crew of Rangers headed by Sergeant Watson, left Captain Steele’s southernmost courtyard and ducked into the narrow alley against its north wall, where Fillmore’s body had been placed late in the afternoon. They had decided things were quiet enough for them to move as Captain Miller had wanted, into the corner building at the north end of their block. From there they could cover the wide east/west alleyway that separated the two pinned-down forces. The move left Steele in the courtyard with the wounded and only four or five able-bodied men, but the others weren’t going far.

  None of the Rangers was eager to go. One, a sergeant, flat out refused to leave the courtyard, even after Steele issued him a direct order. The man had just withdrawn. He protested something had scratched his eye. He was told to just get back and help with the wounded.

  Sergeants Thomas and Watson followed the D-boys out into the night, trailed by Floyd, Kurth, Collett, and several other men. Floyd found a dead donkey on the side of the street just outside the door and crouched down behind it. The D-boys had gone up the alleyway and climbed into the corner building through a window that was only about three feet from the ground. By the time Floyd entered the alley, they had moved Fillmore’s body in through the window.

  Floyd tripped over something. He felt down and found Fillmore’s CAR-15. The dried blood on it flaked off in his hands. He also found Fillmore’s helmet with its headset radio and some of his other gear. He was gathering it up when Watson leaned out the window.

  “What the fuck are you doing, Floyd? Quit playing. Get your ass through this window!”

  Floyd had a hard time climbing through carrying all that gear. Watson gave him a pull and he landed in a space much larger than the one where Captain Steele and the others were. Fillmore’s body was laid out in the middle in the moonlight. The D-boys had flex-cuffed the dead operator’s arms down by his sides and his feet together to make him easier to carry. Across the alley from the window they had entered was another on the wall that divided them from the wounded next door. They smashed the shutters so they could more easily talk back and forth.

  The D-boys set infrared strobes around the new space to mark it for the helicopters. Floyd searched the courtyard and found a full fifty-five-gallon drum under a dripping spigot. He sniffed at it first to see if it was gasoline, then he stuck his finger in and licked it. It was water. Kurth and the rest of the men had been sternly warned about drinking the local water. Nothing will make you sicker quicker, the docs had said. Well, Kurth decided, to hell with the docs. If he got sick, fine, he’d deal with that later. He filled his canteen and swallowed just enough to wet his throat.

  Then he and Sergeant Ramaglia, who was in the room across the alley, began passing canteens back and forth on a broomstick. Ramaglia rounded up all the empties he could find, passing the stick through the holder on the plastic cap that screwed on the top of the canteen. One by one, Floyd filled the canteens from the big drum.

  Then he and Collett sat for a long time and talked in whispers. The D-boys had all the windows and doorways covered, so there was nothing for them to do. The moon was up, casting soft light over Fillmore’s body in the middle of the courtyard. Collett kept checking his watch. Floyd poked around the courtyard, his pants flapping open around his bare middle. On the ground next to his boot he found a brand-new dustcase for an M-16.

  “Hey, Collett, look at this ’ere.”

  They’d been told all the Sammies had were beat-up old weapons. This one still had the packing grease on it.

  Collett was feeling bored. He couldn’t believe it, bored in a combat zone? How could that happen? The whole scene was weird, too weird for belief. Nobody would ever believe this shit back home. They listened to the gun runs overhead and to the approaching roar of weaponry as the giant rescue convoy fought its way in.

  “Hey, Floyd.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’ve got an idea.”

  “What?”

  “Wanna get a Combat Jack?”

  Floyd couldn’t believe his ears. Collett was suggesting they both beat off. This was a running joke with the Rangers, getting a “jack” in exotic places. Guys would brag about getting a Thailand Jack, or an Egypt Jack, or a C-5 Jack.

  They both laughed.

  “Collett, you’re fuckin’ high, man. Yer crazier ’n hell,” Floyd said.

  “No, man. Think about it. You would definitely be the first kid on your block. How many people can say they got one of those, huh?”

  13

  From overhead, the commanders watched the contested neighborhood through infrared and heat-sensitive cameras that sketched the blocks in monochrome. They could see crowds of Somalis moving around the perimeter in groups of a dozen or more, and kept hitting at them with helicopters. Aidid’s militia was trucking in fighters fro
m other parts of the city. The Little Birds made wall-rattling gun runs throughout the night. One of the birds shot at a Somali carrying an RPG who must have been toting extra rounds on his back. They placed a seventeen-pound rocket on him, which killed him and must have blown the extra rounds, because he went up like a Roman candle. When the chopper went back to refuel they found pieces of the man’s body pancaked on their windshield.

  Sergeant Goodale, lying with his wounded butt cheek off the ground, had resumed the job of coordinating gun runs from inside Captain Steele’s courtyard. He couldn’t see anything from where he sat, but he acted as a clearinghouse for all the other radio operators calling in fire. He decided which location needed the help most and relayed it up to the command bird.

  Late in the evening he got word that two very large forces of Somalis were moving from south to north.

  For the first time, Steele felt a stab of panic. Maybe we’re not going to make it out of here. If a determined Somali force stormed the entrance to the court-yard, he and his men would kill a lot of them but probably couldn’t stop them. He moved around making sure all of his men were awake and ready. He was kicking himself now for having let his men rope in without carrying bayonets, another item called for in the tactical standing procedures but which they had jettisoned to save weight. Who would have thought they’d need bayonets? Steele poked his head in the back room where Goodale was with the rest of the wounded, and informed him with grim humor: