by Mark Bowden
Howe was surprised to still be alive. The thought of heading straight back out into the fight scared him, but the fear was nothing next to the loyalty he felt to the men stranded in the city. Some of their own were still out there—Gary Gordon, Randy Shughart, Michael Durant, and the crew of Super Six Four. Alive or dead, they were coming home. This fight wasn’t over until every one of them was back. Fuck it, let’s go out there and kill some folks. That was how he set his mind.
And if they were going back out, there was going to be hell to pay.
14
Sizemore didn’t find out that his buddy Lorenzo Ruiz was dead until after he got back to the hangar.
“You heard about Ruiz, right?” asked Specialist Kevin Snodgrass.
Sizemore knew right away what had happened and he couldn’t stop crying. When they had flown Ruiz out earlier in the afternoon for the hospital in Germany he was still alive. Not long after he left, word came back that he had died. Ruiz had tried to hand Sizemore the packet of letters for his parents and loved ones before the mission and Sizemore had refused it. Now Ruiz was dead. Sizemore couldn’t believe it was Ruiz and not him who had been killed. Ruiz had a wife and a baby. Why would Ruiz be taken and not him? It seemed deeply unfair to Sizemore. Sergeant Watson sat with him for hours, consoling him, talking things through with him. But what could you say?
Sergeant Cash had seen Ruiz not long before he had been flown out.
“You’re going to be fine,” he told him.
“No. No I’m not,” Ruiz said. He had barely enough strength to form the words. “I know it’s over for me. Don’t worry about me.”
Captain Steele got the accurate casualty list when he returned to the hangar. First Sergeant Glenn Harris was waiting for him at the door. He saluted.
“Rangers lead the way, sir.”
“All the way,” Steele said, returning the salute.
“Sir, here’s what it looks like,” Harris said, handing over a green sheet of paper.
Steele was aghast. One list of names ran the entire length of the page. There weren’t just four men killed. On this list the death toll was thirteen. Six others were missing from the second crash site and presumed dead. Of the three critically injured men already flown out to a hospital in Germany—Griz Martin, Lorenzo Ruiz, and Adalberto Rodriguez—Ruiz had already been reported dead. Seventy-three men had been injured. Among the dead, six were Steele’s men—Smith, Cavaco, Pilla, Joyce, Kowalewski, and Ruiz. Thirty of the injured were Rangers. Harris had started a second column at the top that ran almost to the bottom of the page. One third of Steele’s company had either been killed or injured.
“Where are they?” Steele asked.
“Most are at the hospital, sir.”
Steele stripped off his gear and walked across to the field hospital. The captain put a great store on maintaining at least a facade of emotional resilience, but the scene in the hospital undid him. It was a mess. Guys were lying everywhere, on cots, on the floor. Some were still bandaged in the haphazard wraps given them during the fight. He choked out a few words of encouragement to each, fighting back the well of grief in his craw. The last soldier he saw was Phipps, the youngest of the Rangers on the CSAR bird. Phipps looked to Steele like he’d been beaten with a baseball bat. His face was swollen twice normal size and was black-and-blue. His back and leg were heavily bandaged and there were stains from his oozing wounds. Steele laid his hand on him.
“Phipps?”
The soldier stirred. When he opened his eyes there was red where the whites normally were.
“You’re gonna be okay,” Steele said.
Phipps reached up and grabbed hold of the captain’s arm.
“Sir, I’ll be okay in a couple of days. Don’t go back out without me.”
Steele nodded and fled the room.
Private David Floyd was struck by how empty the hangar looked. He dragged himself back to his cot and stripped off his gear. But instead of feeling relieved, he felt this great weight and soreness descend. Around him, guys were talking and talking and talking. It was like they were trying to work the whole thing out. They accounted for all of their number. For every one of the killed or scores of injured there was a story to be told about how and when and where and why. Sometimes the stories differed. One thought Joyce was still alive for a time in the back of the truck while another insisted he was killed almost instantly. Somebody thought it was Diemer who had pulled Joyce from the line of fire, but another was sure it was Telscher. Stebbins had gone down four times. No, somebody argued, it was only three. They told of the long futile struggle to keep Jamie Smith alive. They wept openly.
Nelson, one of the last to return to the hangar, found Sergeant Eversmann in tears.
“What’s wrong?” Nelson asked. Then, knowing his friend Casey Joyce had been on Eversmann’s chalk, he asked, “Where’s Joyce?”
Eversmann looked at him with surprise, and then got too choked up to speak. Nelson ran into the hangar and sought out Lieutenant Perino, who gave him the bad news. He also told him Pilla, his partner in the hangar skits, was dead. Nelson broke down.
Joyce’s death particularly grieved him. He owed the man an apology. Fed up with the order to stand guard duty in full battle dress a few days earlier, Nelson had told the men on his team it was okay to ignore it. He told them to wear their body armor and helmet over shorts and T-shirts. If it caused trouble, he said, he’d take the heat. He hadn’t really thought that through, however, because when the trouble came it landed not on him but on Joyce, who was nominally his superior. Joyce had been sternly upbraided for not being able to control his men.
Nelson had pulled guard duty early Sunday morning, between three and seven, and Joyce had roused himself to come out to talk. They had been together ever since basic training, and they had a special, almost family connection. They had actually met each other years before joining the army. It was just a wild coincidence. Nelson’s stepbrother had roomed with Joyce’s older brother in an apartment in Atlanta, and they had met each other there once or twice as kids. Nelson admired Joyce. He had never seen the man say or do anything unseemly. Just about everybody had tied one on at a local bar or secretly smoked dope or bad-mouthed somebody or tried to get away with something against the rules. Not Casey Joyce. As far as Nelson was concerned, Joyce was the most thoroughly decent guy he’d ever met, genuine to the core. Joyce had gotten his sergeant stripes first, but they both knew Nelson would be getting his soon. It was awkward for Joyce to be Nelson’s superior. They were friends. They had made plans with Pilla and a few of the other guys to drive out to Austin and stay with Joyce’s sister for a few days when they got back. Nelson felt bad about getting his friend in trouble. Just over twenty-four hours ago they had sat together behind a machine gun surrounded by sandbags under a nearly full moon. The guard post was up on a Conex that had been stacked on another to create a nice high vantage point. It was quiet. The low rooflines of Mogadishu spread before them rolling uphill to the north. In the distance they could hear the steady banging of small generators that kept, here and there, a lightbulb or two burning. Otherwise the city was draped in pale blue moonlight.
“Look, I’m as tired of this chain-of-command shit as you are,” Joyce had told Nelson. “Just do me a favor. Whatever happens, don’t do anything that gets First Sergeant Harris and Staff Sergeant Eversmann on my back. Let’s do what we need to do so we can get out of here. Don’t let this come between you and me.”
Joyce hadn’t bitched at him, which he had every right to do and which most guys would have. He was making a plea, man to man, friend to friend. The right thing for Nelson to do was to apologize, and the words were right there on the tip of his tongue, but Nelson didn’t say them. He was still angry about the rule, which he thought was pointless and stupid, and he wouldn’t swallow his pride. Not even for his friend. The apology had still been there on the tip of his tongue the previous afternoon when he’d helped Joyce pull on his gear. Joyce was squad leader and had to be t
he first one out to the helicopter, so Nelson always helped him. He’d been close to saying the apology, but instead just watched his friend walk off. Now he would never have the chance.
Nelson was asked to inventory his friend’s gear. He found Joyce’s Kevlar vest, the one he had helped him put on the day before. It had a hole in the upper back right at the center. He rooted through the vest pockets—a lot of guys stuffed pictures, love letters, and things in the pockets. In the front of Joyce’s vest he found the bullet. It must have passed right through his friend’s body and been caught up in the Kevlar in front. He put it in a tin can. In Pilla’s belongings he found a bag of the little explosives his friend used to insert in people’s cigarettes.
Sergeant Watson walked over to the morgue to see Smith one last time. He unzipped the body bag and gazed at his friend’s pinched, pale lifeless face. Then he leaned over and kissed his forehead.
15
America awakened Monday morning (it was already late afternoon in Mogadishu) to news reports of an ugly fight in Somalia, a place most people had to consult an atlas to find. It wasn’t the biggest news. Russian president Boris Yeltsin was fending off a coup d’état. Washington was preoccupied with developments in Moscow.
Sandwiched in between the dramatic reports from Russia, however, came increasingly distressing news from Somalia. At least five soldiers had been killed and “several” wounded, the early reports said. Even those numbers indicated the worst single day in Mogadishu since the United States had committed troops ten months before. Then, later in the day, came the grotesque images of dead American soldiers being dragged through the city’s dusty streets by angry crowds.
President Clinton was in a hotel room in San Francisco when he saw the pictures. He had been informed earlier in the day that there had been a successful raid in Mogadishu, but that the Rangers had gotten in a scrape. The TV images horrified and angered him, according to an account in Elizabeth Drew’s book On the Edge.
“How could this happen?” he demanded.
The trickle of news was a peculiarly modern form of torture at the homes of the men serving in Somalia. Stephanie Shughart, the wife of Delta Sergeant Randy Shughart, had gotten a phone call at ten o’clock Sunday night. She was home alone. She and Randy had no children. One of the other Fort Bragg wives left her with a chillingly imprecise bit of bad news.
“One of the guys has been killed,” she said.
One of the guys.
Stephanie had talked on the phone with Randy on Friday night. As usual, he’d said nothing about what was going on, just that it was hot, he was getting enough to eat, and he was getting a great tan. He told her he loved her. He was such a gentle man. It had always seemed so incongruous to her how he made a living. He didn’t say anything about his work when they first met. Some of Stephanie’s better-connected friends had whispered to her that Randy was “an operator.” She’d figured he worked on the phones.
One of the guys.
In a bedroom in Tennessee, just across the state line from the Night Stalkers’ base at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, Becky Yacone sat with Willi Frank. Both their husbands, Jim Yacone and Ray Frank, were Black Hawk pilots, and they knew two helicopters had gone down over Mogadishu. Willi had been awakened at six A.M. by a chaplain and commander from the base. She knew right away why the men were at her door. She’d been through exactly the same thing three years before, when Ray’s chopper had crashed on the training mission. She’d met Ray on her birthday twenty-two years earlier, when she was managing a bar in Newport News. Her employees had surprised her with a cake, and everybody ate it except Ray. When she’d asked him why, he’d told her, like it was something everybody in the world with any sense would know, “You don’t eat cake when you’re drinking beer.” They’d gotten married in Las Vegas that same year.
“Ray is missing in action,” the men said.
“How long will it be before we know?” she asked.
They were startled by the question.
“Last time it only took two hours,” Willi explained.
This time it would take longer. Her support unit showed up, wives of two other men in the unit, and then Becky came over. Becky was a Black Hawk pilot herself. She’d met her husband when they were classmates at West Point. She had no news about Jim yet. They all agreed that if anybody could get out of a mess like this alive, downed in the streets of a hostile African city, it was their husbands.
Then the pictures came on the TV. The first of them came on just after noon. They were images of dead Americans. The pictures were distant and shot from such odd angles it was impossible to tell who the dead men were.
“That one has dirty fingernails,” said one of the women. “He must be a crew chief.”
There was some discussion about that. The bodies were in the dirt.
“They’re all dirty,” said another woman.
Nobody at Willi’s thought to tape the show and rerun it. Maybe it was too ghoulish. Besides, they didn’t need to tape it. CNN kept showing the same pictures every half hour. At these short intervals conversation would cease and the women would all crowd anxiously around the screen.
“That’s Ray,” said Willi. Something about the way the body was lying, the turn of the shoulders and arms ...
“No, he’s too small,” said Becky. They knew Randy Shughart and Gary Gordon were missing, and they were both much shorter than Ray.
“No,” said Willi. “I just know that’s Ray.”
She said she was, but she wasn’t sure. She had a bad feeling, but she wasn’t giving up hope.
At the hangar in Mogadishu, the men watched like everybody else the images of their dead comrades being put on display by the jeering Somali crowds. The men who filled the TV room at the hangar saw it replayed again and again. No one said a word. Some of the men turned and left the room. Captains Jim Yacone and Scott Miller sat together before the screen trying to figure out if the body they were looking at was Randy Shughart’s or Ray Frank’s. Both men had the same build and gray hair. Ray’s had turned gray almost overnight. He had contracted a rare disorder in his early thirties and had become allergic to the pigment of his own hair. It had all fallen out and grown back snowy white. Ray also had scars on his torso from the extensive surgery he’d undergone after the Black Hawk crash in training. The D-boys were convinced the body was Randy’s. It was galling to watch the Skinnies strutting around the bodies, poking at them with rifles, dragging them. What kind of animals ... ?
The pilots wanted to get up over those crowds and mow them down, just mow them all down. Fuck the whole lot of them. Then land and recover the bodies. These were American soldiers. Their brothers.
Garrison and Montgomery said no. There were big crowds around those bodies. It would be a massacre.
Mace, Sergeant Macejunas, went back out into the city. The blond operator had gone out into the fight three times the day and night before. Leading the force on foot to Durant’s crash site when the vehicles could go no further was enough to make his courage legendary. Now he was going out alone, dressed as a civilian, a journalist. The D-boys had arranged with one of the sympathetic local NGOs for help finding the six men still missing from the second crash site, Durant, Frank, Field, Cleveland, Shughart, and Gordon. Mace was going along.
To a man, the task force dreaded the prospect of going back into the city, but they were prepared to do it, with as much weaponry, armor, and ammo as they could carry. Here was Mace heading back out without any of that. He was going to find his brothers, alive or dead. The Rangers who saw him were in awe of the man’s courage and cool.
16
Mike Durant’s captors asked if he would make a videotape.
“No,” said Durant.
He was surprised they’d asked. If they wanted to make a video, they were going to anyway. But, since they’d asked ....
Durant had been trained how to handle himself in captivity. How to avoid being helpful without being confrontational. The pilot knew if he got out of this a
live, his actions would be scrutinized. It was safer not to be in that position, speaking to the world from captivity.
They showed up with a camera crew that night anyway. It had been more than twenty-four hours since he crashed and was carried off in an angry swarm of Somalis. He was hungry, thirsty, and still terrified. He had a compound fracture of his right leg, a crushed vertebra, and bullet and shrapnel wounds in his shoulder and thigh. His face was bloody and swollen from where he had been clubbed in the face with the butt of a rifle. His dark hair, caked with sweat and dirt and blood, stuck straight up on end like some cartoon depiction of fright.
There were about ten young men in the crew. They set up lights. Only one of the crew spoke to him, a young man with good English. Durant knew the key to getting through something like this was to offer as little pertinent information as possible, to be cagey, not confrontational. There was a code of conduct spelling out what he could say and what he couldn’t say, and Durant was determined to abide by it. His interrogators were not skillful. Men had been questioning him on and off all day, trying to get him to tell them more about who he was and what his unit was trying to do in Somalia. When the camera was turned on, the interviewer began pressing him on the same points. The Somalis considered all the Americans with the task force to be Rangers.
“No, I’m not a Ranger,” Durant told him. He explained he was a pilot.
“You kill people innocent,” the interviewer insisted.
“Innocent people being killed is not good,” Durant said.