by Mark Bowden
All the wives were invited over to the lieutenant’s house that Sunday, where they learned that the company had been involved in a firefight. All of them, even the cooks. All the women were panicky, but DeAnna was feeling lucky. The more experienced wives explained that for guys who got injured, there would be a phone call. For those who were dead, there would be a knock at the door. DeAnna lay awake that night thinking about that.
There was a knock on the door at 6:30 A.M. DeAnna threw on her robe, and ran down to the door. He’s dead. Casey is dead. She opened the door, but instead of finding soldiers there were two neighbor children.
“Our mother’s father died last night and we have to leave, and we wanted to know if you’d take care of our dog.”
As DeAnna dressed to go next door, she kicked herself for having even had such a morbid, terrible thought about Casey. How could you even think that? She was next door, getting instructions for minding the dog and consoling her friend, whose father had died in another state, when one of the other neighbors present mentioned that she’d heard eleven Rangers had been killed in Somalia.
When DeAnna got home there was a message on the machine from Larry Joyce, Casey’s dad, asking her to call. Larry knew DeAnna would get word first if anything had happened, and he’d phoned her when he’d seen the TV report. She called him.
“President Clinton has already been on TV expressing condolences to the families,” her father-in-law said. The president had used the expression “unfortunate losses,” and voiced continued, determined support for the mission.
DeAnna said she’d heard nothing. They agreed that this was probably good news. She was about to make another call when there was a new knock on the door.
She started down the stairs again, figuring it was the next-door kids with more dog instructions, only this time it was three men in uniform.
“Are you Dina?” one asked.
“No, I’m not,” she said, and shut the door.
The men pushed the door open gently.
“Are you Mrs. Joyce?”
Sometime in the first week of shock and grief, DeAnna received Casey’s effects. With them was a letter he had been writing her just before leaving on the fatal mission. DeAnna knew that the experience in Somalia had shaken Casey, and that in the months he was away he had brooded over minor problems in their relationship.
“I miss you so much,” the letter said, speaking now from beyond the grave. “I’ve said it probably a thousand times, but I want things to be different, and I know they will be. I love you so much! I can’t say it stronger. I want you to love me with all your heart. I think you already do, but just in case I want to prove to you that I’m worth it. I’m not going to come home and be a total nerd slush, if you know what I mean, but I’m going to be myself. I’m going to make you into the most important person in my life. I’m not going to lose sight of this ever again. I want you to know that I want to grow old with you. I want you to realize this because I can’t do it all by myself. I know most of the problems are me and I want to change. I want to go to church. I want us to be happy. Anyways, I can’t say it enough, but I want to start doing things about it. I can’t do anything until I get home. ... By the time you get this letter I might be on my way home, or real close to it.”
22
Durant’s fear of being executed or tortured eased after several days in captivity. After being at the center of that enraged mob on the day he crashed, he mostly feared being discovered by the Somali public. It was a fear shared by Firimbi.
The propaganda minister had grown fond of him. It was something Durant worked at, part of his survival training. He made an effort to be polite. He learned the Somali words for “please,” pilles an, and “thank you,” ma hat san-e. The two men were together day and night for a week. They shared what appeared to be a small apartment. There was a small balcony out the front door, which reminded Durant of an American motel.
The woman who owned the house where Durant was staying insisted on fixing the pilot a special meal, as is the custom for guests in Somalia. She slaughtered a goat and made a meal of goat meat and pasta. The meal was delicious, and huge. Durant thought the chunk of meat and bone in his bowl could feed five people. But the next day both the pilot and his captor had diarrhea. Firimbi helped keep the bedridden pilot clean, which was uncomfortable and embarrassing for both men.
Firimbi kept trying to cheer up the pilot.
“What do you want?” he kept asking.
“I want a plane ticket to the United States.”
“Do you want a radio?”
“Sure,” Durant said, and he was given a small black plastic radio with a volume so low he had to hold it up to his ear. That radio became his life-line. He could hear the BBC World Service, and reports about his captivity. It was wonderful to hear those English voices coming from his own world.
In subsequent days, they laughed and teased each other about the flatulence that followed the worst of the ailment. The mood of his captivity lightened. Durant’s leg had been splinted, but was still swollen and painful. Day and night he lay on the small bed. Sometimes it would be silent for hours. Sometimes he and Firimbi would talk. Their pidgin “Italish” got better.
Durant asked Firimbi how many wives he had.
“Four wives.”
“How many children?”
Firimbi lied.
“Twenty-seven,” he said.
“How do you provide for so many?” the pilot asked.
“I’m a businessman,” Firimbi said. “I used to have a flour and pasta factory,” which was true. He also had grown sons who had left Somalia and sent money, he said. (Firimbi actually had nine children.)
Durant told him he had a wife and a son.
Firimbi tried to explain to the pilot why Somalis were so angry at him and the other Rangers. He talked about the Abdi House attack, how the helicopters had killed scores of his friends and clansmen. Firimbi complained about all the innocent people the Americans had killed, women and children. There were hundreds, perhaps thousands, he said. He explained that Aidid was an important and brilliant leader in his country, not someone the UN or the Americans could just label an outlaw and carry off. Not without a fight anyway. Firimbi considered Durant a prisoner of war. He believed that by treating the pilot humanely, he would improve the image of Somalis in America upon his release. Durant humored his jailer, asking him questions, indulging his whims. For instance, Firimbi loved his khat. One day he handed cash to a guard and sent him to purchase more. When the man returned he began dividing the plant into three equal portions, one for himself, Firimbi, and another guard.
“No,” Firimbi said. “Four.”
The guard looked at him quizzically. Firimbi gestured toward Durant. Durant quickly figured out what his jailer was up to. He nodded at the guard, indicating a cut for himself.
When the guard left, Firimbi scooped up the two piles for himself, winking at Durant and flashing an enormous grin.
Firimbi identified so strongly with the pilot that when Durant refused food, he refused food. When Durant couldn’t sleep because of his pain, Firimbi couldn’t sleep, either. He made Durant promise that when he was released he would tell how well treated he had been. Durant promised he would tell the truth.
After five miserable days in captivity, Durant got visitors. Suddenly the room was cleaned and the bedsheets were changed. Firimbi helped the pilot wash, redressed his wounds, gave him a clean shirt, and wrapped his midsection and legs in a ma-awis, the loose skirt worn by Somali men. Perfume was sprayed around the room.
Durant thought he was about to be released. Instead, Firimbi ushered in a visitor. She was Suzanne Hofstadter, a Norwegian who worked for the International Red Cross. Durant took her hand and held on tight. All she had been allowed to bring along were forms with which he could write a letter. In the letter Durant described his injuries and noted that he had received some medical treatment. He told his family he was doing okay, and asked them to pray for him and t
he others. He still didn’t know the fate of his crew or D-boys Shughart and Gordon.
He wrote that he was craving a pizza. Then he asked Firimbi if he could write another letter to his buddies at the hangar, and his jailer said yes. He wrote that he was doing okay, and told them not to touch the bottle of Jack Daniels in his rucksack. Durant didn’t have much time to think. He was trying to convey in a lighthearted way that he was okay, to lessen their worry for him. At the bottom of this note he wrote, “NSDQ.”
Later, Red Cross officials, concerned about violating their strict neutrality by passing along what might be a coded message, scratched out the initials.
After Hofstadter left, two reporters were ushered in: Briton Mark Huband of the Guardian and Stephen Smith from the French newspaper Liberation. Huband found the pilot lying flat on his back, bare-chested, obviously injured and in pain. Durant was still choked up from the session with Hofstadter. He had held her hand until the last moment, unwilling to see her leave.
Huband and Smith had brought a recorder. They told him he didn’t have to say anything. The reporters pitied Durant, and tried to reassure him. Huband said he’d done a lot of reporting in Somalia, and had developed a sense for when things were bad and when they weren’t. He said his sense was that these people meant Durant no harm.
Durant weighed talking to them and decided it was better to communicate with the outside world than not. He agreed to discuss only the things that had happened to him since the crash. So with the tape recorder rolling, he briefly described the crash and his capture. Then Huband asked why the battle had happened, and why so many people had died. Durant said something he would later regret:
“Too many innocent people are getting killed. People are angry because they see civilians getting killed. I don’t think anyone who doesn’t live here can understand what is going wrong here. Americans mean well. We did try to help. Things have gone wrong.”
It was that “things have gone wrong” line that haunted him after the reporters left. Who was he to pronounce a verdict on the American mission? He should have just said, “I’m a soldier and I do what I’m told.”
He grew depressed. He really did believe things had gone wrong, but he felt he had stepped over a line by saying it.
Durant stayed down until the next day when he heard his wife Lorrie’s voice on the BBC. She had made a statement to the press. He listened intently to her voice. At the end of her statement, Lorrie said four words that brought tears to his eyes. What she said were the four words whose initials the pilot had penned at the bottom of his note—still visible despite the Red Cross scratches. It was the motto of his unit, the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment.
Lorrie said, “Like you always say, Mike, Night Stalkers Don’t Quit.”
His message of defiance had gotten through.
23
In the week following the battle, the men of Task Force Ranger worked through a broad range of emotions as they girded themselves for another fight. They were furious at the Somalis and filled with grief for their dead comrades. They felt disgust for the press that kept showing the horrible images of the dead soldiers being humiliated in the city, less than a mile or two from where they sat. They watched with frustration as a fresh Delta squadron and Ranger company arrived, and grudgingly accepted a back-seat, although every man was prepared and expected to be sent back out into the city. They observed the swagger and casual boasting of the new arrivals with the weary eyes of experience. They all knew that if intel located Durant, they’d be going in with more force than Mogadishu had yet seen. The idea of making this fight was both terrifying and grimly necessary. It was a prospect they both dreaded and welcomed. It was odd that the two emotions could stand side by side. So the men who’d come through the battle unhurt worked to get their weapons, vehicles, minds, and hearts ready.
Then, two days after the fight, a Somali mortar round fell just outside the hangar and killed Sergeant Matt Rierson, leader of the Delta team that had first stormed the target house and taken the Somali targets captive, and whose resolve and experience had helped shore up the lost convoy during the worst of the fight. It seemed bitterly unfair to have come through the storm unhurt only to be felled while standing outside the hangar in idle conversation two days later. Severely injured with Rierson was Dr. Rob Marsh, the Delta surgeon. Alert though in great pain and bleeding profusely, Marsh helped direct the medics who gave him emergency care.
Rangers struggled to accept their profound losses. There was no doubt that they had more than held their own in the battle. What other ninety-nine men would have survived a long afternoon and night besieged by the well-armed angry citizenry of a city of more than a million? Still, each death mocked their former cockiness and appetite for battle. A whole generation of American soldiers had served careers without experiencing a horror of an all-out firefight. Now another had. There was a recognition in the faces of the survivors, a hard-won wisdom.
Sergeant Eversmann mentally replayed his every move during the battle, as he would still be doing years later, from the moment he accidentally tore the headphones out of the hovering Black Hawk to finding Private Blackburn broken and unconscious on the street, to watching his men get hit, one after the other, to that long and bloody ride on the lost convoy. Why had he kept them out on the street when the fire grew so bad? Shouldn’t he have directed them to break down a door and move indoors? How did they get so lost on the ride back? He’d lost Casey Joyce on that ride. There was nothing he could have done about that. Word was that doctors might be able to save Scotty Galentine’s thumb. They had sewed Galentine’s hand with the thumb into his stomach, hoping to foster regeneration of the blood vessels they’d need to reconnect it. And word was that Blackburn was going to make it, too. He was conscious again, although he had no memory of his fall or anything else that happened on the street. He would recover, but never be the same guy his buddies remembered before the fall. The rest of the injuries were minor. But Eversmann had only about six of his guys left.
From Chalk One, the one led in by Captain Steele and Lieutenant Perino, they’d lost Jamie Smith, whose agonizing death at the first crash site would continue to haunt Perino and Sergeant Schmid, the Delta medic who’d torn open Smith’s wound trying to save him. Smith’s death would become the most controversial of the battle, since his was the one life that might have been saved if the force around Wolcott’s crash site had been rescued sooner. Carlos Rodriguez, the Ranger shot in the crotch at crash site one, was going to recover as well. Dale Sizemore had fended off the doctors who still wanted him sent home because of his elbow. He paced the hangar hoping for another chance to avenge his friends. Steve Anderson wrestled with feelings of guilt. So many others had died or been hurt. Why had he escaped injury? He wasn’t sure what made him angrier, the reluctance he’d felt about joining the fight or the politicians in Washington who’d gotten so many of his friends killed and hurt chasing a stupid warlord in Mogadishu. He would grow angrier and angrier brooding over it, and as time went by he was filled with distrust for the system he had enlisted to defend. Mike Goodale, his wounded thigh and rear end bandaged and healing, would be back home in Illinois with his girlfriend Kira before the week was out. Goodale asked Kira to marry him the first time he talked to her on the phone from Germany. He’d seen how short life could be and was determined not to put an important thing off ever again. Lieutenant Lechner faced a long recovery, as doctors at Walter Reed Army Hospital painstakingly stimulated bone growth to heal the hole an AK-47 round had driven through his shin. Undergoing virtually the same procedure in the bed next to his was Sergeant John Burns, whose lower leg had been shattered by a bullet on the lost convoy. Stebbins was home with his wife within the week. The garrulous company clerk would receive a Silver Star for his part in the fight, and was on his way to becoming a legend in the company, an example of how even those in the unit’s least glamorous jobs were Rangers, too.
The ground convoy had been decimated. Only about half of
the fifty-two men who had ridden out on October 3 were still at the hangar. Their vehicles were wrecked. Nearly all of the convoy’s leaders had been injured and had been flown home, including Lieutenant Colonel Danny McKnight. Clay Othic and his buddy Eric Spalding were back home from Germany before the week was out. On the long transport flight home, his right arm still bandaged and disabled, Othic had scribbled a final entry in his Mogadishu diary with his unsteady left hand: “Sometimes you get the bear; sometimes the bear gets you.” Within days, he and Spalding, their wounds bandaged and healing, made the drive home to Missouri they’d promised themselves to catch the end of deer-hunting season. Cruising the interstate in Spalding’s pickup they listened to occasional radio reports about the unfinished business in Mogadishu, a million miles away.
Worst hit was the Delta squadron, which had lost the devout Dan Busch, little Earl Fillmore, Randy Shughart, Gary Gordon, Griz, and then Rierson. Brad Hallings, the Delta sniper whose leg was sheared off inside Super Six Two, would learn to get around so well on an artificial limb that he was able to rejoin the unit. Paul Leonard, who had the calf of his left leg blown away manning a Mark-19 on the lost convoy, would end up doing a long recuperation and rehab at Walter Reed with Burns, Lechner, Galentine, and some of the other more seriously injured guys. President Clinton visited them there one day about two weeks after the battle. He came without fanfare, and seemed shocked and uncharacteristically speechless when confronted with the flesh-and-blood consequences of the fight. The men had been given curt instructions to keep their opinions of Clinton, if negative, to themselves. Galentine posed for a snapshot with the president, a T-shirt pulled over the hand sewed to his abdomen. In the snapshot both men looked equally startled to be in each other’s company.