Jerry Boykin & Lynn Vincent

by Never Surrender

  I knelt next to senior NCO Tom Corbett, an old friend and golf buddy of mine.

  “How are you feeling, Tom?” Shrapnel had ripped him up pretty good.

  “I’m going to be okay, but we’ve got to find these missing guys.”

  “We will, Tom. We’ll find them.”

  Every man I spoke with was more concerned about our MIAs than about himself. As I talked with them, one part of my brain worked on the next mission phase: What’s our next move? Mogadishu had been a time bomb before; now it was a blood-torn, angry hive. How do we get our guys back?

  That afternoon, Garrison, Dave McKnight, and I got in a van and drove to the UN compound. We knew the commanders of some of the other African nations that were part of Restore Hope kept open lines of communication with Aidid. Since they weren’t combatants, this fact was not a foul. Now we intended to use it to send the warlord a message.

  The three of us found the headquarters of one of the African commanders. I cut directly to the chase: “If you have any way to pass information to Aidid, you tell him we want our people back,” I said, leaning closer. “You tell him we will not leave Mogadishu until we have them. And tell him that the sooner we get our people back, the fewer of his people will be dead.”

  11

  THE DAY AFTER THE BATTLE was a flurry of organization, casualty counts, medevacing and regrouping. Delta’s doctor, Rob Marsh, was in the thick of it, blood up to his elbows, his trademark good humor bucking up the wounded.

  By then, I knew the full impact of October 3. Against the odds we’d faced—thousands to ninety-nine—the Battle of the Black Sea was a victory on paper. We’d completed our mission. But at a horrific cost. Now my heart felt like a lead weight. We had seventy-six wounded, more than a dozen confirmed dead, and several still missing, including Shughart, Gordon, and the entire Super Six-Four crew. I had seen the bloody pile of bodies in the five-ton truck. Dan Busch was gone. Earl Fillmore was gone. I prayed for Griz Martin, who fought hard, Rob told me. Just when it seemed he had slipped away, Griz would somehow find another reserve, another measure of strength to cling to life. He didn’t make it.

  Up to that point, I had focused on what I needed to do as a leader, on showing strength, on comforting and encouraging my men. But now, head down, I stumbled to my trailer, sat on the edge of my bunk and sobbed. I bent forward, elbows on my knees, my face in my hands, tears falling on the floor. But as grief tore lose from my chest, it began transforming into something else: Anger.

  Where were You! I prayed. Why did You let these men down? Why did You abandon us?

  Minutes passed. And I realized I had stopped addressing God. I came to a conclusion that hollowed me out inside. If God was real, He would have heard my prayers. If God was real, He wouldn’t have let these good men die.

  For twenty-three years I have been living a lie, I thought. There is no God.

  12

  TOM MATTHEWS AND I were standing in the JOC when CNN broadcast the infamous footage of Somalis dragging two of our guys through the streets. They had ropes tied around the bodies. I could see on the TV screen, one man was nearly naked; the other still had most of a flight suit on. We thought maybe that was Ray Frank. The sight wrenched my gut and seemed to suck the air out of the room. Tom’s eyes burned with pain. His features barely moved, but beneath them I could see the muscles of his face tensed with rage.

  CNN played and replayed the images, and I thought of our guys’ families watching the bodies being desecrated over and over again: Somalis poking them with rifles, hooting, and raising their arms in victory as though they were dragging a safari kill through the streets. That an American news company would glorify the desecration of Americans enraged me.

  Please, God. Don’t let their families see.

  My crisis of faith had passed. At the moment I sat on my bunk and denied God, I heard the Holy Spirit speak to my heart, saying, If there is no God, there is no hope. I didn’t like what had happened. I hated what had happened. But I could not justify praising Him for miracles then denying Him in tragedy. I had seen Him at work in the world, and in my own life, too many times for that.

  As I sat on my bunk that night and prayed for understanding, I decided to simply open my Bible. Not really looking for anything in particular, I opened it to the book of Proverbs and gazed at a verse I had marked somewhere along the way: “Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding.”

  Okay, Lord, I prayed. But this is tough.

  While we watched the CNN broadcast in the JOC, the rest of Task Force Ranger watched it in the hangar. We all wanted to go back in and exact revenge, but it wasn’t the right thing to do, and Garrison and I said no to a retaliatory strike: Too many civilian casualties. But we did arrange for Mace to go out into the city undercover. This would be his fourth trip into Mogadishu—his third since hell broke loose. A local NGO (nongovernmental organization) had agreed to discreetly help us look for our men. Mace was going in with them.

  The next day, Tom and I were in the JOC again when CNN broadcast new footage. It was a grainy interview with a single man, an American. My heart soared—at least one of our guys was alive!

  This man’s face was swollen, misshapen, and streaked with what looked like blood.

  “No, I am not a Ranger,” he said to an interviewer off-camera.

  “You kill people innocent,” the interviewer said.

  “Innocent people being killed is not good,” said the American.

  I looked at Tom. “Who is that?”

  Peering closely at the screen, he said, “That’s Mike Durant.”

  But looking at his face on the television screen, I didn’t even recognize him. I would later find out that in addition to the wounds he received in the crash—including a broken leg—the Somalis had struck him in the face with the severed arm of one of his crew chiefs, breaking his cheek and jawbone. They also shot him in the shoulder as he lay in a tiny, dark room tethered by a dog chain.

  Watching the interview with Mike, conflicting emotions surged through me. Outrage at the pilot’s condition. Hope that Shughart, Gordon, and the others were alive. And dread that my hope was more like wishful thinking. If the Somalis had more than one prisoner, I was pretty sure they would have put them on camera to gloat.

  Our passion became finding Durant. CNN broadcast and rebroadcast his interview footage, and our intel people scoured the scant tape for clues to his location. Durant’s brothers in the 160th desperately wanted Mike to know that we were still out here, that we were turning the city upside down looking for him, that America hadn’t abandoned him. They knew Mike was tough, trained not to break in captivity. Still, seeing his condition on television, they wanted to give him the most important psychological advantage of all: hope.

  Tom Matthews came to see me in the JOC. “Let’s get a loudspeaker on one of the helos and let Mike know we’re still trying to find him.”

  “Great idea,” I said, and we immediately rounded up the Black Hawk techs, who rigged up the necessary equipment. For the next week, the 160th flew regularly over Mogadishu, broadcasting calls that echoed off the city facades.

  “Mike Durant, we will not leave you.”

  “Mike Durant, we are with you always.”

  13

  THE HORROR JUST KEPT ON COMING. On October 5, Tom and I got in a Humvee with Danny McKnight, and Mel Wick, my command sergeant major, and drove out to a lone green tent staked at the other end of the airfield. The field morgue. The Mortuary Affairs unit had set up down there, near the water, and were taking care of the dead. The four of us rumbled in silence across the tarmac and along a crushed shale path. A somber dread pressed in on us, more smothering and oppressive than anything the Somali sun could muster. We knew identifying our dead was our responsibility, but none of us looked forward to the task.

  Mel and I had been together since Delta’s founding, and understood each other. We had shared defeat and victory and all the peaks and potholes in between. This, though, w
as the lowest, most agonizing road we’d ever traveled. The toughest thing I had ever done in my life was to deny that medevac to Corporal Jamie Smith. Now there was a second toughest thing and as we stepped through the flap into the field morgue tent, I was thankful Mel was with me.

  Inside, the tent sweltered, lit from the ceiling by hanging steel fixtures. To our right, I could see green body bags on the floor. I was struck by the sheer number of them, lined up in rows like huge, dark tally marks. Two staff sergeants from Mortuary Affairs bent over a body on a gurney.

  “We’re here to identify the bodies of those who were killed yesterday,” I said.

  “Yes, sir,” said one of the sergeants. Then he stepped aside to show us the man they were working on. “Can you identify this man?”

  I willed my face to be still. For a moment, I couldn’t speak as grief gripped my throat. It was Griz Martin. His face was pale and ashen, but for a moment, in my mind’s eye, I could see it full of life again. I could see that big smile he was known for, the one that showed every tooth in his head, and hear his mischievous laugh.

  Then I could hear his wife crying. I refocused on Griz as he was now, lying on that table. “That’s Master Sergeant Martin,” I said aloud, steeling my voice.

  The mortuary affairs sergeant wrote something on a clipboard. Then the two sergeants led the four of us in among the body bags, unzipping each one just enough to reveal the face of the man inside. Tom identified the men from the 160th, Danny I.D.’d the Rangers, and Mel and I named the men of Delta—Dan Busch, a relatively new operator and a devout Christian; and Earl Fillmore, a fireplug of a man who had been with us in Panama and Grenada, loved life, and volunteered for every tough assignment with a sparkle in his eye. Putting a name, a personhood, to their lifeless bodies was my job as their commander. It was a final gesture of respect. But the image of their pale, silent faces still burns in my brain.

  Since that day, I have given my officers in Special Forces a talk in which I tell them never to waste training time, never to take short cuts that might result in disaster. “One day, each of you is probably going to have an experience that will stick with you for the rest of your life,” I tell them. “One day, you will go in and open a body bag and look into the ashen face of one of your soldiers. At that point, you will ask yourself a question: Did I do everything I could to make sure this soldier accomplished his mission so that he could go home to his family alive?”

  In the years since Somalia, I have asked myself those questions again and again. Heading into Mogadishu, did I take short cuts? No. Did I train my men right, prepare them properly for battle? Yes. Was there something else I could have done to make sure they came home alive? I don’t know.

  I look back on the deterioration of the situation and second-guess myself. It has been popular in the newspapers to speculate that we were arrogant, complacent, or both. That is the view of those who were not there. The fact is we never underestimated the Somalis. We constantly changed our operating patterns out of respect for their tactics.

  Did I do everything I could have done? I’ll never know. And that is the ugly question I keep locked away in a certain drawer of my heart like a loaded gun.

  14

  TWO DAYS AFTER what would become known as the Battle of the Black Sea, I walked up to find Matt Rierson standing with Gary outside the hangar near a Conex. Matt was the Delta sergeant who led the successful assault on the target building that was the whole reason for our October 3 operation. Many of the casualties had already been medevaced out, some to Germany, some straight home. Those of us who remained sweated under a merciless Somali sun that bore down on our heads as if it meant to burn the rest of us out of the country.

  I propped one boot up on a sandbag, part of a bunker fortifying the Conex so we could use it as a shelter during mortar attacks. I looked at Matt and could see in his eyes that his heart was as broken as mine. Delta had lost so many: Shughart and Gordon. Griz. Dan Busch. Earl Fillmore. Brad Hallings was alive but had lost a leg. Matt and I briefly held each other’s gaze and the thought we shared in that moment was, “What do we say? What can we say?”

  I had just opened my mouth to speak when a massive explosion shook the ground. The world tilted sideways as I was knocked to the pavement.

  I heard Gary, in agony: “My legs! My legs!”

  I struggled to my feet and saw Matt lying on the concrete. His skull was split and his eyes were closed. I saw brain matter on the pavement. To his right, I saw Gary writhing on the ground, bright arterial blood pulsing out from beneath him, forming a rapidly spreading pool.

  “Find Doc Marsh!” I yelled.

  Boots pounded, people running toward us. Another explosion rocked the compound. Two soldiers grabbed me and yanked me over the sandbag bunker into the Conex. One of them accidentally stepped on my right boot, and searing pain shot up through my leg. Until then, I didn’t know I’d been hit. The Conex echoed with the muffled thuds of two more mortar rounds.

  Then, as suddenly as it had begun, the attack was over. I scrambled out of the bunker. Gary was still lying on the ground, now gritting his teeth against consuming pain. I saw one of the 160th pilots on the ground beside him. He had his hand buried in Gary’s thigh up to his wrist, trying to pinch off whichever vessel was steadily pumping blood out onto the pavement.

  “Find Doc Marsh!” I yelled again. “Find Rob Marsh!”

  Medics ran up with a pair of litters and laid them on the ground. “Sir, we need you to get on here and let us take you for treatment,” one of them said to me urgently.

  As more medics encircled Gary, I stared at Matt. Only two days before he had risked himself to save others in one of the most lopsided battles in American history. He had lived through that. Only moments ago, I was looking at the life in his eyes. How could he be gone?

  “I’m fine,” I said numbly, waving the medics off. “I’ll walk over.”

  But when I tried to walk, I lurched badly, new pain lancing through my calf and thigh. Shrapnel, I thought, realizing at the same time that my foot was in worse shape than I’d thought. I gave up and lay down on one of the litters. And when I looked over at the litter next to me, I was shocked to see the man lying on it was Rob Marsh.

  His face had already gone grey. From his waist to his thighs, his fatigues were soaked in blood. I hadn’t even known he was near when the mortars hit.

  Not him, too, I thought. Not him. I wasn’t sure how my faith would hold up if God let this African hellhole rob us of another single soul.

  Medics hoisted the litters and rushed us over to the same M.A.S.H. tent where I had watched the Air Force medical teams sort out living from dead two days earlier. Inside, they placed me on a gurney and Rob right next to me, on a gurney to my left. A medical team worked furiously on him, cutting away his uniform, inserting IVs, attaching lines to monitor his blood pressure and pulse.

  I reached over and grabbed Rob’s hand. It was covered in blood. Blood soaked the gurney, dripped on the floor. “Hold on, Rob. You’re gonna make it,” I said.

  Slowly, he turned his head and looked at me. His pupils had dilated to tiny dark holes. His face was vividly white.

  A doctor explored the wound in Rob’s belly. “Looks like the renal artery’s been severed.” The doctor barked instructions. Medics ran up holding more IV bags. Instruments flashed in the low-hanging light.

  Squeezing Rob’s hand, I began to pray silently, Lord, spare this man’s life.

  The coppery smell of blood hung in the tent.

  Don’t let this man die, God. For his family’s sake, spare him.

  “His pressure’s dropping,” a nurse said. “Ninety over fifty.”

  The portable monitor hung on a pole between the gurneys. I could see the red numbers ticking lower, lower.

  “Fight, Rob!” I stared at him intensely, still squeezing his hand. His eyes were closed now. “Don’t give up.”

  God, spare this man. Save his life. I ask it in Jesus’s name.

  “Seventy
over forty and falling. Pulse forty.” The nurse looked at me. “Sir, let go of his hand.”

  “Hold on, Rob! You’re going to make it.”

  “Fifty over thirty, falling rapidly. Pulse is thirty. Sir, please let go of his hand.”

  I ask you in the name of Jesus to save him. Do not let this man die.

  The nurse reached down to pry my fingers away, but I hung on desperately, willing Rob to hold on. Somehow, I thought that if I didn’t let go, if I just prayed hard enough, God wouldn’t take this good man with all the rest.

  “Pulse twenty, pressure’s bottoming out!”

  At that moment, Rob opened his eyes wide and stared into mine, his pupils only pinpoints. “Tell Barbara I love her,” he whispered.

  Then Rob Marsh’s eyes rolled back in his head.

  15

  I WAS MEDEVACED TO THE UN COMPOUND and into surgery, where doctors removed shrapnel from my legs and foot. When I awoke in recovery, my first thought was Rob. Was he dead? I asked a nurse about him.

  “He’s been in surgery,” she said. “He’s still critical. They’re going to medevac him to Germany.” I asked her to take me down to see him. He lay sedated in a bed at the other end of the ward, his face still pale and gray. Sitting in a wheelchair beside his bed, I laid my hand on Rob’s arm and prayed.

  The next morning I asked to return to the airfield so I could be with the rest of the troops. I had to use crutches to get around, and spent most of that day on my bunk trying to recuperate. As I lay there, I began to pray. God, I need You to give me something to help me accept what has happened here. And I really need to come to closure on why this turned out so badly.

  As I was praying, one of the communicators came to my bunk and handed me a fax. It came from a dear friend in Loveland, Colorado, Yale King. There was no message, only a Scripture verse, Isaiah 40:31: “For they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength. They shall mount up on wings of eagles, they shall run and not be weary and they shall walk and not faint.”