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every man figuring this mission would probably be scratched before they got off the ground. That’s how it usually went. There were twenty false alarms for every real mission.
It was an audacious daylight thrust into the “Black Sea,” the very heart of Habr Gidr territory in central Mogadishu and warlord Aidid’s stronghold. Their target was a three-story house of whitewashed stone with a flat roof, a modern modular home in one of the city’s few remaining clusters of intact large buildings, surrounded by blocks and blocks of tin-roofed dwellings of muddy stone.
Many, if they could make it, aspired to join Special Forces, maybe even get picked to try out for Delta, the hale, secret supersoldiers now leading this force
Waiting for the other five Black Hawks to get in position, it seemed to Eversmann that they had held their hover for a dangerously long time. Even over the sound of the rotor and engines the men could hear the pop of gunfire. A Black Hawk hanging in the sky like that made a big target.
In honor of their arrival they were ordered to drop for fifty push-ups, a ritual greeting upon entering a combat zone.
Nelson saw a Somali with a gun lying prone on the street between two kneeling women. The shooter had the barrel of his weapon between the women’s legs, and there were four children actually sitting on him. He was completely shielded in noncombatants, taking full cynical advantage of the Americans’ decency.
Guys without girlfriends were so forlorn they looked forward to reading the letters their buddies got from women.
Take the pigeons. When the force had first moved in, the pigeons had owned the hangar, crapping at will all over people, cots, and equipment. When one of the D-boys got nailed while sitting on his cot cleaning his weapon, the elite force declared war. They ordered up pellet guns. The birds didn’t have a prayer.
Mogadishu was rat heaven; there hadn’t been a regular trash pickup in recorded history.
On the night of September 25, the Skinnies shot down a 101st Division Black Hawk. Three crew members were killed when the downed chopper burst into flames, but the pilot and copilot escaped. They exchanged fire with gunmen on the street until friendly Somalis steered them to a vehicle and got them out.
The next moves were part of a contingency they had rehearsed. Another Black Hawk would take Super Six One’s place over the target area, and the CSAR bird would move in and drop its team. Those fifteen men would give emergency medical treatment and provide some protection for the crash survivors, but they couldn’t hold out long. Already mobs of Somalis were moving toward the crash site from all directions. Securing it would take all of the men on the ground. The mission had been designed for speed: swiftly in, swiftly out. Now they were stuck.
RPGs were meant for ground fighting. It was difficult and dangerous, almost suicidal, to point one skyward. The violent back blast could kill the shooter, and the grenade would only fly up a thousand feet or so, with a whoosh and a telltale trail of smoke pointing back to the shooter. So if the back blast didn’t get him one of the quick guns of the Little Birds surely would.
“Don’t shoot,” Spalding shouted. “She’s got a kid!” The woman abruptly turned. Holding the baby in one arm, she raised a pistol with her free hand. Spalding shot her where she stood.
The Black Hawk is a heavy aircraft. Durant’s weighed about sixteen thousand pounds at that point,
But these days all the mooryan in southern Mogadishu had a common enemy. Some had begun calling themselves, in a play on the word “Rangers,” Revengers. They knew the best way to hurt the Americans was to shoot down a helicopter.
To kill Rangers, you had to make them stand and fight. The answer was to bring down a helicopter. Part of the Americans’ false superiority, their unwillingness to die, meant they would do anything to protect each other, things that were courageous but also sometimes foolhardy. Aidid and his lieutenants knew that if they could bring down a chopper, the Rangers would move to protect its crew.
They hit their first Black Hawk in the dark early morning of September 25, but it wasn’t part of a Ranger mission. The success heartened them. The next time the Rangers came out in force, they would be ready. They would only have to hit one. When Mo’alim heard the helicopters come in low on October 3 he grabbed his M-16 and rounded up his gang.
Like many of the men in the vehicles, he had taken the ceramic plate out of his flak vest.
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He fought the urge to lie down. Either way I’m going to get shot. Moore figured if he stayed up and kept on shooting, at least he’d get shot trying to save himself and the guys. It was a defining moment for him, a point of clarity in the midst of chaos. He would go down fighting. He would not consider lying down again.
!
He had been wildly scared for longer than he had ever felt that way in his life, and now he thought he might literally die of fright. His heart banged in his chest and he found it hard to breathe. His head was filled with the sounds of shooting and explosions and visions of his friends, one by one, going down, and blood splashed everywhere oily and sticky with its dank, coppery smell and he figured, This is it for me. And then, in that moment of maximum terror, he felt it all abruptly, inexplicably fall away. One second he was paralyzed with fear and pain and the next ... he had stopped caring
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It was 5:40 P.M. They had been battling through the streets now for more than an hour. Of the approximately seventy-five men in the convoy, soldiers and prisoners, nearly half had been hit by bullets or shrapnel. Eight were dead, or near death. As they approached K-4 circle, they braced themselves for another vicious ambush.
There was always a temptation to avoid taking such ominous precautions, like the way the D-boys went into battle with their blood types taped to their shoes.
His personal nightmare had been the water drill at the army Special Forces SCUBA training facility. It was called “crossovers.” Trainees were weighted down with water-filled tanks and dropped in a deep pool. Holding their breath, they had to walk twenty-five meters to the other end without coming up for air. For Wilkinson, it was hard enough just to go that distance without blacking out, but the instructors would deliberately detain him, push him backward, disorient him, pull off his mask and fins, rough him up, tangle him up with other trainees ... simulating the helter-skelter,
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When Goffena flared the Black Hawk in low, the wash from his rotors would literally blow thickening crowds back. As the crowd retreated, they exposed those with RPG tubes, who seemed determined to hold their ground. This made them easy targets for the snipers. Trouble was, once the snipers dropped them, others would dart out and pick up their weapons.
The difference between being a coward and hero is not whether you’re scared, it’s what you do while you’re scared.” Thomas didn’t seem to like the answer. He walked away. As they were about to pull out, though, Struecker noticed that he’d climbed on board with the rest of the men.
!
Steele’s Rangers relied on shouted orders from their officers and team leaders. They were younger, less experienced, and terrified. Some tended to just follow the operators instead of staying with their teams. Steele saw a complete breakdown of unit integrity before they’d moved two blocks.
Howe abruptly kicked in the door to a one-room house on his left. He and his team had learned to move like they owned the world. Every house was their house. If they needed shelter, they kicked in a door. Anyone who threatened them would be killed. It was that simple.
Sheik Ali believed the radio broadcasts and flyers printed up by the Aidid’s SNA. The Americans wanted to force all Somalis to be Christians, to give up Islam. They wanted to turn Somalis into slaves.
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.
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.
!
Durant kept his eyes on the sky as the mob closed over him.
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.
he was shooting the army’s new 5.56 mm green-tip round. The green tip had a tungsten carbide penetrator at the tip, and would punch holes in metal, but that very penetrating power meant his rounds were passing right through his targets. When the Sammies were close enough he could see when he hit them. Their shirts would lift up at the point of impact, as if someone had pinched and plucked up the fabric. But with the green-tip round it was like sticking somebody with an ice pick. The bullet made a small, clean hole, and unless it happened to hit the heart or spine, it wasn’t enough to stop a
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The only way to stop the bleeding was to find the severed femoral artery and clamp it. Otherwise it was like trying to stanch a fire hose by pushing down on it through a mattress.
“You’re going to take this thing,” said Barton, holding up a fluorescent orange plastic triangle, “and drop it right out there,” pointing to the middle of the road. Twombly didn’t want to go. There was so much lead flying through that road that it felt like suicide to venture from cover, much less run out to the middle. It crossed his mind to refuse Barton’s order, but just as quickly he rejected that. If he didn’t do it, somebody else would have to. That wouldn’t be fair.
He had noticed that his trousers looked burned and singed, and now, illuminated by the medic’s white light, he saw that the blackened flaking patches along his leg were skin! He felt no pain, just numbness. The fire from the explosion had instantly cauterized all his wounds. He could see the whole lower left side of his body was burned.
commanders inside the JOC had watched with horror as triumphant Somalis overran the site of the second Black Hawk crash, pilot Mike Durant’s, and were now getting frantic calls for a chopper to medevac Smith and Carlos Rodriguez from the first crash site. They had ninety-nine men pinned down in the city, and no rescue force on its way. They knew it would be foolhardy to try to put another Black Hawk down there to evacuate the two badly injured Rangers. The volume of fire was much heavier there than anywhere else in Mogadishu, and the Somalis had already shot down four Black Hawks.
Howe had noticed that the Sammies were good about hauling off their wounded and dead. Bodies tended not to stay put unless they were right in the middle of the street. Weapons, too. If there was a weapon down on the ground, it would be gone eventually unless it was broken. They were smart street fighters. Howe felt a grudging professional admiration.
Goodale was in high spirits for somebody with a second hole through his ass.
The men pinned down listened to the low rumble of nearly one hundred vehicles, tanks, APCs (armored personnel carriers), and Humvees. The thunderclap of its guns edged ever closer. After a while, the rhythm of its shooting sounded like an extended drum solo in a rock song, very heavy metal. It was the wrathful approach of the United States of America, footsteps of the great god of red, white, and blue. It was the best fucking sound in the world.
By about 11 P.M., David had the “gagglefuck” set to go, and was feeling pretty good about it. He regarded the organizational effort as one of his major life accomplishments.
But now the only noise that concerned Steele was the intensifying thunder of guns as the rescue column moved closer to their position. With that much shooting, with two jumpy elements of soldiers about to link up in a confusing city in darkness, the biggest threat to his pinned-down men were their rescuers.
Lepre was behind cover just a few feet away, gazing at Martin’s body. He felt terrible. He had asked the private to take his position, and then the man had been shot dead.
Then came the next shock for the Rangers and D-boys who had been fighting now for fourteen hours. There wasn’t enough room on the vehicles for them. After the 10th Mountain Division soldiers reboarded, the anxious Malaysian drivers just took off, leaving the rest of the force behind. They were going to have to run right back out through the same streets they’d fought through on their way in.
So they ran. The original idea was for them to run with the vehicles in order to have some cover, but the Malay drivers had sped out.
He was furious. The whole scene seemed surreal to him. He couldn’t believe some pissant fucking Sammy had shot him, Sergeant Randal J. Ramaglia of the U.S. Army Rangers. He was going to get out of that city alive or take half of it with him. He shot at anyone or anything he saw. He was running, bleeding, swearing, and shooting. Windows, doorways, alleyways ... especially people. They were all going down. It was a free-for-all now. All semblance of an ordered retreat was gone. Everybody was just scrambling.
Bashir heard a great stir of excitement, people chanting and cheering and shouting. He ran to see. They had a dead American soldier draped over a wheelbarrow. He was stripped to black undershorts and lay draped backward with his hands dragging on the dirt. The body was caked with dry blood and the man’s face looked peaceful, distant. There were bullet holes in his chest and arm. Ropes were tied around his body, and it was half wrapped in a sheet of corrugated tin. The crowd grew larger as the wheelbarrow was pushed through the street. People spat and poked and kicked at the body.
!
They were dragging the body on the street when an outnumbered and outgunned squad of Saudi Arabian soldiers drove up on vehicles. Even though they were with the UN, the Saudis were not considered enemies of the Somalis, and even on this day their vehicles were not attacked. What the Saudis saw made them angry. “What are you doing?” one of the soldiers asked. “We have Animal Howe,” answered an armed young Somali man, one of the ringleaders.
Private George Siegler had hopefully sprinted up to the hatch of an APC just as a voice yelled from inside, “We can only take one more!” Lieutenant Perino already had one leg in the hatch. Out of the corner of his eye Perino saw the younger man’s desperation. He withdrew his leg from the hatch and said, cloaking his kindness with officerly impatience, “Come on, Private, come on.” It would have been easy for the lieutenant to say he hadn’t seen him. Siegler was so moved by the gesture he decided then and there to reenlist.
Out on the field, moving from wounded man to wounded man, was a Pakistani soldier holding a tray with glasses of fresh water. The man had a white towel draped over his arm.
