Black Hawk Down (11 page)

The sergeant grabbed it and placed it in the palm of Galentine's hand.

“Scott, hold this,” he said. “Just put your hand up and hold it, buddy.”

Galentine gripped the thumb with his other fingers.

“Hold it up. You'll be all right.”

A medic came running up to tend the wound. When he saw the severed thumb he dropped the
field dressing to the road. Galentine reached into the medic's kit with his good hand,
removed a clean dressing, and handed it to him. The injured hand stung. It felt the way it
did on a cold day when you hit a baseball wrong.

“Don't worry, Sergeant Galentine, you're gonna be okay,” said Berendsen, bleeding beside
him.

Now Eversmann had only Specialist Dave Diemer, a SAW gunner, facing east. Diemer was
doing the work of three men, so the sergeant moved over to help him. Eversmann lifted his
M-16, found an armed Somali down the street, and squeezed off a round. It occurred to him
that this was the first shot he'd fired since roping in.

It was hectic, Eversmann thought, but things were not too bad just yet. He wrestled to
stay calm, keep track of all these events piling in on him. He took a knee behind a
vehicle alongside Diemer. His mind raced. He had three Rangers injured, only one
critically, and he'd managed to get him out. Galentine's was not life-threatening, nor was
Berendsen's.

Glass shattered, showering bits over him and Diemer. A Somali had run out to the middle
of the street just a few yards away and blasted the car. Diemer dropped behind the rear
wheel on the passenger side and shot him with a quick burst. The Somali was thrown
backward hard to the street and lay in a rumpled heap.

Eversmann radioed to Lieutenant Perino that he had taken two more casualties, but they
weren't urgently in need of evacuation.

“Sergeant Eversmann,” called Telscher, who was across the road. “Snodgrass has been shot.”

Specialist Kevin Snodgrass, the machine gunner, had been crouched behind a car and a
round had evidently skipped off the chassis or ricocheted up from the road.

Eversmann saw Telscher stoop over Snodgrass. The machine gunner was not screaming. It
didn't look dire.

Then Diemer tapped his shoulder.

“Sergeant?”

Eversmann turned wearily. Diemer wore a panicked expression.

“I think I just saw a helicopter get hit.”

BLACK HAWK DOWN

-1-

Mohamed Hassan Farah heard the helicopters approaching from the north. They came as
always, low and loud. Usually they came at night. You would hear only the thrum of their
rotors. You never saw them unless they stopped over your block. Then they would come down
so low the noise beat at your ears and the wash from their rotors pulled trees out of the
sandy ground and sucked tin roofs right off houses, sending them flipping and groaning
through the air. Even then you could see the helicopters only in dim outline against a
dark sky. They flew black on black, like death.

This time was different. It was daylight, midafternoon.

At the sound of them, Farah felt a twinge of panic and anger. He walked outside and
watched them pass swiftly overhead, stirring the trees and quaking the rooftops. He knew
they were Rangers because Rangers always dangled their boots from the open doorways. He
counted about a dozen, but they moved too fast for him to be sure. The soft dry earth
under his sandals vibrated.

He had deep wounds that were still healing from an American helicopter attack three
months earlier, on July 12-months before the Rangers had come. Farah and the others in his
clan had welcomed the UN intervention the previous December. It promised to bring
stability and hope. But the mission had gradually deteriorated into hatred and bloodshed.
Farah believed the Americans had been duped into providing the muscle for UN Secretary
General Boutros Boutros-Ghali, a longtime enemy of the Habr Gidr and clan leader General
Mohamed Farrah Aidid. He believed Boutros-Ghali was trying to restore the Darod, a rival
clan. Ever since July 12, the Habr Gidr had been at war with America.

On that morning, the American QRF helicopters, seventeen in all, had encircled the house
of Abdi Hassan Awale, who was called Qeybdid. Inside the house, in a large second-floor
room, were nearly one hundred of his clansmen, intellectuals, elders, and militia leaders.
There was urgent business to discuss. The Habr Gidr had been under UN siege for four
weeks, ever since a bloody clan ambush killed twenty-four Pakistani soldiers.

Life had grown hard for the clan, but they were used to that. The Habr Gidr was an
age-old rival of the Darod, the clan of former dictator Mohamed Siad Barre, who had ruled
Somalia with terror for twenty years. As an Egyptian diplomat, Boutros-Ghali had worked
against Aidid's revolutionary forces. Barre had been overthrown in 1991, but the Habr Gidr
had been unable to consolidate political power. Now the same Boutros-Ghali, through the
UN, was again trying to defeat them. This is how they saw it. So they were living as they
had for many years, hiding from those in power, biding time, and looking for chances to
strike.

That day in July, the leadership had gathered to discuss how to respond to a peace
initiative from Jonathan Howe, the retired American admiral who was then leading the UN
mission in Mogadishu. Men of middle age were seated at the center of the room on rugs.
Elders took chairs and sofas that had been arranged around the perimeter. Among the elders
present were religious leaders, former judges, professors, the poet Moallim Soyan, and the
clan's most senior leader, Sheik Haji Mohamed Iman Aden, who was over ninety years old.
Behind the elders, standing against the walls, were the youngest men. Many of those
present wore Western clothing, shirts and pants, but most wore the colorful traditional
Somali wraparound cotton skirts called ma-awis.

They were the best-educated members of the clan. Ever since the collapse of order and
government in Somalia there was little work for intellectuals. So a meeting like this was
a big event, a chance to argue over the direction of things. Aidid himself was not
present. In the weeks since the UN searched and leveled most of the buildings in his
residential compound, he had been in hiding. Qeybdid and some of the others present were
his close advisers, hard-liners, and men with blood on their hands. Some were responsible
for attacks on UN troops, including the massacre of the Pakistanis. There were also
moderates in the crowd, men who saw themselves as realists. Ruling impoverished Somalia
meant little without friendly ties with the larger world. The Habr Gidr were enthusiastic
capitalists. Many of the men in this room were businessmen, eager to resume the flood of
international aid and trading ties with America and European powers. They were troubled by
the obstructionist and increasingly dangerous game Aidid was playing with the UN. In
Mogadishu's present atmosphere of confrontation, their arguments were unlikely to prevail,
but some in

the crowd at Abdi House were there to argue for peace.

Farah was one of the moderates, a garrulous balding man in his thirties. He was eager for
some kind of normalcy in his country, and for friendly ties with nations that could help
Somalia. Farah was an engineer, educated in part in Germany. He saw opportunity in the
terrible rums of Mogadishu. Before him lay a lifetime of important and lucrative
rebuilding. But he also believed the man who deserved to lead the country-and the only one
who would steer valuable engineering contracts his way-was his clansman Aidid. The UN
wanted to treat all the warlords and clans as equals when they were not equal.

Farah was on the perimeter of the room with the younger men, but instead of standing, he
had set himself down on one knee between two sofas, which probably saved his life.

The TOW missile is designed to penetrate the armored hull of a tank. It is a two-stage
forty-pound projectile with fins at the middle and back that trails a copper wire as thin
as a human hair. The wire allows the TOW to be steered in flight so that it will follow
precisely the path of a targeting laser. Equipped with a shaped charge inside its rounded
tip, on impact it spurts a jet of plasma, molten copper, which burns through the outer
layer of its target, along the missile to penetrate and deliver its full explosive charge
within. The explosion is powerful enough to dismember anyone standing near it, and hurls
deadly sharp metal fragments in all directions.

What Farah saw and heard was a flash of light and a violent crack. He stood and took one
step forward and heard the whoosh! of a second missile. There was another flash and
explosion. He was thrown to the floor. Thick smoke filled the room. He tried to move
forward but his way was blacked by bodies, a bloody pile of men and parts of men a meter
high. Among those killed instantly was the eldest, Sheik Haji Iman. Through the smoke,
Farah was startled to see Qeybdid, bloody and burned, but still standing at the center of
the carnage.

At another part of the room, Abdullahi Ossoble Barre was momentarily dazed by the blasts.
To him, it looked liked the men closest to the flash had just evaporated. As soon as he
recovered his wits, he began looking for his son.

Those who had survived the first blast were feeling along the wall, groping for the door,
when the second missile exploded. The air was thick with dark smoke and smelled of powder,
blood, and burned flesh. Farah found the stairs, stood, and had taken one step down when a
third missile exploded, disintegrating the staircase. He tumbled to the first floor. He
sat up stunned, and felt himself for broken bones and wet spots. He saw he was bleeding
from a thick gash in his right forearm. He felt a burning there and on his back, which had
been punctured in several places with shrapnel. He crawled forward. There was another
explosion above him. Then another and another. Sixteen missiles were fired in all.

Still trapped upstairs, Barre found his son alive beneath a pile of mangled bodies. He
began pulling men off, and parts of their bodies came off in his hands. After a great
struggle he managed to free his son, who was semiconscious, jerking him free by the legs.
Then they heard Americans from the helicopters storming the house, so he and his son lay
still among the bleeding and played dead. Farah crawled until he found a door to the
outside. He saw one of his clansmen running from the house, and in the sky he saw the
helicopters, Cobras mostly, but also some Black Hawks. The sky was full of them. Red
streams poured from the Cobras' miniguns. The men with Farah in the doorway had a quick
decision to make. Some had blood running from their mouths and ears. They could stay in
the burning house or brave the helicopters' guns outside.

“Let's go out together,” one of the men said. “Some of us will live and some will die.”

His wounds had nearly healed in the three months since.

Now, as the armada of American helicopters roared overhead he was reminded of the shack,
pain, and terror. The sight filled him and his friends with rage. It was one thing for the
world to intervene to feed the starving, and even for the UN to help Somalia form a
peaceful government.

But this business of sending U.S. Rangers swooping down into their city killing and
kidnapping their leaders, this was too much.

Bashir Haji Yusuf heard the helicopters as he relaxed with friends at his house, chewing
khat and embroiled in fadikudirir, the traditional Somali afternoon hours of male
discussion and argument and laughter. Today they had been talking about The Situation,
which is about all they ever discussed anymore. With no government, no Courts, no law, and
no university there was no work for lawyers in Mogadishu, but Yusuf never wanted for
argument.

They all stepped out to see. Yusuf, too, saw the legs dangling and knew it was the
Rangers. They all despised the Rangers, and the Black Hawks, which seemed now to be over
the city continually. They flew in groups, at all hours of day and night, swooping down so
low they destroyed whole neighborhoods, blew down market stalls, and terrorized cattle.
Women walking the streets would have their colorful robes blown off. Some had infants torn
from their arms by the powerful updraft. On one raid, a mother screamed frantically in
flex-cuffs for nearly a half hour be-fore a translator arrived to listen and to explain
that her infant had been blown down the road by the landing helicopters. The residents
complained that pilots would deliberately hover over their roofless outdoor showers and
toilets.

Black Hawks would flare down on busy traffic circles, creating havoc, then power off
leaving the crowd below choking on dust and exhaust. Mogadishu felt brutalized and
harassed.

Yusuf was disappointed in the Americans. He had been partly educated in the United
States, and had many friends there. What troubled him most was, he knew they meant well.
He knew his friends back in South Carolina, where he had attended the university, saw this
mission to Somalia as an effort to end starving and bloodshed. They never saw what their
soldiers were actually doing here in the city. How could these bloody Ranger raids alter
things? The

Situation was as old and as complicated as his life. Civil war had destroyed all
semblance of the old order of things. In this new chaotic Somalia, the shifting alliances
and feuds of the clans and sub-clans were like the patterns wind carved in the sand. Often
Yusuf himself didn't understand what was going on. And yet these Americans, with their
helicopters and laser-guided weapons and shock-troop Rangers were going to somehow sort it
out in a few weeks? Arrest Aidid and make it all better? They were trying to take

down a clan, the most ancient and efficient social organization known to man. Didn't the
Americans realize that for every leader they arrested there were dozens of brothers,
cousins, sons, and nephews to take his place? Setbacks just strengthened the clan's
resolve. Even if the Habr Gidr were somehow crippled or destroyed, wouldn't that just
elevate the next most powerful clan? Or did the Americans expect Somalia to suddenly
sprout full-fledged Jeffersonian democracy?