Black Hawk Down (12 page)

Yusuf knew the bile on Aidid's radio station was nonsense, about how the UN and the
Americans had come to colonize Somalia and wanted to burn the Koran. But in the months
since the Abdi House attack he had come to share the popular anger toward American forces.
On September 19, after a bulldozer crew of engineers from the 10th Mountain Division was
attacked by a band of Somalis, Cobra helicopters attached to the QRF launched TOW missiles
and cannon fire into the crowd that came to see the shooting, killing nearly one hundred
people. The helicopters had become an evil presence over the city. Yusuf remembered lying
in bed one night with his wife, who was pregnant, when Black Hawks had come. One hovered
directly over their house. The walls shook and the noise was deafening and he was afraid
his roof, like others in the village, would be sucked off. In the racket his wife reached
over and placed his hand on her belly.

“Can you feel it?” she asked.

He felt his son kicking in her womb, as if thrashing with fright.

As a lawyer who spoke fluent English, Yusuf had led a group of his villagers to the UN
compound to complain. They were told nothing could be done about the Rangers.

They were not under UN command. Soon every death associated with the fighting was blamed
on the Rangers. Somalis joked bitterly that the United States had come to feed them just
to fatten them up for slaughter.

Yusuf saw the armada slow about two kilometers away to the north, over by the Bakara
Market. If they were going into Bakara, there would be big trouble. The helicopters
circled around the Olympic Hotel.

Right away, he heard the shooting start.

-2-

Most of the Rangers saw Super Six One going down. Chalk Two's SAW gunner, Specialist John
Waddell, had started to relax, more or less, on the northeast corner. He could hear the
pop of gunfire at the other chalk locations around the target block, but after 60-gunner
Nelson had cut down that crowd of Somalia things had quieted at their position. Waddell
heard Lieutenant DiTomasso say over the radio that they were getting ready to move to the
vehicles, which meant the D-boys must be finished in the target house. He'd be back at the
hangar with an hour or two of sunlight left, enough time for him to find a sunny spot on
top of a Conex and finish that Grisham novel.

Then there was an explosion overhead. Waddell looked up to see a Black Hawk twisting
oddly as it flew.

“Hey, that bird's going down!” shouted one of the men across the street.

Nelson screamed, “A bird's been hit! A bird's been hit!”

Nelson had seen the whole thing. He had seen the flash of the RPG launcher and had
followed the smoke trail of the grenade as it rose up at the tail of Black Hawk Super Six
One, which was directly overhead.

They all heard the thunderclap. The tail boom of the bird cracked in the flash and its
rotor stopped spinning with a horrible grinding sound, followed by a coughing
chug-chug-chug. The chopper kept moving forward but shuddered and started to spin. First
slowly, then picking up speed.

-3-

Ray Dowdy felt a jolt, nothing too dramatic, but hard enough to make him bounce in his
seat behind the minigun on the left side of Super Six One. Dowdy had been maintaining and
flying in army choppers for a third of his life. He knew the Black Hawk about as well as
anybody in the world, and the hit didn't sound or feel too bad. It was probably an RPG.
Ever since they roped in their load of D-boys, the air had been thick with smoke trails.

This had been a growing concern. The QRF Black Hawk that had gone down the week before
had been hit by an RPG. It had burst into flames on impact. That incident started
everybody rethinking the way they'd been doing things, even though the task force's six
missions had gone without a hitch. Some of the pilots began agitating for more
flexibility, but their commanders wanted them to stick with the template.

Chief Warrant Officer Cliff Wolcott, the pilot of Super Six One, was not one to complain
about anything. His unflappable cool had earned urn the nickname “Elvis,” that and his
dead-on impression of the late rack idol. There was a crude cartoon profile of Presley
painted on his cockpit door, with the words “Velvet Elvis” underneath. He was a popular
pilot. It was his Black Hawk and crew that had decided to go on several unauthorized
aerial safaris, and after killing and butchering a two-hundred-pound boar (Wolcott helped
hide the carcass from the commanders), they went back out and killed about a dozen more to
hold a surprise barbeque for the task force. The shooting got so furious on that hunt that
one of the snipers put a hole through the Black Hawk's rotor. Wolcott took the heat, which
was mild, because the pig roast was a huge hit with the men, who had been eating MREs and
cafeteria food for more than a month. Wolcott brought back a two-hundred-pound kudu that
he himself bagged from the scat of his Black Hawk-he planned to have the trophy head
mounted. Wolcott was the kind of pilot who would complain to his crew chiefs that he
wished he could change places with them-“I have to fly the helicopter while you guys in
back get to have all the fun.” His exploits were legendary. He had flown secret missions
hundreds of miles behind enemy lines into Iraq during the Gulf War, refueling in flight,
to infiltrate troops searching for Saddam Hussein's SCUD missile sites.

When the grenade hit, Super Six One was in a low orbit over the target area, varying
speed between fifty and seventy knots, trying to avoid moving over the same streets on
every pass.

In back were Dowdy and the other crew chief, Staff Sergeant Charlie Warren, and four
Delta snipers seated on ammo cans. They were busy selecting targets below, the crew chiefs
with their miniguns and the snipers with their custom rifles. At first they shot only at
armed Somalis who were moving toward the target area, but as the volume of fire
intensified they'd begun targeting anyone with a weapon. Since many of the armed men
stayed in crowds, pretty soon Dowdy was mowing down whole crowds of Sammies.

He felt justified. When the QRF's Black Hawk had gone down, Somali mobs had mutilated the
corpses of the dead crew chiefs. This being the first mission since then, as a fellow
Black Hawk crewman, Dowdy was in full payback mode. Whenever he saw a Somali fall under
his guns he'd scream the name of one of the men killed in the crash, something he had
vowed to do. The D-boys in back looking up at him, wondering what he was doing. Dowdy
wasn't being choosy about his targets. He figured moving toward the fight at that point
wasn't flowers.

He dropped one Somali with the best shot he'd over made. One round hit the man in the
left buttock and another splashed into his right upper torso. The man ran but then
stumbled, dropped his gun, and then collapsed in the road.

“Nice shot, Ray,” said pilot Wolcott over the intercom.

When he was close to using the last of his own ammunition, after expending thousands of
rounds, Dowdy reached across to the right side of the aircraft where Warren sat, fishing
for one of his partner's ammo cans.

“Hey. I've got a guy with an RPG,” said Warren. “He's five o'clock moving to six
o'clock,” which meant, since the chopper was in a left-turning orbit, the guy ought to be
showing up on Dowdy's side any second.

He couldn't spot him.

“Is he by a building or something you can describe?”

Warren started to answer when they felt the jolt. Dowdy had that second or two of feeling
all right about it, but the chopper started its spin, he knew they were in trouble. He
gripped his seat and looked forward to the cockpit. Dowdy knew that the correct emergency
procedure for a tail rotor hit was to pull back on the power control taking the engines
off line. This eliminated torque, was what caused the craft to spin counter to the
direction of the rotors.

He heard Elvis ask his copilot, Chief Warrant Officer van “Bull” Briley:

Bull, you gonna pull the PCLs off line or what?" it delivered this line in his typically
teasing fashion, already pulling the levers. He yanked them back so hard the whole
aircraft shook. The spin continued. The second turnabout was more violent. This was all
happening in seconds but to Dowdy it seemed much longer.

Elvis made a last radio transmission.

-Six One, going down.

Dowdy and Warren shouted at the D-boys in back to get down and hold on. The crew chiefs
were on seats that could absorb at least some of the impact, but the snipers were sitting
upright in back without protection. The impact could crush their spines. The operators
scrambled off the cans and spread-eagled, -the better to spread the impact out over their
bodies. As the spin accelerated, they reached for something to hold on to. One of them,
Sergeant First Class Jim Smith, grabbed hold with one hand to a bar behind Warren's seat,
and just then the accelerating spin sent his feet flying out the side door. Smith's
shoulder wrenched with pain but he hung on.

Dowdy glanced down and noticed he hadn't fastened his seat belt.

The helicopter clipped the top of a house; then it flipped over hard and slammed into the
alley nose first and tilted on its left side.

-4- Nelson watched dumbstruck as the chopper fell.

“Oh my God, you guys, look at this,” he shouted. “Look at this!”

Waddell gasped, “Oh, Jesus,” and fought the urge to just stand and watch the bird go
down. He turned away to keep his eyes on his corner.

Nelson shouted, “It just went down! It just crashed!”

“What happened?” called Lieutenant DiTomasso, who came running.

“A bird just went down!” Nelson said. “We've gotta go. We've gotta go right now!”

Word spread wildly over the radio, voices overlapping with the had news. There was no
pretense now of the dead-pan military cool, that mandatory monotone that conveyed
everything under control. Voices rose with surprise and fear: We got a Black Hawk going
down! We got a Black Hawk down!

We got a Black Hawk crashed in the city! Six One! He took an RPG!

Six One down!

We got a bird down, northeast of the target. I need you on out and secure that location!
Roger, bird down!

It was more than a helicopter crash: It cracked the task force's sense of righteous
invulnerability. The Black Hawks and Little Birds were their trump card in this
Godforsaken Place. The choppers, more than their rifles and machine were what kept the
savage mobs at a distance. The Somalis couldn't shoot them down!

But they had seen it, the chopper spinning, falling, one of the D-boys hanging on with
one hand, both feet in the air, riding it down.

-5-

Super Six One had dipped the roof of Abdiaziz Ali Aden's house as it crashed. Aden was a
slip of a teenager with thick bushy hair and glossy black skin, one of eleven children,
eight of whom still lived in the house about six blocks east of the Bakara Market. That
Sunday afternoon most of them were at home, napping or relaxing after a late lunch,
staying out of the hot sun.

Aden had heard the helicopters coming in low, so low that the big tree that stood in the
central courtyard of his stone house was uprooted. Then he heard shooting to the west,
near Hawlwadig, the big road that passed before the Olympic Hotel three blocks over. He
ran toward the noise, crossing Marehan Road outside the door and then Wadigly Road,
keeping to the north wall of the alley. The sky was dark with smoke. As he neared the
hotel, the air around him sizzled and cracked with gunfire. Above him were helicopters,
some with lines of flame coming from their guns. He ran two blocks with his head down,
staying against the wall until he saw American trucks and Humvees, with machine guns
mounted on them, shooting everywhere.

The Rangers wore body armor and helmets with goggles. Aden could see no part of them that
looked human. They were like futuristic warriors from an American movie. People were
running madly, hiding. There was a line of Somali men in handcuffs being loaded onto big
trucks. On the street were dead people and a donkey dead on its side, its water cart still
attached and upended.

It terrified him. As he started back toward his house, one of the Black Hawks flew over
him at rooftop level. It made a rackety blast, and wash from its rotors swept over the
dirt alley like a violent storm. Through this dust, Aden saw a Somali militiaman with an
RPG tube step-into the alley and drop to one knee.

The militiaman waited until the helicopter had passed overhead. Then he leaned the tube
up and fired at the aircraft from behind. Aden saw a great flash from the back end of the
tube and then saw the grenade climb and explode into the rear of the helicopter, cracking
the tail. It began turning, so close that Aden could see the pilot inside struggling at
the controls. It was tilted slightly toward Aden when it bit the roof of his house with a
loud crunch, and then slammed an its side into the alley with a great scraping crash in a
thick cloud of dust.

Fearing it had crushed his house and killed his family, he ran back. He found his parents
and brothers and sisters trapped under a broad sheet of tin roof. They had stayed outside
and had been standing against the west wall when the helicopter hit and the roof came down
on these. They were not badly hurt. Aden worked his way past the huge black body of the
crashed helicopter, which had fallen sideways so that the bottom faced him. He helped pull
the roof off his family. Afraid that the helicopter would explode, they all ran across
Marehan Road, the wide, rutted dirt road just out their front door, to a friend's house
three doors up.

When a few minutes passed with no flames and no explosion, Aden came back to guard his
house. In Mogadishu, if you left your house open and undefended it would be looted. He
entered through the front door and stood in the courtyard by the uprooted tree. The wall
that faced the alley where the helicopter had fallen was now just a heap of stones and
dusty mortar. Aden saw an-American soldier climb out of the hulk, and then another with an
M46. He turned and ran back out the door to a green Volkswagen parked against the wall
across the same alley where the helicopter had fallen. He crawled under it, curling
himself up into a ball.