Black Hawk Down (23 page)

Goffena also noticed that every time he dropped low now he was drawing more fire himself.
He and Yacone heard the tick of bullets puncturing the metal walls of the airframe. Now
and then they saw a glowing arc out ahead, where rounds would clip their rotor blades and
spark, tracing a bright line out in front of the cockpit. Goffena began flying faster and
tried to keep to the south side of the crash site, where the fire didn't seem to be as
heavy. But this was hazardous, too. He knew that immediately to the south was a
neighborhood called Villa Somalia, which was known to have a sizable Aidid militia.

They worked the radio, urging immediate help.

--Alpha Five One [Matthews], this is Super Six Two [Yacone], we're going to need more
friendlies to secure crash site number two.

-- They were repeatedly assured that rescue was imminent. One of the Little Bird pilots
reported:

--We've got to get some ground folks down here or we're not going to be able to keep them
off. There are not enough people left onboard the aircraft to do it.

--Roger, stand by, we're working on it. . . Okay, listen, this is Adam Six Four
[Garrison], we've got a small Ranger element departing here in just a minute headed for
the second crash site. Someone needs to vector him in.

6

Dale Sizemore had been going nuts listening to the radio. These were his brothers, his
Ranger buddies out there pinned down, and they were getting hammered. He heard screams of
pain and fear in the voices of hardened men. This was the big fight they'd all been
preparing for all these years, and here he was, pacing around the radio with a fucking
cast on his arm!

Some days earlier, Sizemore had banged his elbow goofing off in the hangar. The task
force officers had challenged all the NCOs to a volleyball match, but before the contest
the lower ranks had ambushed their commanders and bound them to stretchers with flex cuffs
and duct tape. They then carried them out to the volleyball court and poured water on them
and humiliated them in various ways. Not all the brass had gone quietly. Ranger commander
Steele put up the fight you'd expect from a former lineman on Georgia's national
championship football team, and several of the Delta officers were even harder to take
down. Sizemore was the first guy to hit Harrell, the Delta lieutenant colonel, and it had
been like hitting a cliff. Sizemore was a thickly muscled kid, with legs like pilings, and
he'd been a decent wrestler in high school, but Harrell just tossed him to the concrete
like a flyweight. The fall dinged his elbow pretty good, but Sizemore hadn't given it a
second thought. He and five other Rangers finally got Harrell tied down. The next day, in
a chopper on a signature flight over the city, Sizemore had brushed the elbow on something
again and noticed it was tender and had gotten pretty big.

He woke up on his cot under the bug net early Friday morning, two days before the raid,
to find his elbow so swollen and painful he couldn't sleep. He swallowed four Motrins and
dozed the rest of the night sitting up. At dawn he was flown up to the hospital at the old
US embassy, where they pronounced cellulitis and bursitis and made a four-inch incision to
drain the joint. Then they stitched him back up, slapped a cast around it, put him on an
IV antibiotic drip, and told him he would be flying home to Fort Benning on Monday.

Sizemore was crushed. He had sat alone on the hospital bed looking out the window at
another bright African morning amazed at how much he would miss this place. This was
Sizemore's first real combat zone, and he loved it. The big blond SAW gunner from Illinois
had both the Ranger tab and scroll tattooed on his bulging left deltoid.

His buddies were his family.

And the hangar? Man, life in the hangar was a blast. They still had daily P.T. (physical
training) and had to pull guard duty and other shit details, but ever since they hit Mog
not even regular army Mickey Mouse could fill the available time. They played endless
volleyball. An empty storage room with concrete walls and a high ceiling turned out to be
a perfect Ping-Pong arena. The Romanians would come over and make the ball dipsy-doodle
like it had an IQ. There was a running game of gin rummy (wily little Private Othic had
accumulated a pile of winnings) and long sessions of board games like Risk, Scrabble, and
Stratego. When they weren't training or on some other detail, guys passed time reading
books, playing Gameboy, watching videotapes, writing home, or just hanging out. Sizemore
liked to retreat to a hallway out behind the main hangar where there was a steady ocean
breeze, clap on headphones, and just zone out for an hour now and then. Then there was the
beach. Even though the ocean had sharks . . . a beach was a beach. With sand and dust
everywhere and showers rationed every few days, beach mode more or less prevailed, at
least compared to the usual Ranger standards.

To anybody but Rangers, the accommodations were austere. Each man had only about a
four-by-eight-foot rectangle of space to call his own. An informal protocol had developed
about that space; guys would ask permission before stepping in or walking across. Each cot
had thin wooden poles sticking up from the corners from which, during the night, they
could drape the netting to keep out Somalia's ferocious mosquitoes. The hangar itself was
filthy. It had that musky Third World odor to it. The tarmac with all the choppers was
right outside the big open front doors so the steady salt-air breeze that came through was
scented sweetly with jet fuel and oil. Guys had to keep their weapons wrapped to ward off
the fine dust and sand that accumulated on everything. The roof leaked in about a dozen
spots. There were massive gaps here and there in the tin walls, so when it rained, water
poured in from all directions. Some of the units sandbagged off their space to keep the
floodwaters at bay, which broke up the cavernous space into warrens that had a more homey
feel. The air force guys had built themselves a nifty clubhouselike enclosure toward the
back. Before the rear wall was a big American flag draped from the rafters, alongside a
homemade poster showing their 3rd Battalion, 75th Regiment crest. The chopper crews were
just inside the front door, the D-boys had the corner of the hangar off to the left as you
entered, and the rest were Rangers, Sizemore's buddies. His bunk was right in the middle
toward the back. He could prop his boots on his rucksack and watch the rats scurry along
the intricate interlace of rafters overhead, or watch the hawks who were raising chicks in
a tree outside swoop in and nail pigeons in mid-flight.

And what could be cooler than living with the Delta operators, the “Dreaded D”? They were
the pros, totally squared away. On the eighteen-hour flight aboard the giant C-141
Starlifter when the air force blueshirts insisted that they all stay in their seats, the
D-boys just blew them off. Right after takeoff they unrolled thermal pads (the shiny metal
floor of the bird turns ice cold at altitude) and insulated ponchos, stuck earplugs in
their ears, donned eye patches, swallowed “Blue Bombers” (Halcion tablets), and racked
out. They taught little tricks like wrapping tape around the pins of their grenades to
make sure none accidentally snagged and pulled on a piece of equipment. They wore knee
pads when they went into a fight, which made it easy to quickly drop and shoot, and stay
there for hours if necessary. If it was hot, they didn't walk around in full battle gear.
They wore T-shirts or no shirts at all, and shorts and flip-flops. They all had
sunglasses. If they'd been up until all hours, they slept in a little in the morning. When
they weren't out on a mission, they took the weapons they thought they'd need and left
behind the stuff they didn't. With the D-boys, all of whom were ranked sergeant first
class or higher, rank meant nothing. They all, officers and noncoms, called each other by
their first names or nick-names. They were trained to think and act for themselves.
Nothing was done by the book for its own sake; they were guided by their own experience.
They knew their weapons and tactics and business better than anyone, and basically ran
their own lives, which was an extraordinary thing in the U.S. Army.

Some of the operators, like blond Norm Hooten or short, stocky Earl Fillmore or the
massively built Paul Howe, held training sessions with them, imparting the finer points of
death-dealing and mayhem. Hooten showed Specialist Dave Diemer how to better shoot his
modified SA from the hip, and got one of the Delta armorers to fit out a custom grip for
him. They supplied some of the guys custom-made black canvas bags to slip over a SAW,
which kept the drum of the grenade launcher from getting knocked off when descending the
rope (as often happened). Useful things. Fillmore, who was one of the youngest of the
operators at twenty-eight, showed them how it was possible to knock a guy unconscious by
delivering a hard kick to the thigh, shocking the femoral artery. Howe showed them
techniques for using cover in urban terrain, and how to take down a room. It was great.

Delta operator Dan Busch had been a Ranger just a few years back before he'd vanished
into the deeply covert. Some of the guys had known him before. Busch had changed a lot. He
was Dan now, for one thing, not Sergeant Busch. A few of the guys in Bravo Company had
known him as a hell-raiser. Busch had always been up to something fun. He'd surfaced here
in Mog a changed man. The wild man was now quietly religious and real mellow, a totally
different person. He spent a lot of time back on his cot just quietly cleaning his
weapons, and whipping all comers at Scrabble.

Some were legendary soldiers, like the easygoing veteran Tim Martin, who had a quick dry
wit, a big red blotch birthmark on his face, and a nickname, “Griz,” that fit. Griz was
over forty and had fought in nearly every conflict, open and secret, since Vietnam. He had
been in the army for more than twenty years. Nothing fooled or fazed him.

He had a wife and three daughters at home and talked about his plans of retiring the
following year and starting up a business. But the coolest of all was “Mace,” John
Macejunas, a cheerful, unpretentious former Ranger with a bright blond flattop and a
leathery tan that made him look like a surfer. Mace wasn't as burly as the other guys but
his physique redefined the concept of being in shape. He had so little body fat and was so
buff that he looked like a walking atlas of male musculature. In contrast to the easygoing
Griz, Mace's engine throttle was stuck in high gear. He worked out so much, doing
push-ups, sit-ups, leg lifts, chin-ups, and tormenting himself in ways of his own
devising, that the Rangers regarded him as some sort of mutant strain. Even the other
D-boys held Mace in awe. He was said to be absolutely fearless.

The Rangers had never had a chance to be around these guys before, even though they'd
trained together once or twice. It was like an ongoing tutorial on soldiering from the
best in the business.

The worst thing about hangar life, of course, was no women. There were women around, but
they were all nurses who worked in a different part of the base or over at the UN compound
and all were strictly off-limits. It was tough. There was plenty of porn around, of
course, and many of the Rangers were humorously casual about masturbation. Most were
discreet about it, but some had adopted a sort of crude defiance, standing up next to
their cot to announce, “I'm going to the port-o-pot to fuckin' jack off.” Specialist John
Collett, a SAW gunner with absolutely no shame about such matters, would brag about his
repertory, describing innovative new onanistic techniques- “Man, you shoulda seen me last
night. I shit you not, I was gasping!” and coming up with new and unusual places to jack
off. Collett claimed to have gotten a “harness-jack,” that is, to have masturbated hanging
from a parachute harness. It was pitiful. One of the air force PJs got a blow-up love doll
in the mail and almost nobody laughed. All this horniness under pressure produced even
more adolescent silliness than usual. Corporal Jim Cavaco walked around one night with a
length of nylon cord tied around the end of his penis, holding the rope up delicately
between two fingers, telling everybody, “Juss takin' the dawg out for a walk.”

They played a lot of Risk, the board game where color-coded armies vied to conquer the
world. It took hours, so it was great for killing time. Private First Class Jeff Young, a
tall, fair-haired RTO (Radio Telephone Operator) from upstate New York with big glasses
perched on a nose too small for his long face, had grown up playing Risk with his five
bothers and was so good at it that the other guys formed coalitions to knock him out
first. Young and his sergeant, Mike Goodale, had borrowed the game from the D-boys early
on and monopolized it so much the Delta squadron had to have another game shipped over.
Young and Goodale set it up in front of their racks, and there was usually the same bunch
of guys stooped around it. Over the board, privates and sergeants and even officers all
forgot about rank. They'd be teasing each other, yelling at each other, just like a
regular bunch of guys.

Even the nightly mortar attack was kind of a joke. The Skinnies would lob rounds into the
fenced-off compound that landed with a loud crump, like something very large falling on a
big hollow stack of tin. It freaked guys out at first. They'd drop or dive for cover. But
the Skinnies had such lousy aim that they rarely hit anything, and after a while guys
would just drop and cheer when one landed. Somebody, probably it was Dom Pilla, discovered
that by lifting the big door to the soda and water cooler and then just letting it fall,
it made a crump just like a mortar round. He sent guys diving once or twice before
everybody wised Up. Pretty soon when they heard the sound guys didn't even bother to drop.
They'd cheer. One night a mortar hit so close Sizemore could see sparks from the shrapnel
hitting the outer wall of the hangar. Everybody just clapped and hooted. Across the road,
spooked air force medical personnel, not exactly hardened battle types, were holding hands
and singing prayer songs while the crazy Hoo-ahs across the road were cheering like mad.
The boys in the hangar had even started a pool. For a buck you could pick a ten-minute
time slot, and if a mortar round fell in your slot, yen took the pool. So after everybody
cheered, they would run to check the sheet to see who'd won. Nobody had figured out what
they'd do with the pot if the mortar happened to fall on the winner.