Black Hawk Down (26 page)

It didn't take long for the shooting gallery to open. Sammies would pop up in windows or
doorways or around corners and spray bursts of automatic fire. Most were clearly amateurs.
The kick of the weapon and their own desire to stay behind cover meant they were unlikely
to hit anyone. Yurek figured these were guys just trying not to lose face with their
group. They would let a burst fly with their head turned away and eyes closed, fling the
weapon, and run. Yurek didn't even bother returning fire for some of these. But some of
the men who popped up in windows were different. They didn't shoot instantly. They took
aim. They meant business. He figured these were Aidid's militia guys. There was usually
one militia guy for every four or five who shot at them.

Yurek and his men invariably shot first. During the long boring weeks before this
mission, they had trained almost daily. Captain Steele had insisted on it. They had
unlimited ammo to work with, and out in the desert they had set up a variety of shooting
ranges, including this very drill. In practice, targets would pop out unexpectedly. They
had different shapes and colors. The rules were, shoot if you see the blue triangle, but
hold your fire if it's a green square. Yurek felt the benefit of all that practice. He and
his men engaged in a running series of gunfights. He shot one man in a doorway just ten
feet away. The man stepped out and took aim, a bushy-haired, dusty man with baggy brown
pants and a lightweight blue cotton shirt with an AK. He didn't shoot instantly, and
that's what killed him. Yurek's eyes met his for a split second as he pulled the trigger.
The Somali just fell forward out into the alley without getting off a shot. He was the
second man Yurek had ever shot.

Specialist Lance Twombly blasted at one man with the SAW, shooting the big gun from his
hip. The Sammy had stepped out from a corner with an AK and started shooting. Both he and
the Ranger blasted away at each other not more than fifteen yards apart. Twombly saw his
rounds - there must have been forty of them -chipping the walls and spitting up dirt all
around his target, and he never hit the man. Nor did the Somali hit Twombly. The Sammy ran
off. Twombly just kept on moving, cursing himself for being such a bad shot.

Yurek could not believe it when they made it the entire three blocks without any of his
men being hit. But there was no respite. At the intersection of the main road he looked
downhill and saw Waddell against the wall on his side of the street. Across the street at
the opposite corner, behind a big tree and car, were Nelson and Sergeant Alan Barton,
who'd roped in from the CSAR bird. Twombly moved down that side of the street and crossed
the road to add his SAW to Nelson's M-60. There were two dead Somalis stretched out on the
ground by the car. Across the street from them, diagonally from Waddell, was a little
green Volkswagen. DiTomasso and some men from the CSAR bird were crouched there.

Yurek ran across the road to the car to link up with DiTomasso. He passed the alley and
saw the downed helicopter to his right. Just as he arrived, the Volkswagen began rocking
from the impact of heavy rounds, thunk thunk thunk thunk. Whatever this weapon was, its
bullets were poking right through the car. Yurek and the others all hit the ground. He
couldn't tell where the shooting was coming from.

“Nelson! Nelson, what is it?” he shouted across the street.

“It's a big gun!” Nelson shouted back.

Yurek and DiTomasso looked at each other and rolled their eyes.

“Where is it?” he shouted across to Nelson.

Nelson pointed up the street, and Yurek edged out to look around the car. There were
three dead Somalis on the street. Yurek stood and pulled them together, stacking them,
which enabled him to slide out to his left a few feet behind cover. He saw two Somalis
stretched out on the ground up the street north behind a big gun mounted on a biped. From
that position the gun controlled the street. Behind the tree across the street, they
couldn't see Nelson, and he'd have been a fool to expose his position.

Yurek had a LAW (Light Antitank Weapon) strapped to his back that he'd been carrying
around on every mission for weeks. It was a lightweight disposable plastic launcher (it
weighed only three pounds). He unstrapped it, then climbed up and leaned forward on the
car, taking aim with the weapon's flip-up crosshairs. He guessed they were two hundred
meters away. The rocket launched with a punch of a back blast, and Yurek watched it zoom
straight in on his target and explode with a flash and a loud woom! The gun went flipping
up in the air.

He was accepting congratulations on his shooting when the thunk thank thunk resumed. The
rocket had evidently landed just short, close enough to send the weapon flying and kick up
a cloud of dirt, but evidently not close enough to destroy it or stop its shooters. He saw
them up the street now kneeling behind the weapon, which they'd righted again on its
biped. Yurek picked up a LAW that someone had discarded nearby, but it looked bent and
crushed. He couldn't get it to open up. So he loaded a 40 mm 203 round into the grenade
launcher mounted under the barrel of his M-16. This time his aim was better. You could
actually see the fat 203 round spiral into a target, and this one spun square into the
center. The two Sammies just fell over sideways in opposite directions. He presumed the
gun was destroyed. When the smoke cleared he could see it just lying there between the two
men. No one else came out to get it. Yurek and the others kept a good eye on that gun
until nightfall.

-10-

Barton and Nelson were behind a tree on the northeast corner of the big intersection
directly west of the crash. A little Fiat was parked against the tree. It looked like the
driver had left it with the gas cap wedged tightly against the tree to prevent Mogadishu's
alert and enterprising thieves from siphoning the gas. Nelson had his M-60 machine gun
propped on the roof of the car with belts of ammo draped over the side. From the two dead
Somalis on the street alongside the car, blood formed red-brown pools in the sand.

“It can't get much worse than this,” Barton said.

Just then an RPG exploded against the opposite wall with a brilliant flash and a
chest-wrenching blast. This made them laugh. Laughter was a balm. It held panic at bay and
it seemed to come easily. In these extreme circumstances it became unbearably funny just
to act normal. If they could still laugh they were all right. This was definitely more
fire than they'd ever expected to experience in Mogadishu. Nobody had anticipated a
serious fight from these characters. Nelson wondered where his friends Casey Joyce and Dom
Pilla and Kevin Snodgrass were and how they were faring.

It was raining RPGs. They would drop down from the north and hit the side of the stone
buildings and splash along the walls, great streaking explosions, like someone throwing
fireballs.

“Goddamn, Twombly, this is unreal,” Nelson said.

He crouched down behind a two-foot concrete ramp between the tree and the wall and was
fiddling with his M-60 when a Somali ducked out from behind a tin shed about ten feet up
the street and fired at him and Twombly. Nelson knew he was dead. Rounds hit between his
legs and he felt them passing next to his face.

Twombly dropped the man.

Nelson saw Twombly mouth the words, “You okay?”

“I don't know.”

Twombly had fired his SAW about two feet in front of Nelson's face, so close that his
cheeks and nose had been singed by the muzzle's heat. The blast had hammered his eardrums,
blinded him, and his head was still ringing.

“That hurt,” Nelson complained. “I can't hear and I can't see. Don't you ever fucking
shoot your weapon off that close to me again!”

Just then another Somali took a shot at them and Twombly returned fire with his rifle
directly over Nelson's head. After that, Nelson wouldn't hear a thing for many hours.

-11-

Sergeant Paul Howe and the three men of his Delta team had still been back on the target
house roof when they saw the CSAR team roping down from a Black Hawk about a quarter mile
northeast. They watched while the Black Hawk took the RPG hit with men still on its ropes,
and were amazed at how the pilot held the bird steady after being hit until the last men
were down. Howe knew something was going on over there, but since he had no radio link to
the command net and had been too busy inside the target house to notice that a Black Hawk
had been shot down, he didn't know why the CSAR team was roping in.

He got the full story when he was summoned downstairs by the Delta ground commander,
Captain Scott Miller.

“We're going to move over there and secure it,” Miller said. He explained that the ground
convoy, which was loading the Somali prisoners out front, would drive over to the crash
site. The rest of them were going to move there on foot. Ranger Chalk One, led by Captain
Steele, would take the lead. The operators would follow, and Ranger Chalk Three on the
south end of the target, led by Sergeant Sean Watson, would bring up the rear.

Howe knew the fight was bad and worsening out on the streets. The idea of moving on foot
over to where he'd seen the CSAR bird rope its crew in was daunting. He thought; this is
going to be fun.

Captain Steele saw the operators come spilling out of the courtyard, moving east toward
him. This posed a novel situation for the Ranger commander. He and his men had trained to
provide protection for Delta, but the two units didn't mix. Each had its own chain of
command, its own separate radio links, and, most important, its own way of doing things.
Now they were being thrown together for this move over to the downed Black Hawk. Steele
and Miller conferred briefly about how to proceed, and agreed that the Rangers should take
front and rear positions.

This column of about eighty men would set off on foot just minutes after Lieutenant
Colonel McKnight's ill-fated convoy departed the target building. While that convoy
wandered hopelessly lost through the city, getting hammered, and while Durant's Black Hawk
was crashing about a mile southwest, this force of D-boys and Rangers were having their
own tragic difficulties moving on foot to the first crash site.

They hadn't run more than a block when Sergeant Aaron Williamson got hit. He had been
shot earlier, the round had taken off the tip of his index finger, but Williamson had kept
fighting. Lieutenant Perino heard someone scream, and turned to see Williamson rolling on
the street, writhing and screaming, holding his left leg.

“I've got a man down,” Perino radioed up to Steele.

“Pick him up and keep on moving,” Steele said.

As Howe and his team ran past Williamson, there were five Rangers stooped around the
wounded man.

“Keep moving and let the medic handle it!” Howe shouted at them.

Williamson was carried back up the street to one of the Humvees in the ground convoy,
which was about ready to roll.

Specialist Stebbins, the company clerk along for his first real mission, was out in
front. His blocking position had been at the southeast corner, and they were moving east
now. He trotted crouched and careful, staying away from the walls as the D-boys had
advised. Every few feet down the road a doorway would open into a small courtyard. As
Stebbins came upon one door, a Somali came running out of the building into the courtyard
and Stebbins fired. It was instinctive. The man startled him. Bang bang. Two rounds. The
man dropped to a sitting position, clutching his chest and looking amazed. Then he slumped
over forward and began to rock and moan. He was a big man with short hair.

He was wearing this disco-style bright blue shirt with long sleeves and a big collar.
Most of the Sammies were dusty and wore shabby clothes but this man was dressed nicely,
and he was clean. He had on corduroy bell-bottom pants and his belt had a big die-cast
metal buckle. He seemed completely out of place. Stebbins had just shot him. He had never
shot anyone before.

This all took place in seconds but it seemed much longer. Stebbins was readying to shoot
the man again when Private Carlos Rodriguez grabbed his weapon.

“Don't waste your rounds on him, Stebby,” he said. “Just keep moving.”

Steele, who had a radio strapped to his broad back, fell farther and farther behind
Lieutenant Perino and the rest of Chalk One. The idea was to stay spread out and provide
covering fire for each other as they went through intersections. But right away, to
Steele's dismay, the formation broke down. The D-boys ignored the marching orders and just
kept moving forward. These were men trained to think for themselves, and act independently
in battle, and now they were doing it. Each of the operators had a radio ear-piece under
their little plastic hockey helmets -Steele called them “skateboard helmets” - and a
microphone that wrapped around to their mouth. So they wore usually in constant touch with
each other. When the radios were not working or when the noise level was too high, as it
was now, the D-boys communicated expertly with hand signals.

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.

It was typical of the problems he'd had with Delta from the start For better or worse,
the attitudes and practices of the elite commandos started to rub off on his Rangers when
they began bunking together in the hangar. Before long, everywhere you looked was a
teenage soldier in sunglasses with rolled-up shirtsleeves. Privates would pull guard duty
in helmet, flak vest, gym shorts, and their regulation brown T-shirts. Younger soldiers
began showing more and more impatience with what they saw as meaningless robot-Ranger
formality.

When Steele cracked down, a lot of them thought it was because their captain felt
threatened by the D-boys. In the year before this deployment, the broad-beamed former
lineman moved through his men like muttering Jove through his hinds, the meanest, manliest
man in the army. When Specialist Dave Diemer had defeated all comers in an arm wrestling
contest, Steele took him on and beat him -leaving Diemer whining that the captain had
cheated.