Black Hawk Down (27 page)

Steele gave the unapologetic impression that he could break you with his bare hands if it
weren't for his strict devotion to Jesus and army discipline. He was unbending even when
his senior noncoms thought it was time to bend, like the time back at Fort Bragg when he'd
ordered all the men awakened after midnight because they'd collapsed, with permission from
their platoon sergeants, into bunks without cleaning their weapons after a days-long
grueling training mission. But no matter how tough Steele was, of course, it was the
D-boys who occupied the absolute pinnacle of the macho feeding chain. Most of them were
NCOs, and not only did their very presence deflate any of the standard displays of gruff
manhood, they were serenely and rather obviously unimpressed with Steele's captaincy.

The disdain was mutual. Steele accepted that these operators were good at their jobs, but
he wasn't in awe of them. He found their civilian manner and contemptuous attitude toward
Ranger discipline hard to take. Sure, it was a good idea to encourage individual
initiative and creative thinking in combat, but some of these guys had strayed so far from
traditional army norms it seemed unhealthy. They could be comically arrogant. When they'd
gotten a list of potential target sites, for instance, the D-boys had divvied them up
among different teams. Each was assigned to draw up an assault plan. Since his men were
involved, Steele had sat in on the meeting when the various schemes were presented. The
captain's experience with such a planning session was like this: You sat there and took
notes and asked questions only to make sure you got things down correctly and then saluted
on your way out. The D-boys' meeting was a free-for-all. One group would present its plan
and somebody would pipe up, “Why, that's the stupidest thing I ever heard,” which would
provoke a sturdy “Fuck you,” which quickly degenerated into guys screaming at each other.
It looked to Steele like they were about to assume Kung Fu stances and have it out

Steele could imagine what would happen if a company of Rangers operated that way. Some of
his men were still boys. As far as the captain could tell, most had just emerged from a
lifetime of lounging on sofas eating Fritos and watching MTV. Basic and Ranger training
had shaped most of them up reasonably well, but the average private in Bravo company still
had a long way to go before qualifying as a professional soldier. There were good,
time-tested reasons for Hoo-ah discipline.

It was easy to see why Steele was destined for the losing end of a popularity contest
with the D-boys. Most of his men didn't think through the causes. They saw it all as an
ego conflict.

Like the time Steele was standing in line with his men at mess, and spotted Delta
Sergeant Norm Hooten carrying a rifle with the safety off. Ranger rules required that any
weapon, loaded or unloaded, have the safety on at all times when at the base. It was an
eminently sensible rule, a basic principle of handling weapons safely.

He tapped the blond operator on the shoulders and pointed it out.

Hooten had held up his index finger and said, “This is my safety.”

He showed Steele up right in front of his men.

Now the very breakdowns the captain had feared were happening when it mattered most.
There was nothing he could do about it. As his men passed by helter-skelter, Steele fell
back near the middle of the pack. They'd sort things out at the crash site. If they could
find it. Nobody was sure exactly where it was.

In short order, Howe and his Delta team were in front of the force. Howe saw bullets
skipping off the dirt and skimming down the walls, chipping the concrete. He was way past
worrying about staying in formation. The street was a kill zone. Survival meant moving
like your hair was on fire. It was time to lead by example. The goal was to punch through
to the downed helicopter, and every second mattered. If they failed to link up, then there
would be two weak forces instead of a single strong one. Two perimeters to defend instead
of one. So they moved quickly but also smartly. As Howe moved he thought about making
every one of his shots count, and keeping his back to a wall at all times. They were in a
360-degree battlefield; so keeping a wall behind him meant one angle he couldn't be shot
from. At each crossroads he and his team would pause, watch, and listen. Were bullets
hitting walls? Bouncing off the streets? Were the shots going left to right or right to
left? Every bit of experience and practical knowledge was useful now for staying alive.
Were they machine-gun bullets or AKs? An AK only has twenty-five to thirty rounds in a
magazine, so if you waited for the lull, Sammy would be reloading when you ran. The most
important thing was to keep moving. One of the hardest things in the world to hit is a
moving target.

He and his team had spent years training with each other, had fought together in Panama
and other places, and moved with confidence and authority. Howe felt that they were the
perfect soldiers for this situation. They'd learned to filter out the confusion, put up a
mental curtain. The only information that came fully through was the most critical at that
moment. Howe could ignore the pop of a rifle or the snap of a nearby round. It was usually
just somebody shooting airballs. It would take chips flying from a wall near him to make
him react. As they moved down the street it was one fluid process - scan for threats, find
a safe place to go next, shoot, move, and scan for threats.... The key was to keep moving.
With the volume of fire on these streets, to stop meant to die. The greatest danger was in
getting pinned down.

The Rangers followed as well as they could, leapfrogging across the intersections.
Stebbins and 60-gunner Private Brian Heard kept up with them, reassured just to be close
to the D-boys. These guys knew how to stay alive. Stebbins kept telling himself, this is
dangerous, but we'll make it. It's okay. At the intersections he would take a knee and
shoot while the man in front of him ran. Then the man behind him would tap his shoulder
and he would take off, just closing his eyes and praying and running for all he was worth.

Sergeant Goodale, who had once bragged to his mother how eager he was for combat, felt
terrified. He was waiting for his turn to sprint across a street when one of the D-boys
tapped him on the shoulder. Goodale recognized him:

It was the short stocky one, Earl, Sergeant First Class Earl Fillmore, a good guy.
Fillmore must have seen how scared Goodale looked.

“You okay?” he asked.

“I'm okay.”

Fillmore winked at him and said, “It's all right. We're coming out of this thing, man.”

It calmed Goodale. He believed Fillmore.

By the time they were three blocks over, Howe's team was way out front. With them were
Stebbins, Heard, Goodale, Perino, Corporal Jamie Smith, and a few other Rangers. They
turned left onto Marehan Road, where the alley ended. The wide dirt road sloped uphill
slightly and then downhill for several blocks, so when they made the turn they were just
shy of the crest of a hill. Downhill to the south they could see Sammies running every
which way. Over the crest of the hill to the north, Howe saw signal smoke from what must
have been the crash. They were about two hundred yards away.

There was a blizzard of fire at that intersection. Automatic rifle fire and RPGs came
from all directions. Howe felt the force was in peril of getting stuck and cut to ribbons.
He shouted back down the street to Captain Miller, “Follow me!” and plunged straight down
the left side. Stebbins and several other Rangers followed. Perino, Goodale, Smith, and
some others followed Hooten's Delta team across the street and started down the right
wall. Immediately behind them was Sergeant First Class John Boswell's Delta team.

An RPG exploded on the wall near Howe and his men. Howe felt the wallop of pressure in
his ears and chest and dropped to one knee. One of his men had been hit on the left side
with a small piece of shrapnel. 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. No one was inside. They caught their breath and
reloaded their weapons. Running with all that gear was exhausting. The body armor was like
wearing a wet suit. They were sweating profusely and breathing heavily. Howe drew his
knife and cut away the back of his buddy's shirt to check the wound. There was a small
hole in the man's back with about a two-inch swollen, bruised ring around it. There was
almost no blood. The swelling had closed the hole.

“You're good to go,” Howe told him, and they were out the door and moving again.

Moving up in front of Perino, Goodale saw the familiar desert uniforms down the street
and inwardly rejoiced. They'd made it! Once they'd linked up, the convoy would arrive and
they could all roll out of this hell. The sun was getting low in the sky. Goodale had
promised his fiancée, Kira, that he'd call tonight. He had to get back in time to make
that call.

Goodale ran up behind Sergeant Chuck Elliot, who was squatting at the corner of the first
intersection on the slope, shooting east. Goodale pointed his gun down Marehan Road. He
saw Howe and his team pushing on ahead across the street, in shadow. The low sun still lit
Goodale's side of the street brightly. Because they were on a slope, he could shoot over
the heads of the men down the street at Somalis moving three or four blocks north. It was
a long shot, but he had no other targets. It occurred to him that no one was shooting to
the left, the alley west. It blinded him to look that way. Goodale turned to squint into
the light and pop off a few suppressive rounds when he felt a shooting pain. His right leg
seized up and he fell over backward, right into Perino.

He said, “Ow!”

A bullet had entered his right thigh and passed through him, leaving a big exit wound on
his right buttock. What immediately flashed into Goodale's mind was a story he'd heard
about this 10th Mountain Division guy who had lost his hand the week before when a round
detonated the grenade in the LAW he was carrying. He struggled to get the LAW off his
shoulder.

Perino couldn't tell what Goodale was doing.

“Where are you hit?” he asked.

“Right in the ass.”

Goodale dropped the LAW and yelled to Elliot, “There's a LAW right there!”

Eliot obligingly picked it up.

Perino got back on the radio to Steele, who was now trailing the column.

“Captain, I've got another man hit.”

“Pick him up and keep moving,” Steele insisted.

Instead, Perino moved on across the intersection with some of the other Rangers from
Chalk One, and left Goodale with Sergeant Bart Bullock, the same Delta medic who had
earlier in the fight helped patch up Ranger Todd Blackburn after his fall from the Black
Hawk. Both Bullock and medic Kurt Schmid had rejoined their Delta units at the target
house after sending Blackburn back to base in the three-Humvee convoy (the one on which
Sergeant Pilla had been killed). Schmid was now moving a block north with Perino and
several other Rangers. Goodale lay back on the dirt as Bullock looked him over.

“You got tagged,” Bullock said. “You're all right though. No problem.”

Goodale was disgusted. Game over. It was the same feeling he'd had getting injured in a
football game. They carried you off the field and you were done. It was disappointing, but
if the going had been particularly rough it could also be a relief. He took off his
helmet, then saw an RPG fly past no more than six feet in front of him and explode with a
stupendous wallop about twenty feet away. He put his helmet back on. This game was most
definitely not over.

“We need to get off this street,” Bullock said.

He dragged Goodale into a small courtyard, and the Delta team headed by Sergeant Hooten
hopped in with them. Goodale asked Bullock for his canteen, which the medic had taken off
when removing his gear. Bullock fished it out of Goodale's butt pack and discovered a
bullet hole clean through it from the same round that had passed through his body. There
was still water in the canteen.

“You'll want to keep this,” Bullock said.

With the men at the rear of the column, Captain Steele's overriding goal was to
consolidate his Ranger force and reestablish some order. Time was essential here. Steele
had been told the convoy would probably reach the crash site before he and his men did. He
had just heard on the radio

that another Black Hawk had gone down (Durant's), which meant things were that much more
urgent. From the C2 bird, Harrell explained:

-We are going to try to get everyone consolidated at the northern site and exfil everyone
off the northern site and move to the southern crash site, over.

Steele had about sixty men to account for when those vehicles arrived, and right now he
had only a vague idea where they all were.

As he arrived at the intersection at the top of the rise, he ran across to the right side
of the street with Lieutenant James Lechner and several other Rangers. Sergeant Watson and
the remainder of Chalk Three were the last to turn the corner.

Steele moved over the slight rise and started down the hill. He had gone only about ten
yards when a burst of fire forced him and those with him to drop. He was on his belly,
with his wide face nearly in the sand. Alongside to his left was Sergeant Chris Atwater,
his radioman. Prone to Atwater's left was Lieutenant Lecher, Steele's second-in-command.
Atwater and Steele, both big men, were trying to take cover behind a tree with a trunk
only about one foot wide.

About three strides to their right, Delta team leader Hooten was in a steel doorway to
the small courtyard where Bullock had dragged Goodale. Steele was watching another team of
operators working their way up the street ahead of him. He intended to follow, but just
then one of the D-boys, Fillmore, went limp. His little helmet jerked up and back and
blood came spouting out of his head. It was obviously fatal. Fillmore just crumpled.