Black Hawk Down (49 page)

Huband and Smith had brought a recorder. They told him he didn't have to say anything.
The reporters pitied Durant, and tried to reassure him. Huband said he'd done a lot of
reporting in Somalia, and had developed a sense for when things were bad and when they
weren't. He said his sense was that these people meant Durant no harm.

Durant weighed talking to them and decided it was better to communicate with the outside
world than not. He agreed to discuss only the things that had happened to him since the
crash. So with the tape recorder rolling, he briefly described the crash and his capture.
Then Huband asked why the battle had happened, and why so many people had died. Durant
said something he would later regret:

“Too many innocent people are getting killed. People are angry because they see civilians
getting killed; I don't think anyone who doesn't live here can understand what is going
wrong here. Americans mean well. We did try to help. Things have gone wrong.”

It was that “things have gone wrong” line that haunted him after the reporters left. Who
was he to pronounce a verdict on the American mission? He should have just said, “I'm a
soldier and I do what I'm told.”

He grew depressed. He really did believe things had gone wrong, but he felt he had
stepped over a line by saying it

Durant stayed down until the next day when he heard his wife Lorrie's voice on the BBC.
She had made a statement to the press. He listened Intently to her voice. At the end of
her statement, Lorrie said four words that brought tears to his eyes. What she said were
the four words whose initials the pilot had penned at the bottom of his note-still visible
despite the Red Cross scratches. it was the motto of his unit, the 160th Special
Operations Aviation Regiment.

Lorrie said, “Like you always say, Mike, Night Stalkers Don't Quit”

His message of defiance had gotten through.

-23-

In the week following the battle, the men of Task Force Ranger worked through a broad
range of emotions as they girded themselves for another fight. They were furious at the
Somalis and filled with grief for their dead comrades. They felt disgust for the press
that kept showing the horrible images of the dead soldiers being humiliated in the city,
less than a mile or two from where they sat. They watched with frustration as a fresh
Delta squadron and Ranger Company arrived, and grudgingly accepted a backseat, although
every man was prepared and expected to be sent back out into the city. They observed the
swagger and casual boasting of the new arrivals with the weary eyes of experience. They
all knew that if Intel located Durant, they'd be going in with more force than Mogadishu
had yet seen. The idea of making this fight was both terrifying and grimly necessary. It
was a prospect they both dreaded and welcomed. It was odd that the two emotions could
stand side by side. So the men who'd come through the battle unhurt worked to get their
weapons, vehicles, minds, and hearts ready.

Then, two days after the fight, a Somali mortar round fell just outside the hangar and
killed Sergeant Matt Rierson, leader of the Delta team that had first stormed the target
house and taken the Somali targets captive, and whose resolve and experience had helped
shore up the lost convoy during the worst of the fight. It seemed bitterly unfair to have
come through the storm unhurt only to be felled while standing outside the hangar in idle
conversation two days later. Severely injured with Rierson was Dr. Rob Marsh, the Delta
surgeon. Alert though in great pain and bleeding profusely, Marsh helped direct the medics
who gave him emergency care.

Rangers struggled to accept their profound losses. There was no doubt that they had more
than held their own in the battle. What other ninety-nine men would have survived a long
afternoon and night besieged by the well-armed angry citizenry of a city of more than a
million? Still, each death mocked their former cockiness and appetite for battle. A whole
generation of American soldiers had served careers without experiencing a horror of an
all-out firefight. Now another had. There was a recognition in the faces of the survivors,
a hard-won wisdom.

Sergeant Eversmann mentally replayed his every move during the battle, as he would still
be doing years later, from the moment he accidentally tore the headphones out of the
hovering Black Hawk to finding Private Blackburn broken and unconscious on the street, to
watching his men get hit, one after the other, to that long and bloody ride on the lost
convoy. Why had he kept them out on the street when the fire grew so bad? Shouldn't he
have directed them to break down a door and move indoors? How did they get so lost on the
ride back? He'd lost Casey Joyce on that ride. There was nothing he could have done about
that. Word was that doctors might be able to save Scotty Galentine's thumb. They had sewed
Galentine's hand with the thumb into his stomach, hoping to foster regeneration of the
blood vessels they'd need to reconnect it. And word was that Blackburn was going to make
it, too. He was conscious again, although he had no memory of his fall or anything else
that happened on the street. He would recover, but never be the same guy his buddies
remembered before the fall. The rest of the injuries were minor. But Eversmann had only
about six of his guys left from Chalk One, the one led in by Captain Steele and Lieutenant
Perino, they'd lost Jamie Smith, whose agonizing death at the first crash site would
continue to haunt Perino and Sergeant Schmid, the Delta medic who'd torn open Smith's
wound trying to save him. Smith's death would become the most controversial of the battle,
since his was the one life that might have been saved if the force around Wolcott's crash
site had been rescued sooner. Carlos Rodriguez, the Ranger shot in the crotch at crash
site one, was going to recover as well. Dale Sizemore had fended off the doctors who still
wanted him sent home because of his elbow. He paced the hangar hoping for another chance
to avenge his friends. Steve Anderson wrestled with feelings of guilt. So many others had
died or been hurt. Why had he escaped injury? He wasn't sure what made him angrier, the
reluctance he'd felt about joining the fight or the politicians in Washington who'd gotten
so many of he friends killed and hurt chasing a stupid warlord in Mogadishu. He would grow
angrier and angrier brooding

over it, and as time went by he was filled with distrust for the system he had enlisted
to defend. Mike Goodale, his wounded thigh and rear end bandaged and healing, would be
back home in Illinois with his girlfriend Kira before the week was out Goodale asked Kira
to many him the first time he talked to her on the phone from Germany. He'd seen how short
life could be and was determined not to put an important thing off ever again. Lieutenant
Lechner faced a long recovery, as doctor at Walter Reed Army Hospital painstakingly
stimulated bone growth to heal the hole an AK-47 round had driven through his shin.
Undergoing virtually the same procedure in the bed next to his was Sergeant John Burns,
whose lower leg had been shattered by a bullet on the last convoy. Stebbins was home with
his wife within the week.. The garrulous company clerk would receive a Silver Star for his
part in the fight, and was on his way to becoming a legend in the company, an example of
how even those in the unit's least glamorous jobs were Rangers, too.

The ground convoy had been decimated. Only about half of the fifty-two men who had ridden
out on October 3 were still at the hangar. Their vehicles were wrecked. Nearly all of the
convoy's leaders had been injured and had been flown home, including Lieutenant Colonel
Danny McKnight. Clay Othic and he buddy Eric Spalding were back home from Germany before
the week was out. On the long transport flight home, his right arm still bandaged and
disabled, Othic had scribbled a final entry in his Mogadishu diary with his unsteady left
hand: “Sometimes you get the bear, sometimes the bear gets you.” Within days, he and
Spalding, their wounds bandaged and healing, made the drive home to Missouri. They'd
promised themselves to catch the end of deer-hunting season. Cruising the interstate in
Spalding's pickup they listened to occasional radio reports about the unfinished business
in Mogadishu, a million miles away.

Worst hit was the Delta squadron, which had lost the devout Dan Busch, little Earl
Fillmore, Randy Shughart, Gary Gordon, Griz, and then Rierson. Brad Hallings, the Delta
sniper whose leg was sheared off inside Super Six Eight would learn to get around so well
on an artificial limb that he was able to rejoin the unit. Paul Leonard, who had the calf
of his left leg blown away manning a Mark-19 on the lost convoy, would end up doing a long
recuperation and rehab at Walter Reed with Burns, Lechner, Galentine, and some of the
other more seriously injured guys. President Clinton visited them there one day about two
weeks after the battle. He came without fanfare, and seemed shocked and
uncharacteristically speechless when confronted with the flesh-and-bone consequences of
the fight. The men had been given curt instructions to keep their opinions of Clinton, if
negative, to themselves. Galentine posed for a snapshot with the president, a T-shirt
pulled over the hand sewed to his abdomen. In the snapshot both men looked equally
startled to be in each other's company.

The war wasn't over yet in Mogadishu, however. The

soldiers who had come through the fight unscathed expected things to get worse before
they got better. They did what they could to salute their fallen brothers and move on.

In the days following the battle the Night Stalkers erected a makeshift memorial before
the JOC in memory of the men they'd lost. General Garrison assembled all of the men for a
memorial service, and captured their feelings of sadness, fear, and resolve with the
famous martial speech from Shakespeare's Henry V:

Whoever does not have the stomach for this fight, let him depart. Give him money to speed
his departure since we wish not to die in that man's company. Whoever lives past today and
comes home safely will rouse himself every year on this day, show his neighbor his scars,
and tell embellished stories of all their great feats of battle. These stories will teach
his son and from this day until the end of the world we shall be remembered. We few, we
happy few, we band of brothers; for whoever has shed his blood with me shall be my
brother. And those men afraid to go will think themselves lesser men as they hear of how
we fought and died together.

-24-

Willi Frank got the word about her husband exactly a week after he was reported missing.
It had been a terrible week. Those who hadn't gotten final word on the fate of their men
had continued to scrutinize the news photos and video-tapes of the dead.

One of the most widely circulated shots of a body being dragged through the streets, the
one with the left leg bent up awkwardly, was Tommie Field. The other of the dragged
bodies, the one most often seen on TV, was Randy Shughart. The still photo of a body
draped backward over a handcart was Bill Cleveland. There was no official confirmation
from the army, but the families knew.

Willi was attending the funeral service for Cliff Wolcott when she heard beepers go off
in several places around the church. Two of the beepers that sounded were held by members
of her support unit.

They took her aside after the service. Willi thought they were escorting her to spend a
few minutes with Chris Wolcott. Instead, they told her Ray's body had been identified.

“How do you know it was Ray?” she asked them. “Was his hair gray?”.

The hair was gone on the body, they said, but they described his remains. The body had
been clothed, they told her. She asked them to describe the pants, the underpants.

Ray had left on such short notice that Willi hadn't had time to dry out his military
skivvies. Instead she'd packed his civilian underwear. When they told her what kind of
shorts he was wearing, she knew.

-25-

In his second week of captivity, Durant was moved again, this time to what appeared to be
a private residence with a perimeter fence. He was given a box of gifts from the Red
Cross. One of the items in the box was a pocket Bible.

Keeping track of time was one of the skills Durant had been taught in survival training.
Prisoners of war in Vietnam had found that having some sense of time elapsed and ordering
the events of each day, no matter how mundane, helped to keep them sane. Keeping a record
was an act of faith. It implied you would eventually be released and have a story to tell.

He was not an especially religious man, but Durant found his own use for the Bible. He
began reconstructing the events of his captivity in the margins of it, using code words,
beginning with his crash. He wrote:

“Bump,” recalling the sensation of being hit by the RPG.

“Spin.”

“Horizon,” for the blurring of earth and sky as the chopper spun down.

And so forth. He pressed on, eventually reconstructing the entire term of his captivity
almost hour by hour. The margins of the Bible were beginning to fill with his jottings.

Firimbi watched the pilot studying and making notes in his Bible and assumed Durant was a
very religious man.

“If you convert to Islam, you will be freed,” the captor said.

“You pray to your God, and I'll pray to mine, and maybe we'll both be released,” Durant
joked.

On the radio they played selections of music that Durant liked.

During one of his nights in captivity, Durant had a dream. He dreamed he was one of the
Rangers, and that he was supposed to get on a chopper with Chalk Four. Instead he stumbled
blindly, asking, “Where's Chalk Four? Where's Chalk Four?” He didn't recognize the faces
of the people he was questioning. Suddenly, everyone else in the dream was gone. Overhead
a chopper rose into the sky and flew off, leaving him alone on the ground.

-26-

When Robert Oakley arrived in Mogadishu on October 8, Aidid was still in hiding. It took
several days to arrange, but he eventually met with the warlord's clan. He told the Habr
Gidr leaders that the U.S. military operation against Aidid was over and that Task Force
Ranger's original mission had ended. The Somalis were skeptical.