Jerry Boykin & Lynn Vincent (32 page)
Immediately, the CSAR Black Hawk, piloted by Dan Jollata, took up a hover over the alley. It had been eight minutes since Elvis crashed. As I watched the P.J.s scale down the ropes, an RPG streaked in from the left. Smoke bloomed from the helo’s left side and the bird lurched sideways. The fast-ropes swayed with two P.J.s still hanging on them, now helpless mid-air targets.
My breath caught. We absolutely could not afford to lose another helo. Nearly everyone we had was already tasked on some part of this mission. If another bird went down, there’d be no one left to send.
I could hear radio chatter, other pilots advising Jollata that he was hit badly and needed to put his bird down ASAP. But with his controls catastrophically mushy and smoke spewing from the top of his rotor, Jollata held his hover long enough for the P.J.s to reach the ground. Then, cool as ice, he nursed his bird back to base.
Danny McKnight’s team finished loading Matt Rierson’s assault team and the Somali detainees. After a brief discussion with Gary, I tasked the convoy to go over to the alley to pick up the Super Six-One survivors and the P.J.s.
“Ready for exfil and ready to move to the crash site,” Danny transmitted.
Gary came back. “Roger. Go ahead and move.”
The convoy rolled. It was like driving into a shredder.
Amid the dust and smoke and roadblocks, McKnight’s lead vehicle quickly became lost in Mogadishu’s narrow, unfamiliar streets. From overhead, a P-3 Orion spy plane reported it could see Mogadishu laid out like a grid-map. Trying to help direct the convoy, the Orion crew transmitted directions to Danny—“Turn left at the next intersection!” Still, Danny and his Rangers missed several turns only to run head on into more Somali fighters on each new street.
Scattered small arms fire now became a metal storm. RPGs seared in. One grenade blew three men out of the back of a Humvee, including Delta Master Sergeant Griz Martin, mangling the entire lower half of his body.
Every intersection bristled with crossfire, as hundreds of armed Somalis now pressed brazenly toward the limping convoy. Finally, Danny called to say his vehicles were shot up so bad he didn’t think he could get to the crash. He was taking casualties as well and thought he needed to return to base to evacuate his wounded. I concurred and ordered Danny back to the airfield to try again after he refitted and rearmed.
Then, suddenly, our nightmare scenario materialized: the Somalis shot down Mike Durant’s Blawk Hawk with an RPG.
I HEARD DURANT’S CALL ON THE RADIO: “Going in hard! Going down!”
One of the West-Cam birds quickly put a camera on the crash site, a ragged village about a mile and a half southwest of the main battle. I could see Somalis, many of them armed, already crowding into the area. Our CSAR element was already knee-deep in the first crash site, trying to extricate the bodies of Wolcott and his copilot, Bull Briley, from the wreckage. Danny’s convoy had been decimated. Scotty Miller’s men were holed up in defensive positions around the Six-One crash site. Who could we send? What did we have left? The Pentagon’s skinflint commitment of forces was coming back to bite us in the ass.
I turned to Major Craig Nixon, the XO of the 3rd Ranger Battalion. Quiet and competent, Craig was a behind-the-scenes kind of guy. I had only known him since July.
“Start rounding up anyone you can get your hands on,” I told him. “Grab any vehicles you can find and organize an element to go to the second crash site.”
With the chaos in the streets and, it seemed, every breathing Somali ready to kill Americans, Craig didn’t hesitate. “Roger that,” he said and headed off, gathering every man who could fog a mirror to be part of his rescue team. By the end of the day, he would earn a Silver Star.
On the West-Cam monitors, I could see Super Six-Two, a Black Hawk, plus a pair of Little Birds circling Durant’s crash site, trying to hold back the crowds. Three Delta snipers were aboard Six-Two: Sergeant First Class Randy Shughart, Master Sergeant Gary Gordon, and Sergeant First Class Brad Hallings. The Six-Two pilots circled low and reported that Durant and his copilot, Ray Franks, were alive. I heard Six-Two ask if they could insert two of the snipers into the second crash site. Shughart and Gordon were volunteering to go down there alone and try to hold off the advancing Somali mob.
Gary immediately denied the request, and I concurred. I keyed the mike and said to Gary: “Okay, listen, 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.”
The situation at the Six-Four crash site continued to deteriorate. From overhead, Shughart, Gordon, and Hallings picked off advancing Somalis with deadly accuracy. But instead of retreating, the Sammies kept coming.
The Six-Two pilots asked a second time to put the snipers in. Again, Gary and Tom said no. The third time, the pilots pleaded for approval. The desperation in their voices made the case, and I gave permission for my guys, Randy Shughart and Gary Gordon, to jump from a low hover and try to save the Super Six-Four crew.
AT JUST BEFORE 5 P.M., just yards away from the Six-One crash site, a Ranger element came under a hail of Somali fire hitting three soldiers inside a minute. Corporal Jamie Smith got the worst of it. A bullet pierced his thigh, traveled up his leg, and hit a femoral artery. Delta medic Kurt Schmid got to Smith almost immediately. In the hot-wash, Schmid said Smith was bleeding buckets. The medic had to tear open the entrance wound in Smith’s leg, insert his hand, and feel his way up into Smith’s pelvis to try and manually pinch off the bleeding. Every time Schmid tried it, Smith screamed in pain. But the Ranger had lost so much blood that Schmid couldn’t risk giving him morphine. The drop in blood pressure might kill him.
Smith’s chalk leader, Lieutenant Larry Perino, called for a medevac. Mike Steele relayed the request to Tom Matthews in the command-and-control bird. But the area was too hot to send in a helo.
At about 7 p.m., we sent a Black Hawk in to re-supply the troops pinned down around the Six-One crash site. They were running low on water and ammo, and it was going to take awhile to get the 10th Mountain Division ground convoy in to evacuate them. As soon as the Black Hawk roared in and took up a hover just south of the crash site, Somali gunfire exploded from every direction. Muzzle flash and RPG trails erupted all over the screens in the JOC. Dozens of rounds pierced the Black Hawk’s skin, rotors, and gearbox as two Delta operators kicked out water, ammo, and IV bags, which fell to the ground below. The pilots held the bird steady until the re-supply was complete. Then, shot full of holes and leaking fluid, they were able to return to base. But that helo would not fly again.
About an hour after he left the base, Craig Nixon called me. Because of roadblocks and burning tires, he had to keep changing routes and hadn’t been able to reach Durant’s crash site. He eventually ran head-on into Danny McKnight’s shot-up convoy and needed to help them get back. I agreed, and told Craig to bring them in. In half an hour, both elements limped back through the gates of the airfield. Craig refueled and rearmed and headed out again for a second attempt to get to the second crash site. This time, John Macejunas joined him, determined to get to Shughart, Gordon, and the Six-Four crew before the Somalis did.
Jamie Smith’s condition was deteriorating.
Gary called me in the JOC: “We’ve got two critically wounded who are going to die if we don’t get them out.”
“I don’t think we can get a medevac in there without losing another helo and more people,” I said.
Then Scotty Miller called me directly, an urgent pleading in his voice: “I’ve got to have a medevac in here. We’ve got a man who’s going to die.”
If I sent the medevac, there was a very high risk of getting everybody on that helicopter killed, plus the added risk of creating another rescue scenario when we already had two helos down and the rest shot to pieces. If I didn’t send the medevac, Jamie Smith would almost certainly die.
It was the most agonizing decision I have ever had to make. When I keyed my mike, my heart felt like a stone.
“Scotty, we can’t send another helo in there and get it shot down.”
At about 8 p.m., I heard Steele come up on the command net. Jamie Smith was dead.
THE BATTLE HAD RAGED FOR NEARLY NINE HOURS. Just before midnight, we got the Malaysians, Pakistanis, and the 10th Mountain Division launched toward the crash sites. When I knew they were en route, I walked outside with Chaplain Michalke from the 160th. In the darkness, we walked over near some sandbags fortifying a Conex. With scattered bursts of small arms fire in the distance, we knelt down and prayed for the men pinned down in the city.
Back in the JOC, I watched on the West-Cam as the rescue convoy wound toward the Six-Four crash site. But when the convoy stalled again, frustrated by Somali roadblocks, Macejunas rallied a small force to go and find Durant and the others on foot. With Mogadishu a blistering hornet’s nest, it was an incredibly brave act. But it’s what Shughart and Gordon would’ve done for them, what they
had
done for Durant and his crew. I watched on a FLIR, a Forward Looking Infrared monitor, as Mace reached the second crash site. The FLIR showed “warm” objects—like people and engines—as white images against a black background.
Praying silently, I watched Mace’s ghostly image moving among the remains of Super Six-Four, which appeared as a pale mass against a black field. I didn’t know what to hope for. Knowing the Somalis had already overrun the site, I didn’t think there was a chance in the world Mace would find our guys just sitting there alive and well. I was hoping he’d find some evidence of their escape—or, knowing what the Somalis did to the dead, at least find their bodies intact.
Mace keyed his mike: No signs of life, he reported. Also, no bodies.
For a moment, the JOC echoed with a hollow silence. In one way, Macejunas’s report was a devastating blow. Still, it left us with a shred of hope that Durant and his crew, plus Shughart and Gordon, had been captured and were still alive, or that they had escaped.
I called Gary. “Tell Mace to blow the helo.”
“Roger.”
The FLIR bloomed white as Mace and his team torched Super Six-Four with thermite grenades, then slipped back through the city to link up with the convoy.
WE COULD HAVE LEFT THE CITY HOURS before we did. As soon as the Malaysian APCs and Humvees got into the perimeter there, we could have picked up our force, including our wounded, and left. By the time Elvis’s helo crashed, Delta had already completed the mission, capturing members of the HG leadership and loading them for return to base. But after the first Black Hawk crashed, the entire Battle of the Black Sea became about getting our guys back. There was never a question, never a discussion. Briley and Wolcott were trapped inside Six-One, and nobody was willing to leave them.
On a West-Cam monitor, I could see one task force element fighting its way up the street leading to Elvis’s crash site. Tracer rounds flashed back and forth across the screen and smoke exploded where RPGs hit. I had the camera pan down to another group in time to see them get out of their vehicles to heave aside a barricade of junk and burning tires the Somalis had erected to stop them.
Every man out there was fighting for a cause, in this case, liberating a people from Aidid and his death squads. But when you get down in the dirt and the bullets and the blood, you’re fighting for your brothers, and you don’t want to let them down. You know that if you’re wounded or killed, the man next to you is going to bring you out, and take you home to your family, and he knows the same thing about you. Your brothers are not going to leave you to die or rot in some foreign hellhole. It is an unbreakable code. Knowing that makes you a more committed fighter.
Gary called me to say two elements had closed on Elvis’s crash site. “They’re going to work to get the bodies out.”
An hour later, he called me back. “They can’t get them out. They’re going to have to pull the helo apart.”
I glanced at the clock. It was going to be light soon. We would lose our night-vision advantage, the Somalis would have retrenched and reloaded, and the relative quiet of the city would erupt again into hellfire.
Garrison walked up and stood at my shoulder. “It’s going to be light in an hour.”
“Yeah, I know.” I keyed up Gary. “It’s only an hour until daylight. Relay that to the crash site. We need to get out of there by first light.”
“Roger,” Gary said.
I passed the same message to Scotty Miller. “Start your evacuation as soon as you get the bodies out of the crash. When you head out of there, go to the Pakistani soccer stadium.”
About 30 minutes before daylight, Gary called to say they had Elvis and Bull out of Super Six-One.
From that moment, all our troops commenced the long, slow trek back to base that became known as the Mogadishu Mile.
JUST AFTER DAWN ON OCTOBER 4, I was standing in front of the JOC when a five-ton truck carrying casualties drove onto the airfield and pulled to a stop near the M.A.S.H. tent. The rising sun already burned against my face, lighting the truck in red fire. Walking across the tarmac to meet it was like walking to my own grave. But I knew I had to. As I neared, a Ranger got out of the cab. In the back of the truck I could see corpses, torn and bloody, stacked like firewood, some with their eyes fixed wide open. The first man I recognized was Delta operator Earl Fillmore, shot in the head.
On top of the dead lay the wounded, moaning and writhing, calling out in pain. I saw another one of my guys, Griz Martin, lying there, still alive, but only semi-conscious. As a pair of medics emerged from the M.A.S.H. tent carrying litters, the Ranger lowered the tailgate. A cascade of blood as wide as the truck spilled out like a waterfall. I heard my men’s blood splashing down on the ground. My stomach rolled and tears closed my throat. The medics began separating the living from the dead.
I raised my eyes and looked across the fence that separated our base from Mogadishu. The sunrise now poured gold light over the city, turning a dark and hopeless place temporarily beautiful, like Christmas lights on a brothel. This ragged place had just chewed up and spit out elite fighters from the most powerful army in the history of the world. Men whose safety I prayed for, men whom God placed in my charge.
