Black Hawk Down (10 page)

Both were jealous of the D-boys. The Rangers had spent their downtime in Mog flying out
to shooting ranges, going on five-mile “fun” runs, pulling guard duty, etc., while the
operators had serious fun. Take the pigeons. When the force had first moved in, the
pigeons had owned the hangar, crapping at will all over people, cots, and equipment. When
one of the D-boys got nailed while sitting on his cot cleaning his weapon, the elite force
declared war. They ordered up pellet guns. The birds didn't have a prayer. The D-boys
would triangulate fire and send a mess of blood and feathers plopping down on somebody's
cot. Did these guys know how to kill time on deployment or what? They all had custom-built
weapons with hand-rifled barrels and such. Gun manufacturers outfitted them the way Nike
supplies pro athletes. Some days Delta would commandeer a Black Hawk and roar off to hunt
wild boar, baboons, antelope, and gazelles in the Somali bush. They brought back trophy
tusks and game meat and held cookouts. They called it “realistic training.” Now there was
a flicking deal and a half. One of them, Brad Hallings, had been strutting around the
hangar with a necklace made of boar's teeth. Stocky little Earl Fillmore had taken the
tusks and glued them to a helmet, and he'd strutted around naked striking poses like some
Mongolian warlord.

There was no big game on the horizon for Othic and Spalding, so they had found something
of their own to hunt. Spalding was a sharpshooter, and most nights his job was to squat up
in a hide high in the rafters, peering out over the city with a night-vision scope through
a grapefruit-sized hole in the wall. Othic would spend time up there with him, talking to
pass the time. Up in the hide they'd gotten a closer look than most of the guys at the
rats that were always scampering across the rafters. Mogadishu was rat heaven; there
hadn't been a regular trash pickup in recorded history. Othic and Spalding rigged an
ingenious snare out of two Evian water bottles, some trip wire from their booby traps, and
the contents of an MRE. Othic recorded success in his journal: “.....Good news, The Great
White Hunters (me & Spalding) caught a big ole nasty rat in one of our traps (his really,
but this is a joint operation). The capture of the rat brought cheers from all.”

What Othic wanted most, more even than to go home, were more missions. They had come to
fight. There had been a flurry of action in the beginning, but by late September the pace
had slacked off. Othic wrote:

“1830 hours. Another day without a mission & I'm starting to get pissed. We did go out to
the range & shoot though, as if that's any kind of consolation for us. We also blew more
demo, so I'm starting to become pretty adept at making different charges and firing
systems.. . . We get mail tomorrow (knock on wood!). I know these entries have been
getting more & more boring, but everything is starting to get too familiar, which is bad
because it will lead to laxness that can be dangerous. It's hard to keep sharp when
everything gets routine, you know?”

On the night of September 25, the Skinnies shot down a 101st Division Black Hawk. Three
crew members were killed when the downed chopper burst into flames, but the pilot and
copilot escaped. They exchanged fire with gunmen on the street until friendly Somalis
steered them to a vehicle and got them out.

Othic had been on guard duty that night.

“When I came on guard duty at 2 am me & another guy saw a flaming orange ball moving
across the sky. It went down & there was a big explosion & there was a secondary
explosion,” he wrote. “Today the flag was at half mast for 3 101st pilots who died in the
crash, they were shot down by an RPG.... Later they had a ceremony for our fallen comrades
as they loaded their bodies on the bird home, makes you realize your mortality.”

Eight days later, in a Humvee turret behind his .50 cal, Othic didn't have time to ponder
his mortality. He was waiting around the corner a block south of the target building,
listening to the escalating gunfire and itching to get his gun into the fight. But his
vehicle was the last one in the ground convoy, so he was pulling rear security, with his
gun facing down the road away from everything. He was mostly worried about missing out on
the shooting. Then the convoy started moving. As his Humvee made the turn onto Hawlwadig,
he bagged the chicken.

There was so much confusion it was hard for Othic to orient himself. There were lots of
unarmed people in the streets, so he started off trying to be careful. He hit a Somali
with a gun in the doorway to the hotel. He blasted another down the alley looking west
from the hotel. The man stopped in the middle of the street and looked over his shoulder,
locking eyes momentarily with Othic. The big .50-cal rounds, which could punch head-size
holes in cinder block, tore the man apart. Othic aimed a few more rounds at the man's gun
in the dirt, trying to disable it. Down the street to the south he saw people dragging out
tires and debris for a roadblock, so he swung his turret and put a few rounds down there.
They ran.

There was just too much shooting from all directions for Othic to sort out what was going
on. Bullets were zinging around him and RPGs had started to fly. He would see a cloud of
smoke and a flash and then track the fat arc of the grenade as it rocketed home. Brass
shell casings were piling up around him in the turret. A Somali round hit the pile and one
of the casings flipped up and stung him in the face. When two more rounds hit ammo boxes
right next to him, Othic was alarmed. Somebody had a bead on him. He began shooting
everywhere. There was a Ranger saying that went, “When the going gets tough, the tough go
cyclic.”

Othic's Missouri buddy Eric Spalding was in one of the five-ton trucks farther up the
line. The truck had sandbags on the floor in back to shield those riding back there from
mines, but other than that it wasn't armored. In the passenger seat, Spalding figured his
best defense was a good offense, so he started shooting as soon as the convoy rounded the
corner toward the target building. He shot a man with a gun on the steps of the Olympic
Hotel, and after that targets just kept on coming as fast as he could line them up and
shoot. There wasn't any time to reflect on what was happening. The gunfight started fast
and accelerated.

For Sergeant John Burns, riding in a Humvee behind Spalding's truck, it was hard at first
to grasp the severity of the fight. He and the rest of the Rangers had expected what they
usually found on these missions, a Somali gunman or two taking potshots and running. So
when he saw a Somali man fire an RPG from behind a crowd of women, Burns leapt from the
Humvee to give chase, catching his foot on the lip of the door and falling flat on his
face in the dirt. He scrambled up and ran after the man with the RPG tube, and when he had
a clear bead on him he dropped to one knee and shot him. The Somali fell and Burns,
completely caught up in his own little chase, ran out and grabbed the wounded man by the
shirt, figuring they'd haul him back with the other prisoners. But as he began dragging
the man he became aware of how much shooting was going on, and then, to his horror,
spotted ten armed Somalis around the corner of the hotel.

It dawned on Burns that he was in the middle of a much bigger fight. He released the
wounded man's shirt and sprinted back to his Humvee, where the rest of the men, hunkered
down and firing, eyed him with amazement.

One Humvee back, Private Ed Kallman felt a rush of adrenaline as he drove around the
corner into the melee. He had joined the army searching for excitement after getting bored
with high school in Gainesville, Florida. You started off in the army dreading the
prospect of actual combat, but little by little the hard training and discipline of
Rangering made you start wishing for it. And here it was. War. The real thing. From behind
the wheel, watching through the windshield, Kallman had to remind himself that this wasn't
a movie, and the realization filled him initially with a dark boyish glee. The smoke trail
of an RPG caught the corner of his eye, and he followed it as it zipped past his vehicle
and exploded into one of the five-tons in front. When the smoke cleared he saw Staff
Sergeant Dave Wilson, one of the only two black guys in the Ranger Company, propped
against the wall of a house alongside the truck. Wilson's legs were stretched stiff in
front of him and were splashed with bright red blood. Kaliman was horrified. One of his
guys! He gripped the steering wheel and focused on the vehicle in front of his, suddenly
eager to get moving again.

From his turret in the rear Humvee, Othic had seen the flash of the RPG tube. He swung
his .50 cal around and blasted the spot, mowing down a small crowd that had been standing
in front of the shooter.

Then what felt like a baseball bat came down on his right forearm. It felt just like
that. He heard the crack! and felt the blow and looked down to see a small hole in his
arm. The bone was broken.

He shouted, “I'm hit! I'm hit!”

He really did go cyclic on the .50 cal then, just fired continually for maybe as long as
a minute, taking down trees and walls and anyone in, around, or behind them, before
Sergeant Lorenzo Ruiz stood up in the turret and took the gun.

-13-

At Sergeant Eversmann's intersection, things continued to go badly for Chalk Four. First
Blackburn had fallen out of the helicopter, then they'd roped in well off target, then
they'd been pinned down so they couldn't get in the right position. He had sent five guys
with the litter carrying Blackburn, and none of them had come back yet.

Then Sergeant Galentine got hit.

Galentine was a kid from Xenia, Ohio, who had spent six months operating a press at a
rubber-molding plant after high school before deciding there was more that he could be.
He'd enlisted on the day the Gulf War started and it was over before he was out of basic
training. He'd been waiting for a chance at a real fight ever since. He'd been crushed
when he and Stebbins had gotten left back on this deployment. But now, here he was,
finally in battle. It had a strange effect on him. He turned giddy. He and his buddy,
Specialist Jim Telscher, sat behind two cars as rounds kicked up dirt between them.
Telscher had been smacked in the face by his own rifle coming down the rope and had blood
all over his mouth. Gunfire methodically shattered the windows on both cars and blew out
the tires. Galentine and Telscher sat behind the rear bumpers making stupid faces at one
another.

Galentine did not feel frightened. It didn't register that he could get killed. He just
pointed his M-16 at someone down the street, aimed at center mass, and squeezed off
rounds. The man would drop. Just like target practice, only cooler.

When they started catching rounds from a different direction, he and Telscher ran to an
alley. There, Galentine came face-to-face with a Somali woman. She had chosen that moment
to dash across the alley, and now stood staring in horror at Galentine and trying to open
a door to get inside. His first instinct had been to shoot her, but he hadn't. The woman's
eyes were wide. It startled him, that moment. It cut through his silliness. This wasn't a
game. He had come very close to killing this woman. She got the door open and stepped
inside.

He had next taken cover behind another car on the main road, his rifle braced against his
shoulder, the strap slung around his body. He was picking targets out of a crowd of
hundreds that had massed up the road and was moving toward their position. As he fired, he
felt a painful slap on his left hand that knocked his weapon so hard it spun completely
around him. His first thought was to right his gun, but when he reached he saw his thumb
flopped on his forearm, attached only by a strip of skin.

He picked up the thumb and pressed it back to his hand. “You all right, Scotty? You all
right?” asked Telscher. Eversmann had seen it, the M-16 spinning and a splash of pink by
Galentine's left hand. He saw Galentine reach for the hand, then look across the road at
him.

“Don't come across!” Eversmann shouted. There was withering fire coming down the road.
“Don't come across!”

Galentine heard the sergeant but started running anyway.

For some reason, the lanky chalk leader across the road meant safety. He ran but seemed
to be getting nowhere, like in a dream. His feet were heavy and slow and if there were
bullets flying around him he didn't hear or see them. He dove the last few feet, rolled
over, and leaned up against the wall alongside Eversmann.

The sergeant was still contending with the crowd. Down the street behind him there were
Humvees in front of the target building. Up ahead it looked like half the city of
Mogadishu was massing and closing in on them. Men would dart out into the street and shoot
off bursts from their AKs and then take cover. He could see the telltale flash and puff of
RPGs being launched their way. The grenades would smoke on in and explode with a long
splash of flame and a pounding concussion. From across the street the heat of the blast
would wash over and leave a trace of acrid powder smell in his mouth and nose. At one
point so many rounds came flying-down the road, kicking up dirt and chipping the sides of
buildings, they created a wave of noise and energy that the sergeant could actually see
coming.

One of the Black Hawks flew over and Eversmann stood and stretched his long arm in the
direction of the fire. He watched the crew chief in back sitting behind his minigun and
then saw the gun spout lines of flame at targets up the street and, for a short time, all
shooting from that direction stopped. That's our guys.

To Eversmann's left, Private Anton Berendsen was lying out on the ground firing his
M-203, a grenade launcher mounted under the barrel of his M-16. Berendsen was aiming east
at Somalis who would pop out and spray bullets from behind the rusty tin shacks that
protruded at intervals from the stone walls. Seconds after Galentine dove in, Berendsen
grabbed his shoulder.

“Oh, my God, I'm hit,” he said. He looked up at Eversmann.

Berendsen scooted over against the wall next to Galentine with one arm limp at his side,
picking small chunks of debris from his face. Eversmann squatted down next to both men,
turning first to Berendsen, who was still preoccupied, looking down the alley east.

“Ber, tell me where you're hurt,” Eversmann said.

“I think I got one in the arm.”

Berendsen began fumbling with his good hand with the breech of his grenade launcher. He
couldn't get it open with one hand. Eversmann impatiently opened the breech for him.

“There's a guy right down there,” Berendsen said.

Eversmann was too busy with the wound to look. As he struggled to lift up Berendsen's
vest and open his shirt to assess the wound, the private shot off a 203 round one-handed.
The sergeant turned to look. It occurred to him he probably should have fired the round,
instead of having Berendsen attempt it one-handed. He watched the fist-sized shell spiral
through the air toward a shack about forty meters away. It flattened it in a great flash
of light, noise, and smoke. The shooting from that place stopped.

Berendsen's injury did not look severe. Eversmann turned to Galentine, who was wide-eyed,
like he might be lapsing into shock. His thumb was hanging down below his hand.