Black Hawk Down (2 page)

They held themselves to a higher standard than normal soldiers. With their buff bodies,
distinct crew cuts-sides and butt of the head completely shaved-and their grunted Hoo-ah
greeting, they saw themselves as the army at its gung ho best. Many, if they could make
it, aspired to join Special Forces, maybe even get picked to try out for Delta, the hale,
secret supersoldiers now leading this force in. Only the very best of them would be
invited to try out, and only one of every ten invited would make it through selection. In
this ancient male hierarchy, the Rangers were a few steps up the ladder, but the D-boys
owned the uppermost rung.

Rangers knew the surest path to that height was combat experience. So far, Mog had been
mostly a tease. War was always about to happen. About to happen. Even the missions,
exciting as they'd been, had fallen short. The Somalis-whom they called “Skinnies” or
“Sammies”.-had taken a few wild shots at them, enough to get the Rangers' blood up and
unleash a hellish torrent of return fire, but nothing that qualified as a genuine
balls-out firefight.

Which is what they wanted. All of these guys. If there were any hesitant thoughts, they
were buttoned tight. A lot of these men had started as afraid of war as anyone, but the
fear had been drummed out. Especially in Ranger training. About a fourth of those who
volunteered washed out, enough so that those who emerged with their Ranger tab at the end
were riding the headiest wave of accomplishment in their young lives. The weak had been
weeded out. The strong had stepped up. Then came weeks, months, and years of constant
training. The Hoo-ahs couldn't wait to go to war. They were an all-star football team that
had endured bruising, exhausting, dangerous practice sessions twelve hours a day, seven
days a week-for years-without ever getting to play a game.

They yearned for battle. They passed around the dog-eared paperback memoirs of soldiers
from past conflicts, many written by former Rangers, and savored the affectionate,
comradely tone of their stories, feeling bad for the poor suckers who bought it or got
crippled or maimed but identifying with the righteous men who survived the experience
whole. They studied the old photos, which were the same from every war, young men looking
dirty and tired, half dressed in army combat fatigues, dog tags hanging around their
skinny necks, posing with arms draped over one another's shoulders in exotic lands. They
could see themselves in those snapshots, surrounded by their buddies, fighting their war.
It was THE test, the only one that counted.

Sergeant Mike Goodale had tried to explain this to his mother one time, on leave in
Illinois. His mom was a nurse, incredulous at his bravado.

“Why would anybody want to go to war?” she asked.

Goodale told her it would be like, as a nurse, after all her training, never getting the
chance to work in a hospital. It would be like that.

“You want to find out if you can really do the job,” he explained.

Like those guys in books. They'd been tested and proven. It was another generation of
Rangers' turn now. Their turn.

It didn't matter that none of the men in these helicopters knew enough to write a high
school paper about Somalia. They took the army's line without hesitation. Warlords had so
ravaged the nation battling among themselves that their people were starving to death.
When the world sent food, the evil warlords hoarded it and killed those who tried to stop
them. So the civilized world had decided to lower the hammer, invite the baddest boys on
the planet over to clean things up. 'Nuff said. Little the Rangers had seen since arriving
at the end of August had altered that perception. Mogadishu was like the postapocalyptic
world of Mel Gibson's Mad Max movies, a world ruled by roving gangs of armed thugs. They
were here to rout the worst of the warlords and restore sanity and civilization.

Eversmann had always enjoyed being a Ranger. He wasn't sure how he felt about being in
charge, even if it was just temporary. He'd won the distinction by default. His platoon
sergeant had been summoned home by an illness in his family, and then the guy who replaced
him had keeled over with an epileptic seizure. He, too, had been sent home. Eversmann was
the senior man in line. He accepted the task hesitantly. That morning at Mass in the mess
he'd prayed about it.

Airborne now at last, Eversmann swelled with energy and pride as he looked out over the
full armada. It was a state-of-the-art military force. Already circling high above the
target was the slickest intelligence support America had to offer, including satellites, a
high-flying P3 Orion spy plane, and three OH-58 observation helicopters, which looked like
the bubble-front Little Bird choppers with a five-foot bulbous polyp growing out of the
top. The observation birds were equipped with video cameras and radio equipment that would
relay the action live to General Garrison and the other senior officers in the Joint
Operations Center (JOC) back at the beach. Moviemakers and popular authors might strain to
imagine the peak capabilities of the U.S. military, but here was the real thing about to
strike. It was a well-oiled, fully equipped, late-twentieth-century fighting machine.
America's best were going to war, and Sergeant Matt Eversmann was among them.

-2-

It was only a three-minute flight to the target. With the earphones on, Eversmann could
listen to most of the frequencies in use. There was the command net, which linked the
commanders on the ground to Matthews and Harrell circling overhead in the Command and
Control (or “C2”) Black Hawk, and with Garrison and the other brass back in the JOC. The
pilots had their own link to air commander Matthews, and Delta and the Rangers each had
their own internal radio links. For the duration of the mission all other broadcast
frequencies in the city were being jammed. Inside the steady scratch of static, Eversmann
heard a confusing overlap of calm voices, all the different elements preparing for the
assault.

By the time the Black Hawks had moved down low over the city for their final approach
from the north, the advance Little Birds were already closing in on the target. There was
still time to abort the mission.

Burning tires on the street near the target triggered momentary alarm. Somalis often set
fire to signal trouble and summon militia. Could they be flying into an ambush?

“Those tires, have they been burning for a pretty good period of time or did they just
light them, over?” asked a Little Bird pilot.

“Those tires were burning this morning when we were up,” answered a pilot on one of the
observation birds.

“Two minutes,” the Super Six Seven pilot alerted Eversmann.

The Little Birds moved into position for their “bump,” a sudden climb and then a dive
that would sweep them over the target house with their rockets and guns pointing down. One
by one, the various units would repeat “Lucy,” the code word for the assault to begin:
Romeo Six Four, Colonel Harrell; Kilo Six Four, Captain Scott Miller, the Delta
assault-force commander; Barber Five One, veteran pilot Chief Warrant Officer Randy Jones
in the lead AH6 gunship; Juliet Six Four, Captain Mike Steele, the Ranger commander aboard
Durant's bird; and Uniform Six Four, Lieutenant Colonel Danny McKnight, who was commanding
the ground convoy poised to take them all out. The convoy had rolled up to a spot several
blocks away.

-This is Romeo Six Four to all elements. Lucy. Lucy. Lucy.

-This is Kilo Six Four, roger Lucy.

-This is Barber Five One, roger Lucy.

-Juliet Six Four, roger Lucy.

-This is Uniform Six Four, roger Lucy.

-All elements, Lucy.

It was 3:43 p.m. On the screen in the JOC, commanders saw a crowded Mogadishu
neighborhood, in much better shape than most. The Olympic Hotel was the most obvious
landmark, a five-story white building that looked like stacked rectangular blocks with
square balconies at each level. There was another similar large building on the same side
of the street one block south. Both cast long shadows over Hawlwadig Road, the wide paved
street that ran before them. At the intersections where dirt alleys crossed Hawlwadig,
sandy soil drifted across the pavement. The soil was a striking rust-orange in the late
afternoon light. There were trees in the courtyards and between some of the smaller
houses. The target building was across Hawlwadig from the hotel one block north. It was
built in the same stacked-blocks style, L-shaped, with three stories to the rear and a
flat roof over the two stories in front. It wrapped around a small southern courtyard
toward the rear and was enclosed, as was the whole long block, by a high stone wall.
Moving in front, on Hawlwadig, were cars and people and donkey carts. It was a normal
Sunday afternoon. The target area was just blocks away from the center of the Bakara
Market, the busiest in the city. Conditioned to the helicopters now, people moving below
did not even look up as the first two Little Birds came sweeping into the frame from the
top, from the north, and then banked sharply east and moved off the screen.

Neither chopper fired a shot.

“One minute,” the Super Six Seven pilot informed Eversmann.

The Delta operators would go in first to storm the building. The Rangers would come in
behind them, roping down from the Black Hawks to form a perimeter around the target block.

Delta rode in on benches outside the bubble frames of the four MH-6 Little Birds, each
chopper carrying a four-man team. They wore small black flak vests and plastic hockey
helmets over a radio earplug and a wraparound microphone that kept them in constant voice
contact with each other. They wore no insignias on their uniforms. Hanging out over the
street on their low, fast approach, they scanned the people below, their upturned startled
faces, their hands, and their demeanor, trying to read what would happen when they hit the
street. As the Little Birds came in, the crowd spooked. People and cars began to scatter.
Wind from the powerful rotors knocked some people down and tore~ the colorful robes off
some of the women. A few of the Rangers, still high overhead, spotted people below
gesturing up at them eagerly, as if inviting them to come down to the streets and fight.

The first two Little Birds landed immediately south of the target building on the narrow
rutted alley, blowing up thick clouds of dust. The brownout was so severe that the pilots
and men on the side benches could see nothing looking down. One of the choppers found its
original landing spot taken by the first chopper in, so it banked right, performed a quick
circle to the west, and came down directly in front of the target.

Sergeant First Class Norm Hooten, a team leader on the fourth Little Bird, felt the rotor
blade on his chopper actually nick the side of the target building as it came to a hover.
Figuring the bird had gone as low as it could, Hooten and his team kicked their fast rope
and jumped for it, planning to slide down the rest of the way. It was the world's shortest
fast rope. They were only a foot off the ground.

They moved directly toward the house. Taking down a house like this was Delta's
specialty. Speed was critical. When a crowded house was filled suddenly with explosions,
smoke, and flashes of light, those inside were momentarily frightened and disoriented.
Experience showed that most would drop down and move to the corners. So long as Delta
caught them in this startled state, most would follow stern simple commands without
question. The Rangers had watched the D-boys at work now on several missions, and the
operators had moved in with such speed and authority it was hard to imagine anyone having
the presence of mind to resist. But just a few seconds made a difference. The more time
those inside had to sort out what was happening, the harder they would be to subdue.

The lead assault team that landed on the southern alley, led by Sergeant First Class Matt
Rierson, tossed harmless flashbang grenades into the courtyard and pushed open a metal
gate leading inside. They raced up some back steps and directly into the house, shouting
for those inside to get down. Hooten's four-man team, along with one led by Sergeant First
Class Paul Howe, charged toward the west side of the building, facing Hawlwadig Road.
Hooten's team entered a shop with colorful cartoons of typewriters, pens, pencils, and
other office items painted on the front walls, the Olympic Stationery Store. Inside were
six or seven Somalis who promptly dropped to the floor and stretched their arms in front
of them in response to the barked commands. Hooten could hear sporadic gunfire outside
already, much more than he'd heard on any of the previous missions. Howe's team entered
through the next doorway down. The thickly muscled sergeant kicked the legs out from under
a stunned Somali man just outside the doorway, dropping him.

Howe swept the room with his CAR-15, a black futuristic-looking weapon with a pump-action
shotgun attached to the bayonet lug in front. It was important to assert immediate
control. All he found was a warehouse filled with sacks and odds and ends.

Both teams knew they were looking for a residence, so they quickly moved back out to the
street. They ran south along Hawlwadig and turned left, heading for the courtyard their
teammates had already broken into. They rounded the corner in a worsening dust storm. The
Black Hawks were moving in.

The first, carrying the Delta ground commander and a support element, flared and hovered
about a block north of the target on Hawlwadig as Captain Miller and the other commandos
on board roped down. Along with another Black Hawk full of assaulters, they would be the
second wave to storm the house. Behind them came the Rangers on four Black Hawks, roping
down to positions at the four corners of the block to form the assault's outer perimeter.

As ropes dropped from Black Hawk Super Six Six, hovering over the southwest corner, Chalk
Three began sliding down to the street in twos, one man from each side of the bird. A crew
chief shouted, “No fear!” to each man who exited his side of the aircraft. As Sergeant
Keni Thomas reached for the rope, he thought, Fuck you, pal - you're not the one going in.