Black Hawk Down (20 page)

“What was that?” asked Maddox.

“Don't worry about it. We just ran over somebody.”

And they laughed. They felt no pity and were beyond fear. They were both laughing as
Maddox stopped the truck.

One of the D-boys, Sergeant Mike Foreman, jumped from the back of the truck, ran up, and
opened the driver's side door to a cabin now splattered with blood.

“Holy shit!” he said.

Maddox slid over next to Spalding, who was now preoccupied with his wounds. There was a
perfectly round hole in his left knee, but there was no exit wound. The bullet had
evidently fragmented on impact with the door and glass and only the jacket had penetrated
his knee. It had flattened on impact with his kneecap and just slid around under the skin
to the side of the joint. The remainder of the bullet had peppered his lower leg, which
was bleeding. Spalding propped both legs up on the dash and pressed a field dressing on
one. He lay his rifle on the rim of the side window, changed the magazine, and, as Foreman
got the truck moving again, resumed firing. He was shooting at everything that moved.

To make room for more wounded on the back of his Humvee, wounded Private Clay Othic, who
had been shot in the arm at the beginning of the fight, jumped out the back and ran to the
second truck. One of the men riding there proffered a hand to help him climb aboard, but
with his broken arm Othic couldn't grab hold of anything. After several failed attempts he
ran around to the cab, and Specialist Aaron Hand stepped out to let him squeeze in between
himself and the driver. Private Richard Kowalewski, a skinny quiet kid from Texas whom
they all called “Alphabet” because they didn't want to pronounce his name.

Kowalewski was new to the unit, and quiet. He had just met a girl he wanted to marry, and
had been talking about leaving the regiment when his tour was up in a few months. His
sergeant had been trying to convince him to stay. Minutes after Othic slid in next to him,
Kowalewski was hit by a bullet in his shoulder, which knocked him back against the seat.
He checked out the wound briefly and straightened back up behind the wheel.

“Alphabet, want me to drive?” asked Othic.

“No, I'm okay.”

Othic was struggling in the confined space to apply a pressure dressing to the driver's
bleeding shoulder when the RPG hit. It rocketed in from the left, severing Kowalewski's
left arm and entering his chest. There was an explosion, but most of the two-foot-long
missile embedded itself in Kowalewski, the fins sticking out his left side under his
missing arm, the point sticking out the right side. He was unconscious, but still alive.

Driverless, the truck crashed into the back end of the one before it, the one with the
prisoners in back and with Foreman, Maddox, and Spalding in the cab. The impact threw
Spalding against the side door and then his truck careened into a wall.

Othic had been knocked cold. He awakened to Specialist Hand shaking him, yelling that he
had to get out.

“It's on fire!” Hand shouted.

The-cab was black with smoke and Othic could see the rocket fuse glowing from what looked
like inside Alphabet. The grenade lodged in his chest had evidently exploded before
entering his body, because despite the missile embedded in him, his torso was still
intact. The blast stunned Hand and Othic. Hand jumped out his door. Othic reached over to
grab Kowalewski and pull him out, but the driver's bloody clothes just lifted damply off
of his pierced torso.

Othic stumbled out to the street and noticed his and Hand's helmets had been blown off.
Hand's rifle was shattered.

They moved numbly and even a little giddily. Death had buzzed past close enough to kill
Kowalewski and knock off their helmets but had left them virtually unscathed. Hand
couldn't hear out of his left ear, but that was it. Both men found their helmets down the
street--they had evidently blown right out the window.

Hand also found the lower portion of Kowalewski's arm. Just the left hand and a bit of
wrist. He picked it up, ran back to the Humvee where the D-boys had placed Kowalewski, and
put it in the mortally wounded man's pants pocket.

Still dazed, Othic crawled into a Humvee. As they set off again he began groping on the
floor with his good left hand collecting rounds that guys had ejected from their weapons
when they jammed. Othic passed them back to those still shooting.

Many of the vehicles were running Out of ammo. They had expended thousands of rounds.
Three of the twenty-four Somali prisoners were dead and one was wounded. The back ends of
the remaining trucks and Humvees were slick with blood. There were chunks of viscera
clinging to floors and inner walls. McKnight's lead Humvee had two flat tires, both on the
right side. The vehicles were meant to run on flats, but at nowhere near normal speed. The
second Humvee in line was almost totally disabled. It was dragging an axle and was being
pushed by the five-ton behind it, the one that had been hit by the grenade that killed
Kowalewski. The Humvee driven by the SEALs, the third in line, had three flat tires and
was so pockmarked with bullet holes it looked like a sponge. SEAL Howard Wasdin, who had
been shot in both legs, had them draped up over the dash and stretched out on the hood.
Some of the Humvees were smoking. Carlson's had a gaping grenade hole in the side and four
flat tires.

When the RPG hit Kowalewski in the cab of the first truck, it forced everything behind it
to a halt. In the noise and confusion, no one in McKnight's lead Humvee noticed, so they
proceeded alone up to Armed Forces Road, rolling now at about twenty miles per hour. The
observation helicopters called for a right turn (the convoy had driven past the crash site
a second time about seven blocks back, this time one block to the east of it, looking in
vain for a street wide enough to make a left turn). When they reached Armed Forces Road,
Schilling was surprised to find it deserted. They turned right and had gone only about
forty yards, planning to turn right again and head back down toward the crash site, when
Schilling saw out his right side window a Somali step out into an alley and level an RPG
tube at them.

“RPG! RPG!” he shouted.

The Humvee's big turret gun was silent. Schilling turned to see why Pringle wasn't
shooting, and saw the gunner down in back grabbing a fresh can of ammo. Pringle raised his
hands to cover his head.

“GO!” Schilling screamed at the driver, Private Joe Harosky.

But instead of shooting out of the intersection, Harosky turned into it, and bore
straight down on the man with the RPG tube. This happened in seconds. The grenade
launched. Schilling saw a puff of smoke and heard the distinctive pop and the big ball of
the grenade coming right for them. He froze. He didn't even raise his weapon. The grenade
shot straight past the Humvee at door level on his side. He felt it whoosh past.

“Back up! Back up!” he shouted.

Schilling got off a few rounds, and Pringle was back up working the .50 cal before they'd
cleared the alley. When Schilling turned around, worried they'd ram the Humvee behind
them, he discovered they were all alone. Harosky backed out into Armed Forces Road, where
they turned around and headed west. They spotted the rest of the column where they'd left
it, still facing north just shy of the main road.

McKnight, who had been silent ever since the U-turn back by the Olympic Hotel, seemed to
recover himself at this point. He got out of the Humvee and conferred with Sergeant
Gallagher outside by the hood of the vehicle. Gallagher was furious about the confusion.
But as he confronted McKnight, he was hit with a round that knocked him to the street. He
fell right at Schilling's feet. Bright red blood pumped in spurts from his arm. Schilling
had never seen such scarlet blood. It was obviously arterial. It shot out in powerful
squirts. He pressed his fingers to it and fished for a field dressing in his medical
pouch. He patched up Gallagher as best he could, shoving in Curlex (a highly absorbent
gauze that is used to help stop bleeding) and bandaging it tightly. In their weeks in
Somalia, the PJs had given all of the men additional training with field dressings. They'd
practiced with live goats, shooting the animals and then having the men work on them,
getting their hands in some real gore. The experience helped. Gallagher walked back to his
own vehicle, but Schilling kept his weapon. He needed the ammo.

They had been wandering now for about forty-five minutes. McKnight was ready to pack it
in. There were now far more dead and wounded in the convoy than there were at the first
crash site. He called up to Harrell.

--Romeo Six Four, this is Uniform Six Four. We've got a lot of vehicles that will be
almost impossible to move. Quite a few casualties. Getting to the crash site will be awful
tough. Are pinned down.

Harrell was insistent.

--Uniform Six Four, this is Romeo Six Four. Danny, I really need to get you back to that
crash site. I know you turned left on Armed Forces Road, what's your status?

But McKnight and his men had had enough.

--This is Uniform Six Four. I have numerous casualties, vehicles that are halfway
running. Gotta get these casualties out of here ASAP.

They weren't home yet.

They began moving, and everyone heartened as word passed back that they were finally
pointed back to the base. Maybe some of them would make it out alive after all.

They found Via Lenin, a four-lane road with a median up the center that would lead them
back down to the K-4 traffic circle and home. Spalding began to lose feeling in his
fingertips. For the first time in the ordeal he felt panic. He thought he must be lapsing
into shock. He saw a little Somali boy who looked no more than five years old with an
AK-47, shooting it wildly from the hip, bright flashes from the muzzle of the gun.
Somebody shot the boy and his legs flew up into the air, as though he had slipped on
marbles, and he landed flat on his back. It happened like a slow-motion sequence in a
movie, or a dream. The D-boy driving, Foreman, was a helluva shot. He had his weapon in
one hand and the steering wheel in the other. Spalding saw him gun down three Somalis
without even slowing down.

He was impressed.

He felt his hands curling up like someone with cerebral palsy.

“Hey, man, let's get the hell back,” he said. “I'm not doin' too good.”

“You're doin' cool,” said Foreman.

SEAL John Gay's Humvee was now in the lead. It was riddled with bullets and smoking and
slowing down, running on three rims. There were eight wounded Rangers and Joyce's body in
back, with Wasdin's bloody legs splayed out on the hood (he'd been shot once more in the
left foot). Wasdin was yelling, “Just get me out of here!” The Sammies had stretched two
big underground gasoline tanks across the roadway with junk and furniture and other debris
and had set it all on fire. Afraid to stop the Humvee for fear it would not start back up,
they crashed over and through the flaming debris, nearly flipping, but the wide, sturdy
vehicle righted itself and kept on going. The rest of the column followed.

It was 5:40 P.M. They had been battling through the streets now for more than an hour. Of
the approximately seventy-five men in the convoy, soldiers and prisoners, nearly half had
been hit by bullets or shrapnel. Eight were dead, or near death. As they approached K-4
circle, they braced themselves for another vicious ambush.

OVERRUN

1

Too many things were happening at the same time, all of them bad. Task Force Ranger was
two hours into a mission that was supposed to have taken an hour. For General Garrison and
his staff in the airfield JOC, watching and listening on TV screens and radio, and to
element commanders Harrell and Matthews in the C2 Black Hawk, circling over the fight,
there came the awful recognition that events had slipped out of control.

Their force was now stretched beyond its limits. Durant's crash site was in imminent
danger of being overrun. Most of the original assaulters--about 160 D-boys and Rangers-
were now either cut to pieces on the limping ground convoy or strung out on foot between
the target house and the first helicopter crash site. They belonged to the strongest
military power on earth, but until some additional force could be brought to bear, they
were stranded, fighting for their lives on city streets surrounded by thousands of furious
well-armed Somalis. Forces from a full company of the 10th Mountain Division, another 150
men, had arrived at the task force's base and thrown itself into the effort to reach
Durant's crash site, but they were running into the same problems as the other vehicles
trying to move through the deadly ambushes and roadblocks that had been erected all over
the city.

Two more 10th Mountain companies were en route, and the UN's Pakistani and Malaysian
forces had agreed to add their tanks and armored personnel carriers to the fight, but the
logistics of assembling this polyglot rescue convoy would be daunting, and would take
hours. In two more hours it would be dark.

The men fighting for their lives out in the city knew nothing of the bigger picture. They
could not see beyond the increasingly desperate struggle on their corner, and each still
fought with the expectation that rescue was just minutes away.

Shortly before Durant's helicopter had been shot down, the one and only airborne rescue
team had roped into the first crash site, the one just blocks away from the target
building. They had flown in on Black Hawk Super Six Eight. Air Force Technical Sergeant
Tim Wilkinson had been seated between the two crew chiefs in the back of it when a white
chalkboard was passed from man to man. Written on it in big black letters was “61 DOWN.”
The bad news produced a big jolt of adrenaline. It meant they were going in.

They had been practicing together for months, a mix of soldiers from different units and
branches. Wilkinson was one of two air force PJs on board. With them was a five-man team
of D-boys and seven Rangers. Ever since the mission had been drawn up earlier that summer,
this team of fourteen men had been preparing to rope down to a crashed helicopter, first
at Fort Bragg and then in Mogadishu. Everyone knew there was a chance a helicopter could
be shot down on one of these missions, although it was considered so unlikely that the
CSAR element had originally been cut from the deployment. Garrison had put his foot down
and it had been reinstated, but the bird still had been considered something of a luxury
and a nuisance, like the bulky boxes of emergency medical supplies and equipment Delta
surgeon Major Rob Marsh had insisted on hauling all over the world for the last eight
years. There was always a temptation to avoid taking such ominous precautions, like the
way the D-boys went into battle with their blood types taped to their shoes. You didn't
want to jinx yourself, but prudence dictated preparing for the worst. On the first six
missions the CSAR team had flown in circles for an hour or so and then returned.