Black Hawk Down (21 page)

Wilkinson and the other air force guys practiced emergency medicine like an extreme
sport. Their job was primarily rescuing downed pilots, and since there was no telling
where or when a plane would crash, from mid-ocean to mountaintop, from frozen tundra to
the middle of a crowded city, their unit's motto, “Anytime, anywhere,” was a point of
pride. They were trained to climb cliffs, search deserts, and to dive out of airplanes at
extremely high altitudes, if necessary, sometimes far behind enemy lines, to track lost
and wounded flyers, patch them up, and bring them home. Their training was designed to
push them beyond normal human constraints. Men sometimes died trying to pass the PJ course
in the early 1980s when Wilkinson volunteered. He was twenty-five then, an avid
outdoorsman. He decided to ditch a tamer career as an electrical engineer for something to
make his heart pump faster. His personal nightmare had been the water drill at the army
Special Forces SCUBA training facility. It was called “crossovers.” Trainees were weighted
down with water-filled tanks and dropped in a deep pool. Holding their breath, they had to
walk twenty-five meters to the other end without coming up for air. For Wilkinson, it was
hard enough just to go that distance without blacking out, but the instructors would
deliberately detain him, push him backward, disorient him, pull off his mask and fins,
rough him up, tangle him up with other trainees. . . simulating the helter-skelter,
life-threatening stresses of a real-world rescue. To panic or black out meant failing the
test. Those who made it across the pool had thirty seconds to catch their breath before
setting out to re-cross the pool. This was done over and over again, until many of those
who hadn't failed had decided to quit. And this was just one such sadistic exercise. Those
who made it through tests like these, and who had years of experience performing difficult
rescues, were gutsy, hardened risk takers. But in the Special Forces world, the
“blueshirts” were still considered slightly effete. The D-boys called them
“shake-and-bake” commandos because the PJ route was considered a shortcut into the special
op. community. In most other instances, the air force was the least physically demanding
of the branches. Some of the D-boys saw their presence and the four SEALS as a
genuflection to intraservice rivalry. This was a “joint” operation. Everybody wanted a
chance to play in this war. There were plenty of guys who rose above such pettiness, but
there was enough of it in the hangar to color Wilkinson's weeks of deployment. It was
something he and the other air force specialists had learned to live with.

When the chalkboard came around, Wilkinson was immediately hungry for more information.
Where had Six One gone down? Was it burning? How many people were on board? For him, apart
from the physical danger (in this case being shot at), rescues were a mental challenge.
People's lives depended on how well he could think on his feet. He carried two heavy bags,
one for medical supplies and the other containing tools for cutting open the helicopter
and prying men loose. Training had taught him to cope with street and how to handle the
tools. The rest was all improvisation.

Specialist Rob Phipps, the “Phippster,” was the youngest of the Rangers on board. He was
twenty-two. To the more experienced men, battle was a grim necessity, part of their jobs.
They had weighed the risks and for various reasons had accepted them. For Phipps, the
prospect of going in was just thrilling. His pulse raced and his senses seemed twice as
alert. The only thing he could compare it to was a drug. He could hardly sit still. He had
been a hellion of a teenager growing up in Detroit, drinking and partying, breaking all
the rules, running completely out of control. The Rangers had taken all that fearless
exuberance and pointless bravado and channeled it. That was the secret core of all the
Hoo-ah discipline and esprit. You would be given permission in battle, to break the
biggest social taboo of all. You killed people. You were supposed to kill people. It
wasn't often talked about in just that way, but there it was. Phipps didn't consider
himself bloodthirsty, but he'd been groomed and primed for a moment just like this, and he
was eager. He had his CAR-15, which could fire upward of six hundred rounds per minute,
and he'd been trained to hit what he aimed at. Part of him never believed he'd actually be
asked to do it. Now he reminded himself: This is for real! He was frightened, excited, and
nervous all at once. He had never felt this way.

As pilot Dan Jollata called back, “One minute,” the men checked weapons, chambered
rounds, and passed along whatever bits of information were offered by the crew chiefs and
those at the doors, who could see below. They moved over Wolcott's downed Black Hawk
exactly eight minutes after it crashed. .Jollata flew in from the north, flared, and then
hovered about thirty feet over the street. The Little Bird that had gone in to rescue the
two wounded D-boys had landed right on Marehan Road, but the Black Hawk was much too big
to go all the way down.

From his middle spot, Wilkinson couldn't see anything.

He was taking his cues from Master Sergeant Scott Fales, his team leader. They made eye
contact and nodded. This is it. Then Jollata said it was time, the ropes were kicked out,
and men started sliding out. When it was his turn, Wilkinson noticed that the essential
kit bags, which were supposed to be kicked out first, had been left behind. So he and
Fales waited until the men before them had cleared the rope and then kicked out the bags
themselves. They made one last check around inside the now-empty bird before they jumped.

The delay was costly. As Jollata held his hover these few extra seconds, an RPG exploded
on the left side of his airframe. It rocked the Black Hawk like a roundhouse punch.
Jollata instinctively began to pull up and away.

“Coming out. I think we have been hit,” Jollata radioed. Confirmation was already coming
from nearby Little Birds.

--You have been hit.

--Behind your engines.

--Be advised you are smoking.

“We still have people on the ropes!” one of his crew chiefs shouted.

Jollata could hear his rotor blades whistling. Shrapnel from the blast had peppered them
with holes. The aircraft sloshed from side to side. The blast had damaged the main rotor
housing and had destroyed the engine cooling system. Instinct and training both dictated
that he move out, fast, but Jollata eased the Black Hawk back down to a hover for the
remaining seconds Wilkinson and Fates needed to finish sliding down the ropes.

Stretched out on the rope, Wilkinson heard the explosion above, but he was so intent on
negotiating his descent through the brown dust cloud that he never felt the bird jerk
forward and up, and didn't learn until much later how Jollata's cool had saved his life.

--You had better set it down pretty quick somewhere,

came advice for Jollata from one of the helicopters above.

--You have a big hole on top.

“All systems are normal right now, just a little whine in the rotor system. I think I can
make it back to the field,” said Jollata.

--Be advised you've got smoke coming out of the very top of the rotor. I suggest you go
down to the new port. Put it down now.

--Let Six Eight make his call, said Matthews from the C2 Black Hawk. He looks all right.

Once Wilkinson and Fales were on the ground, Super Sir Eight limped low and slow across
the city trailing a thin gray plume. Jollata struggled in the cockpit to fly it. It was
like maneuvering a truck on a sheet of ice. The Black Hawk could survive without oil for a
time, but losing the cooling system meant the gears would burn. He looked for an open
field near the port.

“I've got the field in sight. All systems normal. I am losing transmission pressure right
now.”

The sturdy Black Hawk kept going. They flew past the open field and then slipped over the
fencing to the airport base. Jollata still faced the challenge of putting it down. He knew
the chopper couldn't hold a hover, so he warned the crew chiefs in back to brace
themselves for a hard landing. He radioed for emergency crews on the ground to be ready,
and then just slammed the bird down with a quick roll at sixty knots. He put it right on
the wheels. They hit with a jolt, but the Black Hawk stayed upright and intact.

2

Wilkinson heard the snap of rounds passing nearby as soon as he hit the street. It was hot
and in the cloud of dust he couldn't see. He ran to a wall on the right side of the street
and waited for the dust to settle.

He was carrying a small medical pack and his CAR-15, sidearm, rounds, radio, canteen, and
body armor. Instead of a K-pot (the standard U.S. Army Kevlar helmet), Wilkinson was
wearing the lightweight plastic Pro-Tech hockey helmet preferred by most of the D-boys.
Their specialized work called for them to move fast in and out of small places, so their
primary concern was bumping their head, not taking a bullet or shrapnel. Wilkinson
preferred the little helmet because he could glue a strip of Velcro to the top, where he
could fasten a flashlight.

Wilkinson had one of the heavy ceramic plates in the front of his body armor, and with
all the other gear must have weighed half again his 180 pounds, yet he didn't feel the
extra weight There had been some learned discussion in the CSAR bird about the pros and
cons of wearing the armor plates. They were heavy, and in some cases were so oversized
that the top of the breastplate jammed uncomfortably up under the chin of men seated in
the choppers. Since so much of their time had been spent just sitting, there was ample
sentiment in the bird for leaving the plates out altogether. The Kevlar itself could stop
shrapnel and a 9-mm round. Wilkinson figured the standard Somali weapon to be the AK-47,
which fires a faster round. So he endured the plate in front, but not in back. It was a
reminder of the all-important rule: Never turn your back on the enemy.

Except, at this intersection of dirt roads and stone houses, the enemy seemed to be
shooting from everywhere. He couldn't see anything. He took his heavy leather fast-roping
gloves off and clipped them on his vest, waiting for the cloud to thin enough so he could
see where he was.

They had put down on Marehan Road, a wide dirt road immediately east of the crash, though
Wilkinson could not yet see Super Six One. As Mogadishu neighborhoods went, this one was
upscale. This wide north-south street was intersected by narrow alleys running east-west.
He knew Super Six One was in one of those. There were one and two story houses made of
rose-tinted, white, or gray-brown stone, roofed with tin, most arrayed around smaller
inner courtyards. Some of the outer walls were smooth plaster and had been painted,
although all were stained with the orange sand of the streets. Most of the walls were
uneven. Even the ones made of modern cinder blocks were so sloppily mortared they
resembled a hastily stacked pile of stones. It was clear that most of the construction,
while in some cases ambitious, was strictly do-it-yourself. There were small trees inside
the courtyards and some out on the street.

He saw some of his team across the road, moving west, up a narrow alley. The kit bags and
fast ropes were still in the middle of Marehan Road. Alongside was a long shard of Super
Six One's shattered rotors. At impact, pieces of the rotors had been hurled blocks away.
Wilkinson ran across the road, still hearing the loud snap of bullets around him, and
picked up both bags. As he rounded the corner to the alley, he saw the wreck. He was
startled by its size. They were used to seeing Black Hawks in the air or out on spacious
tarmacs. In this narrow alley it looked tragic, like a harpooned whale, beached on its
left side. The T-shaped tail boom was twisted and bent down. On its side like that, the
bird was about eight feet high. There were bits and pieces of rotor, engine, stone, and
mortar scattered all over the top of it. Painted on the front end of the bird, under the
right cockpit door facing upward, was a crude cartoon of a crooked-nosed Indian with a
head feather, and the words, “Sitting Bull.” He remembered that “Bull” Briley was Six
One's copilot.

Much had already happened. The rescue team's D-boys and Rangers, including the group from
Chalk Two who had run over from the target building, had set up a small perimeter,
basically guarding the alley to the front and rear of the downed aircraft. The crushed
nose of the bird pointed east. There were a few dead Somalis scattered on the street.
People would rush out, often women or children, to retrieve their weapons, and others
would step out to pull bodies to cover.

Sergeant Fales was at the front end of the wreckage stretching up to peer inside when he
felt a tug at his left pants leg. Then came the pain. It felt like a hot poker had been
stabbed through his calf muscle. Fales, a big, broad-faced man who had fought in Panama
and during the Gulf War, felt anger with the pain. Here he was after years of training for
a moment like this, and after less than three minutes on the ground he'd been shot. How
was he to do his job, direct this rescue, with a big bloody hole in his leg?

He hopped back from the front of the helicopter with a disappointed grimace. Wilkinson
caught up as Fales hobbled back toward the tail of the bird. Delta Sergeant First Class
Bob Mabry had him under one arm.

“What's up?” Wilkinson asked.

“I've been shot.”

“What?”

“Been shot. Rat bastard shot me.”

Fales and Mabry ducked into the hole the crashing helicopter had knocked in the south
wall of the alley. Mabry cut open his pants with his scissors and saw that the bullet had
passed through the calf muscle and out the front of his leg. It had apparently not broken
the leg bones. By the look of it, with flaps of muscle tissue spilled out of the wound,
they figured it ought to hurt badly, but other than that stabbing pain right after he'd
been shot, Fales felt nothing. The anesthetic of fear and adrenaline. Mabry stuffed the
muscle tissue back into the hole, packed some gauze into it, and then applied a pressure
dressing. Both men then crawled back out into the alley, finding cover in a small
cup-shaped space behind the main body of the helicopter created by the bent tail boom.