Black Hawk Down (25 page)

“Listen,” Struecker said. “I understand how you feel. I'm married, too. Don't think of
yourself as a coward. I know you're scared. I'm scared shitless. I've never been in a
situation like this either. But we've got to go. It's our job. The difference between
being a coward and hero is not whether you're scared, it's what you do while you're
scared.”

Thomas didn't seem to like the answer. He walked away. As they were about to pull out,
though, Struecker noticed that he'd climbed on board with the rest of the men.

7

“You're going to go ahead and lead us out,” Lieutenant Larry Moore had instructed
Struecker. “We're going to take these three five-tons, your two vehicles in front, my two
in the rear. The crash site is somewhere in this vicinity,” he said, pointing to a
location between the K-4 traffic circle and the target building. “We don't know for sure.
You're going to flip to this channel,” showing him the frequency on his radio, “and we
have aircraft up in the sky, and the pilot is going to tell you where to go.”

“Okay, whatever,” said Struecker.

One of the company clerks, Sergeant Mark Warner, stepped up.

“Sergeant, can I go out?”

“You have a weapon and some ammo?”

“Yeah.”

“Go ahead, get in the backseat.”

Other volunteers were piling on vehicles down the convoy. Specialist Peter Squeglia, the
company armorer, had pulled on fighting gear and climbed into a truck. He had injured his
ankle playing rugby in the sand with some guys from New Zealand a few days before and had
been relegated to guard duty at the hangar. There was no way he could use a sore ankle as
an excuse to stay out of this. So now he sat with his M-16 pointed out the passenger-side
window of a five-ton truck, wondering what he had gotten himself into. You joined the army
and volunteered for the Rangers ostensibly because you were willing to go into combat, but
in this day and age you didn't really expect them to call your bluff. Squeglia considered
himself more realistic about battle than most of his Ranger buddies, even though be had
never gotten close to one. He had been put off by some of the bravado he'd seen in the
previous weeks.

He would caution his friends, “This is real stuff. One of us is probably going to get
killed one of these times out.” And they all laughed at him. Well, now at least one of
them had definitely been killed-he'd seen them unload Pilla's body-and here he was in the
thick of it. Here it was, a Sunday afternoon in early fall, the kind of day back home
where he and his buddies would spend the afternoon watching football on TV and then head
out to the bars of Newport, Rhode Island, trying to pick up girls, and here he was,
smart-guy twenty-five-year-old Peter Squeglia, riding shotgun in a truck out into the
streets of Mogadishu with what appeared to be the entire indigenous population trying to
kill him. He felt the truck start to move.

As Struecker steered out the east gate he waited for guidance from the C2 Black Hawk
above.

--You need to turn left and then move to the first intersection and take another left.

Struecker made the left turn on Tanzania Street, but as he approached the intersection
gunfire erupted all around.

They weren't more than eighty yards out the back gate.

In a Humvee behind Struecker's, Sergeant Raleigh Cash screamed, “Action left!”

His turret gunner swung around to face five Somalis with weapons, and Cash, who was in
the front passenger seat, heard the explosion of gunfire and the zing and pop of rounds
passing close. Cash had been taught that if you hear that crack it meant the bullet had
passed near your bead. A zing, which sounded to him like the sound made when you hit a
telephone-pole guy wire with a stick, meant the bullet had missed you by a far margin. The
shots were answered by a roaring fusillade.

In another of the rear Humvees, reluctant Steve Anderson heard the eruption of gunfire
and felt his stomach turn. Then he realized most of what he heard was Ranger guns. Any
Somali with a weapon faced a crushing wave of American lead, .50 cals on three of the
Humvees, SAWs and all those M-16s massed on the trucks.

Anderson tried to shoot his SAW, too, but the weapon jammed. He pulled and pulled on the
charging handle, trying to get it unjammed, but it wouldn't budge. So he picked up the
driver's M-16 and took aim out the back of the moving vehicle. An instant before he took
aim he saw a Somali with a rifle dart through a doorway, but it was too late for him to
take a shot.

The lead vehicles were taking the brunt of it. An RPG skipped across the top of
Struecker's Humvee with a screech of metal on metal and exploded across the street against
a concrete wall with a concussion that lifted the wide-bodied vehicle up on two wheels.
Then his .50 gunner returned fire to a massed burst of AK-47s. It occurred to the sergeant
that Sammy was unschooled in the art of ambush. The idea was to let the lead vehicle pass
and suck in the whole column, then open fire. The unarmored flatbed trucks in the middle
loaded with cooks and clerks and other volunteers would have made fat, vulnerable targets.
By opening up on the lead vehicles, it gave the convoy a chance to back out before things
got worse.

Struecker shouted for his driver to throw the Humvee in reverse. Those following would
just have to figure it out.

They slammed into the front of the Humvee behind them, and then that driver threw his
vehicle in reverse and backed into the first truck. Eventually they all got the message.

“You need to find a different route!” he told his eyes in the sky.

--Go back where you came from and turn right instead of left. You can get there that way.

Struecker got the whole column back up to the gate, and this time turned right. Looming
ahead was a roadblock, a big one. While a lot of the people shooting at them were clearly
amateurs, it was obvious there were some experienced military minds among them. This
roadblock was nothing spontaneous. They had anticipated the routes a convoy might take
from the Ranger base and had thrown up barriers of dirt, junk, furniture, vehicle hulks,
chunks of concrete, wire, and whatever else was at hand. There were tires burning on it
that threw churning clouds into the darkening sky. Struecker could taste the sting of the
burning rubber. The convoy knew Super Six Four was down less than a mile away, directly
ahead.

Durant would say later that he heard the sound of a .50 cal, which almost certainly was
from Struecker's Humvee. The pilot believed deliverance was at hand. But the convoy could
advance no closer. Beyond the roadblock, between where they sat and Durant's crippled
Black Hawk, was a concrete wall surrounding the sprawling ghetto of huts and walking
paths. Struecker knew his Humvees could roll over the roadblock, but there was no way the
trucks behind him would make it. And even if they did, there wasn't going to be any way
through the concrete wall.

-See where those tires are burning? That's where the crash is. Go in one hundred meters
past it.

“You'll have to find us another route,” Struecker responded.

-There ain't another route.

“Well, you need to find one. Figure out a way to get there.”

-The only other route as to go all the way around the city and come in through the back
side.

“Fine. We'll take it.” -

Struecker knew every minute mattered. Durant and his crew wouldn't last long. It seemed
like it took forever for the five-tons to turn around on the narrow street. The trucks
weren't delicate about it. They rammed into walls and ground gears. As the trucks fought
their way around, most of the men moved out into the street to defend the convoy. On one
knee in the dirt, Sergeant Cash took a whack on his chest that almost knocked him over. It
felt like someone had punched him up near the shoulder. He ran his band inside his shirt,
looking for blood. There was none. The bullet had skimmed off the front of his chest
plate, tearing the straps of his load-bearing harness so that it was now hanging by
threads.

Squeglia saw a round clip off the side-view mirror of the truck on the driver's side, and
reached his M-16 across the chest of the driver to return fire. Sizemore unloaded on
everything he saw, venting his pent-up rage. Anderson kept his head down, looking for
specific targets. He shot a few times, but didn't think he'd hit anyone.

When they all got pointed at last in the right direction, the convoy spread out along a
road that skirted the city to the southwest, driving through an occasional hail of AK-47
fire. From the peak of one rise they could see Durant's crash site. It was down in a
little valley, but there seemed no easy way to get there.

8

Up in their Black Hawk, Goffena and Yacone could see both convoys in trouble. Lieutenant
Colonel McKnight's battered main convoy was steering back toward the K-4 circle, away from
both crash sites, and the emergency convoy of cooks and volunteers wasn't getting close.

They again asked to insert their Delta snipers. They were down to just two now. Sergeant
Brad Hallings had manned one of Super Six Two's miniguns after one of the crew chiefs was
injured. They would need him there.

Captain Yacone turned around in his seat to discuss the situation with the two Delta
operators.

“Things are getting bad now, guys,” Yacone told them, shouting over the chopper's engines
and the sound of the guns. “The second convoy is taking intensive fire, and it doesn't
sound like it's gonna make it to the crash site. Mike and I have ID'ed a field about
twenty-five to fifty yards away from where they're down. There are lots of shacks and
shanties in between. Once you get there, you could either hunker down and wait for the
vehicles, or try to get the wounded to an open area, where we could come back in and get
you.”

Shughart and Gordon both indicated they were ready to go down.

Up in the command bird, Harrell pondered the request. It was terribly risky, maybe even
hopeless. But one or two properly armed, well-trained soldiers could hold off an
undisciplined mob indefinitely. Shughart and Gordon were experts at killing and staying
alive. They were serious, career soldiers, trained to get hard, ugly things done. They saw
opportunity where others could see only danger. Like the other operators, they prided
themselves on staying cool and effective in extreme danger. They lived and trained
endlessly for moments like this. If there was a chance to succeed, these two believed they
would.

In the C2 bird, seated side by side, Harrell and Matthews weighed the decision. Their
entire air rescue team was on the ground already at the first crash site. The ground
convoy wasn't going to get to Durant and his crew fast enough. But dropping in Shughart
and Gordon would most likely be sending them to their deaths. Matthews turned down the
volume on their radios momentarily.

“Look, they're your guys,” he said to Harrell. “They're the only two guys we've got left.
What do you want to do?”

“What are our choices?” Harrell asked.

“We can put them in or not put them in. Nobody else is going to get to that crash site
that I can see.”

“Put them in,” said Harrell.

So long as there was even a tiny chance, they felt obliged to give it to the downed crew.

When Goffena's crew chief, Master Sergeant Mason Hall, passed word to the men that it was
time to jump, Gordon grinned and gave an excited thumbs-up.

There was a small opening behind one of the huts. It was bordered by a fence and covered
by some debris, but it might do. Goffena made a low pass at it, flaring up near the ground
to blow over the fence and scatter the debris. He couldn't get rid of enough of it to
land, so he held a hover at about five feet as Shughart and Gordon jumped. Shughart got
tangled momentarily on the safety line connecting him to the chopper and had to be cut
free. Gordon took a spill as he ran for cover. Shughart stood motioning with his bands,
indicating confusion. They'd gotten disoriented jumping down, and were crouched in a
defensive posture in the open trying to get their bearings. Goffena dropped the chopper
back down low, leaned out his door, and pointed the way. One of his crew chiefs flung a
smoke grenade in the direction of the crash.

The operators both turned thumbs up and began moving that way.

9

More than a mile to the northeast, back at Chalk Two's original blocking position by the
target building, the war had slowed down for Sergeant Ed Yurek. After stumbling into the
small Somali schoolhouse and coaxing the teacher and children to the floor, Yurek had been
left in charge of the remnants of his chalk when Lieutenant DiTomasso and eight other
Rangers had sprinted down to help out at the first crash site. Yurek had seen the ground
convoy drive off. As the fighting shifted to the Black Hawk crash site three blocks east,
things grew so quiet on Yurek's corner he got spooked. With the lieutenant and his
radioman gone, he had no contact with the command radio net. He was worried the whole

force had forgotten them.

He used his personal radio to call DiTomasso.

“What's up, Lieutenant?”

-You need to find your way to me.

“Roger, sir. Where are you?”

-Take that big alley three blocks east, then turn left. Go about two hundred meters. You
can't miss us.

“Roger.”

It was and it wasn't good news. It felt like they'd finally gotten this small corner of
Mogadishu tamed. They'd grown familiar with angles of fire and potential danger spots and
had found what seemed to be adequate cover. The kids in the little tin schoolhouse had
been quiet as mice. Yurek had been keeping an eye out for them. Out in this very dangerous
city, with bullets and RPGs flying, he was loathe to give up what seemed to have become a
safe and quiet corner. They could hear heavy shooting over by the crash site, and once
they were up and moving down the road, they'd have no cover. DiTomasso and the first men
down the road had at least had the element of surprise. Yurek's would be the second team
to pass through the same gauntlet. He had no doubt Sammy would be waiting.

“Come on, guys. We gotta go!” he reluctantly informed the men.

They began moving east down the alley. They walked fast, weapons aimed and ready, in
single file spread out down the south side of the alley. They stayed a few steps off the
stone walls on that side of the street. The natural inclination was to get as close to the
wall as possible. The wall suggested at least a margin of safety. But Sergeant Paul Howe,
one of the D-boys, had advised them against it. Bullets follow walls, he'd explained. The
enemy can concentrate fire down an alleyway, and the walls on either side will act as
funnels. Some rounds would actually ride the walls for hundreds of feet. Standing tight
against a wall was actually more dangerous than being in the middle of the street.

At the intersections they would stop and cover each other.

Yurek ran while his men laid suppressive fire north and south. Then he covered for the
next man, and so on. They leapfrogged across.