Black Hawk Down (28 page)

An operator grabbed Fillmore and began dragging him into a narrow alley. Then he was
shot, in the neck.

Steele felt the gravity of their predicament hit fully home. This is for keeps.

-12-

Mohamed Sheik Ali moved swiftly around his neighborhood. All had been fighting in these
streets already for a decade, since he was fourteen years old and had been drummed into
Siad Barre's army. He moved mostly in crowds, darting from hiding place to hiding place,
usually staying far enough away to make himself a hard target, but occasionally stealing
close enough to fire off a few well-placed rounds from his AK. If the Americans spotted
him, they saw a short, dusty little man with nappy hair whose teeth were brownish orange
from chewing khat and whose eyes were wide with the effects of the drug and adrenaline.

Sheik All was a professional gunman, a killer, a man who had fought for and against the
dictator, and then put himself and his weathered weapon up for hire. Most Somalis had come
to regard Sheik All and men like him as a plague. They were feared and despised. Now, with
the Rangers to fight, men like him were valued again. To him, the Americans were just a
new enemy to shoot at, and not a particularly brave one. All believed if the Rangers
didn't have the helicopters helping them from above, he and his men would surround and
kill them with ease, with their bare hands.

He relished the fight. There was no quarter given on either side. The black vests that
came with the Rangers were especially ruthless killers. When they had come to Bakara
Market they had come into his home uninvited and they would have to accept his punishment.
Sheik All believed the radio broadcasts and flyers printed up by the Aidid's SNA. The
Americans wanted to force all Somalis to be Christians, to give up Islam. They wanted to
turn Somalis into slaves.

When the helicopter was shot down he rejoiced, and began running toward it.

Unlike most of the crowd he did not run directly to the crash. He knew there would be
armed men around it and that the Rangers would move to it. It would not be easy to get
close.

Sheik All was part of a large number of irregular militia moving in the crowds that had
begun to form a wide perimeter in the neighborhood around the crashed helicopter. He ran
up a street parallel to the moving Rangers. He would run to• a corner, wait by it, and
shoot as the Rangers came across, then he would sprint to the next street and be waiting
for them again. He was not weighted down with armor and gear, and he was not being shot at
from all directions, so he could move faster and more freely than the Rangers. When he got
to the perimeter around the crash site there were crowds, fighters like himself but mostly
people who just came to see, women and children. The Americans were firing down the
streets at everyone. Sheik Ali saw women and children fail.

He and several of the men in his band lay down behind a tree and shot at the Americans as
they came down the slope toward the alley where the crashed helicopter was. There he saw a
Ranger shot in the head, one of the black vests with the little helmets. His buddy tried
to pull him to safety and he, too, was shot, in the neck.

Then Sheik All and his men moved on. They circled around the neighborhood where the
helicopter was down, and crept back down toward it on Marehan Road. Sheik Ali found a tree
and lay flat on his stomach behind it.

There were Americans on his side of the street about two blocks south, hiding behind a
car and a tree and a wall. There were more at the same intersection across the street.
Between him and the Americans were more fighters, most of them crazy people with guns who
didn't know how to fight. Sheik Ali waited behind his cover for a clean shot.

He was there for almost two hours, trading shots with the Americans, before his
companion, Abdikadir Ali Nur, was shot. An American down the street behind an M-60 hit Nur
with several shots that nearly tore off the left half of his body. Sheik Ali himself was
hit by some shrapnel in the face when an M-203 round exploded nearby.

He then helped carry his friend to a hospital.

-13-

The odor of spent gunpowder had always been sweet for Private David Floyd. It reminded him
of home. Out hunting with his father as a boy in South Carolina-which was not that long
ago; he was just nineteen-he would pick up shotgun shells just to sniff them.

Now that odor, which was all around, meant something else. He ran with the others through
the gunfire on the street, rounded the corner just behind a team of D-boys, and then
jumped for whatever cover he could find on the left side of the street. He tucked himself
into a corner by some roofing tin, facing south, disbelieving.

It had been an effort to keep moving. There was a big part of Floyd that just wanted to
crawl into a little ball and hide somewhere. He knew it would be suicide to stop fighting,
but he was that scared. He was scared enough to piss his pants. I'm in it now. It was like
a movie only it was real and he was in the middle. He couldn't believe he was in actual
combat and people were shooting at him, trying to kill him. I'm gonna die on this, dirty
little street in Africa. It was much too frantic a moment to be thinking about such things
but it occurred to Floyd anyway, a sudden image in his mind's eye of a late summer Sunday
morning at home with his parents sitting down to breakfast without the slightest notion
that their precious son David was here, a million miles away,-fighting for his life in
this insane city they'd never even heard of, much less cared about. What in the hell am I
doing here? The D-boys' presence helped keep those impulses under control. They encouraged
the opposite impulse that was there, too, which was to fight like hell, use every round
and grenade and rocket at hand, use all the training he'd been given to inflict as much
punishment as possible. Because it made him mad. To see one of his Ranger brothers shot
down right beside him-he had seen Williamson go down, screaming-it just. ., well, it
pissed Floyd off. So warring with the urge to crawl under a rock was this fury, this
cornered-animal rage, like, you motherfuckers asked for it now you're gonna get it.

Then he saw Fillmore get hit. This was not supposed to happen. These guys knew how to
stay alive. Ho-oly shit. If the D-boys were getting killed, what odds would you give
Private First Class David Floyd for coming out of this alive?

He was against the west wall firing his weapon south pretty rapidly now down Marehan Road
and realizing that the pile of tin around him was no real shelter at all. In the middle of
the street, right in the middle, Specialist John Collett had crawled behind a bump in the
road and was providing superb covering fire to the south with his SAW. Across the street
was Sergeant Watson with a group of other Rangers.

Watson led the group with his own grim sense of humor.

When a barrage of bullets slammed into a wall directly over his bead, Watson turned to
the men with his eyes open comically wide. “Oh, this sucks!” he said, in a way that made
the others smile. His attitude was, we're-in-the-shit-now-but-what-the-fuck!

Sergeant Keni Thomas was closest to Fillmore when he got hit.

“Can you call for a medevac?” shouted Hooten.

Thomas ran back to Watson, who only heard the last part of what Thomas said. Watson knew
there was no way they were going to be able to get Fillmore out, but he didn't have the
heart to tell Thomas.

“Go ahead and ask the captain,” he said.

So Thomas ran as far as he could in Steele's direction, then shouted, “We've got a head
wound. We have to get him out!”

Steele gestured for Thomas to wait a second as be talked on the radio. Then he called
hack, “Is he one of ours?”

Weren't they all one of ours?

“A Delta guy,” Thomas shouted.

Thomas was distressed. He'd never seen a man shot in the head.

“Just calm down,” said Watson when Thomas returned. The sergeant said maybe they could
get him on a vehicle. Where the hell were those vehicles anyway? When they left for the
crash site, the convoy had been on the street right behind them.

Thomas ran back to Hooten.

“We can't land a bird in here,” Thomas said, “but maybe we can get a Humvee.”

“It's all right,” said Hooten. “He's dead.”

Thomas felt oddly emotionless about it. He felt angry with Captain Steele for asking, “Is
he one of ours?” He also felt like a failure.

Collett was feeling good about his spot at the center of Marehan Road. It didn't look
like much. Guys on both sides of the street thought he was crazy. But Collett had deduced
by the rounds cracking over his head that the hump was excellent cover. It looked to him
as if it was the guys who were up and moving who were getting shot. He had good angles,
but there was only room for one man. When Private George Siegler started crawling out
toward him, Collett shouted, “Siegler, get back over there!” Siegler didn't argue. He just
scooted around and crawled back to the wall.

Rounds poked through Floyd's tin shelter. Because the sun was low us the sky, when he
heard the popping noise he saw shafts of light suddenly appear through the metal. It was
like somebody was shooting at him with a laser. Then he saw Private Peter Neathery get hit
across the Street against the same wall where Fillmore had been shot.

Neathery had been down on the ground working his M-60 machine gun when he screamed and
rolled away clutching his right arm. Private Vince Errico took over the big gun, and
seconds later let out a yelp. He, too, had been hit in the right arm. Both Neathery and
Errico were now down, moaning. It was clear that the right side of the wall approaching
the intersection, the place where Fillmore had been killed and where all these other men
were being hit, was like a focal point for enemy fire. Walking through it was asking to be
shot.

The bullet that hit Neathery had torn through his bicep. There was a lot of blood. Doe
Richard Strous calmly examined it as Neathery looked up at Thomas.

“Darius, Sergeant, I hope they send me home for this.”

“Does it hurt?” Thomas asked.

“Hell yeah! I'm all right, though, I do believe in God.” “That's okay,” said Thomas. “He
believes in you, too.” Thomas took over the M-

60. He was squinting west, desperately looking for 'the shooter who had such a bead on
them. Floyd and Specialist Melvin DeJesus were doing the same from their low vantage point
in the shade. Floyd was feeling hopeless. We're gonna buy it here. Then a single brass
cartridge plopped on the street right in front of them. It had to have rolled off the tin
roof of the house they were up against. Whoever was up there would have a clear shot at
the men along the sunny west wall. Floyd stood.

He wasn't tall enough to see up on the roof, but he could reach it with his SAW, He
placed the gun roughly parallel to the rooftop and squeezed a long burst. He heard a loud
thumping and a shout. The shooting from' that direction stopped.

Someone else was shooting from a courtyard to the south. Thomas had used up all the 60
ammo that was left, and he'd already tossed a grenade in that courtyard, and Floyd and
DeJesus sprayed rounds toward it to no effect. They could see big muzzle flashes splash
out from behind a low masonry wall backed with bushes.

“Use the LAW!” Floyd shouted.

Thomas had one of the disposable rocket launchers strapped to his back, but it was so
lightweight and rarely used it was easy to forget about it.

He looked back at Floyd quizzically.

“The LAW! The LAW! On your back!” Floyd gestured to his shoulder.

Thomas's eyebrows went up theatrically, as if to say, Oh yeah!

He unstrapped the tube, extended it, and flipped up the sight. The rocket turned the
courtyard into a ball of fire. Sergeant Watson saw Thomas exulting over the shot, the same
man who had been so upset about Fillmore minutes before. He solved his problems. It was
inspiring for Watson to see bow determined and resilient men could be.

Specialist Mike Kurth was helping to bandage Errico when he saw a grenade drop and roll
out past him. Its smoke trail first caught his eye, then he saw the pineapple shape on the
ground, right next to the hump in the road hiding Collett.

“GRENADE!” sounded several voices together.

The men, Kurth, Errico, Neathery, and Doe Strous, all flopped to the sand and rolled as
fast as they could. Private Jeff Young reached back to grab Strous and pull him away, and
the explosion ripped the medic from his hands.

When it blew, Kurth felt himself driven hard into the ground and felt a flash of heat and
light behind him. He was in just the right spot. The force of the explosion passed over
him. He felt the shock and heat of it, and tasted its bitter chemical ignition, but in the
frantic instants after the blast he moved his arms and legs and saw that he hadn't been
hurt. The rest of the guys could not have been so lucky.

Collett, for sure, was dead. Kurth sat up hesitantly, before the smoke had cleared.

“Doc, you good?” he asked.

“Yeah.”

“Neathery?”

“Yeah.”

“Errico?”

“Yeah.”

“Young?”

“I'm okay.”

He waited to name Collett last.

“Yeah, dude, I'm okay,” his friend answered. The hump in the road had directed the blast
up and away from him.

Strous got some shrapnel in one leg and Young caught a small piece in his boot, but
otherwise everyone was intact.

Farther down the slope on the sunny side of the street, just beyond a tin shack that
jutted out from one of the houses, Captain Steele was still on the ground with his
second-in-command, Lechner, and Atwater, his radioman. Sergeant Hooten was in the doorway
to a courtyard about ten feet to Steele's right. It looked like he was trying to get the
captain's attention.

Floyd saw the barrel of an M-16 protrude from behind the corner down his side of the
street, pointing at the two Ranger officers.

-14-

What Hooten was trying to tell Steele was that he'd chosen a bad place to stop. Fillmore
and one of the other operators had just been shot in that spot.

Steele motioned with his hand for Hooten to wait. He was talking on the radio. He
wondered where in the hell the vehicles were. At the same time Steele's Rangers and the
Delta operators had been running through the streets making their way to the first crash
site, the ground convoy was wandering lost and taking terrible casualties. But Steele
didn't know this. All he knew was that they had left the target house at the same time.
Steele and some of his men had been pinned down now for about ten minutes. If those
vehicles would show up they could all roll out of this mess.

Beside Steele, Lechner and Atwater were working out some fire support. They had trouble
at first because the UHF emergency beacon from the downed Black Hawk a block away was
overriding the signal from Atwater's UHF radio. Lechner was finally able to get through to
one of the attack Little Birds on his FM radio. The pilot, Chief Warrant Officer Hal Wade,
told Lechner to put out some big orange panels marking their positions. Lechner passed the
word.