Black Hawk Down (29 page)

Once the panels were placed on the road, Wade came roaring down Marehan Road just above
the low rooftops. Collett ducked his helmet into his chest. Gunfire erupted from all
directions as the Little Bird flashed past, but the helicopter didn't fire. Wade was
braving the fire to make sure he knew where his own forces were before shooting back. His
chopper flew up and swept into a turn and came roaring back down the road again. There was
another rattling explosion of gunfire, but once again Wade didn't shoot. He now had a
pretty good fix on where his people were on the ground. Wade's Little Bird made another
sweeping turn. This time when he came down his miniguns were blazing.

It was just after that first shooting run that a bullet sprayed sand into Steele's eye.
Lechner turned left. He thought the shot came from across the road, but Steele rolled to
his right and looked at the tin wall behind him. The shot had rung so loud he was certain
it had come from there. His first thought was that one of the wounded Rangers behind him
was shooting through the wall. He kept rolling away, which wasn't easy with the big radio
strapped to his back.

Then two more holes poked -through the tin with loud bangs and dirt flew and Lechner
screamed.

He first felt a whipping sensation and then a crushing blow, as if an anvil had fallen on
the lower hail of his leg. The pain was unbearable. He gripped his upper leg and looked
down at a gaping hole in his leg. The bullet had exploded his shinbone arid traveled on
down his leg and exited at his ankle, shredding the foot beneath the bole.

There had been three rounds. Steele and Atwater had reacted to the first by rolling away,
but Lechner had not.

Steele was rolling when he heard Lechner scream. There was more shooting.

Hooten gesticulated wildly in the doorway, waving Steele in. Atwater was between Lechner
and him and the doorway was close, so Steele got up and ran for it. There was a lip around
the base of the entrance and he tripped over it. The big captain came sprawling into the
courtyard. Atwater came flying in after him.

Steele saw Atwater and shouted, “We've got to get Lechner!”

He stood to run back out but saw the howling lieutenant, his leg a mess, being dragged
toward the door by Bullock, who had run out to the street to help.

Steele took the radio mike from Atwater. Shouting, his words delivered in gasped phrases,
his voice contrasted sharply with the even, cool voices of the pilots and airborne
commanders, reflecting the drama on the ground.

-Romeo Six Four, this it Juliet Six Four. We're taking heavy small arms fire. We need
relief NOW and start extracting.

Harrell responded evenly but with impatience.

-This as Romeo Six Four. I UNDERSTAND you need to be extracted. I've done EVERYTHING I
CAN to get those vehicles to you, over.

Steele spoke wearily.

-Roger, understand. Be advised command element (Lechner] was just hit. Have more
casualties, over.

Sergeant (Goodale, who had been pulled into the same courtyard earlier after being shot
through the thigh and buttock, had heard Lechner howl. It was a horrible sound, the worst
sound he'd ever heard a man make. His own wound, oddly, didn't hurt that bad. Lechner's
looked horrific. He was still screaming when they got him inside. Goodale helped to pull
the lieutenant's radio off. Minutes before, after his injury, Goodale had radioed Lechner
to tell him he would be unable to continue calling in air support. That's why Lechner had
been calling Wade. Now here the lieutenant was, screaming in agony, the upper part of his
right leg normal, but the bottom hail from just below the knee flopped grotesquely to one
side. He was ghost white. Goodale sickened more as he saw a widening pool form under the
leg. Blood flowed from Lechner's wound like it was pouring from a jug.

-15-

At roughly the same time, one and a half miles southwest, his helicopter pancaked into a
squalid village of cloth and tin huts, Black Hawk Super Six Four pilot Mike Durant came
to. There was something wrong with his right leg. He and his copilot, Ray Frank, had been
knocked cold for at least several minutes. They weren't sure how long. Durant was upright,
leaning slightly to the right. The windshield was shattered and there was something draped
over him, a big sheet of tin. The Black Hawk seemed remarkably intact.

The rotor blades had not flexed off. His scat, which was mounted on shock absorbers, had
collapsed down to the floor. It had broken in the full down position and was cocked to the
right. He figured that was because they had been spinning when they hit. The shocks had
collapsed and the spin jerked the seat to the right. It must have been the combination of
the jerk and the impact that had broken his femur. The big bone in his right leg had
snapped on the edge of his seat.

The Black Hawk had flattened a flimsy hut. No one had been inside, but in the hut
alongside a two-year-old girl, Howa Hassan, lay unconscious and bleeding. A hunk of flying
metal from the helicopter had taken a deep gouge out of her forehead. Her mother, Bint
Abraham Hassan, had been splashed with something hot, probably oil, and was severely
burned on her face and legs.

The dazed pilots checked themselves over. Frank's left tibia was broken.

Durant did some things he later could not explain. He removed his helmet and his gloves.
Then he took off his watch. Before flying he always took off his wedding ring because
there was a danger it could catch on rivets or switches. He would pass the strap of his
watch through the ring and keep it there during a flight. Now he removed the watch and
took the ring off the strap and set both on the dashboard.

He picked up his weapon, an MP-5K, a little German 9-mm submachine gun. The pilots called
them SPs, or Skinny-poppers.

Frank tried to explain what happened during the crash.

“I couldn't get them all the way off,” he said, explaining his struggle to reach up and
pull the power control levers back as they fell. Frank said he had reinjured his back. He
had hurt it first in the crash years before. Durant's back hurt, too. They both figured
they had crushed vertebrae. All this happened in the first moments after they came to.

Durant realized that with his leg and back broken, he would be unable to pull himself out
of the chopper. He pushed the piece of tin roof away from him and resolved to defend his
position through the broken windshield. They looked like they were in some little opening,
a yard between huts. There was a hut facing him pieced together with irregularly shaped
pieces of corrugated metal, and a small dirt alleyway alongside it. To his side was
another flimsy wall pieced together like the house. Durant remembers seeing Frank sitting
in the doorway opposite, about to push himself out. It was the last time he saw him.

That's when Shughart and Gordon showed up. Durant was startled. They were suddenly
standing there. He'd either been out for a while or they'd come amazingly fast. He didn't
know either of the Delta operators well, but he recognized their faces. Seeing them gave
him an enormous sense of relief. It was over. He figured they were part of a rescue team.
His next thought had been to get the radio up and operating, but now, with his rescuers
already on the ground, there was no need. Shughart and Gordon were calm. There was
gunfire, mostly from the choppers overhead. The D-boys reached in and lifted Durant out of
the craft gently, one lifting his legs and the other grabbing his torso, as if they had
all the time in the world, and set him down on his side by a tree. He was not in great
pain. With the airframe and a wall joined behind him, and a wall to his left that ran all
the way back behind the tail of the chopper, Durant was in a perfect position to cover the
whole right side of the aircraft.

He could see that his crew chiefs had taken the brunt of the impact. There were no shock
absorbers in back like the ones he and Frank had up front. He watched the operators lift
Bill Cleveland from the fuselage. Cleveland had blood all over his pants and was talking
but making no sense.

Then the D-boys moved to the other side of the helicopter to help Field. Durant couldn't
see feet moving under the fuselage because the landing gear had been crushed on impact.
The belly of the bird was on the dirt. He assumed they were setting up a perimeter over
there, looking for a way to get them out, maybe looking for a place where another
helicopter could set down and load them up. Skinnies were starting to poke their heads
around the corner on Durant's side of the chopper. Just an occasional one or two. He'd
squeeze off a round and they'd drop back behind cover. His gun kept jamming so he'd eject
the round and the next time it would shoot okay. Then it would jam again. He could hear
more and more shooting now from the other side of the airframe. It still hadn't occurred
to him these two D-boys were it, and that there was no rescue team.

-16-

When Mo'alim got to the neighborhood where the second helicopter had crashed, the paths
leading toward it were already littered with bodies. There were choppers shooting from
above and, as Mo'alim had expected, there were still Americans around the crash capable of
fighting.

There was only one direct approach, and Mo'alim could tell it was covered. He kept trying
to hold the crowd back but they were angry and brazen. The slender, bearded militia leader
squatted behind a wall and waited for some of his men to catch up so that they could mount
a coordinated attack.

-17-

On each of his passes over the wreck, Mike Goffena in Super Six Two found the encircling
mob larger. Shughart and Gordon had arrayed themselves and the chopper crew in a perimeter
around the downed bird. Clearly, they had decided against trying to move the crew to open
ground. They were dug in awaiting help. On the radio Goffena could hear the desperate
problems the rescue convoys were having.

The ticking of bullets puncturing his airframe had accelerated, and he was flying through
regular RPG airbursts.

With two Black Hawks down already, his fellow pilots were warning him away.

-Just had an airburst about two hundred meters behind ya.

-RPG passed right under, Super Six Two.

But Goffena was absorbed with the drama unfolding below, and trying to get something done
about it.

“This place is getting extremely hot,” his copilot, Captain Yacone, pleaded on the radio.
“We need to get those folks out of there!”

-Roger, Six Two, can you tell what the situation is?

“Taking fairly regular RPG fire and they're all close.”

Yacone continued to direct support fire from the smaller attack helicopters, pointing
them where the Somali mobs were thickest. Air commander Matthews didn't like what he was
seeing from the C2 Black Hawk. RPG smoke trails were arcing up regularly now from the
crowd pressing in around Durant's crash site. He had Little Bird pilots hovering over the
scene, with copilots trying to pick off targets with M-16s.

-Knock that shit off he said. You're going to get yourselves shot down.

The battle was at its most confusing point. There were now two crash sites. A rescue team
had made it to the first, Cliff Wolcott's, and the entire assault force and original
ground convoy had been directed to move there. A second hastily assembled rescue convoy
had left the Ranger base and not gotten far. They were probing around the vicinity of this
crash site, but not getting close. The first crash site had a fighting chance, but
Durant's, even with the two D-boys they'd dropped in, wouldn't last long without more help.

Goffena flew a low orbit over Durant's downed Black Hawk. Every time he swung west, he
was blinded by the sun. He wished it would hurry and set. He and the other Night Stalkers
felt most comfortable flying at night. In the darkness, with their technology, the chopper
pilots and crew could see while the enemy could not. If Goffena's Black Hawk and the
Little Birds could hold off the mob until nightfall, the men on the ground had a chance.

The mob below now filled all the footpaths back out to the main road. Every time Goffena
made a low pass some of the crowd would scatter, but it would close back up behind him. It
was like running his hand through water. He could see RPGs now flying past his helicopter
very plainly. He saw one of the D-boys get shot.

“This is Six Two,” he radioed. “Ground clement crash site number two has no security
right now. They have one guy on the ground.”

Then, moments later, another plea.

“Are there any ground forces moving to crash site two at this time?” Goffena asked.

-Negative, not at this time.

On one of his turns back into the slowly setting sun Goffena's helicopter collided with
what felt like a freight train.

A resounding crash. It felt like the sky had caved. He had been banking in a steep turn
to the right, about thirty feet off the rooftops, going about 110 knots, and the next
thing be knew the airframe was perfectly level. He saw in front of him what looked like a
big piece of rotor blade, but when his eyes focused he saw it was a crack in his
windshield. He wasn't sure for a moment if he was still flying or on the ground. All the
screens in his cockpit were blank. There was a beat of silence. Then he heard all the
shrieks and beeps of the chopper's alarm systems gradually sounding louder and louder,
like somebody was slowly turning up the volume (he realized later that the initial RPG
blast had deafened him, and that it wasn't the volume turning up, it was the gradual
recovery of his hearing). The alarms were telling him that his engines were dead and that
his rotors had stopped, but it felt like they were still flying.

Goffena realized he had been hit by an RPG on the right side. He couldn't tell if it had
been in front or in back. He didn't know if he had anybody left in back (his crew chiefs,
Sergeants Paul Shannon and Mason Hall, had not been hurt by this blast, but Sergeant Brad
Hallings, the Delta sniper, had his leg almost completely shorn off and was riddled with
shrapnel). Captain Yacone, Goffena's copilot, hung limp in his seat, head slumped straight
down. He didn't know if Yacone was dead or just injured. They were definitely still
flying, and Goffena was alert enough to realize that this was a crash sequence. He had
practiced this in simulators. They were aloft but going down fast.