Black Hawk Down (31 page)

There wasn't.

2

A grenade came from somewhere. It was one of those Russian types that looked like a soup
can on the end of a stick. It bounced off the car and then off Specialist Jason Coleman's
helmet and radio and then it hit the ground.

Nelson, who was still deaf from Twombly's timely machine-gun blast, pulled his M-60 from
the roof of the car and dove, as did the men on both sides of the intersection.

They stayed down for almost a full minute, cushioning themselves from the blast. Nothing
happened.

“I guess it's a dud,” said Lieutenant DiTomasso.

Thirty seconds later another grenade rolled out into the open space between the car and
the tree across the street.

Nelson again grabbed the gun off the car and rolled with it away from the grenade.
Everyone braced themselves once more, and this, too, failed to explode. Nelson thought
they had spent all their luck. He and Barton were crawling back toward the car when a
third grenade dropped between them. Nelson turned his helmet toward it and pushed his gun
in front of him, shielding himself from the blast that this time was sure to come. He
opened his mouth, closed his eyes, and breathed out hard in anticipation. The grenade
sizzled. He stayed like that for a full twenty seconds before he looked up at Barton.

“Dud,” Barton said.

Yurek grabbed it and threw it into the street.

Someone had bought themselves a batch of bad grenades. Wilkinson later found three or
four more unexploded ones inside the body of the helicopter.

The American forces around Wolcott's downed Black Hawk were now scattered along an
L-shaped perimeter stretching south. One group of about thirty men was massed around the
wreck in the alleyway, at the northern base of the “L.” When they learned that the ground
convoy had gotten lost and delayed, they began moving the wounded through the hole made by
the falling helicopter into the house of Abdiaziz Mi Aden (he was st~llhic1den in a back
room). Immediately west of the alley (at the bend of the “L”) was Marehan Road, where
Nelson, Yurek, Barton; and Twombly were dug in across the street at the northwest corner.
On the east side of that intersection, nearest the chopper, were DiTomasao, Coleman,
Belman, and Delta Captain Bill Coultrop and his radio operator. The rest of the ground
force was stretched out south on Marehan Road, along the stem of the “L,” which sloped
uphill Steele and a dozen or so Rangers, along with three Delta teams, about thirty men in
all, were together in a courtyard on the east side of Marehan Road midway up the next
block south, separated from the bulk of the force by half a block, a wide alley, and a
long block. Sergeant Howe's Delta team, with a group of Rangers that included Specialist
Stebbins, followed by the Delta command group led by Captain Miller, had crossed the wide
alley and was moving down the west wall toward Nelson's position. Lieutenant Perino had
also crossed the alley and was moving downhill along the cast wall with Corporal Smith,
Sergeant Chuck Elliot, and several other men.

As Howe approached Nelson's position, it looked to him as though the Rangers were just
hiding. Two of his men ran across the alley to tell the rangers to start shooting. Nelson
and the others were still recovering train the shock of the unexploded grenades. Rounds
wore taking chips off the walls all around them, but it was hard to see where the shots
were coming from. Howe's team members helped arrange Nelson and the others to set up
effective fields of be, and placed Stebbins and machine-gunner Private Brian Hoard at the
southern corner of the same intersection, orienting them to fire west.

Captain Miller caught up with Howe, trailing his radioman and some other members of his
element, along with Staff Sergeant Jeff Bray, an air force combat controller. With all the
shooting at that intersection, Howe decided it was time to get off the street. There was a
metal gate at the entrance to a courtyard between two buildings on his side of the block.
He pushed against the gate, which had two doors that opened inward. Howe considered
putting a charge on the door, but given the number of soldiers nearby and the lack of
cover, the explosion would probably hurt people. So the burly sergeant and Bray began
hurling themselves against the gate. Bray's aide gave way.

“Follow me in case I get shot,” Howe said.

He plunged into the courtyard and rapidly moved through the houses on either side,
running from room to room. Howe was looking for people, focusing his eyes at mid torso
first, checking hands. The hands told you the whole story. The only hands he found were
empty. They belonged to a man and woman and some children, a family of about seven,
clearly terrified. He stood in the doorway with his weapon in his right hand pointing at
them, trying to coax them out of the room with his left hand. It took a while, but they
came out slowly, clinging to each other. The family was flex-cuffed and herded into a
small side room.

Howe then more carefully inspected the space. Each of the blocks in this neighborhood of
Mogadishu consisted of mostly one-story stone houses grouped irregularly around open
spaces, or courtyards. This block consisted of a short courtyard, about two car-lengths
wide, where he now stood. There was a two-story house on the south side and a one-story
house on the north. Howe figured this space was about the safest spot around. The taller
building would shelter them from both bullets and lobbed RPGs. At the west end was some
kind of storage shack. Howe began exploring systematically, making a more thorough sweep,
moving from room to room, looking for windows that would give them a good vantage for
shooting west down the alley. He found several but none that offered a particularly good
angle. The alley to the north (the same one that the helicopter had crashed into one block
west) was too narrow. He could see only about fifteen yards down in either direction, and
all he saw was wall. When he returned to the courtyard, Captain Miller and the others had
begun herding casualties into the space. It would serve as their command post and casualty
collection point for the rest of the night.

As he reentered the courtyard, one of the master sergeants with Miller told Howe to go
back out to the street and help his team. Howe resented the order. He felt he was, at this
point, the de facto leader on the ground, the one doing all the real thinking and moving
and fighting. They had reached a temporary safe point, a time for commanders to catch
their breath and think. They were in a bad spot, but not critical. The next step would be
to look for ways to strongpoint their position, expand their perimeter, and identify other
buildings to take down to give them better lines of fire. The troop sergeant's command was
the order of a man who didn't know what to do next.

Howe was built like a pro wrestler, but he was a thinker. This sometimes troubled his
relationship with authority - especially the army's maddeningly arbitrary manner of
placing unseasoned, less-qualified men in charge. Howe was just a sergeant first-class
with supposedly narrower concerns, but he saw the big picture very clearly, better than
most. After being selected for Delta he had met and married the daughter of Colonel
Charlie A. Beckwith, the founder and original commander of Delta. They had met in a lounge
by Fort Bragg and when he told her that be was a civilian, Connie Beckwith, then a former
army officer herself, nodded knowingly.

“Look,” she said. “I know who you work for so let's stop pretending. My dad started that
unit.”

She had to pull out her driver's license to prove who she was.

Not that Howe had any ambition for formal army leadership. His preferred relationship
with officers was for them to heed his advice and leave him alone. He was frequently
aghast at the failings of those in charge.

Take this setup in Mogadishu, for instance. It was asinine. At the base, the huge hangar
front doors wouldn't close, so the Sammies had a clear view inside at all hours of the day
or night. The city sloped gradually up from the waterfront, so any Somali with patience
and binoculars could keep an eye on their state of readiness. Every time they scrambled to
gear up and go, word was out in the city before they were even on the helicopters. If that
weren't bad enough, you had the Italians, some of them openly sympathetic to their former
colonial subjects who appeared to be flashing signals with their headlights out into the
city whenever the helicopters took off. Nobody had the balls to do anything about it.

Then there were the mortars. General Garrison seemed to regard mortars as little more
than an annoyance. He had walked around casually during the early mortar attacks, his
cigar clenched in his teeth, amused by the way everyone dove for cover. “Piddly-assed
mortars,” he'd said. Which was all well and good, except, as Howe saw it, if the Sammies
ever got their act together and managed to drop a few on the hangar, there'd be hell to
pay. He wondered if the tin roof was thick enough to detonate the round-which would merely
send shrapnel and shards of the metal roof slashing down through the ranks-or whether the
round would just poke on through and detonate on the concrete floor in the middle of
everybody. It was a question that lingered in his mind most nights as he went to sleep.
Then there were the flimsy perimeter defenses. At mealtimes, all the men would be lined up
outside the mess hall, which was separated from a busy outside road by nothing more than a
thin metal wall. A car bomb along that wall at the right time of day could kill dozens of
soldiers.

Howe did not hide his disgust over these things. Now, being ordered to do something
pointless in the middle of the biggest fight of his life, he was furious. He began
gathering up ammo, grenades, and LAWs off the wounded Rangers in the courtyard. It seemed
to Howe that most of the men failed to grasp how desperate their situation had become. It
was a form of denial. They could not stop thinking of themselves as the superior force, in
command of the situation, yet the tables had clearly turned. They were surrounded and
terribly outnumbered. The very idea of adhering to rules of engagement at this point was
preposterous.

“You're throwing grenades?” the troop sergeant major asked him, surprised when he saw
Howe stuffing all of them he could find into his vest pockets.

“We're not getting paid to bring them back,” Howe told him.

This was war. The game now was kill or be killed. He stomped angrily out to the street
and began looking for Somalis to shoot.

He found one of the Rangers, Nelson, firing a handgun at the window of the building Howe
had just painstakingly cleared and occupied. Nelson had seen someone moving in the window,
and they had been taking fire from just about every direction, so he was pumping a few
rounds that way.

“What are you doing?” Howe shouted across the alley.

Nelson couldn't hear Howe. He shouted back, “I saw someone in there.”

“No shit! There are friendlies in there!”

Nelson didn't find out until later what Howe had been waving his arms about. When he did
he was mortified. No one had told him that Delta had moved into that space, but, then
again, it was a cardinal sin to shoot before identifying a target.

Already furious, Howe began venting at the Rangers. He felt they were not fighting hard
enough. When he saw Nelson, Yurek, and the others trying to selectively target armed
Somalis in a crowd at the other end of a building on their side of the street, Howe threw
a grenade over its roof. It was an amazing toss, but the grenade failed to explode. So
Howe threw another, which exploded right where the crowd was gathered. He then watched the
Rangers try to hit a gunman who kept darting out from behind a shed about one block north,
shooting, and then retreating back behind it. The Delta sergeant flung one of his golf
ball-sized minigrenades over the Rangers' position. It exploded behind the shed, and the
gunman did not reappear. Howe then picked up a LAW and hurled it across the road. It
landed on the arm of Specialist Lance Twombly, who was lying on his belly four or five
feet from the corner wall. The LAW bruised his forearm. Twombly jumped to his knees,
angry, and turned to hear Howe bellowing, “Shoot the motherfucker!”

Down on one knee, Howe swore bitterly as he fired. Everything about the situation was
pissing him off, the goddamn Somalis, his leaders, the idiot Rangers. . . even his
ammunition. He drew a bead on three Somalis who were running across the street two blocks
to the north, taking a progressive lead on them the way he had learned through countless
hours of training, squaring them in his sights and then aiming several feet in front of
them. He would squeeze two or three rounds, rapidly increasing his lead with each shot. He
was an expert marksman, and thought he had hit them, but he couldn't tell for sure because
they kept running until they crossed the street and were out of view. It bugged him. His
weapon was the most sophisticated infantry rifle in the world, a customized CAR-15, and he
was shooting the army's new 5.56-mm green-tip round. The green tip had a tungsten carbide
penetrator at the tip, and would punch holes in metal, but that very penetrating power
meant his rounds were passing right through his targets. When the Sammies were close
enough he could see when he hit them. Their shirts would lift up at the point of impact,
as if someone had pinched and plucked up the fabric. But with the green-tip round it was
like sticking somebody with an ice pick. The bullet made a small, clean hole, and unless
it happened to hit the heart or spine, it wasn't enough to stop a man in his tracks. Howe
felt like he had to hit a guy five or six times just to get his attention.

They used to kid Randy Shughart because he shunned the modern rifle and ammunition and
carried a Vietnam-era M-14, which shot a 7.62-mm round without the penetrating qualities
of the new green tip. It occurred to Howe as he saw those Sammies keep on running that
Randy was the smartest soldier in the unit. His rifle may have been heavier and
comparatively awkward and delivered a mean recoil, but it damn sure knocked a man down
with one bullet, and in combat, one shot was often all you got. You shoot a guy; you want
to see him go down. You don't want to be guessing for the next five hours whether you hit
him, or whether he's still waiting for you in the weeds.