Black Hawk Down (35 page)

Marsh had been hovering around the JOC all afternoon as the mission deteriorated. At
first, Garrison had been in the back of the room, chewing on his unlit cigar, listening
and watching quietly. He was not one to interfere. Some top commanders insisted on calling
most of the shots themselves, but Garrison wasn't like that. When they'd begun this
deployment, the general had given a little speech explaining that, for the first time in
his career, he'd been given command of men he felt he didn't need to lead. They knew how
to lead themselves. Garrison told them his job was just to supply them with what they
needed and stay out of their way. But as things began going wrong, the general had moved
to the front of the room.

Marsh had to leave the JOC to tend to Private Blackburn-who had not, as the medic had
feared, broken his neck when he fell from the Black Hawk. The young Ranger had suffered
head and neck trauma, and had a few broken bones. Marsh was working on him when he got
word that a Black Hawk was down in the city. When he returned to peek into the JOC, there
was an anxious buzz about the place. Commanders seemed fixated on the TV screens. Garrison
was fully engaged. Things had clearly gone amok.

The army field hospital at the U.S. embassy was alerted to be ready for casualties. There
was some discussion about sending men directly there, but it was decided to do the primary
care at Marsh's tent. He was ready. He had two surgeons, a nurse anesthetist, and two
physician assistants. Nurses from the adjacent air force mobile surgical facility also
volunteered to help. There would be a triage area just outside the tent. The most urgent
cases would go directly inside. Those who could wait would go to a holding area out back.
Those who were “expectant,” near death and beyond help, would go to a separate spot near
the ambulance, away from the other wounded. Marsh had designated his unit's ambulance for
the dead. It was cool in there. The bodies would be out of the sun and out of view.
Pilla's body was already there.

When the convoy pulled up it was like a scene out of some nightmarish medieval painting.
The back of one of the five-tons opened on a mass of bleeding, wailing, moaning men. Griz
Martin sat to one side holding his entrails in his hands, his legs shattered, awake but
groggy. There hadn't even been time in most cases for the wounds to have been bandaged.
Marsh had just seconds to make a judgment call on each as the litter bearers lifted them
out. Private Adalberto Rodriguez, who had been blown up and run over, went into the tent.
A Delta sergeant, whose left calf had been shot off, went out back to wait. Into the tent
went Sergeant Ruiz, who had a sucking wound in his chest. Some of the wounded Rangers were
dazed. They wandered around the triage area, sputtering angrily. Marsh noted they all were
still carrying weapons. He asked the chaplain to start gathering those guys and talking to
them.

Delta medic Sergeant First Class Don Hutchinson confronted Marsh about Griz. Hutch and
Griz were close.

“He's hurt real bad, Doc.”

Some of the other D-boys had come over to be with Griz, who was semiconscious with what
Marsh recognized as a clearly non-survivable injury. His midsection was basically gone,
and when Marsh tried to turn him over, he saw the whole back of his pelvis had been blown
off. Griz obviously lost a tremendous amount of blood. It was amazing that he was still
alive, much less semiconscious, but when Marsh took his hand, Griz gripped it as hard as
the doctor's hand had ever been gripped. He should have labeled him “expectant,” or
certain to die, and sent him back by the ambulance, but with all the guys from the unit
pressing in, urging him to do something, Marsh felt compelled to act. He felt sure it was
hopeless, but they'd give Griz a full-court press anyway.

Marsh sent into the tent Private Kowalewski, the Ranger driver whose torso had been
penetrated by the unexploded RPG. Amazingly, he still had vital signs. Inside, Captain
Bruce Adams, a general surgeon, examined the broken body of the soldier and recoiled at
what he found. Kowalewski's left arm was gone-one of the air force nurses would find it,
to her horror, in his pants pocket where Specialist Hand had placed it. Adams began
working to restore Kowalewski's breathing while a nurse removed his clothing. They found
the entrance wound of the RPG on one side of his chest, and, lifting a flap of skin under
his right arm, Adams saw the tapered front end of the grenade.

Marsh came by for a quick second assessment and told Adams, “This guy's expectant. Don't
waste any more time on him.”

Assigned to help carry the nearly dead man back out was Sergeant First Class Randy Rymes,
a munitions expert. It was Rymes who recognized that Kowalewski had a live bomb embedded
in his chest. The detonator was on the tip, just under his right arm. Instead of taking
him out by the ambulance, Rymes and another soldier built a sandbag bunker and placed
Kowalewski's body inside it. Rymes then stretched out beside the bunker on his stomach and
reached his hand around to delicately remove the tip of the grenade from under the man's
skin.

While all this was going on, commanders inside the JOC had watched with horror as
triumphant Somalis overran the site of the second Black Hawk crash, pilot Mike Durant's,
and were now getting frantic calls for a chopper to medevac Smith and Carlos Rodriguez
from the first crash site. They had ninety-nine men pinned down in the city and no rescue
force on its way. They knew it would be foolhardy to try to put another Black Hawk down
there to evacuate the two badly injured Rangers. The volume of fire was much heavier there
than anywhere else in Mogadishu, and the Somalis had already shot down four Black Hawks.
Garrison had pilots who were willing to try, but there was no point in getting more men
killed trying to save two.

It had been easy to believe, prior to this day, that the Somali warlord Aidid lacked
broad popular support. But this fight had turned into something akin to a popular
uprising. It seemed like everybody in the city wanted suddenly to help kill Americans.
There were burning roadblocks everywhere. It was obvious Aidid and his clan had been
waiting for the right moment, and this was it. At the second crash site, seen from high
overhead, there was no sign of Shughart, Gordon, Durant, or the Super Six Two crew, only
busy crowds of excited Skinnies still swarming over the wreckage. There was a brief flurry
of hope when the observation birds picked up tracking beacons from Durant's and his
copilot Ray Frank's flight suits, but it was quickly dashed when it became apparent that
the beacons had been stripped from the pilots by canny Aidid militia and were being run
all over the city to confuse the airborne search.

As for the men around the first crash site, they would be all right. Those ninety-nine
were some of the toughest soldiers in the world. They were superbly trained, well armed,
and mean as hell. They owned that neighborhood and nobody was going to take it away from
them, certainly no armed force in Mogadishu.

Unless they ran out of ammo, that is, or keeled over from dehydration. The C2 helicopter
had begun calling for help shortly before dusk.

-Need a resupply ... IV bags, ammo, and water.... Obviously we need them to hurry as fast
as they can. Our boys on the ground are running out of bullets.

-Romeo Six Four [Harrell], this is Adam Six Four [Garrison]. You want us to put resupply
on a halo?

-If you can. Put resupply on a helo. Try to take it out to the northern crash site.
They're running out of ammo, IV bottles, and water, over.

Few of the Rangers had even bothered to take full canteens. They had been running and
fighting now in sweltering heat for several hours. If they were going to make it through
the night they would need more than skill and willpower. So even though it risked turning
a bad situation worse, Garrison ordered a Black Hawk in. They could drop water and ammo
and medical supplies, and, if possible, land and pull the two critical Rangers out. In the
JOC, most of the officers believed the helicopter would be shot out of the sky. It would
most likely crash-land right there on Marehan Road. Either way, the men on the ground
would get their ammo and water.

Black Hawk Super Six Six, piloted by Chief Warrant Officers Stan Wood and Gary Fuller,
moved down through the night just after seven o'clock, guided by infrared strobe lights
set out on the wide street just south of the crash site. As the helicopter descended,
machine-gun fire erupted again from points all around the Ranger perimeter, and RPGs flew.
The men inside courtyards and houses were startled by how close the gunfire was to their
positions, in some cases on the other side of the walls. The rotor wash from the Black
Hawk kicked up a furious sandstorm.

It hovered for about thirty seconds, which was about twenty-eight seconds too long as far
as Sergeant Howe was concerned. He held his breath as the deafening bird hung over the
block, afraid that it was going to pancake in on them. Delta Sergeant First Class Alex
Szigedi, who had survived the lost convoy earlier that afternoon, now hustled in the back
of the helicopter with another operator to shove the kit bags filled with water, ammo, and
IV bags overboard. The helicopter was getting riddled. Szigedi was hit in the face.
Bullets poked holes in the rotor blades and the engine, which began spouting fluids. One
round passed through the transmission gearbox. Super Six Six kept flying. As it pulled up
and away, men scurried out of the buildings to retrieve the new supplies.

Back in the JOC they heard Wood announce, calmly:

-Resupply is complete.

The stranded force had been tucked in for the night.

9

The fight now raged around three blocks of Mogadishu real estate. The block immediately
south of the crash was occupied in two places. The CSAR team and Lieutenant DiTomasso's
Chalk Two Rangers, about thirty-three men in all, had moved in through the wall knocked
over by Super Six One on its way down. They had begun spreading out to adjacent rooms and
courtyards to the south. Abdiaziz Ali Aden was still hiding in one of those back rooms.
Lieutenant Perino had led his men into a courtyard on the same block through a door on the
east side of Marehan Road. He and about eight other soldiers were grouped where Sergeant
Schmid was still working on Corporal Smith, who was slowly fading away. Perino still
wasn't sure where the downed bird was or how close they were to DiTomasso, although they
were separated now by only a few feet. Captain Miller and his contingent of D-boys and
wounded Rangers were in the courtyard Howe had cleared on the west side of Marehan Road.
Miller's twenty-five men had spread out into that block, moving into rooms off the
courtyard. The third block was across a wide alley south on the same side of the street as
Perino. There, in the courtyard they'd sought shelter in earlier, Captain Steele and three
Delta teams were still stuck, unable to push farther down toward the wreck.

This ungainly distribution of forces was problematic. The Little Bird pilots, who were
making frequent gun runs, were having a hard time clearly delineating friendly force
locations from targets. From the C2 Black Hawk high above, Lieutenant Colonel Harrell
radioed a request to Captain Miller.

-Scotty, is it possible for you to get everybody in one small tight perimeter? The
problem we have is everyone is spread out. It's hard to get close accurate fire into you.
And mark your location. We need to know exactly where you are. Is there any way you can
accomplish that, over?

Miller explained that Steele seemed reluctant to move up, and that the Delta teams with
Steele were also pinned down by heavy fire.

-Roger, I know it's tough and you're doing the best you can but try to get everyone at
one site and have one guy talking down there if you can.

Miller conveyed the request to the team leaders cornered with Steele. Then, just before
dark, he ordered Sergeant Howe to move across Marehan Road and into the courtyard opposite
in order to improve their coverage of the street. Howe thought it was a poor idea. It did
nothing he could see to improve their position. He'd been out on the street for long
periods earlier, and had a plan of his own.

Steele and the others stranded at the southernmost tip of this awkward perimeter should
move up and consolidate with them. This would shorten the long leg of the “L,” give them a
single strong position to hold, and give the Little Birds a clearly defined one-block area
to work around.

They could then establish strong interlocking fire positions at each of the key
intersections, both in front of and behind the downed bird, and at the south end of the
block. Looking around outside, Howe had seen three buildings that could be taken down and
occupied, which would have expanded their fire perimeter. A two-story house at the
northwest corner of the intersection off the bird's tail would have provided a shooting
platform that could push the Somali gunmen to the north several blocks farther out. Howe
felt this was so obviously the way to go it surprised him that the ground commanders
hadn't begun it already. Instead, as Howe saw it, they seemed overwhelmed. They had
followed him into the courtyard and then squatted there, just as Steele was now squatting
in a worthless position off to the south. Everything in Howe's training said that survival
depended on proactive soldiering. You constantly assessed your position and worked to
improve it.

Howe knew there was no point arguing. He and the three men on his team ran across the
road in groups of two. They barged through the front door of a two-room house and cleared
it. There was no one inside. Through a barred window in back Howe saw Perino and his
group. One of Howe's team members knocked out the bars and just pushed down the flimsy
stone wall to open up a passage into their space. Perino and Schmid strapped the dying
Corporal Smith to a board and passed him through the window into the room. There they
would be sheltered from grenades lobbed over the walls.