Black Hawk Down (38 page)

Earlier in the afternoon, Waddell had been terrified they wouldn't get out before dark.
But by dusk he was rooting for the sun to finish going down. It seemed to take forever. He
figured once it was dark the shooing would die down and they could breathe easier. He
watched the Little Birds scream in doing gun runs on the alley west, showering him with
brass casings. Their rockets literally shook the ground. They made a sound like a giant
piece of Velcro ripping open, and then there would be the flash and tremendous blast. The
fact that it was so close felt good. That's where he wanted them. Close.

One of the D-boys stripped down and climbed back into the helicopter and fished out some
extra SAW ammunition for Waddell and Barton and found a pair of NODS, which Waddell got.
With the night vision on he could see all the way out past the big intersection west and
use the laser-aiming device, which gave him a much better feeling. The little green Fiat
that had so ably served as cover across the intersection for Nelson, Barton, Yurek, and
Twombly was shot full of holes. Waddell could hear the radio keep promising to send out
the rescue column. They were going to be there in twenty minutes. Then, an hour later, in
forty minutes. After a while it got to be a joke. “They're on their way!” guys would say,
and laugh. When the big column did start to move across the city about a half hour before
midnight, its tanks and armored personnel carriers, trucks and Humvees, he could hear them
miles away. The convoy must have either been in terrific fighting or was basically
lighting up everything in its path, because Waddell could track its movements by the sound
of gunfire and by the way the sky lit up over it. He didn't think about the danger or the
chances of being overrun and killed. He thought about stupid things. He was scheduled to
take a physical fitness test the next day and wondered if, when they got back, they'd
still make him take it. He asked Barton.

“Hey, Sergeant, am I going to have to take a P.T. test tomorrow?”

Barton just shook his head.

Waddell thought about the Grisham novel he'd been reading before they left. He couldn't
wait to finish that book. Wouldn't it be just his luck to get killed and never finish the
last few pages?

Every thirty minutes or so during the night Barton would call over quietly, “You okay?”
If Waddell hadn't heard from him in a while he'd call over to him, “Sergeant, you okay?”
Like either of them was going to go to sleep. Toward the middle of the night the shooting
stopped and during certain stretches the Little Birds weren't making runs and it got very
still. That's when he could hear the relief column off in the distance. Waddell was one of
the few Rangers who had actually brought a canteen full of water with him instead of
stuffing his pouch with ammo, so he handed over his canteen and it was passed around
greedily.

When are we gonna get the fuck out of here? That was what Specialist Phipps wanted to
know. He was in a small, smoky, dusty back room with the rest of the wounded in the
building adjacent to the crashed helicopter, his back and his right calf aching from
shrapnel wounds, listening to the sounds of shooting and blasts outside, wondering when
some wild-eyed Sammy was going to bust in and blow him away. He had no idea what was going
on. Specialist Gregg Gould was in there with him. Gould had taken some shrapnel to his
butt, so he looked pretty ridiculous with his bandaged ass stuck up in the air, talking on
and on about his girlfriend and how much he missed her and how he couldn't wait to see her
again when he got home ... all of which further depressed Phipps, who had no girlfriend.

“Everything is gonna be cool. Man, when we get out of here I'm gonna drink me some beer,”
Phipps said, trying to move Gould off the topic. It didn't work.

Specialist Nick Struzik was in there. He'd been shot in the right shoulder. Phipps had
seen him bleeding up against the stone wall outside earlier, not long before he'd been
hit, and remembered being shocked by it, as though somebody had slapped him. Struzik was
the first of his buddies he saw injured. Staff Sergeant Mike Collins was in really bad
shape. He'd gotten tagged with a round in his right leg that had shattered both fibula and
tibia. The bullet had entered just below the kneecap and come out the back side of his
leg, mangling it. Collins was in some serious pain and had bled a lot. Phipps figured
sadly that ol' Sergeant Collins probably wouldn't make it. He couldn't believe they'd all
left their NODS behind. The NODS had always given them that cocky we're-here-to-kick-ass
feeling on previous night missions because it's one hell of an advantage when you can see
the motherfuckers and they can't see you. Talk about an awesome lesson learned. They all
took sips from the IV bags because they were so thirsty, just to wet their mouths. It
tasted slimy but at least it was wet. Then, after the resupply bird came in, they all got
a few sips of water.

When it was clear they would be staying longer, Sergeant Lamb took Sergeant Ron Galliette
with him and explored all the doors around the inner courtyard. Behind one door they
kicked open were two women. One very old, and three babies. The younger woman wanted to
leave. She was just a teenager, maybe sixteen, and looked too tiny and thin to have borne
the baby she clutched so tightly. She wore a brilliant blue robe with gold trim. The baby
was wrapped in the same colors. She kept moving toward the door. Lamb told Sergeant Yurek
to keep watch on her. Every time Yurek looked away she would move to the door again. He
would hold up his rifle and she would sit back down. Yurek tried to talk to her.

“Look, if we were going to do anything to hurt you we would have done it by now, so just
calm down,” he said, but it was clear that she understood not a word.

Yurek talked to her anyway. He told her that she was far safer for the time being indoors
than out. All she had to do was sit tight. As soon as they could leave, they'd be gone.
When she made another move to the door he used his rifle to push her back into the corner.

“No, no, no! You need to stay here,” he said, trying to frighten her into staying put.
The woman argued back with him with words he didn't understand.

There was a spigot on the wall with the top broken off, and water was dripping steadily
from it. Yurek collected some in his dry canteen and handed it to her. She turned her head
and refused to take it from him.

“Be that way,” he said.

Lamb counted fifteen wounded, along with the body of Super Six One copilot Donovan
Briley. They needed more space, so they placed a small charge on a wall in the back. The
stone and mortar were so flimsy that most walls you could just push down, so this charge
blew a nice big hole about four feet high and two feet wide. It scared everyone when it
went off, particularly the Somali woman Yurek was guarding. She went apoplectic. It even
scared Twombly, who'd set the thing. He thought he had a thirty-second fuse on the charge
and it was only twenty seconds, so he'd jumped a foot when it blew. The new hole opened
into the room off the block's central courtyard, where Perino had originally been, so
DiTomasso's unit and Perino's had finally, inadvertently, linked up. The shock of the
explosion sent more of the outside wall tumbling down on Waddell and Barton out by the
crashed helicopter.

Nelson was so deaf he didn't even hear the blast. His ears just rang constantly, ever
since Twombly had fired his SAW right in his face. Nelson surveyed the carnage around him
and felt wildly, implausibly, lucky. How could he not have been hit? It was hard to
describe how he felt... it was like an epiphany. Close to death, he had never felt so
completely alive. There had been split seconds in his life when he'd felt death brush past
like when another fast-moving car veered from around a sharp curve and just missed hitting
him head-on. On this day he had lived with that feeling, with death breathing right in his
face like the hot wind from a grenade across the street, for moment after moment after
moment, for three hours or more. The only thing he could compare it to was the feeling he
found sometimes when he surfed, when he was inside the tube of a big wave and everything
around him was energy and motion and he was being carried along by some terrific force and
all he could do was focus intently on holding his balance, riding it out. Surfers called
it The Green Room. Combat was another door to that room. A state of complete mental and
physical awareness. In those hours on the street he had not been Shawn Nelson, he had no
connection to the larger world, no bills to pay, no emotional ties, nothing. He had just
been a human being staying alive from one nano-second to the next, drawing one breath
after another, fully aware that each one might be his last. He felt he would never be the
same. He had always known he would die someday, the way anybody knows that they will die,
but now its truth had branded him. And it wasn't a frightening or morbid thing. It felt
more like a comfort. It made him feel more alive. He felt no remorse about the people he
had shot and killed on the street. They had been trying to kill him. He was glad he was
alive and they were dead.

When they moved the wounded into the bigger room cleared out by Twombly's charge,
Sergeant Collins had to be passed through the hole on a stretcher. To get him through they
had to strap him down and tilt the stretcher sideways. Collins protested as they readied
him for this move.

“Guys, I've got a broken leg!”

“I'm sorry,” Lamb told him. “We've got to get you through.”

Collins screamed with pain as they passed him to the men on the other side.

They moved the body of Bull Briley back on a litter. Nelson had seen Briley playing cards
and laughing in the hangar earlier that day. His head had been cut open in the crash,
sliced from ear to ear just beneath his chin. His body was still warm and sweaty but it
had turned a sickly gray.

The slit through his head was an inch wide and had stopped bleeding. When they lifted his
short, thick body on the litter the top of his head flopped back grotesquely. Lamb
remembered seeing him running wearing Spandex shorts, a powerful man. Jesus, this is a sad
day. When they'd worked him through the hole, Lamb climbed through and pulled Briley's
body off the litter and put it up against the wall. The pilot's head hit the wall with a
mushy thud that sickened Lamb. He flattened him out so that when rigor set in the body
would not be folded at the waist.

Abdiaziz Ali Aden waited in darkness. The Rangers moved through his house. Through the
small opening the helicopter had smashed in the roof he could see stars. The Rangers had
hung red lamps out on the trees and on top of the houses. He had never seen lights like
these. Gunfire was still loud out in the streets, coming from all directions. Helicopters
swooped down low and rattled the rooftop with their falling shells. He could hear the
Americans inside talking to the helicopters on their radios, directing their fire.

He wasn't sure which was more dangerous, to stay in the house with all of the Rangers on
the other side of the wall, or to risk being shot running away through the night. He
debated until the sound of the shooting died off, and decided to leave.

He pulled himself up to the top of an outer wall and jumped down to the alley. There were
four people dead where he landed, two men, a woman, and a child. He ran and had only gone
a short distance when a helicopter came roaring down behind him and bullets kicked up the
dirt and bounced off the walls. He kept his head down and kept on running and was
surprised he was not hit.

Tim Wilkinson, the PJ, watched over the wounded men off Captain Miller's courtyard across
Marehan Road. Wilkinson sat in the doorway to the yard with a handgun. There were only
occasional pops of gunfire. Now and then a Little Bird would come roaring down and light
up the sky out the window.

Stebbins lit a match for a cigarette and Wilkinson, startled, wheeled around with his
handgun.

“Just lighting a butt, Sergeant.”

There was a moment of silence, then both men grinned, thinking the same thought.

“I know, I know,” said Stebbins. “It could be hazardous to my health, right?”

-12-

Late in the night, Norm Hooten and the other D-boys, teams led by Sergeants First Class
John Boswell and Jon Hale, along with a crew of Rangers headed by Sergeant Watson, left
Captain Steele's southernmost courtyard and ducked into the narrow alley against its north
wall, where Fillmore's body had been placed late in the afternoon. They had decided things
were quiet enough for them to move as Captain Miller had wanted, into the corner building
at the north end of their block. From there they could cover the wide east-west alleyway
that separated the two pinned-down forces. The move left Steele in the courtyard with the
wounded and only four or five able-bodied men, but the others weren't going far.

None of the Rangers was eager to go. One, a sergeant, flat out refused to leave the
courtyard, even after Steele issued him a direct order. The man had just withdrawn. He
protested something had scratched his eye. He was told to just get back and help with the
wounded.

Sergeants Thomas and Watson followed the D-boys out into the night, trailed by Floyd,
Kurth, Collett, and several other men. Floyd found a dead donkey on the side of the street
just outside the door and crouched down behind it. The D-boys had gone up the alleyway and
climbed into the corner building through a window that was only about three feet from the
ground. By the time Floyd entered the alley, they had moved Fillmore's body in through the
window.

Floyd tripped over something. He felt down and found Fillmore's CAR-15. The dried blood
on it flaked off in his hands. He also found Fillmore's helmet with its headset radio and
some of his other gear. He was gathering it up when Watson leaned out the window.

“What the fuck are you doing, Floyd? Quit playing. Get your ass through this window!”