Black Hawk Down (42 page)

In a sudden volley of gunfire an RPG bounced off the hood.

The explosion a few feet away sounded like someone had dropped an empty Dumpster off a
roof. Squeglia felt the concussion like a blow to the inside of his chest, and then
smelled smoke. Everybody had ducked at the blast.

“Holy shit, what was that?” shouted Specialist David Eastabrooks, who was driving.

“Jesus,” said Sergeant Richard Lamb, who was in the front passenger seat. “I think I've
been hit.”

“Where you hit?” Squeglia asked.

“In the head.”

“Oh, Jesus.”

One of the men in the Humvee fished out a red light flashlight, and they shined it on
Lamb. He had a trickle of blood running down his face and a neat hole, a small one, right
in the middle of his forehead.

“I think I'm okay,” Lamb said. “I'm still talking to you.” He wrapped a bandage around
his head. Doctors would later determine that a piece of shrapnel had lodged between the
frontal lobes of his brain, missing vital tissues by fractions of an inch in either
direction. He was all right. It felt like he had just banged his head. It hurt a lot worse
minutes later when he took a bullet to his right pinkie, which left the tip of it hanging
by a piece of skin. Squeglia could see the bone of his finger jutting from the mangled
flesh. Lamb just swore and stuck the fingertip back on, wrapped it with a piece of duct
tape, and continued working on his radio.

All the way out from the base, Specialist Dale Sizemore was shooting, He'd cut the cast
off his arm to join the fight, and at last he was in it. Night vision gave him and the
other men on this massive column a tremendous advantage over the Somalis. Sizemore spread
out on his stomach in the back of the Humvee just looking for people to shoot. When there
weren't people he shot at windows and doorways. Most of the time he couldn't see whether
he'd hit anybody or not. The NODs severely restricted peripheral vision. He didn't want to
know, really. He didn't want to start thinking about it.

At one point a spray of sparks flew up in his face. He turned his head to discover a
fist-sized hole in the Humvee wall just inches from his head. He hadn't felt a thing. When
an RPG hit one of the trucks ahead, men came running down the street looking for space on
the Humvees as tracers flew. One, Specialist Erik James, a medic, approached Sizemore's
open back hatch carrying a Kevlar blanket.

“You got room?” he asked. He looked dazed and scared. Sizemore and Private Brian Conner
moved over to make a space for him.

“Just get in here and keep that blanket over your head and you'll be all right,” said
Sizemore. He figured it was always a good idea to have a medic close by. James felt
Sizemore had just saved his life.

Specialist Steve Anderson was in a Humvee near Sizemore's in the column, He was in the
back on the driver's side with his eyes pressed to the night-vision viewfinder on his SAW.
Whenever the column stopped, which was often, everyone was expected to pile out and pull
security. The first time they stopped Anderson hesitated. He didn't want to stick his legs
out of the car. He had just started skydiving lessons at home before this deployment, and
now, suddenly, he felt immobilized by the particular fear of being shot in the legs-he'd
received a minor injury to his legs on an earlier mission. Back home he had just made his
first free-fall jump. It had been such a thrill. What if he got his foot shot off and
could never jump again? Anderson reluctantly forced himself out on the street.

At one stop he and Sizemore stood for a long time, it seemed like hours, watching the
windows of a three-story building for some sign of a shooter. They had been there for a
time when Anderson noticed a dent and scrape on roof of the Humvee right next to them. A
round had ricocheted off it.

“Did you notice that before?” he asked Sizemore.

Sizemore hadn't. It hadn't been there when they got out either. Which meant a bullet had
passed between them, missing them both by inches, without their ever knowing it.

That was the way Anderson felt most of the time. Totally in the dark. He saw tracers and
there were times the gunfire was so loud the night seemed ready to split at the seams, but
he could never seem to tell where it was coming from, or find anyone to shoot. Sizemore,
on the other hand, was through ammunition as fast as he could load his weapon. Anderson
was in awe of his friend's confidence and selflessness, and felt both inspired and
diminished by it.

Sizemore unloaded what must have been a full drum of ammo at the front of a building
about fifty feet away. When he was done, Anderson could see rounds glowing and smoldering
from the ground where he had been shooting, which meant he must have hit something. When
rounds hit the ground or street or a building, they deflected off in other directions. But
when they hit flesh, they would glow for a few moments.

“Didn't you see them?” Sizemore asked Anderson.

“There was a whole bunch of them there, shooting at us.”

Anderson hadn't noticed. He felt completely out of his element.

Minutes later he noticed another dent and scrape on the top of the Humvee, right alongside
the first one. He hoped his buddy had silenced the gun that put it there.

At one stop on a wide street, when Anderson and the men in his Humvee were positioned near
a two-story building, a Malaysian APC pulled up about twenty feet behind them and its
machine gunner opened fire. He was shooting at the roof of the building alongside
Anderson. The rounds traced red lines through the darkness, so Anderson could follow their
trajectory, and they were all bouncing off the building next to him. The wall was made of
irregular stone. Any one of those rounds could easily come his way. There was nothing he
could do but watch. One of the rounds hit the building and then traced a wicked arc across
the street like a curveball.

Private Ed Kallman was somewhere else along the giant convoy, driving again, equally
amazed by the light show. Kallman's left arm and shoulder were massively bruised from the
unexploded RPG that had hit the door of his Humvee the previous afternoon and knocked him
cold. He felt fine, excited again, and reasonably safe in such a massive force. There
would be long periods of relative quiet, then suddenly the night would explode with light
and noise. One or two shots from the dark houses or alleys on both sides of the street
would trigger a violent explosion of return fire from the column. Up and down the line
tracers splashed out from the long line, literally thousands of rounds in seconds, just
hosing down whole blocks of homes. His NODs framed the scene in a circle and offered
little depth perception. It also gave off heat just a half inch from his face that after a
while started to bother his eyes. Then he would take a break and just look straight down
or off to the side.

They eventually stopped and waited in the same spot for several hours. Kallman was asked
to pull his Humvee back down the road, about a half block, which he did, and no sooner had
he moved than an RPG exploded on what looked like the spot he had just left. He and others
in his vehicle laughed. An explosion on the wall above sent a shower of debris down on
them. No one was hurt. Kallman moved the Humvee forward a few feet just to make sure it
wasn't stuck.

Through the remainder of the night he just listened to the radio, trying to make sense
out of the constant chatter, trying to figure out what was going on.

Ahead of them in the long column, Sergeant Jeff Struecker was shocked by all the
shooting. He had heard a sergeant major from the 10th Mountain Division telling his men
before they left, “This is for real. You shoot at anything,” and clearly these guys had
taken him seriously.

Struecker had warned his own gunner to pick targets carefully. “When you shoot that fifty
cal, that round goes on forever,” the sergeant explained. It was clear the rest of the
convoy was not taking such precautions. They were throwing lead all over that part of
Mogadishu.

-5-

Earlier in the day, the American helicopters had attacked the garage of Kassim Sheik
Mohamed, a tall, beefy businessman with a round face, a swaggering walk, and a
troublemaker's smile. Kassim's garage was bombed because he had, being a wealthy man, a
fairly large number of armed men guarding it. At the height of the battle, any large
number of well-armed Somalis in the vicinity of the fight was a target. The attack was not
too misdirected. Kassim was a well-to-do member of the Habr Gidr and a supporter of
Mohamed Farah Aidid.

When the bombing started, Kassim ran to a nearby hospital, figuring it was a place the
Americans would not attack. He stayed there for two hours. When he returned to his garage,
much of it was a smoldering ruin. An explosion had flipped a white UN Land Rover Kassim
had purchased about twelve feet into the air and deposited it upright atop a stack of
steel shipment boxes, as though someone had parked it up there. Some of his most valuable
earthmoving equipment was destroyed. Dead was his friend and accountant,
forty-two-year-old Ahmad Sheik, and one of his mechanics, thirty-two-year-old Ismael Ahmed.

It was late in the day, and the dead, according to Islamic law, needed to be buried
before sundown, so Kassim and his men took the bodies to Trabuna Cemetery. On their way
there, a helicopter swooped down low over them and fired rounds that hit all around the
car but missed them.

The cemetery was crowded with wailing people. In the darkness, as the guns of the fight
still pounded in the distance, every open space was crowded with people digging graves.
Kassim and his men drove to one of the only quiet corners. They took shovels and the two
bodies from the back of their cars and began carrying them. Then another American
helicopter came down, frightening them, so they dropped the bodies and shovels and ran.

They hid behind a wall until the helicopter was gone, and then went back out and picked
up the bodies, which were wrapped in sheets, and continued carrying them. Another
helicopter zoomed in low over them. Again they dropped the bodies and shovels and ran to
the wall. This time they left the bodies of Ahmad Sheik and Ismael Ahmed and drove away,
agreeing to come back later in the night to bury them.

Four of Kassim's men came back at about midnight. The guns still pounded out in the city.
They carried the bodies up to a small rise and began digging. But another American
helicopter appeared, hovering low and shining a floodlight down. Kassim's men ran, leaving
the bodies on the ground.

They returned at three in the morning and were finally able to bury Ahmad Sheik and
Ismael Ahmed.

-6-

Half of the rescue convoy had steered south to Durant's crash site, but had gotten stalled
on the outskirts of the ghetto like village of rag and tin huts where Super Six Four had
gone down. In darkness, the unmapped maze of footpaths leading into the village looked
potentially deadly-it was like probing directly into the heart of the hornets' nest.
Sergeant John “Mace” Macejunas, the fearless blond Delta operator, on his third trip out
into the city, slipped off a Humvee and personally led a small force on foot, wearing NODs
and feeling his way into the village toward the wrecked helicopter, where hours before
Mace's buddies Randy Shughart and Gary Gordon had made their last stand.

Around the wreckage they found pools and trails of blood, torn bits of clothing, and many
spent bullet shells, but no weapons and no sign of their buddies Shughart and Gordon, nor
of Durant and the three other crew members. The soldiers searched the huts around the
crash site, demanding information about the downed Americans through a translator, but no
one offered any. Risking drawing fire, they bellowed into the night the names of all six
of the missing men: “Michael Durant!” “Ray Frank!” “Bill Cleveland!” “Tommie Fields!”
“Randy Shughart!” “Gary Gordon!” There was only silence.

Macejunas then supervised the setting of thermite grenades on the helicopter. They stayed
until Super Six Four was a ball of white flame, and then returned to the convoy.

Meyerowich's northern half of the convoy had been delayed by a big roadblock on Hawlwadig
Road up near the Olympic Hotel, which the Malaysian drivers refused to roll through. In
the past, such roadblocks had been heavily mined.

Meyerowich pleaded with the liaison officer. “Tell them small arms fire is ineffective
against them!” he said.

Once or twice he got out of his Humvee and walked up to the lead APC and shouted, waving
his arms, urging the vehicle forward. But the Condor drivers refused to proceed. So the
convoy was stalled while soldiers climbed off the vehicles and dismantled the roadblock by
hand.

Meyerowich and the D-boys decided not to wait for the roadblock situation to be sorted
out. They ran up and down the line of vehicles banging on the doors, shouting for all the
men to pile out of the vehicles. They knew they were only blocks from the pinned-down
force.

“Get out! Get out! Get out! Americans, get out!”

One of those who emerged warily was Specialist Phil Lepre. Earlier in the ride out, when
the shooting got heavy and rounds were pinging off the sides of the APC, Lepre had removed
a snapshot of his baby daughter he carried in his helmet and kissed it good-bye. “Babe,”
he said, “I hope you have a wonderful life.” He stepped out now into the Mogadishu night,
ran to a wall with two other soldiers, and pointed his M-16 down an alley. When his eyes
adjusted to the darkness he saw a group of Somalis a few blocks down, edging their way
toward him.

“I've got Somalians coming down this way!” he said.

One of the D-boys told him to shoot, so Lepre fired down toward the crowd. First he shot
over their heads, but when they didn't disperse he fired straight into them. He saw
several fall. The others dragged them off the alley.

Out in the intersection, soldiers were pulling apart the barricade by hand under heavy
fire. Lepre moved once or twice up the road with the rest of the men. They were spread out
now on both sides of an alley a few blocks ahead of the APCs. They would move, stop, and
wait, then move again, like parts of a human accordion slinking its way east. At one of
the places where they stopped they began taking heavy fire from a nearby building. Men
moved to take better cover and find an improved vantage to return fire.