Black Hawk Down (43 page)

“Hey, take my position,” he called back to twenty-three-year-old rifleman Private James
Martin.

Martin hustled up and crouched behind the wall. Lepre had moved only two steps to his
right when Martin was hit in the head by a round that sent him sprawling backward.

Lepre saw a small hole in his forehead.

Lepre's voice joined others shouting. “Medic! We need a medic up here!”

A medic swooped over the downed man and began loosening his clothes to help prevent
shock. He worked on Martin a few minutes, then turned to Lepre and the others and said,
“He's dead.”

The medic and another soldier tried to drag Martin's body to cover but were scattered by
more gunfire. One of them ran back out and braved the gunfire, firing his weapon with one
hand and dragging Martin to cover with the other. When he got close, others ran out to
help, pulling the body into the alley.

Lepre was behind cover just a few feet away, gazing at Martin's body. He felt terrible.
He had asked the private to take his position, and then the man had been shot dead. All
the dragging had pulled Martin's pants down to his knees. Few of the guys wore underwear
in the tropical heat. Lepre couldn't bear seeing Martin sprawled there like that, half
naked. So despite the gunfire, he stepped out into the alley and tried to pull up the dead
soldier's pants, to give the man some dignity. Two bullets struck the pavement near where
he stooped, and Lepre scrambled reluctantly back to cover.

“Sorry, man,” he said.

-7-

The command bird continued to coax the force linkup at the first crash site.

-They are leading the mounted troops by dismounted troops. The dismounted troops and the
mounted troops are holding south of the Olympic Hotel ...

-Then, talking to the convoy, as they approached the left turn:

-Thirty meters south of the friendlies. They are one minor block to the north of you
right now. If your lead APC continues moving he can make the next left and go one block,
over.

Steele heard the vehicles making the turn. Out the door his men saw the dim

outline of soldiers. Steele and his men called out, “Ranger! Ranger!” “Tenth Mountain
Division,” came the response. -Roger, we've got a linkup with the Kilo and Juliet element
over. Steele stuck his head out the door. “This is Captain Steele. I'm the Ranger
commander.”

“Roger, sir, we're from the 10th Mountain Division,” a soldier answered.

“Where's your commander?” Steele asked.

-8-

It took hours to pry Elvis out of the wreck. It was ugly work. The rescue column had
brought along a quickie saw to cut the chopper's metal frame away from his body, but the
cockpit was lined with a layer of Kevlar that just ate up the saw blade. Next they tried
to pull the Black Hawk apart, attaching chains to the front and back ends of it. A few of
the Rangers, watching this from a distance, thought the D-boys were using the vehicles to
tear the pilot's body out of the wreckage. Some turned away in disgust.

The dead were placed on top of the APCs, and the wounded were loaded inside them. Goodale
hobbled painfully out to the one that had stopped before their courtyard, and was helped
through the doors. He rolled to his side.

“We need you to sit,” he was told.

“Look, I got shot in the ass, it hurts to sit.”

“Then lean on something.”

At Miller's courtyard they carried Carlos Rodriguez out first in his inflated rubber
pants. Then they moved the other wounded. Stebbins was feeling pretty good. Out the window
he could see 10th Mountain Division guys lounging up and down the street, a lot of them.
He protested when they came back for him with a stretcher.

“I'm okay,” be told them. “I can stand on one leg. Just help me over to the vehicle. I've
still got my weapon.”

He hopped on his good foot and was helped up into the armored car.

Wilkinson climbed into the back of the same vehicle. They all expected to be moving
shortly, but instead they sat. The closed steel container was like a sauna and it reeked
of sweat and urine and blood. What a nightmare this mission had become. Every time they
thought it was

over, that they'd made it, something worse happened. The injured in the vehicles couldn't
see what was going on outside, and they didn't understand the delay. They'd all figured
the convoy would arrive and they'd scoot home. It was only a five-minute drive to the
airport. It was now after three o'clock in the morning. The sun would be coming back up
soon. Bullets occasionally pinged off the walls. What would happen if an RPG hit them?

There was a brief mutiny under way in Goodale's Condor.

“Shouldn't we be moving?” Goodale asked.

“Yeah, I would think so,” said one of the other men crammed in with him.

Goodale was closest to the front so he leaned up to the Malay driver.

“Hey, man, let's go,” he said.

“No. No,” the driver protested. “We stay.”

“God damnit, we're not staying! Let's get the fuck out of here!”

“No. No. We stay.”

“No, you don't understand this. We're getting shot at. We're gonna get fucked up in this
thing!”

The commanders were also growing impatient.

-Scotty [Miller], give me an update please, asked Lieutenant Colonel Harrell.

Other than brief stops back at the base to refuel, Harrell and air commander Tom Matthews
were up over the city in their C2 Black Hawk throughout the night.

Miller responded:

-Roger. They're trying to pull it apart. So far no luck

-Roger. You've only got about an hour's worth of darkness left.

There were more than three hundred Americans now in and around these two blocks of
Mogadishu, the vanguard of a convoy that stretched a half mile back toward National
Street, which created a sense of security among the recently arrived 10th Mountain troops
that was not shared by the Rangers or the D-bays who had been fighting all night. The
weary assault force watched with amazement as the regular army guys leaned against walls
and lit cigarettes and chatted out on the same street where they had just experienced
blizzards of enemy fire. To Howe, the Delta team leader who had been so disappointed by
the Rangers, these men seemed completely out of place. The wait for them to extract
Elvis's body was beginning to worry everybody.

When an explosion racked Stebbins's APC, men shouted with anger inside. “Get us the fuck
out of here!” one screamed. Rodriguez was moaning. Stebbins and Heard were taking turns
holding up the machine gunner's IV bag.

They were wedged into the small space like pieces of a puzzle. Soon after the explosion
the carrier's big metal door swung open and a soldier from the 10th who had been hit in
the elbow was lifted in on a litter. He screamed with pain as he hit the floor.

“I can't believe it!” he shouted.

The Malaysian driver kept turning back, trying to keep things calm. “Any minute now,
hospital,” he would say.

After patching up the new arrival, Wilkinson sat back against the inner wall and saw
through a peephole that darkness had begun to drain from the eastern sky. The volume of
fire was starting to pick up. There were more pings off the side of the carrier.

The wounded who had been so eager to board the big armored vehicles now prayed to get
off. They felt like targets in a turkey shoot. Goodale had only a small peephole to see
outside. It was so warm he began to feel woozy. He removed his helmet and loosened his
body armor, but it didn't help much. They all sat in the small dark space just staring
silently at each other, waiting.

“You know what we should do,” suggested one of the wounded D-boys. “We should kind of
crack one of these doors a little bit so that when the RPG comes in here, we'll all have
someplace to explode out of.”

About an hour before sunrise, there was an update from the C2bird to the JOC:

-They are essentially pulling the aircraft instrument panel apart around the body. Still
do not have any idea when they will be done.

-Okay, are they going to be able to get the body out of there? Garrison demanded. I need
an honest no shit for-real assessment from the platoon leader or the senior man present.
Over.

Miller answered:

-Roger. Understand we are looking at twenty more minutes before we can get the body out.

Garrison said:

-Roger. I know they are doing the best they can. We will stay the course until they are
finished. Over.

As the sky to the east brightened, Sergeant Yurek was startled by the carnage back in the
room where they had spent the night. Sunlight illuminated the pools and smears of blood
everywhere. As he poked his head out the courtyard door he could see Somali bodies
scattered up and down the road in the distance. One of the bodies, a young Somali man,
appeared to have been run over several times by one of the vehicles being used to pull
apart the helicopter. Yurek was especially saddened to see, at a corner of Marehan Road,
the carcass of the donkey he had watched miraculously crossing the Street back and forth
through all the gunfire the day before. It was still hooked to its cart.

Howe noticed among the bodies stacked on top of the APCs the soles of two small assault
boots. There was only one guy in the unit with boots that small. It had to be Earl
Fillmore.

Everybody knew the respite here was about to end. Daylight would bring Sammy back
outdoors. Captain Steele stood outside the courtyard door checking his watch compulsively.
He must have looked at it hundreds of times. He couldn't believe they weren't moving yet.
The horizon was starting to get pink. Placing three hundred men at jeopardy in order to
retrieve the body of one man was a noble gesture, but hardly a sensible one. Finally, at
sunup, the grim work was done.

-Adam Six Four. [Garrison], this is Romeo Six Four [Harrell]. They are starting to move
at this time, over. Placing the charges and getting ready to move.

Then came the next shock for the Rangers and D-boys who had been fighting now for
fourteen hours. There wasn't enough room on the vehicles for them. After the 10th Mountain
Division soldiers reboarded, the anxious Malaysian drivers just took off, leaving the rest
of the force behind. They were going to have to run right back out through the same
streets they'd fought through on their way in. It was

5:45 A.M., Monday, October 4. The sun was now over the rooftops.

-9-

So they ran. The original idea was for them to run with the vehicles in order to have some
cover, but the Malay drivers had sped out.

Still hauling the radio on his back, Steele ran alongside Perino. Eight Rangers were
strung out behind them. Behind them were the rest of Delta Force, the CSAR team,
everybody. It happened so fast, men at the far end of the line were surprised when they
made the right turn at the top of the hill to find that the others had moved out already.

Yurek ran with Jamie Smith's gear. Nobody had wanted to touch it. It was like
acknowledging he was gone. The whole force ran the same route the main force had used
coming in, stopping at each intersection to spray covering fire as they one by one
sprinted across. As soon as they began moving the shooting resumed, almost as bad as it
had been the afternoon before. The Rangers shot at every window and door, and down every
cross street. Steele felt like his legs were lead weights and that he was moving at a
fraction of his normal speed, yet he was running as fast as he could.

When they got up to their original blocking position there was withering fire across the
wide intersection before the Olympic Hotel. Sergeant Randy Ramaglia saw the rounds hitting
the sides of the armored vehicles blocks head. We're going to run through that? It was the
same unit as yesterday. He had made it up to the intersection when he felt a sharp blow to
his shoulder, like someone had hit him with a sledgehammer. It didn't knock him down. He
just froze. It took a few seconds for him to regain his senses. At first he thought
something had fallen on him. He looked up.

“Sergeant, you've been shot!” shouted Specialist Collett, who had been running beside him.

Ramaglia turned to him. Colette's eyes were wide.

“I know it,” he said.

He took several deep breaths and tried to move his arm. He could move it. He felt no pain.

The round had hit Ramaglia's left back, taking out a golf ball-sized scoop of it. The
round had then skimmed off his shoulder blade and nicked Colette's sleeve, tearing off the
American flag he had stitched there.

“Are you okay?” a Delta medic shouted at him from across the street.

“Yeah,” said Ramaglia, and he started running again. He was furious. The whole scene
seemed surreal to him. He couldn't believe some pissant fucking Sammy had shot him,
Sergeant Randal J. Ramaglia of the U.S. Army Rangers. He was going to get out of that city
alive or take half of it with him. He shot at anyone or anything he saw. He was running,
bleeding, swearing, and shooting. Windows, doorways, alleyways ... especially people. They
were all going down. It was a free-for-all now. All semblance of an ordered retreat was
gone. Everybody was just scrambling.

Sergeant Nelson, still stone deaf, ran alongside Private Neathery, who had been shot in
the right arm the afternoon before. Nelson had his M-60 and carried Neathery's M-16 slung
across his back. They ran as hard as they could and Nelson shot at everything he saw. He
had never felt so frightened, not even at the height of things the previous day. He and
Neathery were toward the rear and were terrified that in this wild footrace they would be
left behind or picked off. Neathery was having a hard time running, which slowed them
down. When they caught up to a group providing covering fire at the wide intersection they
were supposed to stop and take their turn, cover for that group to advance, but instead
they just ran straight through.

Howe kicked in a door of a house on the street and the team piled in to reload and catch
their breath. Captain Miller stepped in, breathing hard, and told them to keep moving.
Howe went around the room double-checking everybody's status and ammo and then they pushed
back out to the street. He was shooting his CAR-15 and his shotgun. Up ahead the APC
gunners were shooting up everything.

Private Floyd ran with his torn pants flapping, all but naked from the waist down,
feeling especially vulnerable and ridiculous. Alongside him, Doc Strous disappeared
suddenly in a loud flash and explosion that knocked Floyd down. When he regained his
senses and looked over for Strous, all he saw was a thinning ball of smoke. No Doc.