Black Hawk Down (44 page)

Sergeant Watson grabbed Floyd's shoulder. The private's helmet was cockeyed and his eyes
felt that way.

“Where the hell is Strous?”

“He blew up, Sergeant.”

“He blew up? What the hell do you mean he blew up?”

“He blew up.”

Floyd pointed to where the medic had been running. Strous stepped from a tangle of weeds,
brushing himself off, his helmet askew. He looked down at Floyd and just took off running.
A round had hit a flashbang grenade on Strous's vest and exploded, knocking him off his
feet and into the weeds. He was unhurt.

“Move out, Floyd,” Watson screamed.

They all kept running, running and shooting through the brightening dawn, through the
crackle of gunfire, the spray of loose mortar off a wall where a round hit, the sudden
gust of hot wind from a blast that sometimes knocked them down and sucked the air out of
their lungs, the sound of the helicopters rumbling overhead, and the crisp rasp of their
guns like the tearing of heavy cloth. They ran through the oily smell of the city and of
their own bodies, the taste of dust in their dry mouths, with the crisp brown bloodstains
on their fatigues and the fresh memory of friends dead or unspeakably mangled, with the
whole nightmare now grown unbearably long, with disbelief that the mighty and terrible
army of the United States of America had plunged them into this mess and stranded them
there and now left them to run through the same deadly gauntlet to get out.

How could this happen?

Ramaglia ran on some desperate last reserve of adrenaline. He ran and shot and swore
until he began to smell his own blood and feel dizzy. For the first time he felt some
stabs of pain. He kept running. As he approached the intersection of Hawlwadig Road and
National Street, about five blocks south of the Olympic Hotel, he saw a tank and the line
of APCs and Humvees and a mass of men in desert battle dress. He ran until he collapsed,
with joy.

-10-

At Mogadishu's Volunteer Hospital, surgeon Abdi Mohamed Elmi was covered with blood and
exhausted. His wounded and dead countrymen had started coming early the evening before.
Just a trickle at first, despite the great volume of shooting going on. Vehicles couldn't
move on the streets so the patients were carried in or rolled in on handcarts. There were
burning roadblocks throughout the city and the American helicopters were buzzing low and
shooting and most people were afraid to venture out.

Before the fight began, the Volunteer Hospital was virtually empty. It was located down
near the Americans' base by the airport. After the trouble had started with the Americans,
most Somalis were afraid to come there. By the end of this day, Monday, October 4, all
five hundred beds in the hospital would be full. One hundred more wounded would be lined
up in the hallways. And Volunteer wasn't the biggest hospital in the city. The numbers
were even greater at Digfer. Most of those with gut wounds would die. The delay in getting
them to the hospital-many more would come today than came yesterday-allowed infections to
set in that could no longer be successfully treated with what antibiotics the hospital
could spare.

The three-bed operating theater at Volunteer had been full and busy all through the
night. Elmi was part of a team of seven surgeons who worked straight through without a
break. He had assisted in eighteen major surgeries by sunrise, and the hallways outside
were rapidly filling with more, dozens, hundreds more. It was a tidal wave of gore.

He finally walked out of the operating room at eight in the morning, and sat down to
rest. The hospital was filled with the chilling screams and moans of broken people,
dismembered, bleeding, dying in horrible pain. Doctors and nurses ran from bed to bed;
trying to keep up. Elmi sat on a bench smoking a cigarette quietly. A Frenchwoman who saw
him sitting down approached him angrily.

“Why don't you help these people?” she shouted at him.

“I can't,” he said.

She stormed away. He sat until his cigarette was finished. Then he stood and went back to
work. He would not sleep for another twenty-four hours.

-11-

Abdi Karim Mohamud left his friend's house in the morning after the Americans had gone.
The day before he'd been sent home early from his job at the U.S. embassy compound and had
run to witness the fighting around the Bakara Market. It was so fierce, he'd spent a long
sleepless night on the floor at his friend's home, listening to the gunfire and watching
the explosions light up the sky.

The shooting flared up again violently after sunrise as the Rangers fought their way out.
Then it stopped.

He ventured out an hour or so later. He saw a woman dead in the middle of the street. She
had been hit by bullets from a helicopter. You could tell because the helicopter guns tore
people apart. Her stomach and insides were spilled outside her body on the street. He saw
three children, tiny ones, stiff and gray with death. There was an old man facedown in the
street, his blood in a wide pool dried around him, and beside him was his donkey, also
dead. Abdi counted the bullets in the old man. There were three, two in the torso and one
in the leg.

Bashir Haji Yusuf, the lawyer, heard the big fight resume at dawn. He had managed to fall
asleep for a few hours and it awakened him. When that shooting stopped he told his wife he
was going to see. He took his camera with him. He wanted to make a record of what had
happened.

He saw dead donkeys on the road, and severe damage to the buildings around the Olympic
Hotel and farther east. There were bloodstains all over the buildings and streets, as if
some great thrashing beast had been through, but most of the dead had been carried off. He
snapped pictures as he walked down one of the streets where the soldiers had run, and he
saw the husk of the first Black Hawk that had crashed, still smoldering from the fire the
Rangers had set on it. As he walked he saw the charred remains of Humvees, one that was
still burning, and several Malaysian Apes.

Then Bashir heard a great stir of excitement, people chanting and cheering and shouting.
He ran to see.

They had a dead American soldier draped over a wheelbarrow. He was stripped to black
undershorts and lay draped backward with his hands dragging on the dirt. The body was
caked with dry blood and the man's face looked peaceful, distant. There were bullet holes
in his chest and arm. Ropes were tied around his body, and it was half wrapped in a sheet
of corrugated tin. The crowd grew larger as the wheelbarrow was pushed through the street.

People spat and poked and kicked at the body.

“Why did you come here?” screamed one woman.

Bashir followed, appalled. This is terrible. Islam called for reverential treatment and
immediate burial of the dead, not this grotesque display. Bashir wanted to stop them, but
the crowd was wild. These were wild people, ghetto people, and they were celebrating. To
step forward and ask, “What are you doing?” to try to shame them, as Bashir wanted to do,
would risk having them turn on him. He snapped several pictures and followed the mob. So
many people had been killed and hurt the night before. The streets filled with even
angrier, more vicious people. A festival of blood.

Hassan Adan Hassan was in a crowd that was dragging another dead American. Hassan
sometimes worked as a translator for American and British journalists, and wanted to be a
journalist himself. He followed the crowd down to the K-4 circle, where the numbers
swelled to a sizable mob. They were dragging the body on the street when an outnumbered
and outgunned squad of Saudi Arabian soldiers drove up on vehicles. Even though they were
with the UN, the Saudis were not considered enemies of the Somalis, and even on this day
their vehicles were not attacked. What the Saudis saw made them angry.

“What are you doing?” one of the soldiers asked.

“We have Animal Howe,” answered an armed young Somali man, one of the ringleaders.

“This is an American soldier,” said another.

“If he is dead, why are you doing this? Aren't you a human being?” the Saudi soldier
asked the ringleader, insulting him.

One of the Somalis pointed his gun at the Saudi soldier. “We will kill you, too,” the
gunman said.

People in the back of the crowd shouted at the Saudis,

“Leave it. Leave it alone! These people are angry. They might kill you.”

“But why do you do this?” the Saudi persisted. “You can fight and they can fight, but
this man is dead. Why do you drag him?”

More guns were pointed at the Saudis. The disgusted soldiers drove off.

Abdi Karim was with the crowd dragging the dead American. He followed them until he grew
afraid that an American helicopter would come down and shoot at them all. Then he drifted
away from the mob and went home. His parents were greatly relieved to see him alive.

-12-

The Malaysians led everyone to a soccer stadium at the north end of the city, a Pakistani
base of operations. The scene there was surreal. The exhausted Rangers drove in through
the big gate out front, passed through the concrete shadows under the stands, like going
to a football or baseball game at home, and then burst out blinking into a wide sunlit
arena, rows of benches reaching up all around to the sky. In the lower stands lounged rows
and rows of 10th Mountain Division soldiers, smoking, talking, eating, laughing, while on
the field doctors were tending the scores of wounded.

Dr. Marsh had flown to the stadium with two other docs to supervise the emergency care.
Unlike the first load of casualties that had come in with the lost convoy, these had
mostly been patched up by medics in the field. Still, Dr. Bruce Adams found it a hellish
scene. He was used to treating one or maybe two injuries at a time. Here was a soccer
pitch covered with bleeding, broken bodies. The wounded Super Six One crew chief Ray Dowdy
walked up to Adams and held up his hand, which was missing the top digits of two fingers.
The doctor just put his arm around him and said, “I'm sorry.”

For the Rangers, even the ride from the rendezvous point on National Street to the
stadium had been traumatic. There was still a lot of shooting going on and barely enough
room on the Humvees to take all the men who had run out, so guys were piled in two and
three layers deep. Private Jeff Young, who had badly twisted his ankle on the run out, was
picked up by one of the D-boys, who dropped him into the backseat of a Humvee and then
unceremoniously sat on his lap. Private George Siegler had hopefully sprinted up to the
hatch of an APC just as a voice yelled from inside, “We can only take one more!”
Lieutenant Perino already had one leg in the hatch. Out of the corner of his eye Perino
saw the younger man's desperation. He withdrew his leg from the hatch and said, cloaking
his kindness with officerly impatience, “Come on, Private, come on.” It would have been
easy for the lieutenant to say he hadn't seen him. Siegler was so moved by the gesture he
decided then and there to reenlist.

Nelson found himself in a Humvee that had four full cans of 60 ammo, so he worked his rig
the whole way out of the city, shooting at anybody he saw. If they were on the street and
he saw them he shot at them. He was close to coming out of this mess alive, and he was
doing everything he could to make sure he did.

On his way out, Dan Schilling, the air force combat controller who had ridden out the
bloody wandering of the lost convoy and then come back out into the city with the rescue
convoy, saw an old Somali man with a white beard walking up the road with a small boy in
his arms. The boy appeared to be about five years old and was bloody and looked dead. The
old man walked seemingly oblivious to the firefight going on around him. He turned a
corner north and disappeared up the street.

For Steele, the worst moment in the whole fight had come as they pulled away from
National Street. The captain was looking down the line of APCs, watching men climb on
board, and he saw Perino down at the end of the line step back and let Siegler in the
hatch, and then, boom! the vehicles took off. There were still guys back there, Perino and
others! He beat frantically on the shoulders of the APC driver, screaming at him, “I've
got guys still out there!” but the Malay driver had a tanker helmet on and acted like he
didn't hear Steele and just kept on driving. The captain got on the command net. Reception
was so bad inside the carrier that he could barely hear a response, but he broadcast his
alarm in disjointed phrases:

-We got left back on National ... The Paki vehicles were gonna follow us home, the foot
soldier. . . But we loaded up but we had probably fifteen or twenty still had to walk.
They took off and left us. We need to get somebody back down there to pick them up.

-Roger. I understand, Harrell had answered. I thought everybody was Loaded. I got about
three calls. They were telling me they were loaded. Where are they on National?

-Romeo, this is Juliet I'm sending this blind. I need those soldiers picked up on
National ASAP!

In fact, Perino and the others had been picked up, but not without some trouble. The
lieutenant and about six other men, Rangers and some D-boys, were the last ones on the
street when what looked like the last of the vehicles approached. The exhausted soldiers
shouted and waved but the Malaysian driver paid them no mind until one of the D-boys
stepped out and leveled a CAR-15 at him. He stopped. They just piled in on top of the
other men already jammed inside.

Steele didn't find out until he got to the stadium. Some of the Humvees had gone straight
back to the hangar, so it took a last stressful half hour to account for them. Finally
someone back at the JOC read him a list of all the Rangers who had come back there. It was
only then that the captain took a long look around him and the magnitude of what had
happened began to register.

Lieutenant Colonel Matthews, who had been aloft in the command bird with Harrell for the
last fifteen hours except for short refueling breaks, stepped out of the bird and
stretched his legs. He'd become so used to the sound of the rotors by now that he
perceived the scene before him in silence. The wounded were on litters filling half of the
field, tethered to IV bags, bandaged and bloody. Doctors and nurses huddled over the worst
of them, working furiously. He saw Captain Steele sitting by himself on the sandbags of a
mortar pit with his head in his hands. Behind Steele were rows of the dead, neatly arrayed
in zippered body bags. Out on the field, moving from wounded man to wounded man, was a
Pakistani soldier holding a tray with glasses of freshwater. The man had a white towel
draped over his arm.