Black Hawk Down (45 page)

Those who were not wounded walked among the litters on the soccer pitch with tears in
their eyes or looking drained and emotionless-thousand-mile stares. Helicopters,
Vietnam-era Hueys emblazoned with the Red Cross, were coming and going, shuttling those
who were ready back to the hospital by the hangar. Private Ed Kallman, who earlier had
thrilled at the chance to be in combat, now watched as a medic efficiently sorted the
litters as they came off vehicles like a foreman on a warehouse loading dock-“What have
you got there? Okay. Dead in that group there. Live in this group here.” Sergeant Watson
wandered slowly through the wounded, taking account. Once the medics and doctors had cut
off their bloody, dirty clothes and exposed the wounds, the full horror of it was much
greater. There were guys with gaping bruised holes in their bodies, limbs mangled, poor
Carlos Rodriguez with a bullet through his scrotum, Goodale and Gould with their bare
wounded asses up in the air, Stebbins riddled with shrapnel, Lechner with his leg mashed,
Ramaglia, Phipps, Boorn, Neathery... the list went on.

Specialist Anderson, despite his deep misgivings about coming out with the main convoy,
had come through it unhurt. He was thrilled to find his skydiving buddy Sergeant Kern
Thomas still alive and unhurt, but other than that he just felt emotionally spent. He
recoiled at the ugliness of the scene, the wounds, the bodies. When the APC with Super Six
One copilot Bull Briley's body on top arrived, Anderson had to turn away. The body was
discolored. It looked yellow-orange, and through the deep gash in his head he could see
brain matter spilled down the side of the carrier. When the medics came over looking for
help getting the body down, Anderson just ducked away. He couldn't deal with it.

Goodale was laid out in the middle of the big stadium with his pants cut off looking up
at a clear blue sky. A medic leaned over him dropping ash from his cigarette as he tried
to stick an IV needle in his arm. And even though it was sunny and probably close to
ninety degrees again, Goodale's teeth chattered. He was chilled to the bone. One of the
doctors gave him some hot tea.

That's how Sergeant Cash found him. Cash had just arrived on the tail end of the rescue
convoy and was wandering wild-eyed across the field looking for his friends. At first
sight he thought Goodale, who was pale and shivering violently, was a goner.

“Are you all right?” Cash asked.

“I'll be all right. I'm just cold.”

Cash helped flag a nurse, who covered Goodale with a blanket and tucked it in around him.
Then they compared notes. Goodale told Cash about Smith, and went down the list of
wounded: Cash told Goodale what he had seen back at the hangar when the lost convoy came
in. He told him about Ruiz and Cavaco and Joyce and Kowalewski.

“Mac's hit,” said Cash, referring to Sergeant Jeff McLaughlin. “I don't know where
Carlson is. I heard he's dead.”

Rob Phipps fell out of the hatch of his APC when it stopped in the stadium. After hours
locked in that stinking container with all the other wounded, there was a sudden scramble
for the fresh air as soon as the hatch was pushed open. Phipps landed with a thud, but the
fresh air was so sweet he didn't mind the fall. He found he couldn't stand, so a soldier
he didn't know picked him up und carried him to the doctors. Phipps had been fixed with an
IV in his arm when one of the guys from his unit walked up and told him about Cavaco and
Alphabet.

Floyd climbed up over the railing and mounted the benches to a group of 10th Mountain
Division guys and bummed a cigarette. On his way down, Sergeant Watson waved him over to
join the rest of his squad who were still standing. Watson somberly went down the list of
those killed. Floyd was especially shocked to hear about Pilla. Smith and Pilla were his
best friends in the world.

Stebbins sucked in large lungfuls of fresh air when the hatch of his APC finally swung
open. He helped get some of the others off and then a litter was lifted on for him. He was
dragging himself toward it when a 10th Mountain sergeant shouted, “Don't make him crawl,
boys,” and suddenly hands came in from all sides and Stebbins was lifted gently.

He was set down among a group of his buddies, naked from the waist down. Sergeant Aaron
Weaver brought him a hot cup of coffee.

“Bless you, my son,” said Stebbins. “Got any cigarettes?”

Weaver had none. Stebbins asked everyone who walked past, without luck. He finally
grabbed one soldier from the 10th by the arm and pleaded, “Listen, man, you got to find me
a fucking cigarette.” One of the Malaysian drivers, a guy everybody in the APC (including
Stebbins) had been screaming at an hour earlier, walked up and handed him a cigarette. The
driver bent down to light it and then handed him the rest of the pack. When Stebbins tried
to hand it back, the Malaysian took it and stuffed it in Stebbins's shirt pocket.

Watson approached.

“Stebby, I hear you did your job. Good work,” he said, then he reached down and took a
two-inch flap of cloth from Stebbins's shredded trousers and tried to place it over his
genitals. They both laughed.

Dale Sizemore couldn't wait to find the guys on his chalk. He desperately wanted them to
know that he hadn't sat out the fight back at the hangar, but had fought in after them,
twice. It was important that they know he had come after them.

The first person he found was Sergeant Chuck Elliot.

When they saw each other they both cried, happy to be alive, to see each other again.
Then Sizemore started telling Elliot about the dead and wounded Rangers who had been on
the lost convoy. They wept and talked and watched the dead being loaded on helicopters.

“There's Smitty,” said Elliot.

“What?”

“That's Smith.”

Sizemore saw two feet hanging out from under a sheet. One was booted, the other bare.
Elliot told him how he and Perino and the medic had taken turns for hours putting their
fingers up inside Smith's pelvic wound trying to pinch off the femoral artery. They had
cut off the one pants leg and boot, that's how he knew it was Smith. He choked up and
cried.

Then Sizemore found Goodale, with his butt in the air.

“I got shot in the ass,” Goodale announced.

“Serves you right, Goodale, you shouldn't have been running away,” Sizemore told him.

Steele was shocked when he learned that more of his men were dead. The sergeant who told
him didn't have an accurate count yet, but he thought it might be three or four Rangers.
Four? Up until he reached the stadium, Smith was the only one Steele had known about for
sure. He strode off to be by himself. He grabbed a bottle of water and just sat drinking
it, alone with his thoughts. He felt this overwhelming sadness, but dared not break down
in front of his men. There was no one else of his rank around him, no one he could confide
in. Some of his men were in tears, others were chattering away like they couldn't talk
fast enough to get all their stories out. The captain felt odd, hyper-alert. It was the
first time in almost a full day when he felt he could let down for a minute, just relax.
Every sight and sound of the busy scene before him registered fully, as though his senses
had been finely tuned for so long that he couldn't pull back. He found himself a place to
sit at the edge of a mortar pit and laid his rifle across his lap and just breathed deeply
and swished the cool water in his mouth and tried to review all that had happened. Had he
made the right decisions? Had he done everything he could?

Sergeant Atwater, the captain's radio operator, wanted to go over and say something to
him, comfort him somehow. But he felt it wouldn't have been appropriate.

One by one the wounded were loaded on helicopters and flown either to the army hospital
at the U.S. embassy or back to the hangar.

The chopper ride back was calming for Sizemore, the sensations so reminiscent of all
those days in Mog before his fight, the profile flights, the heady first six missions
where everything had gone so well. Feeling the wind through the open doors and looking out
over the now-familiar squalor below, the ocean stretching off to the east, things felt
normal again. It was a reminder of how they had been just a day before, full of fun and so
spoiling for a fight. That was just twenty-four hours ago. Nothing would be like that for
them again. There was no chatter now in the Black Hawk on the way back to the base. The
men all rode silently.

Nelson looked out over the deep blue waters at a U.S. Navy ship in the distance. It was
like he was seeing things through someone else's eyes. Colors seemed brighter to him,
smells more vivid. He felt the experience had changed him in some fundamental way. He
wondered if other guys were feeling this, but it was so strange, he didn't know how to
explain it or how to ask them.

As his chopper lifted off, Steele watched the tight network of streets that had closed in
on them the previous afternoon open up once again to a broader panorama, and he was struck
by how small the space was they had fought over, and it reminded him just how remote and
small a place Mogadishu was in the larger world.

As Sergeant Ramaglia was loaded on a bird, a medic leaned over him and said, “Man, I feel
sorry for you all.”

“You should feel sorry for them,” the sergeant said, “cause we whipped ass.”

-13-

After depositing their dead and wounded, the D-boys quickly boarded helicopters and were
flown back to the hangar. Sergeant Howe and his men went solemnly back to work, readying
themselves to go right back out. They had trained to function without sleep for days at a
time, so they were in a familiar place, one they called the “drone zone,” a point at which
the body transcends minor aches and pains and grows impervious to hot and cold. In the
drone zone they motored on with a heightened level of perception, non-reflective, as if on
autopilot. Howe didn't like the feeling, but he was used to it.

Some of the Rangers and even some of his friends in the unit were acting like they had
been beaten, which pissed off the big sergeant. He knew he and his men had inflicted a lot
more damage than they'd absorbed. They had been put in a terrible spot and had not only
survived, they'd mauled the enemy. He didn't know the estimated body counts, but whatever
the numbers, he knew they'd just fought one of the most one-sided battles in American
history.

He pulled off his sweat-soaked Kevlar and gear and spread it all out on his bunk. He
restuffed all of the pouches and pockets with ammo. Then he methodically stripped down
each of his weapons, cleaned and relubricated each, concluding each procedure with a
function check. When he had everything ready and packed again he stood over it with a
strong sense of satisfaction. His kit, and the precise way that he'd packed it, had served
him well, and he wanted to remember exactly how everything was, for the next time. The
only thing he would have done differently is take along those NODs. He stuffed them in his
backpack. He would never again go on a mission without them, night or day.

Howe was surprised to still be alive. The thought of heading straight back out into the
fight scared him, but the fear was nothing next to the loyalty he felt to the men stranded
in the city. Some of their own were still out there-Gary Gordon, Randy Shughart, Michael
Durant, and the crew of Super Six Four. Alive or dead, they were coming home. This fight
wasn't over until every one of them was back. Fuck it, let's go out there and kill some
folks. That was how he set his mind.

And if they were going back out, there was going to be hell to pay.

-14-

Sizemore didn't find out that his buddy Lorenzo Ruiz was dead until after he got back to
the hangar.

“You heard about Ruiz, right?” asked Specialist Kevin Snodgrass.

Sizemore knew right away what had happened and he couldn't stop crying. When they had
flown Ruiz out earlier in the afternoon for the hospital in Germany he was still alive.
Not long after he left, word came back that he had died. Ruiz had tried to hand Sizemore
the packet of letters for his parents and loved ones before the mission and Sizemore had
refused it. Now Ruiz was dead. Sizemore couldn't believe it was Ruiz and not him who had
been killed. Ruiz had a wife and a baby. Why would Ruiz be taken and not him? It seemed
deeply unfair to Sizemore. Sergeant Watson sat with him for hours, consoling him, talking
things through with him. But what could you say?

Sergeant Cash had seen Ruiz not long before he had been flown out.

“You're going to be fine,” he told him.

“No. No, I'm not,” Ruiz said. He had barely enough strength to form the words. “I know
it's over for me. Don't worry about me.”

Captain Steele got the accurate casualty list when he returned to the hangar. First
Sergeant Glenn Harris was waiting for him at the door. He saluted.

“Rangers lead the way, sir.”

“All the way,” Steele said, returning the salute.

“Sir, here's what it looks like,” Harris said, handing over a green sheet of paper.

Steele was aghast. One list of names ran the entire length of the page. There weren't
just four men killed. On this list the death toll was thirteen. Six others were missing
from the second crash site and presumed dead. Of the three critically injured men already
flown out to a hospital in Germany-Griz Martin, Lorenzo Ruiz, and Adalberto-Rodriguez-Ruiz
had already been reported dead. Seventy-three men had been injured. Among the dead, six
were Steele's men-Smith, Cavaco, Pilla, Joyce, Kowalewski, and

Ruiz. Thirty of the injured were Rangers. Harris had started a second column at the top
that ran almost to the bottom of the page. One third of Steele's company had either been
killed or injured.

“Where are they?” Steele asked.

“Most are at the hospital, sir.”

Steele stripped off his gear and walked across to the field

hospital. The captain put a great store on maintaining at least a facade of emotional
resilience, but the scene in the hospital undid him. It was a mess. Guys were lying
everywhere, on cots, on the floor. Some were still bandaged in the haphazard wraps given
them during the fight. He choked out a few words of encouragement to each, fighting back
the well of grief in his craw. The last soldier he saw was Phipps, the youngest of the
Rangers on the CSAR bird. Phipps looked to Steele like he'd been beaten with a baseball
bat. His face was swollen twice normal size and was black-and-blue. His back and leg were
heavily bandaged and there were stains from his oozing wounds. Steele laid his hand on him.