Black Hawk Down (46 page)

“Phipps?”

The soldier stirred. When he opened his eyes there was red where the whites normally were.

“You're gonna be okay,” Steele said.

Phipps reached up and grabbed hold of the captain's arm. “Sir, I'll be okay in a couple
of days. Don't go back out without me.”

Steele nodded and fled the room.

Private David Floyd was struck by how empty the hangar looked. He dragged himself back to
his cot and stripped off his gear. But instead of feeling relieved, he felt this great
weight and soreness descend. Around him, guys were talking and talking and talking. It was
like they were trying to work the whole thing out. They accounted for all of their number.
For every one of the killed or scores of injured there was a story to be told about how
and when and where and why. Sometimes the stories differed. One thought Joyce was still
alive for a time in the back of the truck while another insisted he was killed almost
instantly. Somebody thought it was Diemer who had pulled Joyce from the line of fire, but
another was sure it was Telscher. Stebbins had gone down four times. No, somebody argued,
it was only three. They told of the long futile struggle to keep Jamie Smith alive. They
wept openly.

Nelson, one of the last to return to the hangar, found Sergeant Eversmann in tears.

“What's wrong?” Nelson asked. Then, knowing his friend Casey Joyce had been on
Eversmann's chalk, he asked, “Where's Joyce?”

Eversmann looked at him with surprise, and then got too choked up to speak. Nelson ran
into the hangar and sought out Lieutenant Perino, who gave him the bad news. He also told
him Pilla, his partner in the hangar skits, was dead. Nelson broke down.

Joyce's death particularly grieved him. He owed the man an apology. Fed up with the order
to stand guard duty in full battle dress a few days earlier, Nelson had told the men on
his team it was okay to ignore it. He told them it was okay to wear their body armor and
helmet over shorts and T-shirts. If it caused trouble, he said, he'd take the heat. He
hadn't really thought that through, however, because when the trouble came it landed not
on him but on Joyce, who was nominally his superior. Joyce had been sternly upbraided for
not being able to control his men.

Nelson had pulled guard duty early Sunday morning, between three and seven, and Joyce had
roused himself to come out to talk. They had been together ever since basic training, and
they had a special, almost family connection.

They had actually met each other years before joining the army. It was just a wild
coincidence. Nelson's stepbrother had roomed with Joyce's older brother in an apartment in
Atlanta, and they had met each other there once or twice as kids. Nelson admired Joyce. He
had never seen the man say or do anything unseemly. Just about everybody had tied one on
at a local bar or secretly smoked dope or bad-mouthed somebody or tried to get away with
something against the rules. Not Casey Joyce. As far as Nelson was concerned, Joyce was
the most thoroughly decent guy he'd ever met, genuine to the core. Joyce had gotten his
sergeant stripes first, but they both knew Nelson would be getting his soon. It was
awkward for Joyce to be Nelson's superior. They were friends. They had made plans with
Pilla and a few of the other guys to drive out to Austin and stay with Joyce's sister for
a few days when they got back. Nelson felt bad about getting his friend in trouble. Just
over twenty-four hours ago they had sat together behind a machine gun surrounded by
sandbags under a nearly full moon. The guard post was up on a Conex that had been stacked
on another to create a nice high vantage point. It was quiet. The low rooflines of
Mogadishu spread before them rolling uphill to the north. In the distance they could hear
the steady banging of small generators that kept, here and there, a lightbulb or two
burning. Otherwise the city was draped in pale blue moonlight.

“Look, I'm as tired of this chain-of-command shit as you are,” Joyce had told Nelson.
“Just do me a favor. Whatever happens, don't do anything that gets First Sergeant Harris
and Staff Sergeant Eversmann on my back. Let's do what we need to do so we can get out of
here. Don't let this come between you and me.”

Joyce hadn't bitched at him, which he had every right to do and which most guys would
have. He was making a plea, man to man, friend to friend. The right thing for Nelson to do
was to apologize, and the words were right there on the tip of his tongue, but Nelson
didn't say them. He was still angry about the rule, which he thought was pointless and
stupid, and he wouldn't swallow his pride. Not even for his friend. The apology had still
been there on the tip of his tongue the previous afternoon when he'd helped Joyce pull on
his gear. Joyce was squad leader and had to be the first one out to the helicopter, so
Nelson always helped him.

He'd been close to saying the apology, but instead just watched his friend walk off. Now
he would never have the chance.

Nelson was asked to inventory his friend's gear. He found Joyce's Kevlar vest, the one he
had helped him put on the day before. It had a hole in the upper back right at the center.
He rooted through the vest pockets-a lot of guys stuffed pictures, love letters, and
things in the pockets. In the front of Joyce's vest he found the bullet. It must have
passed right through his friend's body and been caught up in the Kevlar in front. He put
it in a tin can. In Pilla's belongings he found a bag of the little explosives his friend
used to insert in people's cigarettes.

Sergeant Watson walked over to the morgue to see Smith one last time. He unzipped the
body bag and gazed at his friend's pinched, pale lifeless face. Then he leaned over and
kissed his forehead.

-15-

America awakened Monday morning (it was already late afternoon in Mogadishu) to news
reports of an ugly fight in Somalia, a place most people had to consult an atlas to find.
It wasn't the biggest news. Russian president Boris Yeltsin was fending off a coup d'etat.
Washington was preoccupied with developments in Moscow.

Sandwiched in between the dramatic reports from Russia, however, came increasingly
distressing news from Somalia. At least five soldiers had been killed and “several”
wounded, the early reports said. Even those numbers indicated the worst single day in
Mogadishu since the United States had committed troops ten months before. Then, later in
the day, came the grotesque images of dead American soldiers being dragged through the
city's busy streets by angry crowds.

President Clinton was in a hotel room in San Francisco when he saw the pictures. He had
been informed earlier in the day that there had been a successful raid in Mogadishu, but
that the Rangers had gotten in a scrape. The TV images horrified and angered him,
according to an account in Elizabeth Drew's book On the Edge.

“How could this happen?” he demanded.

The trickle of news was a peculiarly modern form of torture at the homes of the men
serving in Somalia. Stephanie Shughart, the wife of Delta Sergeant Randy Shughart, had
gotten a phone call at ten o'clock Sunday night. She was home alone. She and Randy had no
children. One of the other Fort Bragg wives left her with a chillingly imprecise bit of
bad news.

“One of the guys has been killed,” she said.

One of the guys.

Stephanie had talked on the phone with Randy on Friday night. As usual, he'd said nothing
about what was going on, just that it was hot, he was getting enough to eat, and he was
getting a great tan. He told her he loved her. He was such a gentle man. It had always
seemed so incongruous to her how he made a living. He didn't say anything about his work
when they first met. Some of Stephanie's better-connected friends had whispered to her
that Randy was “an operator.” She'd figured he worked on the phones.

One of the guys.

In a bedroom in Tennessee, just across the state line from the Night Stalkers' base at
Fort Campbell, Kentucky, Becky Yacone sat with Willi Frank. Both their husbands, Jim
Yacone and Ray Frank, were Black Hawk pilots, and they knew two helicopters had gone down
over Mogadishu. Willi had been awakened at six AM. by a chaplain and commander from the
base. She knew right away why the men were at her door. She'd been through exactly the
same thing three years before, when Ray's chopper had crashed on the training mission.
She'd met Ray on her birthday twenty-two years earlier, when she was managing a bar in
Newport News. Her employees had surprised her with a cake, and everybody ate it except
Ray. When she'd asked him why, he'd told her, like it was something everybody in the world
with any sense would know, “You don't eat cake when you're drinking beer.” They'd gotten
married in Las Vegas that same year.

“Ray is missing in action,” the men said.

“How long will it be before we know?” she asked.

They were startled by the question.

“Last time it only took two hours,” Willi explained.

This time it would take longer. Her support unit showed up, wives of two other men in the
unit, and then Becky came over. Becky was a Black Hawk pilot herself. She'd met her
husband when they were classmates at West Point. She had no news about Jim yet. They all
agreed that if anybody could get out of a mess like this alive, downed in the stress of a
hostile African city, it was their husbands.

Then the pictures came on the TV. The first of them came on just after noon. They were
images of dead Americans. The pictures were distant and shot from such odd angles it was
impossible to tell who the dead men were.

“That one has dirty fingernails,” said one of the women. “He must be a crew chief.”

There was some discussion about that the bodies were in the dirt.

“They're all dirty,” said another woman.

Nobody at Willi's thought to tape the show and rerun it. Maybe it was too ghoulish.
Besides, they didn't need to tape it. CNN kept showing the same pictures every half hour.
At these short intervals conversation would cease and the women would all crowd anxiously
around the screen.

“That's Ray,” said Willi Something about the way the body was lying, the turn of the
shoulders and arms...

“No, he's too small,” said Becky. They knew Randy Shughart and Gary Gordon were missing,
and they were both much shorter than Ray.

“No,” said Willi. “I just know that's Ray.”

She said she was, but she wasn't sure. She had a bad feeling, but she wasn't giving up
hope.

At the hangar in Mogadishu, the men watched like everybody else the images of their dead
comrades being put on display by the jeering Somali crowds. The men who filled the TV room
at the hangar saw it replayed again and again. No one said a word. Some of the men turned
and left the room. Captains Jim Yacone and Scott Miller sat together before the screen
trying to figure out if the body they were looking at was Randy Shughart's or Ray Frank's.
Both men had the same build and gray hair. Ray's had turned gray almost overnight. He had
contracted a rare disorder in his early thirties and had become allergic to the pigment of
his own hair. It had all fallen out and grown back snowy white. Ray also had scars on his
torso from the extensive surgery he'd undergone after the Black Hawk crash in training.
The D-boys were convinced the body was Randy's. It was galling to watch the Skinnies
strutting around the bodies, poking at them with rifles, dragging them. What kind of
animals...?

The pilots wanted to get up over those crowds and mow them down, just mow them all down.
Fuck the whole lot of them. Then land and recover the bodies. These were American
soldiers. Their brothers.

Garrison and Montgomery said no. There were big crowds around those bodies. it would be a
massacre.

Mace, Sergeant Macejunas, went back out into the city. The blond operator had gone out
into the fight three times the day and night before. Leading the force on foot to Durant's
crash site when the vehicles could go no farther was enough to make his courage legendary.
Now he was going out alone, dressed as a civilian, a journalist. The D-boys had arranged
with one of the sympathetic local NGOs for help finding the six men still missing from the
second crash site, Durant, Frank, Field, Cleveland, Shughart, and Gordon. Mace was going
along.

To a man, the task force dreaded the prospect of going back into the city, but they were
prepared to do it, with as much weaponry, armor, and ammo as they could carry. Here was
Mace heading back out without any of that. He was going to find his brothers, alive or
dead. The Rangers who saw him were in awe of the man's courage and cool.

-16-

Mike Durant's captors asked if he would make a videotape.

“No,” said Durant.

He was surprised they'd asked. If they wanted to make a video, they were going to anyway.
But, since they'd asked....

Durant had been trained how to handle himself in captivity. How to avoid being helpful
without being confrontational. The pilot knew if he got out of this alive, his actions
would be scrutinized. It was safer not to be in that position, speaking to the world from
captivity.

They showed up with a camera crew that night anyway. It had been more than twenty-four
hours since he crashed and was carried off in an angry swarm of Somalis. He was hungry,
thirsty, and still terrified. He had a compound fracture of his right leg, a crushed
vertebra, and bullet and shrapnel wounds in his shoulder and thigh. His face was bloody
and swollen from where he had been clubbed in the face with the butt of a rifle. His dark
hair, caked with sweat and dirt and blood, stuck straight up on end like some cartoon
depiction of fright.

There were about ten young men in the crew. They set up lights. Only one of the crew
spoke to him, a young man with good English. Durant knew the key to getting through
something like this was to offer as little pertinent information as possible, to be cagey,
not confrontational. There was a code of conduct spelling out what he could say and what
he couldn't say, and Durant was determined to abide by it. His interrogators were not
skillful. Men had been questioning him on and off all day, trying to get him to tell them
more about who he was and what his unit was trying to do in Somalia. When the camera was
turned on, the interviewer began pressing him on the same points. The Somalis considered
all the Americans with the task force to be Rangers.