Black Hawk Down (7 page)

“Okay, fine,” said Stebbins.

Just before heading out to the Black Hawk, Stebbins was by the front door of the hangar
sucking on a last cigarette, trying to get his nerves under control. This was finally it,
what he'd been aiming for all this time. The guys all knew this was a particularly bad
part of town, too. This was likely to be their nastiest mission yet, and it was his first!
He had the same feeling in his gut that was there before his first jump at airborne
school. I'm gonna live through this, he told himself. I'm not gonna die. One of the D-boys
told him, “Look, for the first ten minutes or so you're gonna be scared shitless. After
that you're going to get really mad that they have the balls to shoot at you.” Stebbins
had heard the stories about the other missions, how the Somalis were hit-and-run fighters.
There was no way they'd get in a real shitfight. Up on the profile flights, they'd never
seen any big weapons. This was going to be an urban small-arms deal I'm surrounded by guys
who know what they're doing.

I'm gonna be okay.

Now, hitting the street outside the target building and hearing the pop of distant
gunfire, be knew he was in it for real. After untangling himself from the 60 gunner, he
ran to the wall. He was assigned a corner pointing south, guarding an alley that appeared
empty. It was just a narrow dirt path, barely wide enough for a car, that sloped down on
both sides from mud-stained stone walls to a footpath at the center. There were the usual
piles of random debris and rusted metal parts strewn along the way, in between
outcroppings of cactus. He heard occasional snapping sounds in the air around him and
assumed it was the sound of gunfire a few blocks away, even though the noise was close.
Maybe the air was playing tricks on him. He also heard a peculiar noise, a tchew... tchew
. . . tchew, and it dawned on him that this was the sound of rounds whistling down the
street. That snapping noise? That was bullets passing close enough for him to hear the
little sonic boomlet as they zipped past.

Up the street from Stebbins, Captain Steele spotted a likely source for most of the
rounds coming through their position. There was a sniper one block west on top of the
Olympic Hotel. It was the tallest structure around.

Steele bellowed, “Smith!”

Corporal Jamie Smith came running. He was the best marksman in the chalk. Steele pointed
out the shooter and slapped Smith's back encouragingly. Both men took aim. Their target
was a long shot away, more than 150 yards. They couldn't see if they hit him, but after
they fired the Somali on the rooftop was not seen again.

Across the alley, hiding behind the inverted frame of a burned-out vehicle, squatted
Sergeants Mike Goodale and Aaron Williamson. They were resting their weapons on the hulk,
which sloped down from them toward the center of the alley. All the alleys rose from the
center in uneven sandy berms to stone courtyard walls and small stone houses on both
sides. There were small trees behind some of the walls, and just to the north was the boxy
shape of the three-story back side of the target house. The thick rope they had, come down
on now lay stretched across the alley. The earth had that slightly orange color, which
stained the walls and imparted a rusty tint to the air close to the ground. Goodale could
smell and taste the dust mixed with the odor of gunpowder. He heard the shooting on the
other side of the block, but their corner was still relatively quiet.

Goodale had never felt farther from home in his life, and had a quiet moment or two
crouched at that position to wonder how he'd gotten there. Just before leaving for Somalia
he'd gotten engaged to a girl named Kira he'd met in a feckless freshman year at the
University of Iowa. They had both escaped little Pekin, Illinois, for one of the great
party campuses of the Midwest, promptly flunked out, and then determined to straighten up.
For Mike that had meant joining the army; for Kira it was taking a low-level job with an
advertising agency. They saw each other frequently when Mike was at Benning, but since the
Rangers had been away on a training exercise in Texas before getting the summons for
Somalia, they had been apart now for more than two months, since the day they'd decided to
spend their lives together. The day before he'd gotten his first chance to phone home
since leaving Fort Benning, and he'd gotten the answering machine. He would get another
chance to call tonight, and he'd told her on the answering machine to expect it. He knew
she'd be waiting by the phone.

“Kira, I love you so very much it hurts,” he had written her that morning. “I'm reluctant
to call again because I know it will just make me miss you that much more. On the other
hand, I really want to hear your voice.”

A Somali about one hundred yards down the street to their left stuck his head out from
behind a wall and rattled a burst with an AK-47. Dirt popped up around Goodale and
Williamson. Williamson stepped around to the north side of the hulk. Goodale, who was
closest to the shooter, panicked momentarily, thinking the shots were coming from the
south. He leapt up and ran from the wreck, hopping as rounds kicked up around him, trying
to find someplace better to hide. There was no cover. He dove down behind a pipe sticking
up from the road. It was only about seven inches wide and six inches high and be felt
ridiculous cowering behind it but there was no place else. When the shooting stopped,
momentarily he jumped up and rejoined Williamson behind the hulk, just as the Somali
started shooting again.

Goodale saw the spray of bullets walk up the side of the car, right down the side of
Williamson's rifle, and take off the end of his friend's finger. Blood splashed up on
Williamson's face and he screamed and cursed. Goodale leaned over, checking the blood on
Williamson's face first and then his hand.

Despite the blood and pain, Williamson seemed more angry than hurt.

“If he sticks his head out again I'm taking him,” he said.

Severed fingertip and all, Williamson coolly leveled his M-16 and waited, motionless, for
what seemed like minutes.

When the man down the alley leaned out, Williamson fired, and the man's head seemed to
explode and he fell over hard. With his uninjured hand, Williamson and Goodale exchanged a
high five and some victory whoops.

Moments later, they shot and killed another Somali. The man darted out into their alley
and sprinted away from them. As he ran his loose shirt billowed back to reveal an AK, so
they shot him. About five Rangers squeezed off rounds at the same time. The man lay on the
street only a half block away and (Goodale wondered if they had killed him. He asked the
medic if they should check him out, help him if he was just injured, and the medic just
shook his head and said, “No, he's dead.” It startled Goodale. He had killed a man, or
helped anyway. It troubled him. The man had not actually been trying to kill him when he
fired, so in the purest sense it wasn't self-defense. So how could he justify what he had
just done? He watched the man in the dirt, his clothes tangled around him, splayed
awkwardly where the bullets had felled him. A life, like his, ended.

Was this the right thing?

At his corner, about ten yards east of Goodale and Williamson, Lieutenant Perino watched
Somali children walking up the street toward his men, pointing out their positions for a
shooter hidden around a corner farther down. His men threw flashbang grenades and the
children scattered.

“Hey, sir, they're coming back up,” called machine gunner Sergeant Chuck Elliot.

Perino was on the radio talking to Sergeant Eversmann about Blackburn, the Ranger who had
fallen from the helicopter. The lieutenant was relaying Eversmann's information and
questions to Captain Steele, who was across the street from him. Perino told Eversmann to
hold for a second, stepped out, and sprayed a burst from his M-16 toward the children,
aiming at their feet. They ran away again.

Moments later, a woman began creeping up the alley directly toward the machine gun.

“Hey, sir, I can see there's a guy behind this woman with a weapon under her arm,”
shouted Elliot.

Perino told him to shoot. The 60 gun made a low, blatting sound. The men called the gun a
pig.

Both the man and woman fell dead.

-7-

As he roped in at the northeast corner of the target block, Specialist John Waddell
delayed his descent long enough to avoid piling into Specialist Shawn Nelson, Chalk Two's
60 gunner, who usually took a second or two longer to untangle himself and his big gun. On
a training mission one time Waddell had plowed into the guy beneath him, and they'd both
been hit by the guy coming after them. That time he'd bitten his tongue right through.
This time it went well. Waddell got both feet on the ground and then hurried to a wall on
the right side of the street, just the way that Lieutenant Tom DiTomasso had drawn it up.
Chalk Two was one long block east of where Sergeant Eversmann's Chalk Four was supposed to
have roped down. The lieutenant was concerned because he couldn't see Chalk Four. He
managed to reach the embattled sergeant on the radio, and Eversmann explained how they'd
roped in a block north of their position. DiTomasso sent a team one north to see if they
could spot Chalk Four from that alley, but they hustled back to report a large crowd of
Somalis was massing in that direction.

As he ran to take a position against the north wall, Waddell was surprised to find that
all his gear, weapons, and ammo weren't slowing him down. There was a lot of it, and it
was bulky and heavy. He carried a big weapon, too, the M-249, or SAW (Squad Automatic
Weapon). It was a prestige item, a highly portable machine gun that could deal death at
seven hundred rounds per minute. Normally, fully kitted up like that, it felt like gravity
had doubled. But Waddell was surprised to find, as he scrambled for a wall, that his arms
and legs felt a little numb, but that was it. He figured this was adrenaline, from the
excitement and fear, and regarded it with his usual calm detachment.

Waddell was a bit of a loner, a precise young man whose dark hair looked especially stark
in the standard Ranger buzzcut. After a month of equatorial sun only face, neck, and arms
were tan. The stupid regs required T-shirts at all times. He was a newcomer to the rifle
company, another of Bravo's babies, just eighteen years old. Despite a perfect grade point
average in high school back in Natchez, Mississippi, he had decided, to his parents'
horror, to temporarily forgo college and enlist in the army, to jump out of airplanes and
climb cliffs and engage in the other high-risk behavior of an elite infantry unit.

Rangering had met his expectations so far, but it whetted his appetite for real action.
On this deployment to Mog he had spent most of his time waiting around and reading. He
went through pulp fiction by the boxload. Just today he'd read through to the last chapter
of a John Grisham novel that really had him hooked. He'd found a quiet spot on top of a
Conex container and had planned to finish it. But then they were called to suit up for a
possible mission. They'd sat out in the bird ready to ride out, only to have the mission
scrubbed. So he'd stripped down and taken the book back up on the Conex, only to be called
back down again to go on a profile flight. He'd suited up again, taken a ride, stripped
back down, and was back into the last chapter when they were called for this mission. It
felt like the world was conspiring against his finishing that novel.

When everybody was down, the rope jettisoned, and the Black Hawk gone, Waddell's team was
ordered by the lieutenant to set up to help cover Nelson, who had placed his “pig” on a
bipod at the crest of a slight rise in the road and was already shooting steadily. The
chalk's two machine gunners tended to draw most of the fire.

Nelson had been working his gun hard before he'd even left the helicopter. Looking down
from the open doorway he'd seen a man with an AK step out to the middle of the street and
shoot up through the dust cloud at the bird. Nelson got off six rounds at the guy and
didn't notice if he'd hit him until he saw him splayed out where he'd been standing. He
figured either he'd hit him or the crew chief alongside him had scored with the minigun.

Rounds had been snapping around his bead when Nelson came down the rope. Not many, but
one bullet coming at you is too many. It made him mad. It was always hard to slow his drop
down the rope with that big 60 gun strapped on, and Nelson fell over at the bottom. Staff
Sergeant Ed Yurek had run out to help him to his feet and guide him to a wall.

“Man, this is getting hairy fast,” Nelson said.

Nelson had set up near the center of the road facing west. Up to his right was an alley,
where he could see Somalis aiming guns his way. Nelson's gun scattered them, all but one,
an old man with a bushy white Afro, farther down, who seemed so intent on shooting west
that he was unaware of the big gun down the alley to his left. He was still a little too
far away to shoot, but Nelson could see the man maneuvering in his direction. The 60
gunner knew what the old man was trying to do. DiTomasso had spread the word that Chalk
Four was stuck one block northwest of their position. The old man was obviously looking
for a better vantage point to shoot at Eversmann and his men.

“Shoot him, shoot him,” urged his assistant.

“No, watch,” Nelson said. “He'll come right to us.”

And, sure enough, the man with the white Afro practically walked right up to them. He
ducked behind a big tree about fifty yards off, biding from Eversmann's Rangers, but
oblivious to the threat off his left shoulder. He was loading a new magazine in his weapon
when Nelson blasted about a dozen rounds into him. They were “slap” rounds, plastic-coated
titanium bullets that could penetrate armor, and he saw the rounds go right through the
man, but the guy still pot up, retrieved his weapon, and even got off a shot or two in
Nelson's direction. The machine gunner was shocked. He shot another twelve rounds at the
man, who nevertheless managed to crawl behind the tree. This time he didn't shoot back.

“I think you got him,” said the assistant gunner.

But Nelson could still see the Afro moving behind the tree. The man was kneeling and
evidently still alive. Nelson squeezed off another long burst and saw bark splintering off
the bottom of the tree. The Afro slumped sideways to the street. His body quivered but he
seemed to have at least expired. Nelson was surprised how hard it could be to kill a man.

As this was going on, Waddell crept up the rise cautiously alongside Nelson. Both men lay
prone. Alongside them, Waddell saw the body of the Somali who had been shot from the
helicopter. Looking for a better spot to cover Nelson, Waddell moved over to a wall on the
south side of the alley. As he did, he saw another Somali step out from behind a corner to
the west and shoot at Nelson, who was absorbed by his duel with the white Afro. Waddell
shot the man. In books and movies when a soldier shot a man for the first time he went
through a moment of soul searching. Waddell didn't give it a second thought. He just
reacted. He thought the man was dead. He had just folded. Startled by Waddell's shot,
Nelson hadn't seen the man drop. Waddell pointed to where he had fallen and the machine
gunner stood up, lifted his big gun, and pumped a few more rounds into the man's body to
make sure. Then they both ran for better cover.

They found it behind a burned-out car. Peering out from underneath toward the north now,
Nelson saw a Somali with a gun tying prone on the street between two kneeling women. The
shooter had the barrel of his weapon between the women's legs, and there were four
children actually sitting on him. He was completely shielded in noncombatants, taking full
cynical advantage of the Americans' decency.

“Check this out, John,” he told Waddell, who scooted over for a look.

“What do you want to do?” Waddell asked.