Black Hawk Down (9 page)

Struecker and the rest of the column timed their departure so they wouldn't arrive out
behind the Olympic Hotel before the assault had begun. They had watched the armada move
out over the ocean, and left the base only after the helicopters radioed that they had
turned back inland. Struecker, who was supposed to lead the convoy, took a wrong turn. He
had studied the photomap back in the hangar, and thought he had it down, but once out in
the city things tended to get confusing. Every street looked the same, and there were no
signs to help. They were moving fast. They went northeast on Via Gesira to the K-4 circle
and then north on Via Lenin to the old reviewing stand. There they would turn right on
National Street, proceed east, and then turn north on a street that paralleled Hawlwadig
heading toward the target house. But when Struecker took an early left and Mitchell's
vehicle followed, the rest of the convoy didn't.

--Hey, where the hell are you guys? came the voice of Platoon Sergeant Bob Gallagher over
the radio.

“We're coming,” assured Struecker. “We turned wrong. We're on our way.” It was
embarrassing. Struecker managed to steer his and Mitchell's Humvees back through the maze
of streets, and rejoined the rest of the convoy at the hotel.

Before the convoy reached the holding point, Signalman Chief John Gay, a SEAL in the left
rear of the third Humvee, heard a shot and felt a hard impact on his right hip. Stunned,
and in pain, he shouted that he'd been hit. They drove straight on, as planned, to the
target building, where Master Sergeant Tim “Griz” Martin, the Delta operator who was
sitting beside Gay, jumped out and came around to have a look. The remainder of the team
fanned out around the vehicles. Martin tore open Gay's pants and examined his hip, then
gave Gay good news. The round had hit smack on the SEAL's Randall knife. It had shattered
the blade, but the knife had deflected the bullet. Martin pulled several bloody fragments
of blade out of Gay's hip and quickly bandaged it. Gay limped out of the vehicle, took
cover, and began returning fire.

Struecker was assigned to evacuate Blackburn, the Ranger who had fallen from the
helicopter. Sergeant Joyce had fetched help for Blackburn and the men carrying his litter.
The SEAL Humvee, driven by Master Sergeant Chuck Esswein, had driven up Hawlwadig and the
wounded Ranger was lifted in through the back batch. Two medics climbed in with him. Delta
Sergeant John Macejunas took the shotgun seat alongside Esswein. Struecker's Humvee, with
its .50 cal in the turret, took the lead, and Mitchell's Humvee, which had a Mark-19
rapid-fire grenade launcher in the turret, brought up the rear.

--This is Uniform Six Four, McKnight radioed up to the command bird. I've got a critical
casualty. I am going to send three out, with one in the cargo that has a casualty in it.

Struecker told McKnight, “I'll have him back there in five minutes.”

The lieutenant colonel said the rest of them would be coming along soon. The mission was
almost over.

The three vehicles began racing back to base through streets now alive with gunfire and
explosions. This time Struecker knew which way to go. He had mapped a return route that
was simple. Several blocks over was National Street. They could follow that all the way
back down to the K-4 traffic circle, and from there they would bear right back to the
beach.

Except things had gotten a lot worse. Roadblocks and barricades began to appear. They
drove around and through them. One of the medics, Private Good, was holding up the IV bag
for Blackburn with one hand while shooting his CAR-15 with the other. Up in Struecker's
Humvee, turret gunner Paulson was frantically trying to swivel his .50 cal to engage
shooters firing from both sides. So Struecker instructed his M-60 gunner, Pilla, to
concentrate all his fire to the right, and leave everything on the left to Paulson. They
didn't want to drive too fast, because a violently bumpy ride couldn't do Blackburn any
good.

Pilla was shot as they turned on National. He was killed instantly. The bullet entered
his forehead and the exit wound blew out the back of his skull. His body flopped over into
the lap of Moynihan, who cried out in horror, covered with his friend's blood and brain.

“Pilla's hit!” he screamed.

Just then, over the radio, came the voice of Sergeant Gallagher.

--How're things going?

Struecker ignored the radio, and shouted back over his shoulder at Moynihan.

“Calm down! What's wrong with him?” He couldn't see all the way to the back hatch.

“He's dead!”

Moynihan was freaking out.

“How do you know he's dead? Are you a medic?”

Struecker turned for a quick look over his shoulder and the whole rear of his vehicle was
covered with blood. Pilla was in Moynihan's lap.

“He's shot in the head! He's dead!” Moynihan said.

“Just calm down,” Struecker pleaded. “We've got to keep fighting until we get back.”

To hell with driving carefully. Struecker told his driver to step on it, and hoped
Esswein would follow. He could see RPGs flying across the street now. It seemed like the
whole city was shooting at them.

Then Gallagher's voice came across again.

--How's it going?

“I don't want to talk about it.”

Gallagher didn't like that answer.

--You got any casualties?

“Yeah, one.”

Struecker tried to leave it at that. Nobody on their side had gotten killed, so far as he
knew, and he didn't want to be the one to put news like that on the air. He knew radio
operators all over the battlefield could hear their conversation. There were speaker boxes
in some of the vehicles and the birds could all listen in. The radio operators on the
ground monitored all the bands. Men in battle drink up information like water-it becomes
more important than water. Unlike most of these guys, Struecker had been to war before, in
Panama and the Persian Gulf, and he knew soldiers fought better when things were going
their way. Once things turned, it was hard to reassert control. People panicked. It was
happening to Moynihan right now. Panic was a virus in combat, a deadly one.

--Who is he and what's his status? Gallagher demanded.

“It's Pilla.”

--What's his status?

Struecker held the microphone for a moment, debating with himself, and then reluctantly
answered:

“He's dead.”

At the sound of that word all the radio traffic, which was busy, stopped. Long seconds of
silence followed.

-10-

Ali Hussein was minding the Labadhagal Bulal Pharmacy, well south of all the shooting.

He went to the front steps of the store and saw many men with guns, Aidid militia,
running toward the fight. Some were militia and some were just neighbors who had fetched
their own guns.

Hussein wanted to see what was happening, but he was afraid the shop would be looted if
he left it untended. He just stood and listened as the sound of shooting crept down closer
and closer to his street.

Then American army vehicles, three of them, came racing down his street. The big guns in
the back were shooting. He jumped into the shop and slammed shut the metal door just as
bullets rang off it. He rolled against a side wall that he knew from previous fighting was
the safest place in the house, and bullets sprayed through windows into the shop as the
vehicles raced past.

Then they were gone and the shooting stopped.

-11-

The little convoy sped out to the main road and for a stretch the firing abated and in the
distance was the ocean. But as they approached the port area, there were thousands of
Somalis in the streets. Struecker's heart sank. They were no longer taking heavy fire, but
how was he going to get his three vehicles through that?

His driver slowed down to a crawl and leaned on the horn as they entered the throng.
Struecker told the driver not to stop moving. He threw flashbangs out in front of his
vehicle, which chased some of the people away, and then told his .50-

cal gunner to open up over the crowd's head. The ocean was on the other side.

Struecker tried to raise the doctors on the radio, and couldn't get anyone to pick up, so
he broke in on the command radio net.

“I need the doc right away,” he said.

The sound of the big gun scattered most of the people and the vehicles sped up again. The
Humvee may have run over some people. It was either that or stones and debris in the road.
Struecker didn't look back to see. He then came up on a slow-moving pickup truck with
people hanging off the back. It would not get out of their way and there wasn't enough
room to go around it, so Struecker told his driver to ram it. A man with his leg hanging
off the back screamed with pain as the Humvee hit, and then rolled into the back of the
truck, which finally steered off the road.

Struecker radioed, “Can you have the doc waiting for us out there by the gate, over?”

They entered the compound with a tremendous sense of relief and exhaustion. They had run
the gauntlet. Several of the Rangers in his and the other Humvees had been injured. Pilla
was dead. But, for them, at least, it was over.

His bloodstained crew piled out looking dazed. Struecker was startled by what he saw at
the base. He had expected to step out into calm and safety. Instead, everyone around him
seemed frantic.

He heard a commander's voice on the speaker box, shouting at someone, “Pay attention to
what's going on and listen to my orders!”

Something had happened.

The medical crews descended on their vehicles. One of the doctors reached in and started
to turn Pilla over.

“Don't worry about him,” Struecker said. “He's dead.”

So the doctor moved on to Esswein's Humvee to get Blackburn. Struecker grabbed one of the
orderlies as he went past.

“Look, there's a dead man in the back of my vehicle. You need to get him off.”

The sergeant watched as they pulled Pilla from the back of the Humvee. The top of his
head was gone. His face was white and distorted and puffed up so bad it looked round. It
didn't look anything like Pilla anymore.

Private Clay Othic shot a chicken. When it was time for all the vehicles to move up and
start loading prisoners, all hell broke loose on Hawlwadig. There were people racing in
all directions, men with AK-47s shooting at them, RPGs nipping smoke trails through the
air and detonating with ear-popping explosions... and in the midst of all this a panicked
flock of chickens came hurtling out in front of Othic's gun. One of the birds turned to a
puff of feathers when hit by a round from his .50 cal. “Little Hunter” had bagged yet
another species.

Othic was the smallest guy in the company, and looked about thirteen, so he was assigned
(per standard operating procedure) to the biggest gun, a “Ma-Deuce,” the Browning M-2
.50-caliber machine gun, which was mounted in the roof turret of his Humvee. Othic had
made a bit of a name for himself early on in the deployment by inadvertently stealing
General Garrison's personal Humvee. The turret on his own kept sticking and his sergeant
told him to trade it in for another one “over there,” pointing toward the motor pool. So
Othic had just picked out the one that looked cleanest. They got it back before the
general found out.

They called him “Little Hunter” because back home while other guys would head for the
bars of Auburn and Atlanta when they had time off, sometimes during hunting season Othic,
a country boy from Missouri, would vanish into the woods around Fort Benning with his
rifle and come back with wild turkey or deer, which he would clean right there in the
barracks and deliver up to the mess. He had that rare capacity of being able to enjoy
himself anywhere. He even enjoyed standing guard duty out front of the compound, where the
most interesting thing was confiscating film from the bozos who ignored signs forbidding
them to take pictures, which turned out to be just about everybody with a camera. He had a
collection of unrolled strips of it on the razor wire outside, draped like brown tinsel.

Othic had been keeping track of the days in Mog in a small journal he had stashed in his
rucksack. He addressed each entry to his parents, and planned to just give it to them when
he got back. In regard to confiscating film, he wrote this entry, borrowing some
atmospherics from Star Trek: “Log Entry, Star Date 3 Sept. 1993 1700 hours. Just got off
guard duty at the main gate again, it was a pretty interesting one though. We confiscated
1 videotape & three rolls of film in 2 hrs. People aren't allowed to take pictures of the
stuff we have & boy do they have a case of the ass when they do have it taken it away.
It's funny 'cause we have signs up, but they try to be sneaky about it anyway. Ha! You
lose, sucker!”

Othic's fondness for writing made it particularly galling that he didn't get as many
letters as the other guys, and, most particularly, that he didn't have a girlfriend to
correspond with. Guys without girlfriends were so forlorn they looked forward to reading
the letters their buddies got from women. Not that all woman letters were good. Sergeant
Raleigh Cash, this guy from Oregon, had gotten a Dear John letter while he was in Mog. It
was a crusher. The girl sent him a shoebox filled with his stuff, CDs, tapes, pictures,
and other detritus of a dead relationship, a real double-barreled dump, right there in the
hangar. They teased Cash about it mercilessly, but in a way that made it easier to take.
Still, the feeling was that any letter from a woman was better than none. Specialist Eric
Spalding, a guy from Missouri who was his best buddy, got some good ones and let Othic
read them. This was nice, but it made Othic feel pathetic. He was thinking about getting
his sister to write him a real sexy letter just so he'd have something of his own to show
off.

He and Spalding had become good buddies and made a plan to drive back to Missouri
together in Othic's pickup truck when they got home. Othic's dad worked as an agent for
the Immigration and Naturalization Service, and he planned to try for a job there when he
got out of the army. He told Spalding his dad might help fix him up, too. They were hoping
to get back to Missouri in time for fall deer season.