Black Hawk Down

by Mark Bowden

  Blackburn was bleeding from the nose and ears. Private First Class Mark Good, the medic, was already at work on him. The kid had one eye shut and the other open. Blood was coming from his mouth and he was making a gurgling sound. He was unconscious. Good had been through emergency medical training, but this was beyond him. It was the most severe injury the task force had seen in Somalia.

  Blackburn hadn’t been shot, he’d fallen. He’d somehow missed the rope. Seventy feet straight down to the street. He had just been reassigned as assistant to the chalk’s 60 gunner, and he’d been carrying a lot of ammo, so he was heavier than he’d ever been on a fast rope. That, the excitement, the extreme height of the rope-in ... for whatever reason, he hadn’t held on. He looked all busted up inside. Eversmann stepped away. He took a quick count of his chalk.

  Hawlwadig was about fifteen yards wide, littered with debris, as was all of Mogadishu. The dust cloud thinned, and he could see his men had peeled off as planned against the mud-stained stone walls on either side of the street. That left Eversmann in the middle of the road with Blackburn and Good. It was hot, and fine sand was caked in his eyes, nose, and ears. They were taking fire, but it wasn’t accurate. Oddly, it hadn’t even registered with the sergeant at first. You would think bullets flying past would command your attention, but he’d been too preoccupied to notice. Now he did. Passing bullets made a loud snap, like cracking a stick of dry hickory. Eversmann had never been shot at before. So this is what it’s like. As big a target as he made, he figured he’d better find some cover. He and Good grabbed Blackburn under the arms and head, trying to keep his neck straight, and dragged him to the west side of the intersection. There they squatted behind two parked cars.

  Eversmann shouted up the street to his radio operator, Private First Class Jason Moore, and asked him to raise Captain Mike Steele on the company net. Steele and two lieutenants, Larry Perino and Jim Lechner, had roped down with the rest of Chalk One at the southeast corner of the target block. Chalk Four was at the northwest corner. Minutes passed. Moore shouted back down the street to say he couldn’t get Steele.

  “What do you mean you can’t get him?”

  Moore just shrugged. The tobacco-chewing roughneck from Princeton, New Jersey, was wearing a headset under his helmet that allowed him to talk without tying up his hands. Before leaving he’d taped the on/off switch for his microphone to his rifle—a nifty touch, he thought. But as he’d roped in, he’d inadvertently clasped the connecting wire against the rope. Friction had burned right through it. Moore hadn’t noticed it yet, however, and couldn’t figure out why his calls weren’t being heard.

  Eversmann tried his walkie-talkie. Again Steele didn’t answer, but after several tries Lieutenant Perino came on the line. The sergeant knew this was their first time in combat, and his first time in charge, so he made a particular effort to speak slowly and clearly. He explained that Blackburn had fallen and was hurt, bad. He needed to come out. Evers-mann tried to convey urgency without alarm.

  —Say again, said Perino.

  The sergeant’s voice was fading in and out on his radio. Eversmann repeated himself. There was a delay. Then Perino’s voice came back.

  —Say all again, over.

  Eversmann was shouting now. He repeated, “Man down, WE NEED TO EXTRACT HIM ASAP!”

  —Calm down, Perino said.

  That really burned Eversmann. This is one hell of a time to start sharpshooting me.

  The radio call brought two Delta medics running up Hawlwadig, Sergeants First Class Kurt Schmid and Bart Bullock. The more experienced men quickly began assisting Good. Schmid inserted a tube down Blackburn’s throat to help him breathe. Bullock put a needle in the kid’s arm and hooked up an IV.

  Fire was growing heavier. To the officers watching on screens in the command center, it was like they had poked a stick into a hornet’s nest. It was an amazing and unnerving thing, to view a battle in real time. Cameras from high over the fight captured crowds of Somalis throughout the area erecting barricades and lighting tires to summon help. Thousands of people were pouring into the streets, many with weapons. They were racing from all directions toward the Bakara Market, where the mass of helicopters overhead clearly marked the fight throughout the city. Moving in from more distant parts were vehicles overflowing with armed men. The largest number appeared to be coming from the north, directly toward Eversmann’s position and that of Chalk Two, which had roped in at the northeast corner.

  Eversmann’s men had fanned out and were shooting in every direction except back toward the target building. Across the street from where the medics were working on Blackburn, Sergeant Casey Joyce had his M-16 trained on the growing crowd to the north. Somalis approached in groups of a dozen or more from around corners several blocks up, and others, closer, darted in and out of alleys taking shots at them. They were wary of the Americans’ guns, but edging in. The Rangers were bound by strict rules of engagement. They were to shoot only at someone who pointed a weapon at them, but already this was unrealistic. It was clear they were being shot at, and down the street they could see Somalis with guns. But those with guns were intermingled with the unarmed, including women and children. The Somalis were strange that way. Most noncombatants who heard gunshots and explosions would flee. Whenever there was a disturbance in Mogadishu, people would throng to the spot. Men, women, children—even the aged and infirm. It was like some national imperative to bear witness. Rangers peering down their sights silently begged the gawkers to get the hell out of the way.

  Things were not playing out according to the neat script in Eversmann’s head. His chalk was still a block north of their position. He’d figured they could just hoof it down once they got on the ground, but Blackburn falling and the unexpected volume of gunfire had ruled that out. Time played tricks. It would be hard to explain to someone who wasn’t there. Events outside him seemed to be happening at a frantic pace, but his own perceptions had slowed; seconds were like minutes. He had no idea how much time had gone by. Two minutes? Five? Ten? It was hard to believe things could have gone so much to hell in such a short time.

  He knew the D-boys worked fast. He kept checking behind him to see if the ground convoy had moved up. It was too early for that, but he looked anyway, wishing, because that would be a sign that things were wrapping up. He must have looked a dozen times before he saw the first Humvee round the corner about three blocks down. What a relief! Maybe the D-boys have finished and we can roll out of here.

  Schmid, the Delta medic, had examined Blackburn more closely, and was alarmed. The kid had a severe head injury at a minimum, and there was a big lump on the back of his neck. It might be a break. He looked up at Eversmann.

  “He’s litter urgent, Sergeant. We need to extract him right now or he’s gonna die.”

  Eversmann called Perino again.

  “Listen, we really need to move this guy or he’s gonna die. Can’t you send somebody up the street?”

  No, the Humvees could not move up. Eversmann relayed this news to the Delta medic.

  “Listen, Sergeant, we’ve got to get him out,” said Schmid.

  So Eversmann summoned two of the sergeants in his chalk, Casey Joyce and Jeff McLaughlin, who came running. He addressed the more senior of the two, McLaughlin, shouting over the escalating noise of the fight.

  “You need to move Blackburn down to those Humvees, toward the target.”

  They unfolded a compact litter and placed Blackburn on it. Five men took off with him, Joyce and McLaughlin in front, Bullock and Schmid in back, with Good running alongside holding up the IV bag connected to the kid’s arm. They ran stooped. McLaughlin didn’t think Blackburn was going to make it. On the litter he was deadweight, still bleeding from the nose and mouth. They were all yelling at him, “Hang on! Hang on!” but, by the look of him, he had already let go.

  They had to keep setting down the litter to return fire. They would run a few steps, set Blackburn down, shoot, then pick him up and carry him a few more s
teps, then put him down again.

  “We’ve got to get those Humvees to come to us,” said Schmid. “We keep picking him up and putting him down like this and we’re going to kill him.”

  Joyce volunteered to fetch a Humvee. He took off running on his own.

  3

  On the screens and from the speakers in the JOC, everything appeared to be going smoothly. The command center was a whitewashed two-story structure adjacent to the hangar at Task Force Ranger’s airport base. A mortar round had fallen on it at some point, and the roof was caved in on one side. It bristled with so many antennae and wires that the men called it the Porcupine. On the first floor, off a long corridor, there were three rooms where senior officers sat wearing headphones and watching TV screens. General Garrison sat in the back of the operations room, chewing his cigar and taking it all in. Color images of the fight were coming from cameras in the Orion spy plane and the observation helicopters, and there were five or six radio frequencies buzzing. Garrison and his staff probably had more instant information about this unfolding battle than any commanders in history, but there wasn’t much they could do but watch and listen. So long as things stayed on course, any decisions would be made by the men in the fight. The general’s job was to stay on top of the situation and try to think one or two steps ahead. In the event things went wrong he could call across the city to the UN compound, where troops from the 10th Mountain Division waited, three regular army companies in varying degrees of readiness. So far there was no need. Other than one injured Ranger, the mission was clean. At about the same time they learned of Blackburn’s fall, the D-boys inside the target building radioed that they’d found the men they were looking for. This was going to be a success.

  It had been risky, going into Aidid’s Black Sea neighborhood in daylight. The nearby Bakara Market was the center of the Habr Gidr world. Dropping in next door was a thumb in the warlord’s eye. The UN forces stationed in Mog, most of them Pakistanis since the U.S. Marines had pulled out in May, wouldn’t go near that part of town. It was the one place in the city where Aidid’s forces could mount a serious fight on short notice, and Garrison knew the dangers of slugging it out there. Washington’s commitment to Somalia wouldn’t withstand many American losses. He had warned in a memo just weeks before:

  “If we go into the vicinity of the Bakara Market, there’s no question we’ll win the gunfight, but we might lose the war.”

  The timing was also risky. Garrison’s task force preferred to work at night. Their helicopters were flown by the crack pilots of the 160th SOAR, who had dubbed themselves the Night Stalkers. They were expert at flying totally black. With night-vision devices, they could move around on a moonless night like it was midday. The unit’s pilots had been involved in almost every U.S. ground combat operation since Vietnam. When they weren’t fighting they were practicing, and their skills were simply amazing. These pilots were fearless, and could fly helicopters in and out of spaces where it would be hard to insert them with a crane. Darkness made the speed and precision of the D-boys and Rangers that much more deadly. Night afforded still another advantage. Many Somali men, particularly the young men who cruised around Mog on “technicals,” vehicles with .50-caliber machine guns bolted in back, were addicted to khat, a mild amphetamine that looks like watercress. Mid-afternoon was the height of the daily cycle. Most started chewing at about noon, and by late afternoon were wired, jumpy, and raring to go. Late at night it was just the opposite. The khat chewers had crashed. So today’s mission called for going to the worst place in Mog at the worst possible time.

  Still, the chance of bagging two of Aidid’s top men at the same time was too good to pass up. They had done three previous missions in daylight without a hitch. Risk was part of the job. They were daring men; that’s why they were here.

  The Somalis had seen six raids now, so they more or less knew what to expect. The task force had done what it could to keep them guessing. Three times daily, mission or no mission, Garrison would scramble the whole force onto helicopters and send them up over the city. The Rangers loved it at first. You piled into the back end of a Black Hawk and held on for dear life. The hotshot Nightstalkers would swoop down low and fast and bank so hard it would stack your insides into one half of your body. They’d rocket down streets below the roofline, with walls and people on both sides flashing past in a blur, then climb hundreds of feet and scream back down again. Corporal Jamie Smith wrote to his folks back in Long Valley, New Jersey, that the profile flights were “like a ride on a roller coaster at Six Flags!” But with so many flights, it got old.

  Garrison had also been careful to vary their tactics. They usually came in on helicopters and left by vehicles, but sometimes they came in on vehicles and left by helicopters. Sometimes they came and left on choppers, or on vehicles. So the template changed. Above all, the troops were good. They were experienced and well trained.

  They had come close to grabbing Aidid several times, but that wasn’t their only goal. Their six previous missions had struck fear into the Habr Gidr ranks, and more recently they’d begun to pick off the warlord’s top people. Garrison felt they had performed superbly so far, despite press accounts that portrayed them as bumblers. When they’d inadvertently arrested a group of UN employees on their first mission—the “employees” had been nabbed in an off-limits area with piles of black market contraband—the newspapers had dubbed them Keystone Kops. Garrison had the stories copied and posted in the hangar. That sort of thing just fired the guys up more, but to the public, and to Washington officials keenly concerned about how things played on CNN, the task force was so far a bust. They had been handed what seemed like a simple assignment, capture the tinhorn Somali warlord Mohamed Farrah Aidid or, failing that, take down his organization, and for six weeks now they’d had precious little visible success. Patience was wearing thin, and pressure for progress was mounting.

  Just that morning Garrison had been stewing about it in his office. It was like trying to hit a curveball blindfolded. Here he had a force of men he could drop on a building—any building—in Mogadishu with just a few minutes’ notice. These weren’t just any men, they were faster, stronger, smarter, and more experienced than any soldiers in the world.

  Point out a target building and the D-boys could take it down so fast that the bad guys inside would be hog-tied before the sound of the flashbang grenades and door charges had stopped ringing in their ears. They could herd the whole mess of them out by truck or helicopter before the neighborhood militia even had a chance to pull on its pants. Garrison’s force could do all this and even videotape the whole operation in color for training purposes (and to show off a little back at the Pentagon), but they couldn’t do any of these things unless their spies on the ground pointed them at the right goddamn house.

  For three nights running they had geared up to launch at a house where Aidid was either present or about to be (so the general’s spies told him). Every time they had failed to nail it down.

  Garrison knew from day one that intelligence was going to be a problem. The original plan had called for a daring, well-placed lead Somali spy, the head of the CIA’s local operation, to present Aidid an elegant hand-carved cane soon after Task Force Ranger arrived. Embedded in the head of the cane was a homing beacon. It seemed like a sure thing until, on Garrison’s first day in-country, Lieutenant Colonel Dave McKnight, his chief of staff, informed him that their lead informant had shot himself in the head playing Russian roulette. It was the kind of idiotic macho thing guys did when they’d lived too long on the edge.

  “He’s not dead,” McKnight told the general, “but we’re fucked.”

  When you worked with the locals there were going to be setbacks. Few people knew this better than Garrison, who was the picture of American military machismo with his gray crew cut, desert camouflage fatigues, and combat boots, a 9 mm pistol strapped to a shoulder holster and that unlit half cigar jammed perpetually in the side of his mouth. Garrison had been living by t
he sword now for about three decades. He was one of the least known important army officers in America. He had run covert operations all over the world—Asia, the Middle East, Africa, Central America, South America, the Caribbean. One thing all these missions had in common was they required cooperation from the locals.

  They also demanded a low threshold for bullshit. The general was a bemused cynic. He had seen just about everything, and didn’t expect much—except from his men. His gruff informality suited an officer who had begun his career not as a military academy graduate, but a buck private. He had served two tours in Vietnam, part of it helping to run the infamously brutal Phoenix program, which ferreted out and killed Viet Cong village leaders. That was enough to iron the idealism out of anybody. Garrison had risen to general without exercising the more politic demands of generalship, which called for graceful euphemism and frequent obfuscation. He was a blunt realist who avoided the pomp and pretense of upper-echelon military life. Soldiering was about fighting. It was about killing people before they killed you. It was about having your way by force and guile in a dangerous world, taking a shit in the woods, living in dirty, difficult conditions, enduring hardships and risks that could—and sometimes did—kill you. It was ugly work. Which is not to say that certain men didn’t enjoy it, didn’t live for it. Garrison was one of those men. He embraced its cruelty. He would say, this man needs to die. Just like that. Some people needed to die. It was how the real world worked. Nothing pleased Garrison more than a well-executed hit, and if things went to hell and you had to slug it out, then it was time to summon a dark relish for mayhem. Why be a soldier if you couldn’t exult in a heart-pounding, balls-out gunfight? Which is what made him so good.