Black Hawk Down

by Mark Bowden

  The worst thing about hangar life, of course, was no women. There were women around, but they were all nurses who worked in a different part of the base or over at the UN compound and all were strictly off-limits. It was tough. There was plenty of porn around, of course, and many of the Rangers were humorously casual about masturbation. Most were discreet about it, but some had adopted a sort of crude defiance, standing up next to their cot to announce, “I’m going to the port-o-pot to fuckin’ jack off.” Specialist John Collett, a SAW gunner with absolutely no shame about such matters, would brag about his repertory, describing innovative new onanistic techniques—“Man, you shoulda seen me last night. I shit you not, I was gasping!” and coming up with new and unusual places to jack off. Collett claimed to have gotten a “harness-jack,” that is, to have masturbated hanging from a parachute harness. It was pitiful. One of the air force PJs got a blow-up love doll in the mail and almost nobody laughed. All this horniness under pressure produced even more adolescent silliness than usual. Corporal Jim Cavaco walked around one night with a length of nylon cord tied around the end of his penis, holding the rope up delicately between two fingers, telling everybody, “Juss takin’ the dawg out for a walk.”

  They played a lot of Risk, the board game where color-coded armies vied to conquer the world. It took hours, so it was great for killing time. Private First Class Jeff Young, a tall, fair-haired RTO (Radio Telephone Operator) from upstate New York with big glasses perched on a nose too small for his long face, had grown up playing Risk with his five brothers and was so good at it that the other guys formed coalitions to knock him out first. Young and his sergeant, Mike Goodale, had borrowed the game from the D-boys early on and monopolized it so much the Delta squadron had to have another game shipped over. Young and Goodale set it up in front of their racks, and there was usually the same bunch of guys stooped around it. Over the board, privates and sergeants and even officers all forgot about rank. They’d be teasing each other, yelling at each other, just like a regular bunch of guys.

  Even the nightly mortar attack was kind of a joke. The Skinnies would lob rounds into the fenced-off compound that landed with a loud crump, like something very large falling on a big hollow stack of tin. It freaked guys out at first. They’d drop or dive for cover. But the Skinnies had such lousy aim that they rarely hit anything, and after a while guys would just drop and cheer when one landed. Somebody, probably it was Dom Pilla, discovered that by lifting the big door to the soda and water cooler and then just letting it fall, it made a crump just like a mortar round. He sent guys diving once or twice before everybody wised up. Pretty soon when they heard the sound guys didn’t even bother to drop. They’d cheer. One night a mortar hit so close Sizemore could see sparks from the shrapnel hitting the outer wall of the hangar. Everybody just clapped and hooted. Across the road, spooked air force medical personnel, not exactly hardened battle types, were holding hands and singing prayer songs while the crazy Hoo-ahs across the road were cheering like mad. The boys in the hangar had even started a pool. For a buck you could pick a ten-minute time slot, and if a mortar round fell in your slot, you took the pool. So after everybody cheered, they would run to check the sheet to see who’d won. Nobody had figured out what they’d do with the pot if the mortar happened to fall on the winner.

  The movie room had three TVs and three VCRs. Guys always crowded in to watch CNN. Sometimes their own missions were featured. In fact, when the force got back from their first mission with their flex-cuffed Somali prisoners, before they had even finished stripping off their gear, they were astonished to see themselves on their top secret mission on CNN, with footage shot from a distance by infrared cameras. Nobody ever answered the reporters’ questions, and they would laugh and groan about how outrageously wrong they got everything in the newspapers and on TV.

  There were two armed forces radio stations, one that played almost all country music and one that divided its play time between “white” music, mostly classic rock, and “black” music, mostly rap. The Rangers, who unlike the 10th Mountain Division guys based across the city were nearly all white, would get a kick out of the dedications during “black” time: Yo, my brothahs and sistahs, this is 2-G Smoothie 4-U flippin’ out a disc fo’ Regina at the 271st Supply from Dope Gangsta at the 33rd. Peace! In the evening they practically wore out the collection of videotapes shipped over in boxes, mostly old heroic action-adventure-type stuff. One week they had a James Bond film festival, a different feature every night. One of the few new releases was Last of the Mohicans, which some of the guys had just finished watching twice in a row one night when Captain Steele came in, saw the final credits, and announced he hadn’t seen that one yet. So they rewound it and watched it a third time.

  Most days when there wasn’t a mission they trained, which was totally cool. They got to go north of the city into the desert and blow things up, or practice lobbing grenades and rockets at targets or perfecting their marksmanship with various automatic weapons. In the dunes outside Mog there were lots of toys and more ammo than usual to go around, and they didn’t have all the range restrictions that applied back home. Out there under the hot sun in their desert fatigues with their floppy camouflage sun hats on they were like a bunch of overgrown kids playing soldier ... with real bullets and grenades. It was the sort of thing that made Rangering so cool. It was real soldiering. Hard core, heavy metal. It was way more fun than college. They were on an adventure, Sizemore and the rest of the guys bunked in that hangar. They were in Africa, not behind some desk or cash register or sitting in class staring out the window across a sleepy campus. They did things like jump out of airplanes, fast-rope out of helicopters, rappel down cliffs ... stuff like what they were doing over here, doing good, chasing around an exotic Third World capital after a murderous warlord.

  Sizemore had talked the doctor into letting him return to the hangar to spend his last day with his unit, and had just been packing his stuff up at the hospital for the chopper ride back when two men were brought in who had just been wounded in a Humvee in the city by a remote-controlled mine. There was a 10th Mountain Division guy who was all right, and a Somali-American interpreter who had been torn in half. From the waist down he was gone. His insides were laying next to him on the gurney.

  Sizemore had never seen such a thing. One of the man’s arms just twisted off the side of the stretcher, swinging, attached to the trunk by a hunk of meat. Who were these people? What made them think they could get away with this?

  When he returned to the hangar, guys were suiting up for this mission. Sizemore had seethed with frustration and disappointment. All the guys were saying this might be a hot one. What if they were right? Had he come this far to miss out on it? In his place they were sending Specialist Stebbins, the company’s training room clerk. Stebbins! Sizemore couldn’t believe his luck.

  The hangar had buzzed with jitters. Even Sergeant Lorenzo Ruiz, the boxer, was uneasy. Nothing usually bothered Lo.

  “I got a bad feeling, Dale,” he said.

  Ruiz and Sizemore were tight. They had absolutely nothing in common, but for some reason they’d hit it off years back. Ruiz was a tough kid from El Paso, Texas, a former amateur boxer, who had joined the army after a judge had given him a choice between the military or prison. In the Ranger Regiment, Ruiz had pulled his life together and excelled. He was married and had a little girl. Sizemore was just a big suburban kid, something of a ladies’ man—his buddies had nicknamed him, with his full lips and big blue eyes and broad shoulders, “Adonis.” But Ruiz was the real romantic. Out drinking with the guys his temper would flash one minute and the next minute he’d be wiping away a tear, sniffling with his Mexican accent, “I luff you guys.” Ruiz was superstitious, and had struggled with premonitions of his death in Somalia. Sizemore wasn’t superstitious at all, but he’d made a pact with his buddy, to humor him. They would both write final letters to their families that were only to be mailed if they were killed. They had exchanged them for safekeeping. S
izemore’s was addressed to his mom and stepfather and aunt, and mostly just told them how much he loved them. Ruiz’s told his wife he loved her, and instructed his brother, Jorges, to care for their mother and grandmother. Both wrote that if they had been killed, they had died doing what they wanted to do. There was no need to say much more. That afternoon, as Ruiz kitted up for the mission to the Black Sea, he had reminded Sizemore about the letter.

  “Shut up, Lo,” he told him. “You’ll be back in here in a few minutes.”

  But now Ruiz was out there with the rest of the guys catching hell—Sizemore didn’t know it, but his buddy had already been mortally wounded. Sizemore wondered where Ruiz was, and how Goodale and Nelson were making out. He worried about Stebbins. Jesus, Stebby was the guy who made coffee for them! Here he was, probably the best man with a SAW in the unit, and the company clerk was out there fighting his battle. Sizemore was glued to the radio outside the JOC with some other guys who had been left behind because they had gone out on a water run shortly before the mission came up. This group had their Humvees parked in a semicircle outside the big open front doors to the hangar, ready to roll if needed.

  Listening to the sounds on the radio had a different effect on Specialist Steve Anderson. It scared him. Anderson had wanted to be a soldier so bad that he had lied about having severe asthma when he joined. He carried his inhaler with him everywhere. On the first day of basic training they were all warned sternly that any drugs were contraband and if caught with any they were in deep, dark shit. A box was passed around the barracks and they were told they had one last chance, an amnesty, to chuck anything they weren’t supposed to have. Anderson panicked and threw in his inhaler, and then suffered such a terrible asthma attack three or four days later that he had to confess and was shipped out to a hospital. The next day the drill sergeant told Sizemore and the rest of the guys in the platoon that Anderson had died.

  A month later, at airborne school, Sizemore spotted this tall, skinny ghost doing KP duty, walked over, and rubbed his eyes for a better look. Anderson had not only survived the asthma attack, somebody in the chain of command had admired his determination enough to let him stay in and keep his inhaler.

  But now, faced with the prospect of such pitched battle, Anderson was infected by the panic on the radio. Everybody was talking twice as much as usual, as if they needed to stay in touch, as if the radio was a net to prevent their free fall. Anderson didn’t show it but he was quaking. His stomach churned and he was in a cold sweat. Do I have to go out there? Until this mission, nobody had gotten seriously hurt. The missions were a gas. When the megaphone sounded “Get it on!” he had always felt, cool, action. Just like all the other guys. Not now.

  The horror hit home when Sergeant Struecker’s three-Humvee convoy had raced in, all shot up, and the docs lifted out the broken body of Private Blackburn, the Ranger who had fallen from the helicopter to the street. Specialist Brad Thomas emerged from one of the Humvees with red eyes. He saw Anderson and choked out, “Pilla’s dead.” Thomas was crying and Anderson felt himself start to cry. The fear was palpable. Anderson was glad to be someplace safe. He was ashamed of himself, but that’s how he felt.

  He wasn’t alone. Moments after they unloaded Pilla and Blackburn, they got orders to go back out. A second Black Hawk, Durant’s, had crashed and was in danger of being overrun. Over the radio they learned that Casey Joyce, another of their buddies, was dead. Mace and the SEALs who had helped bring Blackburn back were already rearmed and ready. Anderson saw no hesitation whatsoever with these guys. But the younger Rangers, to a man, seemed shaken.

  Brad Thomas couldn’t believe it. He had been on the beach with Joyce and Pilla when they were called for this mission. Within the Ranger company, Thomas, Joyce, Pilla, Nelson, and a few other guys hung together. They were a few years older and had had a little more experience. Joyce and Thomas were both married. Thomas had gone to college for a few years, studying classical guitar, before enlisting. They were less boisterous and, when it came to taking risks, still willing but less eager.

  Thomas had seen his friend Pilla killed, and had felt through the rest of that insane ride back to the base that he wasn’t going to make it. When they arrived he had felt an enormous sense of relief. He figured the mission was over. Things had gone completely to shit and the rest of the guys would be rolling back in any minute. Emotionally, for him, the fight was done.

  So when Struecker approached and instructed the men to start rearming, they were going back out, Thomas was incredulous.

  How could they go back out into that? They’d barely escaped with their lives. The whole fucking city was trying to kill them!

  Struecker felt his own heart sink. His vehicles were all shot up. The rear of his Humvee was splattered with Pilla’s blood and brains. When the body was pulled out it didn’t even look like Pilla anymore. The top of his head was gone and his face was grotesquely swollen and disfigured. Struecker’s men were freaking out.

  Mace, the grim Delta warrior, pulled Streucker aside.

  “Look, Sergeant, you need to clean your vehicle up. If you don’t, your guys are going to get more messed up.”

  So Struecker strode over to his squad.

  “Listen, men. You don’t have to do this if you don’t want to. I’ll do it myself if I have to. But we have to clean this thing up right now because we’re fixin’ to roll right back out. Everybody else go resupply. Go get yourselves some more ammunition.”

  Struecker asked his .50 gunner, “Will you help me clean up? You don’t have to.”

  Together they set off for buckets of water, and working with sponges, they soaked up the blood and brain and scraped it from the interior.

  Sizemore saw all this and it made him wild with anger.

  “I’m going out there with you guys,” he said.

  “You can’t, you’re hurt,” said Sergeant Raleigh Cash, who had been in charge of the squad that had gone on the water run.

  Sizemore didn’t argue. He was wearing gym shorts and a T-shirt and his own gear had been packed away for the flight home tomorrow, so he ran into the hangar, pulled on his pants and shirt, and grabbed any stray gear he could find. He found a flak vest that was three sizes too big for him and a helmet that lolled around on his head like a salad bowl. He grabbed his SAW and stuffed ammo in his pockets and pouches and came running back out to the convoy with his boots unlaced and his shirt unbuttoned and just climbed into Cash’s Humvee.

  “I’m going out,” he told Cash.

  “You can’t go out there with that cast on your elbow.”

  “Then I’ll lose it.”

  Sizemore ran back into the hangar and found a pair of scissors. He cut straight up the inside seam of the cast and then flung it away. Then he came back and resumed his place on the vehicle.

  Cash just shook his head.

  Anderson admired Sizemore’s eagerness and felt all the more ashamed of himself. He had donned his own gear, as instructed, but he was mortified. He didn’t know whether to feel more ashamed of his fear or his sheeplike acceptance of the orders. When it came time to climb in the vehicles he again followed orders, amazed at his own passivity. He would go out into Mogadishu and risk his life but it wasn’t out of passion or solidarity or patriotism, it was because he didn’t dare refuse. He showed none of this.

  Not everyone was as passive. Brad Thomas pulled Struecker aside.

  “Man, you know, I really don’t want to go back out.”

  The sergeant had been expecting this to happen, and dreading it. He knew how he felt about driving back into the city. It was a nightmare. Thomas’s words expressed how everyone felt. How could he force those men back out into the fight, especially the men who had just come through hell to get back to base? The sergeant knew all the men were watching to see how he’d handle it. Struecker was a model Ranger, strong, unassuming, obedient, tough, and strictly by-the-book. He was like the prize pupil in class. The officers loved him, which meant at least some of the men regar
ded him with a slightly jaundiced eye. Challenged like this, they expected Struecker to explode.

  Instead, he pulled Thomas aside and spoke to him quietly, man to man. He tried to calm him, but Thomas was calm. As Struecker saw it, the man had just decided he’d taken all he could take. Thomas had just been married a few months before. He had never been one of the chest-beaters in the regiment. It was a perfectly rational decision. He did not want to go back out there to die. The whole city was shooting at them. How far could they get? However steep a price the man would pay for backing down like that, and for a Ranger it would be a steep price indeed, to Struecker it looked like Thomas had made up his mind.

  “Listen,” Struecker said. “I understand how you feel. I’m married, too. Don’t think of yourself as a coward. I know you’re scared. I’m scared shitless. I’ve never been in a situation like this either. But we’ve got to go. It’s our job. The difference between being a coward and hero is not whether you’re scared, it’s what you do while you’re scared.”

  Thomas didn’t seem to like the answer. He walked away. As they were about to pull out, though, Struecker noticed that he’d climbed on board with the rest of the men.

  7

  “You’re going to go ahead and lead us out,” Lieutenant Larry Moore had instructed Struecker. “We’re going to take these three five-tons, your two vehicles in front, my two in the rear. The crash site is somewhere in this vicinity,” he said, pointing to a location between the K-4 traffic circle and the target building. “We don’t know for sure. You’re going to flip to this channel,” showing him the frequency on his radio, “and we have aircraft up in the sky, and the pilot is going to tell you where to go.”

  “Okay, whatever,” said Struecker.

  One of the company clerks, Sergeant Mark Warner, stepped up.

  “Sergeant, can I go out?”