Black Hawk Down

by Mark Bowden

  The dead were placed on top of the APCs, and the wounded were loaded inside them. Goodale hobbled painfully out to the one that had stopped before their courtyard, and was helped through the doors. He rolled to his side.

  “We need you to sit,” he was told.

  “Look, I got shot in the ass. It hurts to sit.”

  “Then lean or something.”

  At Miller’s courtyard they carried Carlos Rodriguez out first in his inflated rubber pants. Then they moved the other wounded. Stebbins was feeling pretty good. Out the window he could see 10th Mountain Division guys lounging up and down the street, a lot of them. He protested when they came back for him with a stretcher.

  “I’m okay,” he told them. “I can stand on one leg. Just help me over to the vehicle. I’ve still got my weapon.”

  He hopped on his good foot and was helped up into the armored car.

  Wilkinson climbed into the back of the same vehicle. They all expected to be moving shortly, but instead they sat. The closed steel container was like a sauna and it reeked of sweat and urine and blood. What a nightmare this mission had become. Every time they thought it was over, that they’d made it, something worse happened. The injured in the vehicles couldn’t see what was going on outside, and they didn’t understand the delay. They’d all figured the convoy would arrive and they’d scoot home. It was only a five-minute drive to the airport. It was now after three o’clock in the morning. The sun would be coming back up soon. Bullets occasionally pinged off the walls. What would happen if an RPG hit them?

  There was a brief mutiny under way in Goodale’s Condor.

  “Shouldn’t we be moving?” Goodale asked.

  “Yeah, I would think so,” said one of the other men crammed in with him.

  Goodale was closest to the front, so he leaned up to the Malay driver.

  “Hey, man, let’s go,” he said.

  “No. No,” the driver protested. “We stay.”

  “God damnit, we’re not staying! Let’s get the fuck out of here!”

  “No. No. We stay.”

  “No, you don’t understand this. We’re getting shot at. We’re gonna get fucked up in this thing!”

  The commanders were also growing impatient.

  —Scotty [Miller], give me an update please, asked Lieutenant Colonel Harrell.

  Other than brief stops back at the base to refuel, Harrell and air commander Tom Matthews were up over the city in their C2 Black Hawk throughout the night.

  Miller responded:

  —Roger. They’re trying to pull it apart. So far no luck.

  —Roger. You’ve only got about an hour’s worth of darkness left.

  There were more than three hundred Americans now in and around these two blocks of Mogadishu, the vanguard of a convoy that stretched a half mile back toward National Street, which created a sense of security among the recently arrived 10th Mountain troops that was not shared by the Rangers or the D-boys who had been fighting all night. The weary assault force watched with amazement as the regular army guys leaned against walls and lit cigarettes and chatted out on the same street where they had just experienced blizzards of enemy fire. To Howe, the Delta team leader who had been so disappointed by the Rangers, these men seemed completely out of place. The wait for them to extract Elvis’s body was beginning to worry everybody.

  When an explosion rocked Stebbins’s APC, men shouted with anger inside. “Get us the fuck out of here!” one screamed. Rodriguez was moaning. Stebbins and Heard were taking turns holding up the machine gunner’s IV bag. They were wedged into the small space like pieces of a puzzle. Soon after the explosion the carrier’s big metal door swung open and a soldier from the 10th who had been hit in the elbow was lifted in on a litter. He screamed with pain as he hit the floor.

  “I can’t believe it!” he shouted.

  The Malaysian driver kept turning back, trying to keep things calm. “Any minute now, hospital,” he would say.

  After patching up the new arrival, Wilkinson sat back against the inner wall and saw through a peephole that darkness had begun to drain from the eastern sky. The volume of fire was starting to pick up. There were more pings off the side of the carrier.

  The wounded who had been so eager to board the big armored vehicles now prayed to get off. They felt like targets in a turkey shoot. Goodale had only a small peephole to see outside. It was so warm he began to feel woozy. He removed his helmet and loosened his body armor, but it didn’t help much. They all sat in the small dark space just staring silently at each other, waiting.

  “You know what we should do,” suggested one of the wounded D-boys. “We should kind of crack one of these doors a little bit so that when the RPG comes in here, we’ll all have someplace to explode out of.”

  About an hour before sunrise, there was an update from the C2 bird to the JOC:

  —They are essentially pulling the aircraft instrument panel apart around the body. Still do not have any idea when they will be done.

  —Okay, are they going to be able to get the body out of there? Garrison demanded. I need an honest, no shit, for-real assessment from the platoon leader or the senior man present. Over.

  Miller answered:

  —Roger. Understand we are looking at twenty more minutes before we can get the body out.

  Garrison said:

  —Roger. I know they are doing the best they can. We will stay the course until they are finished. Over.

  As the sky to the east brightened, Sergeant Yurek was startled by the carnage back in the room where they had spent the night. Sunlight illuminated the pools and smears of blood everywhere. As he poked his head out the courtyard door he could see Somali bodies scattered up and down the road in the distance. One of the bodies, a young Somali man, appeared to have been run over several times by one of the vehicles being used to pull apart the helicopter. Yurek was especially saddened to see, at a corner of Marehan Road, the carcass of the donkey he had watched miraculously crossing the street back and forth through all the gunfire the day before. It was still hooked to its cart.

  Howe noticed among the bodies stacked on top of the APCs the soles of two small assault boots. There was only one guy in the unit with boots that small. It had to be Earl Fillmore.

  Everybody knew the respite here was about to end. Daylight would bring Sammy back outdoors. Captain Steele stood outside the courtyard door checking his watch compulsively. He must have looked at it hundreds of times. He couldn’t believe they weren’t moving yet. The horizon was starting to get pink. Placing three hundred men at jeopardy in order to retrieve the body of one man was a noble gesture, but hardly a sensible one. Finally, at sunup, the grim work was done.

  —Adam Six Four [Garrison], this is Romeo Six Four [Harrell]. They are starting to move at this time, over. ... Placing the charges and getting ready to move.

  Then came the next shock for the Rangers and D-boys who had been fighting now for fourteen hours. There wasn’t enough room on the vehicles for them. After the 10th Mountain Division soldiers reboarded, the anxious Malaysian drivers just took off, leaving the rest of the force behind. They were going to have to run right back out through the same streets they’d fought through on their way in.

  It was 5:45 A.M., Monday, October 4. The sun was now over the rooftops.

  9

  So they ran. The original idea was for them to run with the vehicles in order to have some cover, but the Malay drivers had sped out.

  Still hauling the radio on his back, Steele ran alongside Perino. Eight Rangers were strung out behind them. Behind them were the rest of Delta Force, the CSAR team, everybody. It happened so fast, men at the far end of the line were surprised when they made the right turn at the top of the hill to find that the others had moved out already.

  Yurek ran with Jamie Smith’s gear. Nobody had wanted to touch it. It was like acknowledging he was gone. The whole force ran the same route the main force had used coming in, stopping at each intersection to spray covering fire as
they one by one sprinted across. As soon as they began moving the shooting resumed, almost as bad as it had been the afternoon before. The Rangers shot at every window and door, and down every cross street. Steele felt like his legs were lead weights and that he was moving at a fraction of his normal speed, yet he was running as fast as he could.

  When they got up to their original blocking position there was withering fire across the wide intersection before the Olympic Hotel. Sergeant Randy Ramaglia saw the rounds hitting the sides of the armored vehicles blocks ahead. We’re going to run through that? It was the same shit as yesterday. He had made it up to the intersection when he felt a sharp blow to his shoulder, like someone had hit him with a sledgehammer. It didn’t knock him down. He just froze. It took a few seconds for him to regain his senses. At first he thought something had fallen on him. He looked up.

  “Sergeant, you’ve been shot!” shouted Specialist Collett, who had been running beside him.

  Ramaglia turned to him. Collett’s eyes were wide.

  “I know it,” he said.

  He took several deep breaths and tried to move his arm. He could move it. He felt no pain.

  The round had hit Ramaglia’s left back, taking out a golf ball–sized scoop of it. The round had then skimmed off his shoulder blade and nicked Collett’s sleeve, tearing off the American flag he had stitched there.

  “Are you okay?” a Delta medic shouted at him from across the street.

  “Yeah,” said Ramaglia, and he started running again. He was furious. The whole scene seemed surreal to him. He couldn’t believe some pissant fucking Sammy had shot him, Sergeant Randal J. Ramaglia of the U.S. Army Rangers. He was going to get out of that city alive or take half of it with him. He shot at anyone or anything he saw. He was running, bleeding, swearing, and shooting. Windows, doorways, alleyways ... especially people. They were all going down. It was a free-for-all now. All semblance of an ordered retreat was gone. Everybody was just scrambling.

  * * *

  Sergeant Nelson, still stone deaf, ran alongside Private Neathery, who had been shot in the right arm the afternoon before. Nelson had his M-60 and carried Neathery’s M-16 slung across his back. They ran as hard as they could and Nelson shot at everything he saw. He had never felt so frightened, not even at the height of things the previous day. He and Neathery were toward the rear and were terrified that in this wild footrace they would be left behind or picked off. Neathery was having a hard time running, which slowed them down. When they caught up to a group providing covering fire at the wide intersection they were supposed to stop and take their turn, cover for that group to advance, but instead they just ran straight through.

  Howe kicked in a door of a house on the street and the team piled in to reload and catch their breath. Captain Miller stepped in, breathing hard, and told them to keep moving. Howe went around the room double-checking everybody’s status and ammo and then they pushed back out to the street. He was shooting his CAR-15 and his shotgun. Up ahead the APC gunners were shooting up everything.

  Private Floyd ran with his torn pants flapping, all but naked from the waist down, feeling especially vulnerable and ridiculous. Alongside him, Doc Strous disappeared suddenly in a loud flash and explosion that knocked Floyd down. When he regained his senses and looked over for Strous, all he saw was a thinning ball of smoke. No Doc.

  Sergeant Watson grabbed Floyd’s shoulder. The private’s helmet was cockeyed and his eyes felt that way.

  “Where the hell is Strous?”

  “He blew up, Sergeant.”

  “He blew up? What the hell do you mean he blew up?”

  “He blew up.”

  Floyd pointed to where the medic had been running. Strous stepped from a tangle of weeds, brushing himself off, his helmet askew. He looked down at Floyd and just took off running. A round had hit a flashbang grenade on Strous’s vest and exploded, knocking him off his feet and into the weeds. He was unhurt.

  “Move out, Floyd,” Watson screamed.

  They all kept running, running and shooting through the brightening dawn, through the crackle of gunfire, the spray of loose mortar off a wall where a round hit, the sudden gust of hot wind from a blast that sometimes knocked them down and sucked the air out of their lungs, the sound of the helicopters rumbling overhead, and the crisp rasp of their guns like the tearing of heavy cloth. They ran through the oily smell of the city and of their own bodies, the taste of dust in their dry mouths, with the crisp brown bloodstains on their fatigues and the fresh memory of friends dead or unspeakably mangled, with the whole nightmare now grown unbearably long, with disbelief that the mighty and terrible army of the United States of America had plunged them into this mess and stranded them there and now left them to run through the same deadly gauntlet to get out. How could this happen?

  Ramaglia ran on some desperate last reserve of adrenaline. He ran and shot and swore until he began to smell his own blood and feel dizzy. For the first time he felt some stabs of pain. He kept running. As he approached the intersection of Hawlwadig Road and National Street, about five blocks south of the Olympic Hotel, he saw a tank and the line of APCs and Humvees and a mass of men in desert battle dress. He ran until he collapsed, with joy.

  10

  At Mogadishu’s Volunteer Hospital, surgeon Abdi Mohamed Elmi was covered with blood and exhausted. His wounded and dead countrymen had started coming early the evening before. Just a trickle at first, despite the great volume of shooting going on. Vehicles couldn’t move on the streets so the patients were carried in or rolled in on handcarts. There were burning roadblocks throughout the city and the American helicopters were buzzing low and shooting and most people were afraid to venture out.

  Before the fight began, the Volunteer Hospital was virtually empty. It was located down near the Americans’ base by the airport. After the trouble had started with the Americans most Somalis were afraid to come there. By the end of this day, Monday, October 4, all five hundred beds in the hospital would be full. One hundred more wounded would be lined in the hallways. And Volunteer wasn’t the biggest hospital in the city. The numbers were even greater at Digfer. Most of those with gut wounds would die. The delay in getting them to the hospital—many more would come today than came yesterday—allowed infections to set in that could no longer be successfully treated with what antibiotics the hospital could spare.

  The three-bed operating theater at Volunteer had been full and busy all through the night. Elmi was part of a team of seven surgeons who worked straight through without a break. He had assisted in eighteen major surgeries by sunrise, and the hallways outside were rapidly filling with more, dozens, hundreds more. It was a tidal wave of gore.

  He finally walked out of the operating room at eight in the morning, and sat down to rest. The hospital was filled with the chilling screams and moans of broken people, dismembered, bleeding, dying in horrible pain. Doctors and nurses ran from bed to bed, trying to keep up. Elmi sat on a bench smoking a cigarette quietly. A French woman who saw him sitting down approached him angrily.

  “Why don’t you help these people?” she shouted at him.

  “I can’t,” he said.

  She stormed away. He sat until his cigarette was finished. Then he stood and went back to work. He would not sleep for another twenty-four hours.

  11

  Abdi Karim Mohamud left his friend’s house in the morning after the Americans had gone. The day before he’d been sent home early from his job at the U.S. embassy compound and had run to witness the fighting around the Bakara Market. It was so fierce he’d spent a long sleepless night on the floor at his friend’s house, listening to the gunfire and watching the explosions light up the sky.

  The shooting flared up again violently after sunrise as the Rangers fought their way out. Then it stopped.

  He ventured out an hour or so later. He saw a woman dead in the middle of the street. She had been hit by bullets from a helicopter. You could tell because the helicopter guns tore people apart. He
r stomach and insides were spilled outside her body on the street. He saw three children, tiny ones, stiff and gray with death. There was an old man facedown in the street, his blood in a wide pool dried around him, and beside him was his donkey, also dead. Abdi counted the bullets in the old man. There were three, two in the torso and one in the leg.

  Bashir Haji Yusuf, the lawyer, heard the big fight resume at dawn. He had managed to fall asleep for a few hours and it awakened him. When that shooting stopped he told his wife he was going to see. He took his camera with him. He wanted to make a record of what had happened.

  He saw dead donkeys on the road, and severe damage to the buildings around the Olympic Hotel and further east. There were bloodstains all over the buildings and streets, as if some great thrashing beast had been through, but most of the dead had been carried off. He snapped pictures as he walked down one of the streets where the soldiers had run, and he saw the husk of the first Black Hawk that had crashed, still smoldering from the fire the Rangers had set on it. As he walked he saw the charred remains of Humvees, one that was still burning, and several Malaysian APCs.

  Then Bashir heard a great stir of excitement, people chanting and cheering and shouting. He ran to see.

  They had a dead American soldier draped over a wheelbarrow. He was stripped to black undershorts and lay draped backward with his hands dragging on the dirt. The body was caked with dry blood and the man’s face looked peaceful, distant. There were bullet holes in his chest and arm. Ropes were tied around his body, and it was half wrapped in a sheet of corrugated tin. The crowd grew larger as the wheelbarrow was pushed through the street. People spat and poked and kicked at the body.