Black Hawk Down (13 page)

When the American soldier with the gun rounded the corner he saw Aden, peered at him
closely, probably looking for a weapon, and then moved on. He stopped near the front end
of the car. Men could have reached out and touched the soldier's boots and pointed his gun
at a Somali man with an M-16 across the wide street. The two men fired at the same time
but neither fell. Then the Somali man's gun jammed and the American didn't shoot. He ran
over to the wall across Marehan Road, closer, and shot him. The bullet went in the Somali
man's forehead. Then the American ran over and shot him three more times where he lay on
the road.

As he did this a big Somali woman came running from a narrow alley beside the house,
right in front of the soldier. Startled, he quickly fired his weapon. The woman fell face
forward, dropping like a sack, without putting out her arms to break the fall.

More Somalis came now, with guns, shooting at the American. He dropped to one knee and
shot them, many of them, but the Somalis' bullets also hit him.

Others came out from hiding then, and moved toward the crash. Then a helicopter landed
right on Marehan Road and these Somalis scattered. It seemed incredible that a helicopter
could fit in such a small space. It was one of the little ones. The roar of the helicopter
was deafening and dust swirled around. Aden couldn't breathe. Thin the shooting got worse.

One of the pilots was leaning out of the helicopter aiming his weapon south, toward the
crest of the hill. Another ran from the helicopter toward the one that had crashed. The
shooting was even worse then. It was so loud that the sound of the helicopter skid the
guns was just one ongoing explosion. Bullets hit and rocked the old car. Aden curled
himself up tight and wished he were someplace else.

-6-

Cameras on the three observation choppers captured the disaster close-up and in color.
General Garrison and his staff watched on screens at the JOC. They saw Wolcott's Black
Hawk moving smoothly; then a shudder and puff of smoke near the tail rotor, then an
awkward Counter rotation as Super Six One fell, making two slow turns clockwise. Nose up,
until its belly hit the top of a stone building and its front end was cast down violently.
On impact, its mass rotors snapped and went flying. The body of the Black Hawk came to
rest in a narrow alley on its side against a stone wall in a cloud of dust.

There wasn't enough time for anyone to consider all the ramifications of that crash, but
the sick sinking feeling that came over officers watching on-screen went way beyond the
immediate fate of the men on board.

They had lost the initiative. The only way to regain it now would be to bolster strength
at the crash site, but that would take time and movement, which meant casualties.

There were already casualties on the downed bird. There was no time to reflect on causes
or consequences. If Elvis's chopper had gone down in flames, the general could just pull
everybody out with the prisoners as planned and mount a second mission to retrieve the
bodies and make sure the chopper was completely destroyed--there were sensitive items on
the bird that the army didn't want just anybody to have.

But seeing men climb out of the wreckage, and watching as the unscripted battle now
joined around it, the ground shifted beneath Garrison's feet. The next moves were part of
a contingency they had rehearsed. Another Black Hawk would take Super Six One's place over
the target area, and the CSAR bird would move in and drop its team. Those fifteen men
would give emergency medical treatment and provide some protection for the crash
survivors, but they couldn't hold out long. Already mobs of Somalis wore moving toward the
crash site from all directions. Securing it would take all of the men on the ground. The
mission had been designed for speed: swiftly in, swiftly out. Now they were stuck. The
entire force at the target building and on the convoy would have to fight their way to the
crash site. They had to move fast, before Aidid's forces surrounded it and cut it off. If
that happened, the crash survivors and the CSAR team would have no hope. Delta Force and
the Rangers were the best the army had to offer. Now they were going to be tested.

It was hard to imagine any other force of 150 men trapped in a hostile city, besieged on
all sides by a heavily armed populace, who had a reasonable chance of surviving. They were
at the eye of a terrible storm. The observation birds showed burning tires sending tall
black columns of smoke around the perimeter of the congested blocks. Many thousands of
armed Somalis were thronging toward those plumes from all directions, on vehicles and on
foot. People were erecting barricades and digging trenches across roads, laying traps for
American vehicles, trying to seal them in. The streets surrounding the target house and
crash site were already mobbed. You could see the ring closing.

Word was sent to the 10th Mountain Division troops across the city to mobilize
immediately. This was going to be one hell of a gunfight.

-7-

“We gotta go,” Nelson told Lieutenant DiTomasso. “We gotta go right now.”

From Chalk Two's position at the target block's northeast corner, Nelson had gotten a
pretty good fix on where Super Six One had crashed. He could see crowds of Somalis already
running that way.

“No, we've got to stay here,” said the lieutenant. “There's a crowd over there,” argued
Nelson, the impending disaster overcoming his deference for rank. “Stand fast,” DiTomasso
said.

“I'm going,” said Nelson.

Guns poked out of a window across the street, and just then he spotted two Somali boys
running, one with something in his hand. Nelson dropped to a knee and fired a burst with
the M-60. Both boys fell. One had been holding a stick. The other got up and limped for
cover.

Specialist Waddell was feeling the same urge to run toward the crash. They had all heard
about the way the Somalis had mutilated the remains of the men who died in the previous
Black Hawk crash. In the hangar they hut talked it over. They resolved that such a thing
would never happen to their guys.

DiTomasso held Nelson back. He raised Captain Steele on the radio.

“I know where it is. I'm leaving,” the lieutenant said.

“No, wait,” said Steele. He could understand the urge to go help, but if Chalk Two just
took off, the target building perimeter would break down. He tried to get

on the command net, but the airwaves were so busy he couldn't be heard.

He waited fifteen seconds.

“We need to go!” Nelson was shouting at DiTomasao. “Now!”

As he started running, Steele called back.

“Okay, go,” he told DiTomasso. “But I want somebody to stay.”

DiTomasso shouted, "All right, Nelson. Make it happen.

With some of the men already in pursuit of Nelson, the lieutenant ran down the street to
Sergeant Yurek. He would leave half the chalk.

“You keep the fight here,” he told Yurek.

Eight Rangers moved at a trot. DiTomasso caught up with Nelson and his M-6O in front.
Waddell was in the rear with his SAW. They moved with their weapons up and ready. Somalis
took wild shots at them from windows and doorways as they moved, but no one was hit. Twice
on their way east, Nelson dropped to a knee and opened fire on the crowd moving parallel
to them one block north.

When they rounded the corner three blocks over, there was a wide sand road that sloped
down to the intersection of the alley where Super Six One lay. Straight in front of them
and this just astonished Nelson--one of the Little Birds had landed. Its rotors were
turning in a space so small the tips were just inches from the stone walls.

-8-

Piloting the Little Bird Star Four One, Chief Warrant Officers Keith Jones and Karl Maier
searched for and found the fallen Black Hawk minutes after it went down. They could tell
by the way the front end of the bird had crumpled that Elvis and Bull were probably dead.
Jones saw one soldier, Staff Sergeant Daniel Busch, on the ground against a wall bleeding
from the stomach with several Somalis splayed on the ground around him.

Landing in the big intersection near Busch would have been easier, but Jones didn't want
to be a fat target from four different directions. He eased the bird up the street between
two stone houses and set it down on a slope. He and Maier felt themselves rock back when
they touched down.

As soon as they landed, Sammies came at them. Both pilots opened fire with handguns. Then
Sergeant Smith, the operator who had hung on with one hand as the Black Hawk fell, and the
second of the two soldiers Abdiaziz Ali Aden had seen climb out of the wreckage (Busch had
been the first), appeared alongside Jones's window.

Over the din be mouthed to Jones, “I need help.” His one arm hung limp. Jones hopped out
and followed Smith back to the intersection, leaving Maier to control the bird and provide
cover up the alley.

Just then, Lieutenant DiTomasso and his men rounded the corner and came face-to-face with
the Little Bird. Maier nearly shot the lieutenant. When the pilot lowered his weapon, the
startled DiTomasso tapped his helmet, indicating he wanted a head count on casualties.

Maier gestured that he didn't know.

Nelson and the other Rangers hurried down the slope, ducking under the blades of the
Little Bird. Nelson saw Busch leaning against a wall one block down with a bad gut wound.
The Delta sniper had his SAW on his lap and a .45 pistol on the ground in front of him.
There were two Somali bodies nearby. Busch, a devoutly religious man, had told his mother
before leaving for Somalia, “A good Christian soldier is just a click away from heaven.”
Nelson recognized him as the guy who beat all comers in the hangar at Scrabble. One poor
guy had lost forty-one straight games to him. There was a mass of blood in his lap now.
Busch looked ghostly white, gone.

Nelson shot one of the Somalis on the ground who was still breathing and then lay behind
the bodies for cover. He picked up Busch's .45 handgun and stuck it in his pocket. The
hulking frame of the Black Hawk was across the wide road to his right in the alley.
Somalis climbing on the wreckage fled when they saw the Rangers round the corner.

As the rest of the squad fanned out to form a perimeter, Jones and Smith dragged Busch's
limp body toward the Little Bird. Jones helped Smith into the small space behind the
cockpit, and then stooped and lifted Busch to the doorway, setting him in Smith's lap.
Smith wrapped his arms around the more badly wounded Delta sniper as Jones tried to apply
first aid.

Busch had been shot just under the steel belly plate of his body armor. His eyes were
gray and rolled up in his head. Jones knew there was nothing he could do for him.

The pilot stepped out and climbed back into his seat. On the radio he heard air commander
Matthews in the C2 bird.

--Four One, come on out. Come out now.

Jones grabbed the stick and told Maier, “I have it.”

He told the command net

--Four One is coming out.

-9-

Under the steady drone of his rotors, layered deep in the overlap of urgent calls in his
headphones, Chief Warrant Officer Make Durant had picked out the voice of his friend Cliff.

--Six One going down.

Just like that. Elvis's' voice was oddly calm, matter-of-fact.

Durant and his copilot, Chief Warrant Officer Ray Prank, were circling barren land north
of Mogadishu in Super Six Four, a Black Hawk just like the one Elvis had been flying.

They had two crew chiefs in back, Staff Sergeant Bill Cleveland and Sergeant Tommie
Field, waiting behind silent guns. For years they had done little but prepare rigorously
for battle, but here they were stuck in this calm oval flight pattern over sand, a good
four-minute flight from the action.

The shadow of their chopper glided over the flat, empty landscape. Mogadishu ended
abruptly and turned to sand and scrub brush north of October 21st Road. From there to the
blaring horizon was little but stubby tress, cactus, goats, and camels in a hazy ocean of
sand.

Diurnal thought about his friends, Elvis and Bull. They were skilled, veteran warriors.
It didn't seem possible that a motley rabble of Somalis had managed to shoot them out of
the air. Bull Briley had seen action from Korea to the invasion of Panama. Durant
remembered seeing Bull angry the night before. He'd gotten a chance to phone home, the
first chance in months, and had gotten the damned answering machine. God, wouldn't it be
sad if...

Durant continued his methodical turns. Every time he banked west it felt like be was
flying straight into the sun.

Going down over Mog was had news but not catastrophic. It was a contingency. They had
practiced it since their arrival, with Elvis's own helicopter, in fact-which was weird. It
wasn't even that shocking, at least not to the pilots, who had a finer sense of the risks
they ran than most of the men they flew. Most of the Rangers were practically kids. They
had grown up in the most powerful nation on earth, and saw these techno-laden,
state-of-the-art choppers as symbols of America's vast military might, all but
invulnerable over a Third World dump like Mog.

It was a myth that had survived the downing of the QRF's Black Hawk. That was chalked up
as a lucky shot. RPGs were meant for ground fighting. It was difficult and dangerous,
almost suicidal, to point one skyward. The violent back blast could kill the shooter, and
the grenade would only fly up a thousand feet or so, with a whoosh and a telltale trail of
smoke pointing back to the shooter. So if the back blast didn't get him one of the quick
guns of the Little Birds surely would. They were all but useless against a fast-moving,
low-flying helicopter, so the logic went. And the Black Hawk was damn near indestructible.
It could take a hammering without even course. It was designed to stay in the air no
matter what.

So most of the foot soldiers that rode in the birds regarded the downing of a Black Hawk
as a one-in-a-million event. Not the pilots. Since that first Black Hawk had gone down
they'd seen more and more of those climbing smoke trails and sudden airbursts. Going down
was suddenly notched from possible to probable and entered their nightmares. Not that it
deterred Durant and the other pilots in the least. Taking risks was what they did. The
160th SOAR, the Night Stalkers, chauffeured the most elite soldiers in the U.S. military
into some of the most dangerous spots on the planet.

Durant was a compact man. He was short, fit, dark-haired, and had this way of standing
ramrod straight, feet set slightly wider than his shoulders, as if daring someone to knock
him down. If he looked better rested than most of the guys back at the hangar it was
because Durant, had searched out a sleeping space in the small cooking area of a trailer
behind the JOC. All the pilots slept in the trailers, which were relatively luxurious
compared to the cots in the hangar. Given the precision and alertness flying demanded, not
to mention the responsibility for their crew and their multimillion-dollar high-tech
flying machines, Garrison considered well-rested pilots a priority. Durant had done better
than most. The cooking trailer was air-conditioned. His part of the deal was he had to
break down his bunk every night and clear the space for the cooks, but it was well worth
the hassle.