Black Hawk Down (36 page)

As far as Howe was concerned, his position sucked. From the doorway, he could see only
the corners of the alleyways to the south and north. Far from expanding their field of
fire, he could see no more than twenty yards out in each direction!

Just listening to the shouted questions and commands on the radio, Howe sensed that some
of those in charge were out of their depth. There was just too much going on. He could see
it in their faces. Sensory overload. When it happened you could almost see the fog pass
over a man's eyes. They just withdrew. They became strictly reactive.

Take the vaunted Rangers. Some of the Rangers were out there in the fight, but nobody was
telling them what to do, and they sure as hell didn't know. Most of them were holed up in
back rooms of the house one block south with their commander, Steele, waiting to see what
was going to happen next. Howe figured there were more than two dozen capable men and
several heavy weapons back there in that house. What the hell were they doing? That was
one thing he and Miller and even the commanders overhead seemed to agree on at least.
Steele and his Rangers needed to pick up their wounded and move fifty fucking yards down
the slope to consolidate the perimeter and join the fucking fight! But Steele wouldn't
budge. It was as if the Rangers saw the D-boys as their big brothers, and since their big
brothers were around, everything would be okay.

Shooting quieted down after the moon came up. It cast faint shadows out on the street.
The Little Bird gun runs lit up the sky with tracers and rockets. Brass from their
miniguns rained down on the tin rooftops like somebody banging on the side of an empty
metal bucket. There were bodies of Somalis still stretched out on the road. Howe had
noticed that the Sammies were good about hauling off their wounded and dead. Bodies tended
not to stay put unless they were right in the middle of the street. Weapons, too.

If there was a weapon down on the ground, it would be gone eventually unless it was
broken. They were smart street fighters. Howe felt a grudging professional admiration.
They were disciplined, and what they lacked in sophisticated weapons and tactics they made
up for with determination. They used concealment very well. Usually all you saw of a
shooter was the barrel of his weapon and his head. Once darkness fell and the amateurs
went home, the firing became less frequent but more accurate.

Shortly after moonrise, Howe was startled by loud voices from around the corner north of
his doorway, over where Stebbins and Heard had been hit. At first he thought it was
Rangers. Who else would be dumb enough to be talking that loud out on the street? But the
Rangers were all supposed to be off the street. He popped an earplug and listened harder.
The voices were speaking Somali. They must have been half deaf like everybody else from
all the explosions, and didn't realize how loud they were talking. Sometimes it took
soldiers two or three days to regain full hearing after a fight. As three Somalis rounded
the corner, one of the D-boys from across the street shone a white light on the first in
line. His eyes looked as wide as a raccoon's startled in a garbage can. With his rifle
resting on a doorjamb, Howe placed his tritium sight post on the second man and began
shooting on full automatic, sweeping his fire in a smooth motion over the third man. All
three Somalis went down hard. Two of the men struggled to their feet and dragged the third
man up and around the corner.

Howe and the other operators let them go. They didn't want to expose their firing
positions with more muzzle flashes. Howe was disgusted again with this 5.56 ammo. When he
put people down he wanted them to stay down.

-10-

When Steele and his men had first moved into the courtyard it was bedlam. The noise was
relentless: shooting, grenade blasts, helicopter rotors, radio calls, men shouting,
crying, groaning, screaming back and forth, trying to be heard over the din, each one's
need more urgent than the next man's. There was smoke and gunpowder and dust in the air.
Poor Lieutenant Lechner was bleeding a river from his shattered right leg and bellowing
with pain.

The courtyard itself was about fifteen feet wide and maybe eighteen feet long. There were
two rooms to the right as you entered, two rooms to the left, and at the rear was a
covered porch walled off from the open middle with ornate concrete latticework. The first
room to the left was filled, floor to ceiling, with tires. The first room on the right
held the Somali family who lived here. They had been searched, flex-cuffed, and placed in
the corner. Steele had five wounded men back behind the concrete partition. Two of them,
Goodale and Lechner, could no longer walk. Medics were still working on Lechner. Steele
had three teams of D-boys mixed in with his force, none of whom answered to him, which
further confused matters.

At one point the D-boys were talking about putting a heavy gun out on the street just
outside the courtyard doorway. They all carried rifles. Specialist Collett nervously
listened to them discussing it. He was a SAW gunner, and the only machine gunner who
hadn't been injured. If anybody was going to be sent out there, it would be him. He'd
spent more than an hour crouched behind a rock in the middle of Marehan Road, and now that
he was finally safely indoors, going back out was the last thing he wanted.

He'd do it, but he dreaded it.

“I'm not sending anyone back outside,” Steele told them.

Collett heaved a quiet sigh of relief.

Steele shouted back to his ranking sergeant, Sean Watson, to see if there were any back
doors to this house. With all the shooting going on out front he figured, when they left,
it would be best to go out another way. Watson said there were no back doors.

He could talk on the radio to his lieutenants, Perino and DiTomasso, but he wasn't sure
how far away either of them was. DiTomasso spent a few minutes on the radio trying to
orient the captain, but they had come in from different directions and neither was
familiar with the neighborhood so the discussion got nowhere. Steele felt like he was
playing the childhood game where everyone is asked to turn their back to the blackboard
and draw a picture according to the teacher's instructions-the point of the game being how
differently all the drawings turned out. In fact, Steele was no more than fifty yards away
from Perino, who was separated from DiTomasso by nothing more than an eight-inch flimsy
interior wall. They might as well have been miles apart.

Steele was desperate to get a fix on where all his men had gone, frightened that one or
more had been left behind in the confusion. He'd lost track of Sergeant Eversmann and
Chalk Four completely. The last he knew, he had ordered them to head to the crash site on
foot. He did not know that they had been picked up by the ground convoy and then gone
through hell before returning to base, where they were now. Perino and DiTomasso had given
him a count on who was with them, and Perino had seen Rodriguez and Boren pulled into the
casualty center across Marehan Road. But what of Stebbins and Heard? Steele had no direct
radio link to Captain Miller, so he relayed his requests for information to the C2 bird,
and they passed them along to Miller.

-Kilo Six Four [Miller], this is Romeo Six Four [Harrell]. He [Steele] is requesting
status on a Ranger Stebbins and a Ranger Heard. He thinks they are with you. Can you
confirm, over?

The C2 bird reported back to Steele:

-Roger, Juliet, the answer is affirmative. They have those two Rangers with them, over.

That was good news. But nobody seemed to know where

Eversmann's chalk had gone. Steele had just begun to contemplate a next move when Perino
radioed him again about Smith. The captain knew it was hopeless to keep asking for another
helicopter to come down, but he also knew he wasn't the one covered with Smith's blood,
watching the young man's life ebb away.

“I'm gonna ask for it, but it's going to be pretty hard to put a bird in,” Steele said.

“I've got a big intersection right outside,” said Perino. “They can put one down there.”

Steele called up on the command net.

-Romeo Six Four, this is Juliet Six Four. We need medevac NOW. We have a critical who is
not going to make it.

Word came back down minutes later.

-Roger, understand. We are pressing the QRF to get there as quickly as they can. I doubt
that we can get a Hawk in there to get anybody out, over.

Medic Kurt Schmid had relayed a request for blood, getting

Smith's type off his dog tags. After the resupply Black Hawk came and went, he approached
Delta team leader Paul Howe.

“Was there any blood?”

“No,” Howe told him.

Schmid figured the blood supply must be stretched thin dealing with all the casualties
from the lost convoy. He had heard on the radio that the docs back at the base were
drawing blood from donors to meet the sudden demand.

He kept working on Smith, even though it now felt hopeless. He had Perino and others in
their courtyard taking turns pressing into Smith's lower abdomen to keep pressure over the
femoral artery. The medic had finally relented and given Smith a morphine drip. It had
quieted the corporal. He was still conscious, but just barely. He looked pale and distant.
He had begun to make peace with dying. Perino could tell that even though Smith was now
quiet and weak he was still alert enough to be very scared. He talked about his family.
His father had been a Ranger in Vietnam, and had lost a leg in combat. His younger
brother, Mike, was planning to enlist and enter Ranger school. Mike's twin, Matt, also
wanted to join. Jamie had grown up wanting to be nothing else. He had played football and
lacrosse in high school in northern New Jersey, and done well enough in his classes to
graduate, which was good enough. He hadn't been interested in books or school; he knew
what be wanted to be. Nothing could deter him. Not even the scare his father, James Sr.,
had tried to put in him, speaking to him graphically about the horrors he had seen and
experienced in Nam. Three years earlier, when he was still in basic training, Smith had
written to his father, “Today while walking back from lunch I saw two Rangers walking
through the company area. It's the dream of being one of those guys in faded fatigues and
a black beret that keeps me going.”

Smith was now asking the medic to tell his parents and family goodbye and to tell them
that he had been thinking of them as he died, and that he loved them. They said prayers
together.

“Hold tight,” Schmid told the dying corporal. “We're working on getting you out of here.
I'm doing everything I can.”

Away from Smith, the medic kept telling Perino, “We need help. He's not going to make it.”

But how to convey the urgency with so much else going on? The resupply had delivered
mostly fluids, and Schmid pumped those into Smith, but the kid had lost too much blood. He
needed a doctor and a hospital. Even that may not have been enough to save him. He was
just barely alive.

When the moon came up. Steele kicked himself for letting the men leave behind their NODs.
Here he was, the inflexible by-the-book-robot Ranger tyrant, and he'd relaxed procedures
this one time for what seemed like ample reason, and now they were in the fight of their
lives, at night, lacking the most significant technological advantage they had over their
enemy. If ever there was a more perfect illustration of why not to ignore procedure.

Still, it had seemed like such an obvious call that Sergeant Goodale had ridiculed
Private Jeff Young back in the hangar for even asking about them as they had prepared to
go out.

“Young, think about it. What time is it?”

“About three o'clock.”

“How long have our missions been?”

“About two hours,”

“Is it still light out at five?”

“Yeah.”

“Then why would you want to bring your night vision?” Steele was mortified by the
stupidity of his call. In an hour or two it was going to be darker than four inches up a
goat's butt. He made a quick check around the courtyard to see if anybody, maybe just
accidentally, had brought NODs along. No one had. Out the half-opened metal doorway it now
looked dark as a cavern. From where he stood in the second room at the north end of the
courtyard-it appeared to be the kitchen-Steele could see moonlight reflecting blue off the
barrels of his men's weapons sticking out of doorways. He called out to them one by one to
make sure no one nodded off.

Miller wasn't sure what was going on down the block. After he'd relayed the first request
for Steele and his men to move up, Steele had declined an offer to speak directly to
Miller via one of the D-boys' headsets. From the Delta command position, there was no
telling what was wrong with Steele. There was some concern that the captain had been
injured. The Ranger commander had broadcast that the “command element” had been hit, and
nobody was sure if that meant him (Steele had been talking about Lechner). Miller had
relayed a request for Steele to move at least some of his force down, if not across the
intersection, then to the corner building on their block where they could help cover the
southern intersection. The Ranger commander had heard the urgings from the command
helicopter, arguing that it would be easier for the Little Birds to do gun runs if the
forces were in a tighter perimeter. The idea of stepping out of the relative safety of
their fortified courtyard back into the street was hardly appealing; nevertheless, when
the C2 bird made the initial request, Steele agreed.

He radioed Perino and asked him to throw a blue Chemlite out his courtyard door into the
street.

“Roger, it's out,” said the lieutenant.

Steele then stepped briefly out into the street. He was surprised how close the light
was, only a short sprint up the road.

He radioed back to Harrell, “Okay. Hoo-ah.”

Then he went back to tell Sergeant Watson to get ready for the move. Watson was blunt.