Jerry Boykin & Lynn Vincent (33 page)

As I stood by that truck with their blood pooling around my boots, its coppery smell boring into my brain, I felt I had failed them. Worse, God had failed them—and in failing them had failed me. A hollow ringing rose inside me, the strange noise of catastrophic personal and professional failure.

Defeat hung over me like a poison fog. Leaving the truck, I walked over to an area where the Humvees were parked. They told the story of the battle: bullet-shattered windshields, spent cartridges, the doors and hoods peppered with bullet holes. One Humvee had been pierced by an RPG. The interior of every vehicle was covered with brown, caking blood. In a couple of spots, I saw brain matter.

The assessment pierced more holes in my spirits, sinking them lower. But I kept my head up for the sake of the guys. The sun crept higher, heating up the air. I walked back toward the hangar and began talking with the troops, trying to get an understanding of who was dead and who was missing. Sergeant Rick Whittaker, a sniper troop sergeant, was standing at the door of the hangar.

He was a big guy and I had to look up to talk to him. “Rick, are you missing any people?”

His eyes welled with tears. “Yes, I’m missing Gordy and Randy,” he said. “They went into the second crash site and they’re gone.” He paused, his throat working, eyes pleading. “They’re gone.”

“Rick, we’ll get them back,” I said. I think we both knew that didn’t necessarily mean alive.

Next, I saw Tom Matthews by the door to the JOC. He had just come back in from the mission. “How many of your guys did we lose, Tom?” I said.

“Two dead and four missing,” he said tightly. I had never seen Tom Matthews upset. Never. Now his jaws were clenched tight and he shotgunned his words out quickly then closed his mouth again as if he didn’t trust his voice not to shake. “We’ve got to find them.”

“We will,” I said. “We
will
.”

Rob Marsh and his medical team were receiving the wounded in a makeshift holding area near the M.A.S.H. tent. Crossing the tarmac, I felt like I was walking toward a nightmare. Dozens of men lay on litters, some awake, some unconscious, bullet holes and shrapnel peppering their flesh. As I knelt and began talking and praying with them, one by one, I saw pain in their faces. Not physical pain, but the pain of losing brothers.

I knelt next to senior NCO Tom Corbett, an old friend and golf buddy of mine.

“How are you feeling, Tom?” Shrapnel had ripped him up pretty good.

“I’m going to be okay, but we’ve got to find these missing guys.”

“We will, Tom. We’ll find them.”

Every man I spoke with was more concerned about our MIAs than about himself. As I talked with them, one part of my brain worked on the next mission phase: What’s our next move? Mogadishu had been a time bomb before; now it was a blood-torn, angry hive. How do we get our guys back?

That afternoon, Garrison, Dave McKnight, and I got in a van and drove to the UN compound. We knew the commanders of some of the other African nations that were part of Restore Hope kept open lines of communication with Aidid. Since they weren’t combatants, this fact was not a foul. Now we intended to use it to send the warlord a message.

The three of us found the headquarters of one of the African commanders. I cut directly to the chase: “If you have any way to pass information to Aidid, you tell him we want our people back,” I said, leaning closer. “You tell him we will not leave Mogadishu until we have them. And tell him that the sooner we get our people back, the fewer of his people will be dead.”

11

THE DAY AFTER THE BATTLE was a flurry of organization, casualty counts, medevacing and regrouping. Delta’s doctor, Rob Marsh, was in the thick of it, blood up to his elbows, his trademark good humor bucking up the wounded.

By then, I knew the full impact of October 3. Against the odds we’d faced—thousands to ninety-nine—the Battle of the Black Sea was a victory on paper. We’d completed our mission. But at a horrific cost. Now my heart felt like a lead weight. We had seventy-six wounded, more than a dozen confirmed dead, and several still missing, including Shughart, Gordon, and the entire Super Six-Four crew. I had seen the bloody pile of bodies in the five-ton truck. Dan Busch was gone. Earl Fillmore was gone. I prayed for Griz Martin, who fought hard, Rob told me. Just when it seemed he had slipped away, Griz would somehow find another reserve, another measure of strength to cling to life. He didn’t make it.

Up to that point, I had focused on what I needed to do as a leader, on showing strength, on comforting and encouraging my men. But now, head down, I stumbled to my trailer, sat on the edge of my bunk and sobbed. I bent forward, elbows on my knees, my face in my hands, tears falling on the floor. But as grief tore lose from my chest, it began transforming into something else: Anger.

Where
were
You!
I prayed.
Why did You let these men down? Why did You abandon us?

Minutes passed. And I realized I had stopped addressing God. I came to a conclusion that hollowed me out inside. If God was real, He would have heard my prayers. If God was real, He wouldn’t have let these good men die.

For twenty-three years I have been living a lie
, I thought.
There is no God
.

12

TOM MATTHEWS AND I were standing in the JOC when CNN broadcast the infamous footage of Somalis dragging two of our guys through the streets. They had ropes tied around the bodies. I could see on the TV screen, one man was nearly naked; the other still had most of a flight suit on. We thought maybe that was Ray Frank. The sight wrenched my gut and seemed to suck the air out of the room. Tom’s eyes burned with pain. His features barely moved, but beneath them I could see the muscles of his face tensed with rage.

CNN played and replayed the images, and I thought of our guys’ families watching the bodies being desecrated over and over again: Somalis poking them with rifles, hooting, and raising their arms in victory as though they were dragging a safari kill through the streets. That an American news company would glorify the desecration of Americans enraged me.

Please, God. Don’t let their families see
.

My crisis of faith had passed. At the moment I sat on my bunk and denied God, I heard the Holy Spirit speak to my heart, saying,
If there is no God, there is no hope
. I didn’t like what had happened. I
hated
what had happened. But I could not justify praising Him for miracles then denying Him in tragedy. I had seen Him at work in the world, and in my own life, too many times for that.

As I sat on my bunk that night and prayed for understanding, I decided to simply open my Bible. Not really looking for anything in particular, I opened it to the book of Proverbs and gazed at a verse I had marked somewhere along the way: “Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding.”

Okay, Lord
, I prayed.
But this is tough
.

While we watched the CNN broadcast in the JOC, the rest of Task Force Ranger watched it in the hangar. We all wanted to go back in and exact revenge, but it wasn’t the right thing to do, and Garrison and I said no to a retaliatory strike: Too many civilian casualties. But we did arrange for Mace to go out into the city undercover. This would be his fourth trip into Mogadishu—his third since hell broke loose. A local NGO (nongovernmental organization) had agreed to discreetly help us look for our men. Mace was going in with them.

The next day, Tom and I were in the JOC again when CNN broadcast new footage. It was a grainy interview with a single man, an American. My heart soared—at least one of our guys was alive!

This man’s face was swollen, misshapen, and streaked with what looked like blood.

“No, I am not a Ranger,” he said to an interviewer off-camera.

“You kill people innocent,” the interviewer said.

“Innocent people being killed is not good,” said the American.

I looked at Tom. “Who
is
that?”

Peering closely at the screen, he said, “That’s Mike Durant.”

But looking at his face on the television screen, I didn’t even recognize him. I would later find out that in addition to the wounds he received in the crash—including a broken leg—the Somalis had struck him in the face with the severed arm of one of his crew chiefs, breaking his cheek and jawbone. They also shot him in the shoulder as he lay in a tiny, dark room tethered by a dog chain.

Watching the interview with Mike, conflicting emotions surged through me. Outrage at the pilot’s condition. Hope that Shughart, Gordon, and the others were alive. And dread that my hope was more like wishful thinking. If the Somalis had more than one prisoner, I was pretty sure they would have put them on camera to gloat.

Our passion became finding Durant. CNN broadcast and rebroadcast his interview footage, and our intel people scoured the scant tape for clues to his location. Durant’s brothers in the 160th desperately wanted Mike to know that we were still out here, that we were turning the city upside down looking for him, that America hadn’t abandoned him. They knew Mike was tough, trained not to break in captivity. Still, seeing his condition on television, they wanted to give him the most important psychological advantage of all: hope.

Tom Matthews came to see me in the JOC. “Let’s get a loudspeaker on one of the helos and let Mike know we’re still trying to find him.”

“Great idea,” I said, and we immediately rounded up the Black Hawk techs, who rigged up the necessary equipment. For the next week, the 160th flew regularly over Mogadishu, broadcasting calls that echoed off the city facades.

“Mike Durant, we will not leave you.”

“Mike Durant, we are with you always.”

13

THE HORROR JUST KEPT ON COMING. On October 5, Tom and I got in a Humvee with Danny McKnight, and Mel Wick, my command sergeant major, and drove out to a lone green tent staked at the other end of the airfield. The field morgue. The Mortuary Affairs unit had set up down there, near the water, and were taking care of the dead. The four of us rumbled in silence across the tarmac and along a crushed shale path. A somber dread pressed in on us, more smothering and oppressive than anything the Somali sun could muster. We knew identifying our dead was our responsibility, but none of us looked forward to the task.

Mel and I had been together since Delta’s founding, and understood each other. We had shared defeat and victory and all the peaks and potholes in between. This, though, was the lowest, most agonizing road we’d ever traveled. The toughest thing I had ever done in my life was to deny that medevac to Corporal Jamie Smith. Now there was a second toughest thing and as we stepped through the flap into the field morgue tent, I was thankful Mel was with me.

Inside, the tent sweltered, lit from the ceiling by hanging steel fixtures. To our right, I could see green body bags on the floor. I was struck by the sheer number of them, lined up in rows like huge, dark tally marks. Two staff sergeants from Mortuary Affairs bent over a body on a gurney.

“We’re here to identify the bodies of those who were killed yesterday,” I said.

“Yes, sir,” said one of the sergeants. Then he stepped aside to show us the man they were working on. “Can you identify this man?”

I willed my face to be still. For a moment, I couldn’t speak as grief gripped my throat. It was Griz Martin. His face was pale and ashen, but for a moment, in my mind’s eye, I could see it full of life again. I could see that big smile he was known for, the one that showed every tooth in his head, and hear his mischievous laugh.

Then I could hear his wife crying. I refocused on Griz as he was now, lying on that table. “That’s Master Sergeant Martin,” I said aloud, steeling my voice.

The mortuary affairs sergeant wrote something on a clipboard. Then the two sergeants led the four of us in among the body bags, unzipping each one just enough to reveal the face of the man inside. Tom identified the men from the 160th, Danny I.D.’d the Rangers, and Mel and I named the men of Delta—Dan Busch, a relatively new operator and a devout Christian; and Earl Fillmore, a fireplug of a man who had been with us in Panama and Grenada, loved life, and volunteered for every tough assignment with a sparkle in his eye. Putting a name, a
personhood
, to their lifeless bodies was my job as their commander. It was a final gesture of respect. But the image of their pale, silent faces still burns in my brain.

Since that day, I have given my officers in Special Forces a talk in which I tell them never to waste training time, never to take short cuts that might result in disaster. “One day, each of you is probably going to have an experience that will stick with you for the rest of your life,” I tell them. “One day, you will go in and open a body bag and look into the ashen face of one of your soldiers. At that point, you will ask yourself a question: Did I do everything I could to make sure this soldier accomplished his mission so that he could go home to his family alive?”

In the years since Somalia, I have asked myself those questions again and again. Heading into Mogadishu, did I take short cuts? No. Did I train my men right, prepare them properly for battle? Yes. Was there something else I could have done to make sure they came home alive? I don’t know.

I look back on the deterioration of the situation and second-guess myself. It has been popular in the newspapers to speculate that we were arrogant, complacent, or both. That is the view of those who were not there. The fact is we never underestimated the Somalis. We constantly changed our operating patterns out of respect for their tactics.

Did I do everything I could have done? I’ll never know. And that is the ugly question I keep locked away in a certain drawer of my heart like a loaded gun.

14

TWO DAYS AFTER what would become known as the Battle of the Black Sea, I walked up to find Matt Rierson standing with Gary outside the hangar near a Conex. Matt was the Delta sergeant who led the successful assault on the target building that was the whole reason for our October 3 operation. Many of the casualties had already been medevaced out, some to Germany, some straight home. Those of us who remained sweated under a merciless Somali sun that bore down on our heads as if it meant to burn the rest of us out of the country.