Mike Durant as he appeared on the videotape shot by his Somali captors the day after he was shot down and taken captive. Courtesy: Cable News Network. Copyright © 1998 Cable News Network, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
View from a Black Hawk doorway over one corner of Mogadishu’s Bakara Market. Courtesy: Lance Twombly.
Enraged Somalis drag the body of Black Hawk crew chief Bill Cleveland through the streets of Mogadishu the morning after the battle. Courtesy: Paul Watson/The Toronto Star.
Michael Durant heard the guns of the giant rescue convoy roaring into the city. The injured Black Hawk pilot was flat on his back bound with a dog chain on a cool tile floor in a small octagonal room with no windows. Air, moonlight, and sounds filtered in through a pattern of crosses cut high in the upper third of the concrete walls. He tasted dust in the air and he smelled of blood and gunpowder and sweat. The room had no furniture and only one door, which was closed.
When the angry mob had closed over him, he thought he was going to die. He still did not know the fate of the three other men on his crew, copilot Ray Frank and crew chiefs Tommy Field and Bill Cleveland, or of the two D-boys who had tried to protect them. Durant did not know those men’s names.
He had passed out when the mob carried him off. He’d felt himself leaving his body, watching the scene from outside himself, and at the worst of the chaos and terror it had calmed him. But the feeling hadn’t lasted. He’d come to when he was thrown into the back of a flatbed truck with a rag tied around his head, surprised to still be alive and expecting at any moment to die. He was driven around. The truck would go and then stop, go and then stop. He guessed it was about three hours after the crash when they’d brought him to this place, removed the rag, and wrapped his hands with the chain.
What Durant didn’t know was that he had been taken from the first group of Somalis who seized him. Yousef Dahir Mo’alim, the neighborhood militia leader who had spared him from the attacking crowd after it had overwhelmed and killed the others, had intended to carry Durant back to his village and turn him over to leaders of the Habr Gidr. As they’d left the crash site, however, they were stopped by a better-armed band of maverick mooryan, who had a technical with a big gun in back. This group considered the injured pilot not a war prisoner to be swapped for captured clan leaders, but a hostage. They knew somebody would pay money to get him back. Mo’alim’s men were outnumbered and outgunned, so they’d reluctantly given Durant up. This was the way things were in Mogadishu. If Aidid wanted the pilot back, he would have to fight for him, or pay.
Durant’s right leg ached where the femur was broken and he could feel the ooze of blood inside his pants where one end of the broken bone had pushed through his skin in the manhandling. It did not hurt that badly. He didn’t know if that was good or bad. He was still alive, so the bone had not punctured an artery. His back was what really bothered him. He figured he’d crushed a vertebrae in the crash.
He managed to work one hand free of the chain. He was sweating so his hand slid out easily when he relaxed it. It gave him his first sense of triumph. He had fought back in some small way. He could wipe the dirt from his nose and eyes and straighten his broken leg somewhat and get a little more comfortable. Then he wrapped his hand back into the chain so that he still appeared to be bound.
At one point he heard several armored vehicles roll right past outside. He heard shooting and thought he was about to be rescued, or killed. There was a furious firefight. He heard the low pounding of a Mark 19 automatic grenade launcher and the explosion of what sounded like TOW missiles. He had never been at the receiving end of a barrage and he was shaken by how powerful and frightening it was. The explosions came closer and closer. The Skinnies holding him grew more and more agitated. They were all young men with weapons that looked rusty and poorly maintained. He listened to them shouting at each other, arguing. Several times one or more barged into the room to threaten him. One of the men spoke some English. He said, “You kill Somalis. You die Somalia, Ranger.”
Durant couldn’t understand the rest of their words but he gathered they would shoot him before letting the approaching Americans take him back.
He listened to the pitched battle with hope and fear. Then the sounds marched off and faded. He felt disappointed, despite the danger. They had been so close!
Then a gun barrel poked around the door. Just the black barrel. Durant caught the motion in the corner of his eye and turned his head just as it flamed and the room rang with a shot. He felt the impact in his left shoulder and his left leg. Eyeing his shoulder, he saw blood and the back end of a bullet protruding from his skin. It evidently had hit the floor first and had ricocheted into him without enough force to fully penetrate. A bit of shrapnel had punctured his leg.
He slid his hand from the chain and tried to wrench the bullet from his shoulder. It was an automatic move, a reflex, but when his fingers touched it they sizzled and he winced with pain. It was still hot. It had burned his fingertips.
He thought: Lesson learned; wait until it cools down.
Word of the big fight in Mogadishu reached Washington early Sunday. General Garrison had received a call several hours into the battle from General Wayne Downing, an old friend who was commander in chief of U.S. Special Operations Command. Downing had come to his office at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa after a morning jog, and had decided to ring up his friend in Mogadishu to see how things were going. This was about two hours into the fight. Garrison quickly summarized what had happened so far: There had been a successful mission, two of Aidid’s lieutenants and a slew of lesser lights had been captured, but two helicopters were down, lots of lead was flying, and the boys were still in the thick of it. Downing asked Garrison if there was anything he could do right away, and then got off the phone. The last thing his friend needed at that moment was some desk jockey thirteen thousand miles away looking over his shoulder.
Downing spread the word. National Security Adviser Tony Lake was given the bare outline at the White House that morning, two Aidid lieutenants captured, two helicopters down, rescue operation underway. Lake was more preoccupied just then with events in Moscow, where Russian President Boris Yeltsin was fending off a right-wing coup d’état. President Clinton did not mention Mogadishu at a press conference that morning, which took place at the same time Task Force Ranger was pinned down around the first crash site. Clinton and the rest of America remained ignorant of the drama in faraway Mogadishu. After the press conference, the president flew to San Francisco for a planned two-day speaking tour.
Garrison’s move back into the city came with crushing force. If Aidid wanted to play, the U.S. Army would play. Centered around twenty-eight Malaysian APCs and four Pakistani tanks, the convoy numbered almost a hundred vehicles and was nearly two miles long, with enough firepower to blaze their own roads if necessary. Lieutenant Colonel Bill David was given responsibility for quickly assembling this force at the New Port, about two miles up the coast from the Ranger base.
David’s reaction, upon being handed this assignment, was, You’ve got to be kidding me. His own men, two 10th Mountain Division rifle companies, three hundred men strong, had amassed at the airport. David’s Charlie Company, the “Tigers,” had taken some light casualties at the K-4 circle ambush trying to get to Durant’s crash site, but they were otherwise fresh and eager to join the fight. They’d been joined by Alpha Company, under the command of Captain Drew Meyerowich. The armor would be nice, but what was David going to do with Malaysians and Pakistanis? He huddled with General Gile, second in command of the 10th. They agreed that once their men linked up with the foreign troops at the New Port, they would ask the Malaysians to take their own infantry out of the APCs and fill them with American troops. It would be, Thank you very much, we’ll take your vehicles and drivers, but we don’t need your men. David could sense how that was going to go over.
“Do these guys speak English?” he asked.
Most of the officers spoke some, Gile said, and there would be liaison officers to help smooth the process.
David had walked out of the JOC with his head spinning. The forty-year-old career army officer (West Point, Class of ’75) from St. Louis, Missouri, had just been handed the assignment of a lifetime. He had been in Mogadishu for two months, commanding a battalion of peacekeepers there to back up the UN forces. He’d never been particularly happy about the presence of Garrison’s Task Force Ranger, which had flown in and begun its own secret missions independent of the force structure already in place. Regular army units both admire and resent the elite special forces. The conventional divisions don’t get nearly as much money to train, or the choice assignments. Watching Task Force Ranger move into Mogadishu and steal their thunder was not easy for the proud officers and men of the 10th, which has its own distinguished battle history. Since the daring mission had gone bad, it was easy to regard it as foolhardy—What were they doing in Aidid’s notorious Black Sea neighborhood in broad daylight? Where was the reserve force? Now David and his men, sometimes scorned by the elite forces, were charged with pulling Delta’s and the Rangers’ asses out of the fire.
He had to move his men, along with what was now called the “Cook Platoon,” volunteers combined with the remnants of the original assault forces, north to the New Port, negotiate with the Malaysians and Pakistanis, develop a plan, and then allow for his subordinates to disseminate it up and down the giant convoy. Then he had to steer them out into the city and keep it all together in the dark as they battled their way to the two crash sites.
While the commanders were working up this plan, the Rangers assigned to the rescue column fretted and paced. Their buddies were still trapped out there! Those who had already been in the fight knew how terrible the battle had become. The uninjured had helped move their wounded and dead buddies from the lost convoy’s Humvees and trucks to the field hospital, where Dr. Marsh and his team of doctors and nurses were furiously working to save their lives. The Rangers known to be dead were Pilla, Cavaco, and Joyce. In bad shape were Blackburn, Ruiz, Adalberto Rodriguez, and the Delta operator Griz Martin. There were dozens more injured. It was a ghastly scene. Even those soldiers who had not been hurt were so blood-splattered they looked injured.
Some of the medical aides approached Sergeant Eversmann, who had commanded Chalk Four and come out with his men on the lost convoy. Eversmann was unhurt, but most of the men on his chalk had been hit. On the ride out, he had been sandwiched on the back of a Humvee with the wounded, so his uniform was caked with blood. As he stood by now, helping to unload them, two medics grabbed him and began cutting off his pants.
“Leave me alone!” he said. “I’m okay!”
They paid him no mind. Some of the men who were really wounded protested in the same way.
“Look, I’m fine. Work on them!” he shouted, pointing to men who were waiting for attention.
Eversmann was losing it. He’d been through a lot this day, and just the sight of all this blood, and all those mangled men—his men!—dismayed him. It was hard to stay even. He was venting on the nurses and medics when one, an older man, pulled him aside.
“Sergeant, what’s your name?”
“Well, Matt, listen. You need to calm down.”
“Roger.”
“We are going to take care of these guys. They’re going to be fine. You just need to calm down.”
“I am calm,” shouted Eversmann, who clearly was not. “I just want you to take care of them!”
“What these guys need right now from you is to see you being a stand-up guy. Don’t let them see you being nervous because that just makes them nervous.”
Eversmann realized he was making a fool of himself.
“Okay,” he said.
He stood helplessly for a few moments, turned, and walked slowly back to the hangar. It was hard to remove himself from the emotions of the fight. He felt himself in a kind of aftershock. Having to identify the dead was chilling. Casey Joyce was one of his men. He’d last seen Joyce when he ran off with the litter carrying Blackburn back to the convoy. He’d lost track of him after that. Now he saw his face pale and stretched with the life drained out. During the fight there hadn’t been time to react to the terror or even to recoil at what was grotesque. Now it all sank in.
It helped when Lieutenant Colonel McKnight asked him to reinforce perimeter security at the airport. There were fears that with all the fighting, Aidid might try storming the base. So Eversmann packed his brooding away and went to work. He still had six men from his chalk who were able.
The stitches on Specialist Sizemore’s elbow, where he had earlier cut off his cast to join the fight, were open and bleeding, but he waved the nurses away. He didn’t want to be sidelined again. He was haunted by images of his buddies out there in the city under siege, waiting for him. He was angry, and like many of his Ranger buddies, he wanted revenge. He thought about Stebbins, who had taken his place on the bird, and was infuriated that the company clerk was out there in his place. He had to get out there. What was holding things up? Sizemore was pacing around the waiting Humvees when a D-boy approached and asked, “Anybody here know Alphabet?”
Sizemore said he did. They walked together through the gate and past the hospital tent to the fire station. Behind it the minibunker of sandbags built by Sergeant Rymes was now covered by a white sheet. The sergeant lifted the sheet. Inside was Kowalewski’s body with the RPG still embedded in his torso.
“Is this Kowalewski?” the D-boy asked.
Sizemore nodded, or he thought he did. He was stunned. The D-boy asked him again.
“Is this Kowalewski?”
“Yes, that’s him.”
Lanky Steve Anderson tried to motivate himself for going back out. He had gone out the first time reluctantly. The events of the day so far had stirred up a mess of strong feelings, but anger predominated. Until today Anderson had been as gung ho as the rest of the guys, but now, seeing all the dead and wounded, he just felt used and stupid. His life was being put at risk and he was being thrust into a situation where he had to shoot and kill people in order to survive ... and it was hard to see why. How could some politicians in Washington take men like him and put them in such a position, guys who are young, naive, patriotic, and eager to do the right thing, and take advantage of all that for no good reason?
He listened to one of his buddies, Private Kevin Matthews, who had been in the small Humvee column when Pilla was killed and had gone back out with the first rescue convoy. Matthews was going on about this guy he had killed out on the street a few hours before, about how the man shook as five, ten, fifteen rounds slammed into him, and it sounded to Anderson like Matthews was bragging. Except, as he listened more, he saw that the young private was actually upset and was going on because he just needed to talk about what had happened. Matthews was trembling. He wanted to be reassured that he had done the right thing.
“What else could you do?” Anderson said.
Anderson had just talked to his parents the night before back in Illinois, and he’d told them everything was okay, nothing was happening, and probably nothing would. And now, this.
* * *
An effort was launched to identify men who could drive the five-ton trucks wearing NODs. The night vision goggles blocked all peripheral vision and sharply foreshortened the view. It took time to get used to driving with them. Specialist Peter Squeglia, the company armorer, had some experience riding a motorcycle wearing NODs, so one of the lieutenants asked him to take a truck.
“Sir, if you’re telling me to drive it, I’ll drive it. But I’ve never driven a truck before.”
The idea of grinding gears and stalling out in the middle of a gun-fight, where one stalled vehicle can hold up an entire column, or, worse, get left behind, terrified Squeglia. The lieutenant made a face, and walked off to find someone else. Squeglia went back to collecting weapons off the dead and wounded. Later he would clean and repair them. For now he just piled them next to his cot, a heap of blood-smeared steel. The lieutenant’s expression left Squeglia feeling deflated and guilty. Everybody was scared. Some guys were frantic to join the fight while others were looking for a way to avoid going out. Squeglia was somewhere in the middle. After what he had seen of the lost convoy, part of him felt like going out into that city was like committing suicide. It was crazy, but they had to do it. They were going to load Rangers on the back of flatbed trucks lined with sandbags that weren’t going to stop a damn thing, and roll them out into the streets where every one of these skinny Somali motherfuckers was trying to kill them, and for what? At least the Malaysians had armored vehicles. Squeglia was going to go. He was going to do his part, but he wasn’t going to do anything foolish, like decide to learn how to drive a big truck in the middle of a firefight.
When it came time to climb aboard, Squeglia picked up his pistol and his CAR-15, which he had rigged with an M-203 grenade launcher. He made sure he got in the truck after most of the others. He figured the safest spot in the flatbed, if anyplace was safe, was toward the rear where the spare tire and muffler came up. He crouched down behind that. Maybe it would stop something. The sandbags certainly wouldn’t.
Just before the convoy left the base, Specialist Chris Schleif dashed back into the hangar, rooted through Squeglia’s pile of weapons, and fished out Dominic Pilla’s M-60 and ammo. The gun and ammo can were still slick with Pilla’s blood and brain matter. Schleif ditched his own weapon and boarded the Humvee with Pilla’s.
“He didn’t get a chance to kill anybody with it,” Schleif explained to Specialist Brad Thomas, who like Schleif was heading back out into the city for the third time. “I’m going to do it for him.”
It was 9:30 P.M. when the rescue force left the airport and drove north to the New Port to link up with the Malaysians and Pakistanis. Most of the Rangers, all of the D-boys, SEALs, and air force combat controllers who hadn’t been killed or injured, and both companies of the 10th Mountain Division made up a force of nearly five hundred men. Waiting for them there were the Malaysian APCs, German-made “Condors,” rolling steel Dumpsters painted snow white with a driver in front and a porthole in the back for a gunner. Each was built to hold about six men. The Paki tanks were American-made M-48s. The armor was lined up and ready to go when the long convoy of trucks and Humvees arrived, but coordinating movement of this strange collection of vehicles—Lieutenant Colonel David called it a “gagglefuck”—was going to take more time.
He plunged right into it. With a map spread out on the hood of his Humvee, and with soldiers gathered around holding up flashlights to illuminate it, he began improvising a plan. To David’s relief, most of the Malaysian and Pakistani officers spoke English. There was little argument or discussion. The Malaysian officers at first balked at removing their infantry from the APCs, but relented when David agreed to let each vehicle retain a Malaysian driver and gunner. The various units did not have radios that were compatible, so American radios had to be placed with all the vehicles. They worked out fire control procedures, steps to prevent friendly fire incidents, call signs, the route, and a host of other critical issues.
David felt a sense of urgency, but not an overriding one. He knew there were critically injured soldiers at the first crash site for whom every minute was important. On the other hand, this convoy was it. If they screwed up, failed to reach the crash site, and got broken up or bogged down, who was going to come in and rescue them? If one or two soldiers died waiting it would be tragic, but rescuing the other ninety-seven men, and getting his own in and out safely, had to be the priority.
To the Rangers and the 10th Mountain Division soldiers eyeing the Condors for the first time, they looked like caskets on wheels. Choosing between the APCs and the sandbagged five-ton trucks was like choosing your poison: You could get riddled with bullets in the back of a flatbed or toasted by a grenade dropped into the turret or poked through the skin of an APC. The men reluctantly began to board the Condors an hour or so after they’d arrived at the New Port. There were only little peepholes in the sides, so most of the force would be riding blind. The idea of being driven out by Malaysians didn’t make them feel any better.
As the hours crept by without action, the Rangers stewed with impatience. As they saw it, they were being held back by this slow-moving, by-the-book regular army unit that didn’t fully appreciate the urgency of the situation. Further back in the column it looked like nothing was being done. Some of the 10th Mountain guys were dozing in the back of vehicles. Sleeping! Ranger Sergeant Raleigh Cash couldn’t contain himself. His buddies were dying out in the city and these guys were taking naps? Why the hell weren’t they moving? He had made peace with himself riding out with the cook convoy in that aborted effort to rescue Durant and his crew. If he was going to die today, so be it. The pull of loyalty felt stronger in him than the will to survive. He had thought it through methodically. He was wearing body armor, so if he got shot, it would probably be to the arms or legs and there were medics who would take care of him. It would hurt, but he had been hurt before. If he was shot in the head, then he would die. He wouldn’t feel any pain. His life would just be over. Just like that. The end. His friends would take care of his family for him. If he died then that was what was meant to happen.
When word came that Smith was dead, that he had bled out waiting for rescue, Cash lost it. He vented his anger and impatience on a 10th Mountain Division officer. He told the officer that before the Rangers had gotten saddled with his unit they’d had no trouble finding the fight.
“Look, we’re not holding things up,” the officer protested. “We’re ready to go just as much as you are. You have to have a little faith in your leaders.”
“It’s taking too long,” Cash said, his voice rising with anger. “My friends are dying out there! We need to get going now!”
Cash’s platoon leader came over and quieted him.
“Look, we all want to get going.”
By about 11 P.M., David had the “gagglefuck” set to go, and was feeling pretty good about it. He regarded the organizational effort as one of his major life accomplishments. The Paki tanks would lead the convoy out into the city. Behind them, each platoon would have four APCs interspersed with trucks and Humvees. The QRF’s Cobra gunships would provide air support. They’d roll out to a staging point on National Street, then one half of the force would steer south toward Durant’s Super Six Four crash site and the other would push north to Wolcott’s Super Six One, where the bulk of the task force was pinned down. They had commo links established, liaison officers dispersed throughout the convoy ... they were good to go.
Then one of the Pakistani officers ran up. His commander objected to the tanks leading the convoy. This was a problem because tanks were needed to plow through the formidable barricades (ditches, abandoned shells of cars and trucks, heaps of stone, burning tires and debris) the Somalis had erected to block most of the main roads leading out of the UN facilities. Since the New Port was home base for the Pakis, and they were the ones who had proposed the route to the holding point, a compromise was reached. The tanks would lead the way out to the K-4 circle, then fall back to the midfront of the column.
Then new problems surfaced. It was easy to see how, with enough commanders, a battle could be debated into defeat. After conferring with their superiors, the Malaysians said they had been ordered to keep their APCs on the main roads, for the same reason that Garrison had earlier judged Mogadishu the wrong place to fight with armor. It was hard for tanks and APCs to maneuver in the city’s complex web of narrow streets and alleys. The big vehicles were vulnerable when they moved slowly through streets where the enemy could creep up close or drop grenades down from rooftops and trees, or fire armor-piercing rounds at close range.
David got back out of his Humvee and huddled with the officers again. He told Captain Meyerowich, “Look, Drew, here’s the situation. I need for your company to lead us out.”
The Pakistanis agreed to lead the convoy as far as the K-4 circle, which was the borderline of Aidid’s turf. At that point Meyerowich’s company, most of them riding in the Condors, would pull through and take the lead.
It was now 11:23 P.M.
As he heard the guns of the giant convoy approaching, Captain Steele knew this was the most dangerous time of the night. The moon was high and shooting in the neighborhood around the first crash site had all but stopped. There were a few pops every once in a while. The air had cleared of smoke and gunpowder. Now there was just that musky stink of Somalia, the trace of desert dust in the air, and the slight aftertaste of the iodine pills in their canteens. Sammies would still inexplicably wander right into the middle of their perimeter up the street. The D-boys would let them walk until they reached a cross-fire zone and then drop them with a few quick shots. Every once in a while the Little Birds would rumble in and unleash a rocket and spray of minigun fire. But now the only noise that concerned Steele was the intensifying thunder of guns as the rescue column moved closer to their position. With that much shooting, with two jumpy elements of soldiers about to link up in a confusing city in darkness, the biggest threat to his pinned-down men were their rescuers.
—Romeo Six Four [Harrell], this is Juliet Six Four [Steele]. How we gonna keep from running out of the building and getting smoked?
—They’re looking for your position to be marked with an IR strobe. If there’s any doubt in your mind, flash a red desert flashlight at them.
Up the street, Captain Miller had his own concerns.
—Okay, this task force is made up of Malaysians and who, over?
—Malaysians and Americans. They have Rangers with them, over.
Miller added hopefully:
—Okay, so every vehicle should have some type of NODs so they can ID the strobe, over?
—That was the instruction sent back, over.
Then, a few minutes later, the command helicopter reassured Miller.
—Yeah, they’re moving. The lead element has night vision devices so they should be able to pick up your IR strobe, Scotty, over.
Miller was also informed that members of the Delta unit, including Major James Nixon, John Macejunas, Matt Rierson, and Chuck Esswein, would be leading the column in, which to him and the other Delta team leaders was an enormous relief.
The rescue convoy was coming from the south. By the sound of it, they were moving along the same route the Rangers and D-boys had taken that afternoon, east from the Olympic Hotel, which meant they would reach Steele’s position first. They were coming steadily but slowly, and from the sound of it they were just shooting at everything. It was about ten minutes before two in the morning. Without the NODs nobody could see that far down the street. They just had to hunker down and wait and hope the convoy did not come blasting its way down the middle of their street.
—Romeo Six Four, this is Juliet Six Four. We’re going to put IR strobes out in front of the buildings here. We plan on throwing a red Chemlite as well to mark for casualties. If we can have the APCs pull in as close to those red chems as possible that will facilitate the loading of the casualties, over.
—Roger, but you better be real careful with those red Chemlites or the bad guys will start shooting at them, over.
—Okay, but you’re saying all the guys will have NODs, right?
—They’ve got people in the lead element with NODs and they should be homing in on your IR strobes, over.
It was tense. Nearly an hour had gone by since Steele had been told the convoy would reach him in twenty minutes.
—Romeo, this is Juliet. I understand now they may have turned north. The ground reaction force turned north. Do they have an ETA at this location?
—No, they are moving slowly, taking their time. It is going to take them a while, Mike. Probably fifteen to twenty minutes based on where I think they are, over.
—Okay. We are fairly secure here. I think the Little Bird runs dampened the rebels’ spirits.
Word came from the command helicopter at about two o’clock.
—Okay, start getting ready to get out of there, but keep your heads down. Now is a bad time.
—Roger, copy. Positions are marked at this time. We are ready to move, said Steele.
—Roger, they are going to be coming in with heavy contact so be real careful.
—You better believe it, over.
“We’re about to link up,” Steele radioed Perino. “I want everybody to back up out of the courtyards, and to stay away from the doors and windows.”
So the Rangers drew back like hermit crabs into their shells, and listened. They were all terrified of the 10th Mountain Division, whom they regarded as poorly trained regular army schmoes, just a small step removed from utterly incompetent civilianhood.
Five minutes passed. Ten minutes passed. Twenty minutes passed. Then another radio call from the command bird.
—Just to give you an update. They are still at that U-turn off. They had a little bit of a direction problem amongst themselves. They should be moving now. Will let you know as soon as they start rolling northbound.
Perino called Captain Steele. “Where are they?” he asked.
Steele said, “Any minute now.”
Both men laughed.
Captain Drew Meyerowich was with the Delta operators who were leading his portion of the rescue convoy toward Steele and Miller’s position. It had been a pitched battle much of the way in. Two of the Malaysian drivers had taken a wrong turn and driven about thirty of Meyerowich’s men off in the wrong direction. They’d been ambushed and caught up in a severe firefight, and one of their men, Sergeant Cornell Houston, had been mortally wounded.
For all his careful planning, Specialist Squeglia ended up in a Humvee. The banging of gunfire was constant, most if it coming from the convoy, which stretched so far in both directions Squeglia could not see the front or rear. No one had lights on, but muzzle flashes and explosions lit up the whole line. In the reflected light he saw two dead donkeys by the side of the road, still strapped to carts. The air was filled with diesel fumes, and through the open side window of the Humvee Squeglia smelled the gunpowder from his weapon mingled with the burning tires and trash and the general pungent, rotten smell of Somalia itself. He was out in it now.
In a sudden volley of gunfire an RPG bounced off the hood. The explosion a few feet away sounded like somebody had dropped an empty Dumpster off a roof. Squeglia felt the concussion like a blow to the inside of his chest, and then smelled smoke. Everybody had ducked at the blast.
“Holy shit, what was that?” shouted Specialist David Eastabrooks, who was driving.
“Jesus,” said Sergeant Richard Lamb, who was in the front passenger seat. “I think I’ve been hit.”
“Where you hit?” Squeglia asked.
“In the head.”
“Oh, Jesus.”
One of the men in the Humvee fished out a red light flashlight, and they shined it on Lamb. He had a trickle of blood running down his face and a neat hole, a small one, right in the middle of his forehead.
“I think I’m okay,” Lamb said. “I’m still talking to you.”
He wrapped a bandage around his head. Doctors would later determine that a piece of shrapnel had lodged between the frontal lobes of his brain, missing vital tissues by fractions of an inch in either direction. He was all right. It felt like he had just banged his head. It hurt lots worse minutes later when he took a bullet to his right pinkie, which left the tip of it hanging by a piece of skin. Squeglia could see the bone of his finger jutting from the mangled flesh. Lamb just swore and stuck the fingertip back on, wrapped it with a piece of duct tape, and continued working his radio.
All the way out from the base, Specialist Dale Sizemore was shooting. He’d cut the cast off his arm to join the fight, and at last he was in it. Night vision gave him and the other men on this massive column a tremendous advantage over the Somalis. Sizemore spread out on his stomach in the back of the Humvee just looking for people to shoot. When there weren’t people he shot at windows and doorways. Most of the time he couldn’t see whether he’d hit anybody or not. The NODs severely restricted peripheral vision. He didn’t want to know, really. He didn’t want to start thinking about it.
At one point a spray of sparks flew up in his face. He turned his head to discover a fist-sized hole in the Humvee wall just inches from his head. He hadn’t felt a thing. When an RPG hit one of the trucks ahead, men came running down the street looking for space on the Humvees as tracers flew. One, Specialist Erik James, a medic, approached Sizemore’s open back hatch carrying a Kevlar blanket.
“You got room?” he asked. He looked dazed and scared.
Sizemore and Private Brian Conner moved over to make a space for him.
“Just get in here and keep that blanket over your head and you’ll be all right,” said Sizemore. He figured it was always a good idea to have a medic close by. James felt Sizemore had just saved his life.
Specialist Steve Anderson was in a Humvee near Sizemore’s in the column. He was in the back on the driver’s side with his eyes pressed to the night-vision viewfinder on his SAW. Whenever the column stopped, which was often, everyone was expected to pile out and pull security. The first time they stopped Anderson hesitated. He didn’t want to stick his legs out of the car. He had just started skydiving lessons at home before this deployment, and now, suddenly, he felt immobilized by the particular fear of being shot in the legs—he’d received a minor injury to his legs on an earlier mission. Back home he had just made his first freefall jump. It had been such a thrill. What if he got his foot shot off and could never jump again? Anderson reluctantly forced himself out on the street.
At one stop he and Sizemore stood for a long time, it seemed like hours, watching the windows of a three-story building for some sign of a shooter. They had been there for a time when Anderson noticed a dent and scrape on the roof of the Humvee right next to them. A round had ricocheted off it.
“Did you notice that before?” he asked Sizemore.
Sizemore hadn’t. It hadn’t been there when they got out either. Which meant a bullet had passed between them, missing them both by inches, without their even knowing it.
That was the way Anderson felt most of the time. Totally in the dark. He saw tracers and there were times the gunfire was so loud the night seemed ready to split at the seams, but he could never seem to tell where it was coming from, or find anyone to shoot. Sizemore, on the other hand, was going through ammunition as fast as he could load his weapon. Anderson was in awe of his friend’s confidence and selflessness, and felt both inspired and diminished by it.
Sizemore unloaded what must have been a full drum of ammo at the front of a building about fifty feet away. When he was done, Anderson could see rounds glowing and smoldering from the ground where he had been shooting, which meant he must have hit something. When rounds hit the ground or street or a building, they deflected off in other directions. But when they hit flesh, they would glow for a few moments.
“Didn’t you see them?” Sizemore asked Anderson. “There was a whole bunch of them there, shooting at us.”
Anderson hadn’t noticed. He felt completely out of his element. Minutes later he noticed another dent and scrape on the top of the Humvee, right alongside the first one. He hoped his buddy had silenced the gun that put it there.
At one stop on a wide street, when Anderson and the men in his Humvee were positioned near a two-story building, a Malaysian APC pulled up about twenty feet behind them and its machine gunner opened fire. He was shooting at the roof of the building alongside Anderson. The rounds traced red lines through the darkness, so Anderson could follow their trajectory, and they were all bouncing off the building next to him. The wall was made of irregular stone. Any one of those rounds could easily come his way. There was nothing he could do but watch. One of the rounds hit the building and then traced a wicked arc across the street like a curveball.
Private Ed Kallman was somewhere else along the giant convoy, driving again, equally amazed by the light show. Kallman’s left arm and shoulder were massively bruised from the unexploded RPG that had hit the door of his Humvee the previous afternoon and knocked him cold. He felt fine, excited again, and reasonably safe in such a massive force. There would be long periods of relative quiet, then suddenly the night would explode with light and noise. One or two shots from the dark houses or alleys on both sides of the street would trigger a violent explosion of return fire from the column. Up and down the line tracers splashed out from the long line, literally thousands of rounds in seconds, just hosing down whole blocks of homes. His NODs framed the scene in a circle and offered little depth perception. It also gave off heat just a half inch from his face that after a while started to bother his eyes. Then he would take a break and just look straight down or off to the side.
They eventually stopped and waited in the same spot for several hours. Kallman was asked to pull his Humvee back down the road, about a half block, which he did, and no sooner had he moved than an RPG exploded on what looked like the spot he had just left. He and others in his vehicle laughed. An explosion on the wall above sent a shower of debris down on them. No one was hurt. Kallman moved the Humvee forward a few feet just to make sure it wasn’t stuck.
Through the remainder of the night he just listened to the radio, trying to make sense out of the constant chatter, trying to figure out what was going on.
Ahead of them in the long column, Sergeant Jeff Struecker was shocked by all the shooting. He had heard a sergeant major from the 10th Mountain Division telling his men before they left, “This is for real. You shoot at anything,” and clearly these guys had taken him seriously.
Streucker had warned his own gunner to pick targets carefully. “When you shoot that fifty cal, that round goes on forever,” the sergeant explained. It was clear the rest of the convoy was not taking such precautions. They were throwing lead all over that part of Mogadishu.
Earlier in the day, the American helicopters had attacked the garage of Kassim Sheik Mohamed, a tall, beefy businessman with a round face, a swaggering walk, and a troublemaker’s smile. Kassim’s garage was bombed because he had, being a wealthy man, a fairly large number of armed men guarding it. At the height of the battle, any large number of well-armed Somalis in the vicinity of the fight was a target. The attack was not too misdirected. Kassim was a well-to-do member of the Habr Gidr and a supporter of Mohamed Farah Aidid.
When the bombing started, Kassim ran to a nearby hospital, figuring it was a place the Americans would not attack. He stayed there for two hours. When he returned to his garage, much of it was a smoldering ruin. An explosion had flipped a white UN Land Rover Kassim had purchased about twelve feet into the air and deposited it upright atop a stack of steel shipment boxes, as though someone had parked it up there. Some of his most valuable earthmoving equipment was destroyed. Dead was his friend and accountant, forty-two-year-old Ahmad Sheik, and one of his mechanics, thirty-two-year-old Ismael Ahmed.
It was late in the day, and the dead, according to Islamic law, needed to be buried before sundown, so Kassim and his men took the bodies to Trabuna Cemetery. On their way there, a helicopter swooped down low over them and fired rounds that hit all around the car but missed them.
The cemetery was crowded with wailing people. In the darkness, as the guns of the fight still pounded in the distance, every open space was crowded with people digging graves. Kassim and his men drove to one of the only quiet corners. They took shovels and the two bodies from the back of their cars and began carrying them. Then another American helicopter came down, frightening them, so they dropped the bodies and shovels and ran.
They hid behind a wall until the helicopter was gone, and then went back out and picked up the bodies, which were wrapped in sheets, and continued carrying them. Another helicopter zoomed in low over them. Again they dropped the bodies and shovels and ran to the wall. This time they left the bodies of Ahmad Sheik and Ismael Ahmed and drove away, agreeing to come back later in the night to bury them.
Four of Kassim’s men came back at about midnight. The guns still pounded out in the city. They carried the bodies up to a small rise and began digging. But another American helicopter appeared, hovering low and shining a floodlight down. Kassim’s men ran, leaving the bodies on the ground.
They returned at three in the morning and were finally able to bury Ahmad Sheik and Ismael Ahmed.
Half of the rescue convoy had steered south to Durant’s crash site, but had gotten stalled on the outskirts of the ghettolike village of rag and tin huts where Super Six Four had gone down. In darkness, the unmapped maze of footpaths leading into the village looked potentially deadly—it was like probing directly into the heart of the hornet’s nest. Sergeant John “Mace” Macejunas, the fearless blond Delta operator, on his third trip out into the city, slipped off a Humvee and personally led a small force on foot, wearing NODS and feeling his way into the village toward the wrecked helicopter, where hours before Mace’s buddies Randy Shughart and Gary Gordon had made their last stand.
Around the wreckage they found pools and trails of blood, torn bits of clothing, and many spent bullet shells, but no weapons and no sign of their buddies Shughart and Gordon, nor of Durant and the three other crew members. The soldiers searched the huts around the crash site, demanding information about the downed Americans through a translator, but no one offered any. Risking drawing fire, they bellowed into the night the names of all six of the missing men: “Michael Durant!” “Ray Frank!” “Bill Cleveland!” “Tommie Field!” “Randy Shughart!” “Gary Gordon!” There was only silence.
Macejunas then supervised the setting of thermite grenades on the helicopter. They stayed until Super Six Four was a ball of white flame, and then returned to the convoy.
Meyerowich’s northern half of the convoy had been delayed by a big roadblock on Hawlwadig Road up near the Olympic Hotel, which the Malaysian drivers refused to roll through. In the past, such roadblocks had been heavily mined.
Meyerowich pleaded with the liaison officer. “Tell them small arms fire is ineffective against them!” he said.
Once or twice he got out of his Humvee and walked up to the lead APC and shouted, waving his arms, urging the vehicle forward. But the Condor drivers refused to proceed. So the convoy was stalled while soldiers climbed off the vehicles and dismantled the roadblock by hand.
Meyerowich and the D-boys decided not to wait for the roadblock situation to be sorted out. They ran up and down the line of vehicles banging on the doors, shouting for all the men to pile out of the vehicles. They knew they were only blocks from the pinned-down force.
“Get out! Get out! Get out! Americans, get out!”
One of those who emerged warily was Specialist Phil Lepre. Earlier in the ride out, when the shooting got heavy and rounds were pinging off the sides of the APC, Lepre had removed a snapshot of his baby daughter he carried in his helmet and kissed it good-bye. “Babe,” he said, “I hope you have a wonderful life.” He stepped out now into the Mogadishu night, ran to a wall with two other soldiers, and pointed his M-16 down an alley. When his eyes adjusted to the darkness he saw a group of Somalis a few blocks down, edging their way toward him.
“I’ve got Somalians coming down this way!” he said.
One of the D-boys told him to shoot, so Lepre fired down toward the crowd. First he shot over their heads, but when they didn’t disperse he fired straight into them. He saw several fall. The others dragged them off the alley.
Out in the intersection, soldiers were pulling apart the barricade by hand under heavy fire. Lepre moved once or twice up the road with the rest of the men. They were spread out now on both sides of an alley a few blocks ahead of the APCs. They would move, stop, and wait, then move again, like parts of a human accordion slinking its way east. At one of the places where they stopped they began taking heavy fire from a nearby building. Men moved to take better cover and find an improved vantage to return fire.
“Hey, take my position,” he called back to twenty-three-year-old rifleman Private James Martin.
Martin hustled up and crouched behind the wall. Lepre had moved only two steps to his right when Martin was hit in the head by a round that sent him sprawling backward. Lepre saw a small hole in his forehead.
Lepre’s voice joined others shouting, “Medic! We need a medic up here!”
A medic swooped over the downed man and began loosening his clothes to help prevent shock. He worked on Martin a few minutes, then turned to Lepre and the others and said, “He’s dead.”
The medic and another soldier tried to drag Martin’s body to cover but were scattered by more gunfire. One of them ran back out and braved the gunfire, firing his weapon with one hand and dragging Martin to cover with the other. When he got close, others ran out to help, pulling the body into the alley.
Lepre was behind cover just a few feet away, gazing at Martin’s body. He felt terrible. He had asked the private to take his position, and then the man had been shot dead. All the dragging had pulled Martin’s pants down to his knees. Few of the guys wore underwear in the tropical heat. Lepre couldn’t bear seeing Martin sprawled there like that, half naked. So despite the gunfire, he stepped out into the alley and tried to pull up the dead soldier’s pants, to give the man some dignity. Two bullets struck the pavement near where he stooped, and Lepre scrambled reluctantly back to cover.
“Sorry, man,” he said.
The command bird continued to coax the force linkup at the first crash site.
—They are leading the mounted troops by dismounted troops. The dismounted troops and the mounted troops are holding south of the Olympic Hotel....
Then, talking to the convoy, as they approached the left turn:
—Thirty meters south of the friendlies. They are one minor block to the north of you right now. If your lead APC continues moving he can make the next left and go one block, over.
Steele heard the vehicles making the turn. Out the door his men saw the dim outline of soldiers. Steele and his men called out, “Ranger! Ranger!”
“Tenth Mountain Division,” came the response.
—Roger, we’ve got a linkup with the Kilo and Juliet element, over.
Steele stuck his head out the door.
“This is Captain Steele. I’m the Ranger commander.”
“Roger, sir, we’re from the 10th Mountain Division,” a soldier answered.
“Where’s your commander?” Steele asked.
It took hours to pry Elvis out of the wreck. It was ugly work. The rescue column had brought along a quickie saw to cut the chopper’s metal frame away from his body, but the cockpit was lined with a layer of Kevlar that just ate up the saw blade. Next they tried to pull the Black Hawk apart, attaching chains to the front and back ends of it. A few of the Rangers, watching this from a distance, thought the D-boys were using the vehicles to tear the pilot’s body out of the wreckage. Some turned away in disgust.
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.
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.
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.
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. Her 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.
“Why did you come here?” screamed one woman.
Bashir followed, appalled. This is terrible. Islam called for reverential treatment and immediate burial of the dead, not this grotesque display. Bashir wanted to stop them, but the crowd was wild. These were wild people, ghetto people, and they were celebrating. To step forward and ask, “What are you doing?” to try to shame them, as Bashir wanted to do, would risk having them turn on him. He snapped several pictures and followed the mob. So many people had been killed and hurt the night before. The streets filled with even angrier, more vicious people. A festival of blood.
Hassan Adan Hassan was in a crowd that was dragging another dead American. Hassan sometimes worked as a translator for American and British journalists, and wanted to be a journalist himself. He followed the crowd down to the K-4 circle, where the numbers swelled to a sizable mob. They were dragging the body on the street when an outnumbered and outgunned squad of Saudi Arabian soldiers drove up on vehicles. Even though they were with the UN, the Saudis were not considered enemies of the Somalis, and even on this day their vehicles were not attacked. What the Saudis saw made them angry.
“What are you doing?” one of the soldiers asked.
“We have Animal Howe,” answered an armed young Somali man, one of the ringleaders.
“This is an American soldier,” said another.
“If he is dead, why are you doing this? Aren’t you a human being?” the Saudi soldier asked the ringleader, insulting him.
One of the Somalis pointed his gun at the Saudi soldier. “We will kill you, too,” the gunman said.
People in the back of the crowd shouted at the Saudis, “Leave it. Leave it alone! These people are angry. They might kill you.”
“But why do you do this?” the Saudi persisted. “You can fight and they can fight, but this man is dead. Why do you drag him?”
More guns were pointed at the Saudis. The disgusted soldiers drove off.
Abdi Karim was with the crowd dragging the dead American. He followed them until he grew afraid that an American helicopter would come down and shoot at them all. Then he drifted away from the mob and went home. His parents were greatly relieved to see him alive.
The Malaysians led everyone to a soccer stadium at the north end of the city, a Pakistani base of operations. The scene there was surreal. The exhausted Rangers drove in through the big gate out front, passed through the concrete shadows under the stands, like going to a football or baseball game at home, and then burst out blinking into a wide sunlit arena, rows of benches reaching up all around to the sky. In the lower stands lounged rows and rows of 10th Mountain Division soldiers, smoking, talking, eating, laughing, while on the field doctors were tending the scores of wounded.
Dr. Marsh had flown to the stadium with two other docs to supervise the emergency care. Unlike the first load of casualties that had come in with the lost convoy, these had mostly been patched up by medics in the field. Still, Dr. Bruce Adams found it a hellish scene. He was used to treating one or maybe two injuries at a time. Here was a soccer pitch covered with bleeding, broken bodies. The wounded Super Six One crew chief Ray Dowdy walked up to Adams and held up his hand, which was missing the top digits of two fingers. The doctor just put his arm around him and said, “I’m sorry.”
For the Rangers, even the ride from the rendezvous point on National Street to the stadium had been traumatic. There was still a lot of shooting going on and barely enough room on the Humvees to take all the men who had run out, so guys were piled in two and three layers deep. Private Jeff Young, who had badly twisted his ankle on the run out, was picked up by one of the D-boys, who dropped him into the backseat of a Humvee and then unceremoniously sat on his lap. Private George Siegler had hopefully sprinted up to the hatch of an APC just as a voice yelled from inside, “We can only take one more!” Lieutenant Perino already had one leg in the hatch. Out of the corner of his eye Perino saw the younger man’s desperation. He withdrew his leg from the hatch and said, cloaking his kindness with officerly impatience, “Come on, Private, come on.” It would have been easy for the lieutenant to say he hadn’t seen him. Siegler was so moved by the gesture he decided then and there to reenlist.
Nelson found himself in a Humvee that had four full cans of 60 ammo, so he worked his pig the whole way out of the city, shooting at anybody he saw. If they were on the street and he saw them he shot at them. He was close to coming out of this mess alive, and he was doing everything he could to make sure he did.
On his way out, Dan Schilling, the air force combat controller who had ridden out the bloody wandering of the lost convoy and then come back out into the city with the rescue convoy, saw an old Somali man with a white beard walking up the road with a small boy in his arms. The boy appeared to be about five years old and was bloody and looked dead. The old man walked seemingly oblivious to the firefight going on around him. He turned a corner north and disappeared up the street.
For Steele, the worst moment in the whole fight had come as they pulled away from National Street. The captain was looking down the line of APCs, watching men climb on board, and he saw Perino down at the end of the line step back and let Siegler in the hatch, and then, boom! the vehicles took off. There were still guys back there, Perino and others! He beat frantically on the shoulders of the APC driver, screaming at him, “I’ve got guys still out there!” but the Malay driver had a tanker helmet on and acted like he didn’t hear Steele and just kept on driving. The captain got on the command net. Reception was so bad inside the carrier that he could barely hear a response, but he broadcast his alarm in disjointed phrases:
—We got left back on National. ... The Paki vehicles were gonna follow us home, the foot soldier. ... But we loaded up but we had probably fifteen or twenty still had to walk. They took off and left us. We need to get somebody back down there to pick them up.
—Roger. I understand, Harrell had answered. I thought everybody was loaded. I got about three calls. They were telling me they were loaded. Where are they on National?
—Romeo, this is Juliet. I’m sending this blind. I need those soldiers picked up on National ASAP!
In fact, Perino and the others had been picked up, but not without some trouble. The lieutenant and about six other men, Rangers and some D-boys, were the last ones on the street when what looked like the last of the vehicles approached. The exhausted soldiers shouted and waved but the Malaysian driver paid them no mind until one of the D-boys stepped out and leveled a CAR-15 at him. He stopped. They just piled in on top of the other men already jammed inside.
Steele didn’t find out until he got to the stadium. Some of the Humvees had gone straight back to the hangar, so it took a last stressful half hour to account for them. Finally someone back at the JOC read him a list of all the Rangers who had come back there. It was only then that the captain took a long look around him and the magnitude of what had happened began to register.
* * *
Lieutenant Colonel Matthews, who had been aloft in the command bird with Harrell for the last fifteen hours except for short refueling breaks, stepped out of the bird and stretched his legs. He’d become so used to the sound of the rotors by now that he perceived the scene before him in silence. The wounded were on litters filling half of the field, tethered to IV bags, bandaged and bloody. Doctors and nurses huddled over the worst of them, working furiously. He saw Captain Steele sitting by himself on the sandbags of a mortar pit with his head in his hands. Behind Steele were rows of the dead, neatly arrayed in zippered body bags. Out on the field, moving from wounded man to wounded man, was a Pakistani soldier holding a tray with glasses of fresh water. The man had a white towel draped over his arm.
Those who were not wounded walked among the litters on the soccer pitch with tears in their eyes or looking drained and emotionless—thousand-mile stares. Helicopters, Vietnam-era Hueys emblazoned with the Red Cross, were coming and going, shuttling those who were ready back to the hospital by the hangar. Private Ed Kallman, who earlier had thrilled at the chance to be in combat, now watched as a medic efficiently sorted the litters as they came off vehicles like a foreman on a warehouse loading dock—“What have you got there? Okay. Dead in that group there. Live in this group here.” Sergeant Watson wandered slowly through the wounded, taking account. Once the medics and doctors had cut off their bloody, dirty clothes and exposed the wounds, the full horror of it was much greater. There were guys with gaping bruised holes in their bodies, limbs mangled, poor Carlos Rodriguez with a bullet through his scrotum, Goodale and Gould with their bare wounded asses up in the air, Stebbins riddled with shrapnel, Lechner with his leg mashed, Ramaglia, Phipps, Boorn, Neathery ... the list went on.
Specialist Anderson, despite his deep misgivings about coming out with the main convoy, had come through it unhurt. He was thrilled to find his skydiving buddy Sergeant Keni Thomas still alive and unhurt, but other than that he just felt emotionally spent. He recoiled at the ugliness of the scene, the wounds, the bodies. When the APC with Super Six One copilot Bull Briley’s body on top arrived, Anderson had to turn away. The body was discolored. It looked yellow-orange, and through the deep gash in his head he could see brain matter spilled down the side of the carrier. When the medics came over looking for help getting the body down, Anderson just ducked away. He couldn’t deal with it.
Goodale was laid out in the middle of the big stadium with his pants cut off looking up at a clear blue sky. A medic leaned over him dropping ash from his cigarette as he tried to stick an IV needle in his arm. And even though it was sunny and probably close to ninety degrees again, Goodale’s teeth chattered. He was chilled to the bone. One of the doctors gave him some hot tea.
That’s how Sergeant Cash found him. Cash had just arrived on the tail end of the rescue convoy and was wandering wild-eyed across the field looking for his friends. At first sight he thought Goodale, who was pale and shivering violently, was a goner.
“Are you all right?” Cash asked.
“I’ll be all right. I’m just cold.”
Cash helped flag a nurse, who covered Goodale with a blanket and tucked it in around him. Then they compared notes. Goodale told Cash about Smith, and went down the list of wounded. Cash told Goodale what he had seen back at the hangar when the lost convoy came in. He told him about Ruiz and Cavaco and Joyce and Kowalewski.
“Mac’s hit,” said Cash, referring to Sergeant Jeff McLaughlin. “I don’t know where Carlson is. I heard he’s dead.”
Rob Phipps fell out of the hatch of his APC when it stopped in the stadium. After hours locked in that stinking container with all the other wounded, there was a sudden scramble for the fresh air as soon as the hatch was pushed open. Phipps landed with a thud, but the fresh air was so sweet he didn’t mind the fall. He found he couldn’t stand, so a soldier he didn’t know picked him up and carried him to the doctors. Phipps had been fixed with an IV in his arm when one of the guys from his unit walked up and told him about Cavaco and Alphabet.
Floyd climbed up over the railing and mounted the benches to a group of 10th Mountain Division guys and bummed a cigarette. On his way down, Sergeant Watson waved him over to join the rest of his squad who were still standing. Watson somberly went down the list of those killed. Floyd was especially shocked to hear about Pilla. Smith and Pilla were his best friends in the world.
Stebbins sucked in large lungfuls of fresh air when the hatch of his APC finally swung open. He helped get some of the others off and then a litter was lifted on for him. He was dragging himself toward it when a 10th Mountain sergeant shouted, “Don’t make him crawl, boys,” and suddenly hands came in from all sides and Stebbins was lifted gently.
He was set down among a group of his buddies, naked from the waist down. Sergeant Aaron Weaver brought him a hot cup of coffee.
“Bless you, my son,” said Stebbins. “Got any cigarettes?”
Weaver had none. Stebbins asked everyone who walked past, without luck. He finally grabbed one soldier from the 10th by the arm and pleaded, “Listen, man, you got to find me a fucking cigarette.” One of the Malaysian drivers, a guy everybody in the APC (including Stebbins) had been screaming at an hour earlier, walked up and handed him a cigarette. The driver bent down to light it and then handed him the rest of the pack. When Stebbins tried to hand it back, the Malaysian took it and stuffed it in Stebbins’s shirt pocket.
Watson approached.
“Stebby, I hear you did your job. Good work,” he said, then he reached down and took a two-inch flap of cloth from Stebbins’s shredded trousers and tried to place it over his genitals. They both laughed.
Dale Sizemore couldn’t wait to find the guys on his chalk. He desperately wanted them to know that he hadn’t sat out the fight back at the hangar, but had fought in after them, twice. It was important that they know he had come after them.
The first person he found was Sergeant Chuck Elliot. When they saw each other they both cried, happy to be alive, to see each other again. Then Sizemore started telling Elliot about the dead and wounded Rangers who had been on the lost convoy. They wept and talked and watched the dead being loaded on helicopters.
“There’s Smitty,” said Elliot.
“What?”
“That’s Smith.”
Sizemore saw two feet hanging out from under a sheet. One was booted, the other bare. Elliot told him how he and Perino and the medic had taken turns for hours putting their fingers up inside Smith’s pelvic wound trying to pinch off the femoral artery. They had cut off the one pants leg and boot, that’s how he knew it was Smith. He choked up and cried.
Then Sizemore found Goodale, with his butt in the air.
“I got shot in the ass,” Goodale announced.
“Serves you right, Goodale, you shouldn’t have been running away,” Sizemore told him.
Steele was shocked when he learned that more of his men were dead. The sergeant who told him didn’t have an accurate count yet, but he thought it might be three or four Rangers. Four? Up until he reached the stadium, Smith was the only one Steele had known about for sure. He strode off to be by himself. He grabbed a bottle of water and just sat drinking it, alone with his thoughts. He felt this overwhelming sadness, but dared not break down in front of his men. There was no one else of his rank around him, no one he could confide in. Some of his men were in tears; others were chattering away like they couldn’t talk fast enough to get all their stories out. The captain felt odd, hyperalert. It was the first time in almost a full day when he felt he could let down for a minute, just relax. Every sight and sound of the busy scene before him registered fully, as though his senses had been finely tuned for so long that he couldn’t pull back. He found himself a place to sit at the edge of a mortar pit and laid his rifle across his lap and just breathed deeply and swished the cool water in his mouth and tried to review all that had happened. Had he made the right decisions? Had he done everything he could?
Sergeant Atwater, the captain’s radio operator, wanted to go over and say something to him, comfort him somehow. But he felt it wouldn’t have been appropriate.
One by one the wounded were loaded on helicopters and flown either to the army hospital at the U.S. embassy or back to the hangar.
The chopper ride back was calming for Sizemore, the sensations so reminiscent of all those days in Mog before this fight, the profile flights, the heady first six missions where everything had gone so well. Feeling the wind through the open doors and looking out over the now-familiar squalor below, the ocean stretching off to the east, things felt normal again. It was a reminder of how they had been just a day before, full of fun and so spoiling for a fight. That was just twenty-four hours ago. Nothing would be like that for them again. There was no chatter now in the Black Hawk on the way back to the base. The men all rode silently.
Nelson looked out over the deep blue waters at a U.S. Navy ship in the distance. It was like he was seeing things through someone else’s eyes. Colors seemed brighter to him, smells more vivid. He felt the experience had changed him in some fundamental way. He wondered if other guys were feeling this, but it was so strange, he didn’t know how to explain it or how to ask them.
As his chopper lifted off, Steele watched the tight network of streets that had closed in on them the previous afternoon open up once again to a broader panorama, and he was struck by how small the space was they had fought over, and it reminded him just how remote and small a place Mogadishu was in the larger world.
As Sergeant Ramaglia was loaded on a bird, a medic leaned over him and said, “Man, I feel sorry for you all.”
“You should feel sorry for them,” the sergeant said, “’cause we whipped ass.”
After depositing their dead and wounded, the D-boys quickly boarded helicopters and were flown back to the hangar. Sergeant Howe and his men went solemnly back to work, readying themselves to go right back out. They had trained to function without sleep for days at a time, so they were in a familiar place, one they called the “drone zone,” a point at which the body transcends minor aches and pains and grows impervious to hot and cold. In the drone zone they motored on with a heightened level of perception, nonreflective, as if on autopilot. Howe didn’t like the feeling, but he was used to it.
Some of the Rangers and even some of his friends in the unit were acting like they had been beaten, which pissed off the big sergeant. He knew he and his men had inflicted a lot more damage than they’d absorbed. They had been put in a terrible spot and had not only survived, they’d mauled the enemy. He didn’t know the estimated body counts, but whatever the numbers he knew they’d just fought one of the most one-sided battles in American history.
He pulled off his sweat-soaked Kevlar and gear and spread it all out on his bunk. He restuffed all of the pouches and pockets with ammo. Then he methodically stripped down each of his weapons, cleaned and relubricated each, concluding each procedure with a function check. When he had everything ready and packed again he stood over it with a strong sense of satisfaction. His kit, and the precise way that he’d packed it, had served him well, and he wanted to remember exactly how everything was, for the next time. The only thing he would have done differently is take along those NODs. He stuffed them in his backpack. He would never again go on a mission without them, night or day.
Howe was surprised to still be alive. The thought of heading straight back out into the fight scared him, but the fear was nothing next to the loyalty he felt to the men stranded in the city. Some of their own were still out there—Gary Gordon, Randy Shughart, Michael Durant, and the crew of Super Six Four. Alive or dead, they were coming home. This fight wasn’t over until every one of them was back. Fuck it, let’s go out there and kill some folks. That was how he set his mind.
And if they were going back out, there was going to be hell to pay.
Sizemore didn’t find out that his buddy Lorenzo Ruiz was dead until after he got back to the hangar.
“You heard about Ruiz, right?” asked Specialist Kevin Snodgrass.
Sizemore knew right away what had happened and he couldn’t stop crying. When they had flown Ruiz out earlier in the afternoon for the hospital in Germany he was still alive. Not long after he left, word came back that he had died. Ruiz had tried to hand Sizemore the packet of letters for his parents and loved ones before the mission and Sizemore had refused it. Now Ruiz was dead. Sizemore couldn’t believe it was Ruiz and not him who had been killed. Ruiz had a wife and a baby. Why would Ruiz be taken and not him? It seemed deeply unfair to Sizemore. Sergeant Watson sat with him for hours, consoling him, talking things through with him. But what could you say?
Sergeant Cash had seen Ruiz not long before he had been flown out.
“You’re going to be fine,” he told him.
“No. No I’m not,” Ruiz said. He had barely enough strength to form the words. “I know it’s over for me. Don’t worry about me.”
Captain Steele got the accurate casualty list when he returned to the hangar. First Sergeant Glenn Harris was waiting for him at the door. He saluted.
“Rangers lead the way, sir.”
“All the way,” Steele said, returning the salute.
“Sir, here’s what it looks like,” Harris said, handing over a green sheet of paper.
Steele was aghast. One list of names ran the entire length of the page. There weren’t just four men killed. On this list the death toll was thirteen. Six others were missing from the second crash site and presumed dead. Of the three critically injured men already flown out to a hospital in Germany—Griz Martin, Lorenzo Ruiz, and Adalberto Rodriguez—Ruiz had already been reported dead. Seventy-three men had been injured. Among the dead, six were Steele’s men—Smith, Cavaco, Pilla, Joyce, Kowalewski, and Ruiz. Thirty of the injured were Rangers. Harris had started a second column at the top that ran almost to the bottom of the page. One third of Steele’s company had either been killed or injured.
“Where are they?” Steele asked.
“Most are at the hospital, sir.”
Steele stripped off his gear and walked across to the field hospital. The captain put a great store on maintaining at least a facade of emotional resilience, but the scene in the hospital undid him. It was a mess. Guys were lying everywhere, on cots, on the floor. Some were still bandaged in the haphazard wraps given them during the fight. He choked out a few words of encouragement to each, fighting back the well of grief in his craw. The last soldier he saw was Phipps, the youngest of the Rangers on the CSAR bird. Phipps looked to Steele like he’d been beaten with a baseball bat. His face was swollen twice normal size and was black-and-blue. His back and leg were heavily bandaged and there were stains from his oozing wounds. Steele laid his hand on him.
“Phipps?”
The soldier stirred. When he opened his eyes there was red where the whites normally were.
“You’re gonna be okay,” Steele said.
Phipps reached up and grabbed hold of the captain’s arm.
“Sir, I’ll be okay in a couple of days. Don’t go back out without me.”
Steele nodded and fled the room.
Private David Floyd was struck by how empty the hangar looked. He dragged himself back to his cot and stripped off his gear. But instead of feeling relieved, he felt this great weight and soreness descend. Around him, guys were talking and talking and talking. It was like they were trying to work the whole thing out. They accounted for all of their number. For every one of the killed or scores of injured there was a story to be told about how and when and where and why. Sometimes the stories differed. One thought Joyce was still alive for a time in the back of the truck while another insisted he was killed almost instantly. Somebody thought it was Diemer who had pulled Joyce from the line of fire, but another was sure it was Telscher. Stebbins had gone down four times. No, somebody argued, it was only three. They told of the long futile struggle to keep Jamie Smith alive. They wept openly.
Nelson, one of the last to return to the hangar, found Sergeant Eversmann in tears.
“What’s wrong?” Nelson asked. Then, knowing his friend Casey Joyce had been on Eversmann’s chalk, he asked, “Where’s Joyce?”
Eversmann looked at him with surprise, and then got too choked up to speak. Nelson ran into the hangar and sought out Lieutenant Perino, who gave him the bad news. He also told him Pilla, his partner in the hangar skits, was dead. Nelson broke down.
Joyce’s death particularly grieved him. He owed the man an apology. Fed up with the order to stand guard duty in full battle dress a few days earlier, Nelson had told the men on his team it was okay to ignore it. He told them to wear their body armor and helmet over shorts and T-shirts. If it caused trouble, he said, he’d take the heat. He hadn’t really thought that through, however, because when the trouble came it landed not on him but on Joyce, who was nominally his superior. Joyce had been sternly upbraided for not being able to control his men.
Nelson had pulled guard duty early Sunday morning, between three and seven, and Joyce had roused himself to come out to talk. They had been together ever since basic training, and they had a special, almost family connection. They had actually met each other years before joining the army. It was just a wild coincidence. Nelson’s stepbrother had roomed with Joyce’s older brother in an apartment in Atlanta, and they had met each other there once or twice as kids. Nelson admired Joyce. He had never seen the man say or do anything unseemly. Just about everybody had tied one on at a local bar or secretly smoked dope or bad-mouthed somebody or tried to get away with something against the rules. Not Casey Joyce. As far as Nelson was concerned, Joyce was the most thoroughly decent guy he’d ever met, genuine to the core. Joyce had gotten his sergeant stripes first, but they both knew Nelson would be getting his soon. It was awkward for Joyce to be Nelson’s superior. They were friends. They had made plans with Pilla and a few of the other guys to drive out to Austin and stay with Joyce’s sister for a few days when they got back. Nelson felt bad about getting his friend in trouble. Just over twenty-four hours ago they had sat together behind a machine gun surrounded by sandbags under a nearly full moon. The guard post was up on a Conex that had been stacked on another to create a nice high vantage point. It was quiet. The low rooflines of Mogadishu spread before them rolling uphill to the north. In the distance they could hear the steady banging of small generators that kept, here and there, a lightbulb or two burning. Otherwise the city was draped in pale blue moonlight.
“Look, I’m as tired of this chain-of-command shit as you are,” Joyce had told Nelson. “Just do me a favor. Whatever happens, don’t do anything that gets First Sergeant Harris and Staff Sergeant Eversmann on my back. Let’s do what we need to do so we can get out of here. Don’t let this come between you and me.”
Joyce hadn’t bitched at him, which he had every right to do and which most guys would have. He was making a plea, man to man, friend to friend. The right thing for Nelson to do was to apologize, and the words were right there on the tip of his tongue, but Nelson didn’t say them. He was still angry about the rule, which he thought was pointless and stupid, and he wouldn’t swallow his pride. Not even for his friend. The apology had still been there on the tip of his tongue the previous afternoon when he’d helped Joyce pull on his gear. Joyce was squad leader and had to be the first one out to the helicopter, so Nelson always helped him. He’d been close to saying the apology, but instead just watched his friend walk off. Now he would never have the chance.
Nelson was asked to inventory his friend’s gear. He found Joyce’s Kevlar vest, the one he had helped him put on the day before. It had a hole in the upper back right at the center. He rooted through the vest pockets—a lot of guys stuffed pictures, love letters, and things in the pockets. In the front of Joyce’s vest he found the bullet. It must have passed right through his friend’s body and been caught up in the Kevlar in front. He put it in a tin can. In Pilla’s belongings he found a bag of the little explosives his friend used to insert in people’s cigarettes.
Sergeant Watson walked over to the morgue to see Smith one last time. He unzipped the body bag and gazed at his friend’s pinched, pale lifeless face. Then he leaned over and kissed his forehead.
America awakened Monday morning (it was already late afternoon in Mogadishu) to news reports of an ugly fight in Somalia, a place most people had to consult an atlas to find. It wasn’t the biggest news. Russian president Boris Yeltsin was fending off a coup d’état. Washington was preoccupied with developments in Moscow.
Sandwiched in between the dramatic reports from Russia, however, came increasingly distressing news from Somalia. At least five soldiers had been killed and “several” wounded, the early reports said. Even those numbers indicated the worst single day in Mogadishu since the United States had committed troops ten months before. Then, later in the day, came the grotesque images of dead American soldiers being dragged through the city’s dusty streets by angry crowds.
President Clinton was in a hotel room in San Francisco when he saw the pictures. He had been informed earlier in the day that there had been a successful raid in Mogadishu, but that the Rangers had gotten in a scrape. The TV images horrified and angered him, according to an account in Elizabeth Drew’s book On the Edge.
“How could this happen?” he demanded.
The trickle of news was a peculiarly modern form of torture at the homes of the men serving in Somalia. Stephanie Shughart, the wife of Delta Sergeant Randy Shughart, had gotten a phone call at ten o’clock Sunday night. She was home alone. She and Randy had no children. One of the other Fort Bragg wives left her with a chillingly imprecise bit of bad news.
“One of the guys has been killed,” she said.
One of the guys.
Stephanie had talked on the phone with Randy on Friday night. As usual, he’d said nothing about what was going on, just that it was hot, he was getting enough to eat, and he was getting a great tan. He told her he loved her. He was such a gentle man. It had always seemed so incongruous to her how he made a living. He didn’t say anything about his work when they first met. Some of Stephanie’s better-connected friends had whispered to her that Randy was “an operator.” She’d figured he worked on the phones.
One of the guys.
In a bedroom in Tennessee, just across the state line from the Night Stalkers’ base at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, Becky Yacone sat with Willi Frank. Both their husbands, Jim Yacone and Ray Frank, were Black Hawk pilots, and they knew two helicopters had gone down over Mogadishu. Willi had been awakened at six A.M. by a chaplain and commander from the base. She knew right away why the men were at her door. She’d been through exactly the same thing three years before, when Ray’s chopper had crashed on the training mission. She’d met Ray on her birthday twenty-two years earlier, when she was managing a bar in Newport News. Her employees had surprised her with a cake, and everybody ate it except Ray. When she’d asked him why, he’d told her, like it was something everybody in the world with any sense would know, “You don’t eat cake when you’re drinking beer.” They’d gotten married in Las Vegas that same year.
“Ray is missing in action,” the men said.
“How long will it be before we know?” she asked.
They were startled by the question.
“Last time it only took two hours,” Willi explained.
This time it would take longer. Her support unit showed up, wives of two other men in the unit, and then Becky came over. Becky was a Black Hawk pilot herself. She’d met her husband when they were classmates at West Point. She had no news about Jim yet. They all agreed that if anybody could get out of a mess like this alive, downed in the streets of a hostile African city, it was their husbands.
Then the pictures came on the TV. The first of them came on just after noon. They were images of dead Americans. The pictures were distant and shot from such odd angles it was impossible to tell who the dead men were.
“That one has dirty fingernails,” said one of the women. “He must be a crew chief.”
There was some discussion about that. The bodies were in the dirt.
“They’re all dirty,” said another woman.
Nobody at Willi’s thought to tape the show and rerun it. Maybe it was too ghoulish. Besides, they didn’t need to tape it. CNN kept showing the same pictures every half hour. At these short intervals conversation would cease and the women would all crowd anxiously around the screen.
“That’s Ray,” said Willi. Something about the way the body was lying, the turn of the shoulders and arms ...
“No, he’s too small,” said Becky. They knew Randy Shughart and Gary Gordon were missing, and they were both much shorter than Ray.
“No,” said Willi. “I just know that’s Ray.”
She said she was, but she wasn’t sure. She had a bad feeling, but she wasn’t giving up hope.
At the hangar in Mogadishu, the men watched like everybody else the images of their dead comrades being put on display by the jeering Somali crowds. The men who filled the TV room at the hangar saw it replayed again and again. No one said a word. Some of the men turned and left the room. Captains Jim Yacone and Scott Miller sat together before the screen trying to figure out if the body they were looking at was Randy Shughart’s or Ray Frank’s. Both men had the same build and gray hair. Ray’s had turned gray almost overnight. He had contracted a rare disorder in his early thirties and had become allergic to the pigment of his own hair. It had all fallen out and grown back snowy white. Ray also had scars on his torso from the extensive surgery he’d undergone after the Black Hawk crash in training. The D-boys were convinced the body was Randy’s. It was galling to watch the Skinnies strutting around the bodies, poking at them with rifles, dragging them. What kind of animals ... ?
The pilots wanted to get up over those crowds and mow them down, just mow them all down. Fuck the whole lot of them. Then land and recover the bodies. These were American soldiers. Their brothers.
Garrison and Montgomery said no. There were big crowds around those bodies. It would be a massacre.
Mace, Sergeant Macejunas, went back out into the city. The blond operator had gone out into the fight three times the day and night before. Leading the force on foot to Durant’s crash site when the vehicles could go no further was enough to make his courage legendary. Now he was going out alone, dressed as a civilian, a journalist. The D-boys had arranged with one of the sympathetic local NGOs for help finding the six men still missing from the second crash site, Durant, Frank, Field, Cleveland, Shughart, and Gordon. Mace was going along.
To a man, the task force dreaded the prospect of going back into the city, but they were prepared to do it, with as much weaponry, armor, and ammo as they could carry. Here was Mace heading back out without any of that. He was going to find his brothers, alive or dead. The Rangers who saw him were in awe of the man’s courage and cool.
Mike Durant’s captors asked if he would make a videotape.
“No,” said Durant.
He was surprised they’d asked. If they wanted to make a video, they were going to anyway. But, since they’d asked ....
Durant had been trained how to handle himself in captivity. How to avoid being helpful without being confrontational. The pilot knew if he got out of this alive, his actions would be scrutinized. It was safer not to be in that position, speaking to the world from captivity.
They showed up with a camera crew that night anyway. It had been more than twenty-four hours since he crashed and was carried off in an angry swarm of Somalis. He was hungry, thirsty, and still terrified. He had a compound fracture of his right leg, a crushed vertebra, and bullet and shrapnel wounds in his shoulder and thigh. His face was bloody and swollen from where he had been clubbed in the face with the butt of a rifle. His dark hair, caked with sweat and dirt and blood, stuck straight up on end like some cartoon depiction of fright.
There were about ten young men in the crew. They set up lights. Only one of the crew spoke to him, a young man with good English. Durant knew the key to getting through something like this was to offer as little pertinent information as possible, to be cagey, not confrontational. There was a code of conduct spelling out what he could say and what he couldn’t say, and Durant was determined to abide by it. His interrogators were not skillful. Men had been questioning him on and off all day, trying to get him to tell them more about who he was and what his unit was trying to do in Somalia. When the camera was turned on, the interviewer began pressing him on the same points. The Somalis considered all the Americans with the task force to be Rangers.
“No, I’m not a Ranger,” Durant told him. He explained he was a pilot.
“You kill people innocent,” the interviewer insisted.
“Innocent people being killed is not good,” Durant said.
That was the best they got out of him. Those were the words people all over the world would be seeing on their TV the next day. Somalia had been a back-burner news item in the weeks before this battle. None of the major American newspapers or networks even had a correspondent in Mogadishu. Now this east African coastal city was front and center. The coup d’état fizzled in Moscow and the images of the Somali crowds humiliating American bodies had drawn the attention of the world, and the outrage of America. Durant’s swollen, bloody face, with that wild, frightened look in his eye, lifted off the videotape, would soon be in newspapers and on the covers of news-magazines worldwide. It was an image of American helplessness. More than one American asked the same question President Clinton had asked, How could this have happened? Didn’t we go to Somalia to feed starving people?
Willi Frank got down on her hands and knees and peered closely at the TV. She was trying to see around the corners of the screen. She was sure, if they had Durant, they must have other members of the crew. They probably had Ray, too. He was probably sitting right next to Mike, just off the frame!
Durant felt okay about the interview. After the camera crew left, a doctor came. He was kind, and he spoke English well. He told Durant he had been trained at the University of Southern California. He apologized for the limited supplies he had with him, just some aspirin, some antiseptic solution, and some gauze. He used forceps and gauze and the solution to gently probe Durant’s leg wound, where the broken femur poked through the skin, and he cleaned off the end of the bone and the tissue around it.
It was sharply painful, but the pilot was grateful. He knew enough about wounds to know that a femur infection was relatively common and deadly, even with simple fractures. His was compound, and he had been lying on a dirty floor all night and day. Durant asked about his crew and the D-boys, but the doctor said he knew nothing.
When the doctor left, the pilot was moved from the room where he had awakened that morning to the sounds of birds and children. He was pushed to the floor in the back of a car, and a blanket was placed over him. It was terribly painful. Then two men got in the car and sat on him. His leg was moving all over the place. It had swelled badly, and the slightest move was torture.
They brought him to a little apartment and left him in the care of a gangly, nearsighted man he would come to know well over the next ten days. It was Abdullahi Hassan, a man they called “Firimbi,” the propaganda minister for clan leader Mohamed Farrah Aidid.
The pilot didn’t know it, but the warlord had paid his ransom.
Now, to get Durant back, America would have to negotiate with Aidid.
Garrison and the task force were willing, but Washington had lost its stomach for the fight.
Former U.S. Ambassador to Somalia Robert Oakley had been attending a party at the Syrian embassy in Washington on Tuesday, October 5, when he got a phone call from the White House. It was Anthony Lake, national security adviser to President Clinton.
“I need to talk to you first thing in the morning,” Lake said.
“Why, Tony?” Oakley said. “I’ve been home for six months.”
Oakley, a gaunt, plainspoken intellectual with a distinguished career in diplomacy, had been President George Bush’s top civilian in Mogadishu during the humanitarian mission that had begun the previous December. With the famine over and a new administration in Washington, Oakley had departed the city in March 1993, at about the same time his old friend Admiral Jonathan Howe had taken over the top UN job in Somalia.
Since his return, Oakley had watched with dismay the course of events in Somalia. He had frequent conversations with former colleagues in the State Department, but despite his long experience there, no top officials in the administration had consulted with him. He wasn’t offended, but he was concerned about prospects for the government-building process he’d help set in motion. He’d watched with growing concern as events and UN resolutions pushed Aidid out of the peace process, and felt the idea of tracking the clan leader down like an outlaw was bound to fail. But no one had asked his opinion.
“Can you come to breakfast tomorrow at seven-thirty?” Lake asked.
Now they were in trouble. The day after the October 3 battle, Secretary of Defense Les Aspin and Secretary of State Warren Christopher had been grilled by angry members of Congress. How had this happened? Why were American soldiers dying in far-off Somalia when the humanitarian mission there had supposedly ended months before? As many as five hundred Somalis had been killed and over a thousand injured. Durant was still a captive. The public was outraged, and Congress was demanding withdrawal.
Senator Robert C. Byrd, Democratic chairman of the Appropriations Committee, called for an immediate end “to these cops-and-robbers operations.”
“Clinton’s got to bring them home,” said Senator John McCain, a Republican member of the Armed Services Committee and former prisoner of war in Vietnam.
There were perceived intelligence failures up and down the line. In Mogadishu, the escalating violence between the Habr Gidr and UN forces had been perceived as individual incidents, not the probing actions of a determined enemy force. In Washington, officials at the Pentagon, White House, and Congress were stunned by the size, scope, and ferocity of Aidid’s counterattack on October 3. In retrospect, Aspin’s inaction on General Montgomery’s September request for tanks and Bradley armored vehicles seemed indicative of an administration that had fallen asleep on its watch—something Republican legislators could use to batter the Clinton administration.
The battle was also a blow to an administration already unpopular with the military establishment. It made Clinton look uninterested in the welfare of America’s soldiers. The president had been getting briefed on Task Force Ranger’s missions in advance. This one had been mounted so quickly he had not been informed. Clinton complained bitterly to Lake. He felt he had been blindsided, and he was angry. He wanted answers to a broad range of questions from policy issues to military tactics.
At the breakfast table in the East Wing on Wednesday were Lake and his deputy, Samuel R. Berger, and U.S. Ambassador to the UN Madeleine K. Albright. They talked about what had happened informally, and then walked Oakley into the Oval Office, where they joined the president, the vice president, Christopher, Aspin, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and several other advisers.
The meeting lasted six hours. The thrust of the discussion was: What do we do now? Staying in Mogadishu to pursue Aidid was out of the question, even though Admiral Howe and General Garrison were eager to do so. They believed Aidid had been struck a mortal blow and that it wouldn’t take much more to finish the job. If the reports from local spies were correct, some of Aidid’s strongest clan allies had fled the city fearing the inevitable American counterattack. The clan’s arsenals of RPGs were severely depleted. Others were sending peace feelers, offering to dump Aidid to ward off more bloodshed. But it was clear listening to the discussion that morning in the White House that America had no intention of initiating any further military action in Somalia.
America was pulling out. The meeting ended with a decision to reinforce Task Force Ranger, make a show of military resolve, but call off any further efforts to apprehend Aidid or his top aides. After enough tanks, men, planes, and ships poured into Mogadishu to level the city, the forces were to simply stay put for a while. Renewed efforts would be made to negotiate a stable Somali government that would include Aidid, but the United States would make a dignified withdrawal, by March 1994. The Somali warlord didn’t know it yet, but his clan had scored a major victory. Without U.S. muscle, there was no way the UN could impose a government on Somalia without Aidid’s cooperation.
Oakley was dispatched to Mogadishu to deliver this message and to try to secure the release of Durant.
There would be no negotiating with Aidid over Durant. Oakley was instructed to deliver a stern message: The president of the United States wanted the pilot released. Now.
Firimbi was a big man for a Somali, tall with long arms and big hands. He had a potbelly, and squinted through thick, cloudy black-framed glasses. He was extremely proud of his position in the SNA. Once Aidid had purchased Durant back from the bandits who had kidnapped him, Firimbi was told, “Anything bad that happens to the pilot will also happen to you.”
When Durant arrived that night, Firimbi found him angry, frightened, and in pain. He met the pilot’s sullen demeanor with his own earnest hostility. America had just caused a bloodbath in Firimbi’s clan, and he held men like this pilot accountable. It was hard not to be angry.
Durant had no idea where he’d been taken. In the drive through the city he had been under a blanket in the backseat. They might have been taking him out to kill him. The men who brought him carried him up steps and along a walkway and set him down in a room.
Firimbi greeted him, but the pilot at first didn’t answer. Durant could speak a little Spanish, and Firimbi, like most educated Somalis, could speak Italian. The languages were similar enough for them to communicate somewhat. After they had been alone together for a time they spoke enough to establish this basis for limited conversation. Durant complained about his wounds. Despite the efforts of the doctor who visited him at the other place, they had become swollen, tender, and infected. Firimbi sullenly helped wash him again and rebandaged them. He passed word along that Durant needed a doctor.
That night, Monday, October 4, Durant and Firimbi heard American helicopters flying overhead, broadcasting haunting calls:
“Mike Durant, we will not leave you.”
“Mike Durant, we are with you always.”
“Do not think we have left you, Mike.”
“What are they saying?” Firimbi asked.
Durant told him that his friends were worried about him, and would be looking for him.
“And we treat you so nicely,” said his captor. “It is a Somali tradition never to hurt a prisoner.”
Durant smiled at him through his battered, swollen face.
For Jim Smith, the father of Corporal Jamie Smith, the nightmare had begun during a Monday afternoon meeting in the conference room of the bank where he worked in Long Valley, New Jersey. The meeting was interrupted when his boss’s wife opened the door and stepped in.
She said she was sorry to interrupt, then turned to Smith.
“I just got a call from Carol,” she said. “Call home.”
Obviously, Smith’s wife, Carol, had felt this was urgent. They’d been ignoring the office phones during the meeting, so Carol had called the boss’s home number, looking for a way to track him down.
Smith called his wife from an adjoining office.
“What’s the matter?” he asked.
He will always remember her next words.
“There are two officers here. Jamie has been killed. You have to come home.”
When he opened the door at home, Carol said, “Maybe they’re wrong, Jim. Maybe Jamie is just missing.”
But Smith knew. He had been a Ranger captain in Vietnam, and lost a leg in combat. He knew that in a tight unit like the Rangers, death notification wouldn’t go out unless they had the body.
“No,” he told his wife quietly, trying to make the words sink in. “If they say he’s dead, they know.”
Camera crews began to arrive within hours. When everyone in his immediate family had been given the news, Smith walked out to the front yard to answer questions.
He was repulsed by the attitude of the reporters and the kinds of questions they asked. How did he feel? How did they think he felt? He told them he was proud of his son and deeply saddened. Did he think his son had been properly trained and led? Yes, his son was superbly trained and led. Whom did he blame? What was he supposed to say: The U.S. Army? Somalia? Himself, for encouraging his son’s interest in the Rangers? God?
Smith told them that he didn’t know enough about what had happened yet to blame anybody, that his son was a soldier, and that he died serving his country.
A Mailgram arrived two days later with a stark message signed by a colonel he didn’t know. It resonated powerfully with Smith, even though he knew its contents before reading the words. It joined him in a sad ritual as old as war itself, with every person who had ever lost someone beloved in battle:
“THIS CONFIRMS PERSONAL NOTIFICATION MADE TO YOU BY A REPRESENTATIVE OF THE SECRETARY OF THE ARMY, THAT YOUR SON, SPC JAMES E. SMITH, DIED AT MOGADISHU, SOMALIA, ON OCTOBER 3, 1993. ANY QUESTIONS YOU MAY HAVE SHOULD BE DIRECTED TO YOUR CASUALTY ASSISTANCE OFFICER. PLEASE ACCEPT MY DEEPEST SYMPATHY IN YOUR BEREAVEMENT.”
Stephanie Shughart got word about her husband, Randy, that same Monday morning. She had been up all night after getting the word that “one of the guys” had been killed. Anticipating further news, she had called her boss to say she wouldn’t be in for work—a family emergency. The families at Bragg braced themselves. At least one family was going to take a hit.
Stephanie’s boss knew that Randy was in the army, and he sometimes did dangerous work. She also knew how uncharacteristic it was for Stephanie to stay home from work. She drove straight over to the Shugharts’ house.
The two women drank coffee and watched CNN. Stephanie was in a perfect agony of suspense as the first TV reports aired about what had happened in Mogadishu. She and her boss were talking when two silhouettes appeared outside the door.
Stephanie opened it to two men from her husband’s unit. One was a close friend. This is it. He’s dead.
“Randy is missing in action,” he said.
So it was better news than she expected. Stephanie was determined not to despair. Randy would be okay. He was the most competent man alive. Her mental image of Somalia was of a jungle. She pictured her husband in some clearing, signaling for a chopper. When her friend told her that Randy had gone in with Gary Gordon, she felt even better. They’re hiding somewhere. If anybody could come through it alive, it was those two.
News came rapid-fire over the next few days, all of it bad. Families learned of the deaths of Earl Fillmore and Griz Martin. Then there were the horrible images of a dead soldier being dragged through the streets. Then word came that Gary’s body had been recovered. Stephanie despaired. When proof came that Durant was alive and being held captive, her hopes soared. Surely they had Randy, too. They just weren’t showing him on camera. She prayed and prayed. First she prayed for Randy to be alive, but as the days went by and her hopes dimmed, she began to pray that he not be someplace suffering, and that if he were dead, that he died quickly. Over the next week she went to several funerals. She sat and grieved with the other wives. Eventually all the missing men except Shughart had been accounted for. All were dead, their bodies horribly mutilated.
Stephanie asked her father to stay with her. Her friends took turns keeping her company. This went on for days. It was hell.
When she saw a car pull into her driveway with several officers and a priest inside, she knew.
“They’re here, Dad,” she said.
“The Somalis have returned a body, and it’s been identified as Randy,” one of officers said.
“Are you sure?” she asked.
“Yes,” he said. “We’re sure.”
She was discouraged from viewing Randy’s body—and, being a nurse, Stephanie could imagine why better than most. She sent a friend to Dover, Delaware, where the body had been flown. When he came back, she asked, “Could you tell it was him?”
He shook his head sadly. He hadn’t been able to tell.
DeAnna Joyce had been feeling lucky. On Friday night, two nights back, they’d held a lottery over at the lieutenant’s house on post at Fort Benning to see when the wives would get to talk to their husbands. They hadn’t seen the men for months, ever since they’d left to train at Fort Bliss earlier that summer. Eighteen of the women would get to take phone calls Saturday night, eighteen more Sunday night, and two on Monday. DeAnna had gotten stuck with one of the Mondays, but as she was leaving another of the wives had wanted to switch, so she’d gotten to speak to Casey Saturday night. Then all the calls for Sunday and Monday were canceled.
There had always been that good fortune in Casey’s smile. She’d met him at a mall in Texas. DeAnna was working as a saleswoman for a clothing store chain, The Limited, and this guy she knew stopped in to ask her a question about a girl. He’d introduced her to Casey. They must have said all of two words to each other.
“Hey.”
“Howyadoin’?”
Like that. Only, she learned later, on his way out of the store Casey had informed his friend, “I’m going to marry that girl.”
They started dating, and then Casey transferred from the University of Texas to North Texas University in order to attend the same school as DeAnna. He was studying journalism. But he didn’t like going to class and wasn’t doing that well and told her one day in 1990 that he was going to leave school and join the army. Or, he asked her. She’d said, “Do what you want.” So he’d gone through basic, then airborne school, where he’d gotten this horrible fist-sized tattoo on the back of his right shoulder. It was supposed to be a Rottweiler, but it looked more like a wildcat. It sported an airborne unit maroon beret. Then he decided to push on through the Ranger Indoctrination Program.
Casey’s father, a retired lieutenant colonel, had never won a Ranger tab, so it was something Casey was bound and determined to do. It wasn’t easy. He and his buddy Dom Pilla had both just about decided to quit—Casey called and asked DeAnna if she’d think less of him, and she’d said no—but then Casey and Dom had talked each other into staying. They’d both made it. He returned home a Ranger, making plans to get the maroon beret on his tattoo recolored with the black beret of the Rangers. They were married on May 25, 1991.
DeAnna started crying when she got on the phone with him Saturday night, and couldn’t stop. It upset Casey, too. They both just sobbed back and forth how much they loved each other. She was desperate for him to come home.
All the wives were invited over to the lieutenant’s house that Sunday, where they learned that the company had been involved in a firefight. All of them, even the cooks. All the women were panicky, but DeAnna was feeling lucky. The more experienced wives explained that for guys who got injured, there would be a phone call. For those who were dead, there would be a knock at the door. DeAnna lay awake that night thinking about that.
There was a knock on the door at 6:30 A.M. DeAnna threw on her robe, and ran down to the door. He’s dead. Casey is dead. She opened the door, but instead of finding soldiers there were two neighbor children.
“Our mother’s father died last night and we have to leave, and we wanted to know if you’d take care of our dog.”
As DeAnna dressed to go next door, she kicked herself for having even had such a morbid, terrible thought about Casey. How could you even think that? She was next door, getting instructions for minding the dog and consoling her friend, whose father had died in another state, when one of the other neighbors present mentioned that she’d heard eleven Rangers had been killed in Somalia.
When DeAnna got home there was a message on the machine from Larry Joyce, Casey’s dad, asking her to call. Larry knew DeAnna would get word first if anything had happened, and he’d phoned her when he’d seen the TV report. She called him.
“President Clinton has already been on TV expressing condolences to the families,” her father-in-law said. The president had used the expression “unfortunate losses,” and voiced continued, determined support for the mission.
DeAnna said she’d heard nothing. They agreed that this was probably good news. She was about to make another call when there was a new knock on the door.
She started down the stairs again, figuring it was the next-door kids with more dog instructions, only this time it was three men in uniform.
“Are you Dina?” one asked.
“No, I’m not,” she said, and shut the door.
The men pushed the door open gently.
Sometime in the first week of shock and grief, DeAnna received Casey’s effects. With them was a letter he had been writing her just before leaving on the fatal mission. DeAnna knew that the experience in Somalia had shaken Casey, and that in the months he was away he had brooded over minor problems in their relationship.
“I miss you so much,” the letter said, speaking now from beyond the grave. “I’ve said it probably a thousand times, but I want things to be different, and I know they will be. I love you so much! I can’t say it stronger. I want you to love me with all your heart. I think you already do, but just in case I want to prove to you that I’m worth it. I’m not going to come home and be a total nerd slush, if you know what I mean, but I’m going to be myself. I’m going to make you into the most important person in my life. I’m not going to lose sight of this ever again. I want you to know that I want to grow old with you. I want you to realize this because I can’t do it all by myself. I know most of the problems are me and I want to change. I want to go to church. I want us to be happy. Anyways, I can’t say it enough, but I want to start doing things about it. I can’t do anything until I get home. ... By the time you get this letter I might be on my way home, or real close to it.”
Durant’s fear of being executed or tortured eased after several days in captivity. After being at the center of that enraged mob on the day he crashed, he mostly feared being discovered by the Somali public. It was a fear shared by Firimbi.
The propaganda minister had grown fond of him. It was something Durant worked at, part of his survival training. He made an effort to be polite. He learned the Somali words for “please,” pilles an, and “thank you,” ma hat san-e. The two men were together day and night for a week. They shared what appeared to be a small apartment. There was a small balcony out the front door, which reminded Durant of an American motel.
The woman who owned the house where Durant was staying insisted on fixing the pilot a special meal, as is the custom for guests in Somalia. She slaughtered a goat and made a meal of goat meat and pasta. The meal was delicious, and huge. Durant thought the chunk of meat and bone in his bowl could feed five people. But the next day both the pilot and his captor had diarrhea. Firimbi helped keep the bedridden pilot clean, which was uncomfortable and embarrassing for both men.
Firimbi kept trying to cheer up the pilot.
“What do you want?” he kept asking.
“I want a plane ticket to the United States.”
“Do you want a radio?”
“Sure,” Durant said, and he was given a small black plastic radio with a volume so low he had to hold it up to his ear. That radio became his life-line. He could hear the BBC World Service, and reports about his captivity. It was wonderful to hear those English voices coming from his own world.
In subsequent days, they laughed and teased each other about the flatulence that followed the worst of the ailment. The mood of his captivity lightened. Durant’s leg had been splinted, but was still swollen and painful. Day and night he lay on the small bed. Sometimes it would be silent for hours. Sometimes he and Firimbi would talk. Their pidgin “Italish” got better.
Durant asked Firimbi how many wives he had.
“Four wives.”
“How many children?”
Firimbi lied.
“Twenty-seven,” he said.
“How do you provide for so many?” the pilot asked.
“I’m a businessman,” Firimbi said. “I used to have a flour and pasta factory,” which was true. He also had grown sons who had left Somalia and sent money, he said. (Firimbi actually had nine children.)
Durant told him he had a wife and a son.
Firimbi tried to explain to the pilot why Somalis were so angry at him and the other Rangers. He talked about the Abdi House attack, how the helicopters had killed scores of his friends and clansmen. Firimbi complained about all the innocent people the Americans had killed, women and children. There were hundreds, perhaps thousands, he said. He explained that Aidid was an important and brilliant leader in his country, not someone the UN or the Americans could just label an outlaw and carry off. Not without a fight anyway. Firimbi considered Durant a prisoner of war. He believed that by treating the pilot humanely, he would improve the image of Somalis in America upon his release. Durant humored his jailer, asking him questions, indulging his whims. For instance, Firimbi loved his khat. One day he handed cash to a guard and sent him to purchase more. When the man returned he began dividing the plant into three equal portions, one for himself, Firimbi, and another guard.
“No,” Firimbi said. “Four.”
The guard looked at him quizzically. Firimbi gestured toward Durant. Durant quickly figured out what his jailer was up to. He nodded at the guard, indicating a cut for himself.
When the guard left, Firimbi scooped up the two piles for himself, winking at Durant and flashing an enormous grin.
Firimbi identified so strongly with the pilot that when Durant refused food, he refused food. When Durant couldn’t sleep because of his pain, Firimbi couldn’t sleep, either. He made Durant promise that when he was released he would tell how well treated he had been. Durant promised he would tell the truth.
After five miserable days in captivity, Durant got visitors. Suddenly the room was cleaned and the bedsheets were changed. Firimbi helped the pilot wash, redressed his wounds, gave him a clean shirt, and wrapped his midsection and legs in a ma-awis, the loose skirt worn by Somali men. Perfume was sprayed around the room.
Durant thought he was about to be released. Instead, Firimbi ushered in a visitor. She was Suzanne Hofstadter, a Norwegian who worked for the International Red Cross. Durant took her hand and held on tight. All she had been allowed to bring along were forms with which he could write a letter. In the letter Durant described his injuries and noted that he had received some medical treatment. He told his family he was doing okay, and asked them to pray for him and the others. He still didn’t know the fate of his crew or D-boys Shughart and Gordon.
He wrote that he was craving a pizza. Then he asked Firimbi if he could write another letter to his buddies at the hangar, and his jailer said yes. He wrote that he was doing okay, and told them not to touch the bottle of Jack Daniels in his rucksack. Durant didn’t have much time to think. He was trying to convey in a lighthearted way that he was okay, to lessen their worry for him. At the bottom of this note he wrote, “NSDQ.”
Later, Red Cross officials, concerned about violating their strict neutrality by passing along what might be a coded message, scratched out the initials.
After Hofstadter left, two reporters were ushered in: Briton Mark Huband of the Guardian and Stephen Smith from the French newspaper Liberation. Huband found the pilot lying flat on his back, bare-chested, obviously injured and in pain. Durant was still choked up from the session with Hofstadter. He had held her hand until the last moment, unwilling to see her leave.
Huband and Smith had brought a recorder. They told him he didn’t have to say anything. The reporters pitied Durant, and tried to reassure him. Huband said he’d done a lot of reporting in Somalia, and had developed a sense for when things were bad and when they weren’t. He said his sense was that these people meant Durant no harm.
Durant weighed talking to them and decided it was better to communicate with the outside world than not. He agreed to discuss only the things that had happened to him since the crash. So with the tape recorder rolling, he briefly described the crash and his capture. Then Huband asked why the battle had happened, and why so many people had died. Durant said something he would later regret:
“Too many innocent people are getting killed. People are angry because they see civilians getting killed. I don’t think anyone who doesn’t live here can understand what is going wrong here. Americans mean well. We did try to help. Things have gone wrong.”
It was that “things have gone wrong” line that haunted him after the reporters left. Who was he to pronounce a verdict on the American mission? He should have just said, “I’m a soldier and I do what I’m told.”
He grew depressed. He really did believe things had gone wrong, but he felt he had stepped over a line by saying it.
Durant stayed down until the next day when he heard his wife Lorrie’s voice on the BBC. She had made a statement to the press. He listened intently to her voice. At the end of her statement, Lorrie said four words that brought tears to his eyes. What she said were the four words whose initials the pilot had penned at the bottom of his note—still visible despite the Red Cross scratches. It was the motto of his unit, the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment.
Lorrie said, “Like you always say, Mike, Night Stalkers Don’t Quit.”
His message of defiance had gotten through.
In the week following the battle, the men of Task Force Ranger worked through a broad range of emotions as they girded themselves for another fight. They were furious at the Somalis and filled with grief for their dead comrades. They felt disgust for the press that kept showing the horrible images of the dead soldiers being humiliated in the city, less than a mile or two from where they sat. They watched with frustration as a fresh Delta squadron and Ranger company arrived, and grudgingly accepted a back-seat, although every man was prepared and expected to be sent back out into the city. They observed the swagger and casual boasting of the new arrivals with the weary eyes of experience. They all knew that if intel located Durant, they’d be going in with more force than Mogadishu had yet seen. The idea of making this fight was both terrifying and grimly necessary. It was a prospect they both dreaded and welcomed. It was odd that the two emotions could stand side by side. So the men who’d come through the battle unhurt worked to get their weapons, vehicles, minds, and hearts ready.
Then, two days after the fight, a Somali mortar round fell just outside the hangar and killed Sergeant Matt Rierson, leader of the Delta team that had first stormed the target house and taken the Somali targets captive, and whose resolve and experience had helped shore up the lost convoy during the worst of the fight. It seemed bitterly unfair to have come through the storm unhurt only to be felled while standing outside the hangar in idle conversation two days later. Severely injured with Rierson was Dr. Rob Marsh, the Delta surgeon. Alert though in great pain and bleeding profusely, Marsh helped direct the medics who gave him emergency care.
Rangers struggled to accept their profound losses. There was no doubt that they had more than held their own in the battle. What other ninety-nine men would have survived a long afternoon and night besieged by the well-armed angry citizenry of a city of more than a million? Still, each death mocked their former cockiness and appetite for battle. A whole generation of American soldiers had served careers without experiencing a horror of an all-out firefight. Now another had. There was a recognition in the faces of the survivors, a hard-won wisdom.
Sergeant Eversmann mentally replayed his every move during the battle, as he would still be doing years later, from the moment he accidentally tore the headphones out of the hovering Black Hawk to finding Private Blackburn broken and unconscious on the street, to watching his men get hit, one after the other, to that long and bloody ride on the lost convoy. Why had he kept them out on the street when the fire grew so bad? Shouldn’t he have directed them to break down a door and move indoors? How did they get so lost on the ride back? He’d lost Casey Joyce on that ride. There was nothing he could have done about that. Word was that doctors might be able to save Scotty Galentine’s thumb. They had sewed Galentine’s hand with the thumb into his stomach, hoping to foster regeneration of the blood vessels they’d need to reconnect it. And word was that Blackburn was going to make it, too. He was conscious again, although he had no memory of his fall or anything else that happened on the street. He would recover, but never be the same guy his buddies remembered before the fall. The rest of the injuries were minor. But Eversmann had only about six of his guys left.
From Chalk One, the one led in by Captain Steele and Lieutenant Perino, they’d lost Jamie Smith, whose agonizing death at the first crash site would continue to haunt Perino and Sergeant Schmid, the Delta medic who’d torn open Smith’s wound trying to save him. Smith’s death would become the most controversial of the battle, since his was the one life that might have been saved if the force around Wolcott’s crash site had been rescued sooner. Carlos Rodriguez, the Ranger shot in the crotch at crash site one, was going to recover as well. Dale Sizemore had fended off the doctors who still wanted him sent home because of his elbow. He paced the hangar hoping for another chance to avenge his friends. Steve Anderson wrestled with feelings of guilt. So many others had died or been hurt. Why had he escaped injury? He wasn’t sure what made him angrier, the reluctance he’d felt about joining the fight or the politicians in Washington who’d gotten so many of his friends killed and hurt chasing a stupid warlord in Mogadishu. He would grow angrier and angrier brooding over it, and as time went by he was filled with distrust for the system he had enlisted to defend. Mike Goodale, his wounded thigh and rear end bandaged and healing, would be back home in Illinois with his girlfriend Kira before the week was out. Goodale asked Kira to marry him the first time he talked to her on the phone from Germany. He’d seen how short life could be and was determined not to put an important thing off ever again. Lieutenant Lechner faced a long recovery, as doctors at Walter Reed Army Hospital painstakingly stimulated bone growth to heal the hole an AK-47 round had driven through his shin. Undergoing virtually the same procedure in the bed next to his was Sergeant John Burns, whose lower leg had been shattered by a bullet on the lost convoy. Stebbins was home with his wife within the week. The garrulous company clerk would receive a Silver Star for his part in the fight, and was on his way to becoming a legend in the company, an example of how even those in the unit’s least glamorous jobs were Rangers, too.
The ground convoy had been decimated. Only about half of the fifty-two men who had ridden out on October 3 were still at the hangar. Their vehicles were wrecked. Nearly all of the convoy’s leaders had been injured and had been flown home, including Lieutenant Colonel Danny McKnight. Clay Othic and his buddy Eric Spalding were back home from Germany before the week was out. On the long transport flight home, his right arm still bandaged and disabled, Othic had scribbled a final entry in his Mogadishu diary with his unsteady left hand: “Sometimes you get the bear; sometimes the bear gets you.” Within days, he and Spalding, their wounds bandaged and healing, made the drive home to Missouri they’d promised themselves to catch the end of deer-hunting season. Cruising the interstate in Spalding’s pickup they listened to occasional radio reports about the unfinished business in Mogadishu, a million miles away.
Worst hit was the Delta squadron, which had lost the devout Dan Busch, little Earl Fillmore, Randy Shughart, Gary Gordon, Griz, and then Rierson. Brad Hallings, the Delta sniper whose leg was sheared off inside Super Six Two, would learn to get around so well on an artificial limb that he was able to rejoin the unit. Paul Leonard, who had the calf of his left leg blown away manning a Mark-19 on the lost convoy, would end up doing a long recuperation and rehab at Walter Reed with Burns, Lechner, Galentine, and some of the other more seriously injured guys. President Clinton visited them there one day about two weeks after the battle. He came without fanfare, and seemed shocked and uncharacteristically speechless when confronted with the flesh-and-blood consequences of the fight. The men had been given curt instructions to keep their opinions of Clinton, if negative, to themselves. Galentine posed for a snapshot with the president, a T-shirt pulled over the hand sewed to his abdomen. In the snapshot both men looked equally startled to be in each other’s company.
The war wasn’t over yet in Mogadishu, however. The soldiers who had come through the fight unscathed expected things to get worse before they got better. They did what they could to salute their fallen brothers and move on. In the days following the battle the Night Stalkers erected a makeshift memorial before the JOC in memory of the men they’d lost. General Garrison assembled all of the men for a memorial service, and captured their feelings of sadness, fear, and resolve with the famous martial speech from Shakespeare’s Henry V:
Whoever does not have the stomach for this fight, let him depart. Give him money to speed his departure since we wish not to die in that man’s company. Whoever lives past today and comes home safely will rouse himself every year on this day, show his neighbor his scars, and tell embellished stories of all their great feats of battle. These stories he will teach his son and from this day until the end of the world we shall be remembered. We few, we happy few, we band of brothers; for whoever has shed his blood with me shall be my brother. And those men afraid to go will think themselves lesser men as they hear of how we fought and died together.
Willi Frank got the word about her husband exactly a week after he was reported missing. It had been a terrible week. Those who hadn’t gotten final word on the fate of their men had continued to scrutinize the news photos and videotapes of the dead.
One of the most widely circulated shots of a body being dragged through the streets, the one with the left leg bent up awkwardly, was Tommie Field. The other of the dragged bodies, the one most often seen on TV, was Randy Shughart. The still photo of a body draped backward over a handcart was Bill Cleveland. There was no official confirmation from the army, but the families knew.
Willi was attending the funeral service for Cliff Wolcott when she heard beepers go off in several places around the church. Two of the beepers that sounded were held by members of her support unit.
They took her aside after the service. Willi thought they were escorting her to spend a few minutes with Chris Wolcott. Instead, they told her Ray’s body had been identified.
“How do you know it was Ray?” she asked them. “Was his hair gray?”
The hair was gone on the body, they said, but they described his remains. The body had been clothed, they told her. She asked them to describe the pants, the underpants. Ray had left on such short notice that Willi hadn’t had time to dry out his military skivvies. Instead she’d packed his civilian underwear. When they told her what kind of shorts he was wearing, she knew.
In his second week of captivity, Durant was moved again, this time to what appeared to be a private residence with a perimeter fence. He was given a box of gifts from the Red Cross. One of the items in the box was a pocket Bible.
Keeping track of time was one of the skills Durant had been taught in survival training. Prisoners of war in Vietnam had found that having some sense of time elapsed and ordering the events of each day, no matter how mundane, helped to keep them sane. Keeping a record was an act of faith. It implied you would eventually be released and have a story to tell.
He was not an especially religious man, but Durant found his own use for the Bible. He began reconstructing the events of his captivity in the margins of it, using code words, beginning with his crash. He wrote:
“Bump,” recalling the sensation of being hit by the RPG.
“Spin.”
“Horizon,” for the blurring of earth and sky as the chopper spun down.
And so forth. He pressed on, eventually reconstructing the entire term of his captivity almost hour by hour. The margins of the Bible were beginning to fill with his jottings.
Firimbi watched the pilot studying and making notes in his Bible and assumed Durant was a very religious man.
“If you convert to Islam, you will be freed,” the captor said.
“You pray to your God, and I’ll pray to mine, and maybe we’ll both be released,” Durant joked.
On the radio they played selections of music that Durant liked.
During one of his nights in captivity, Durant had a dream. He dreamed he was one of the Rangers, and that he was supposed to get on a chopper with Chalk Four. Instead he stumbled blindly, asking, “Where’s Chalk Four? Where’s Chalk Four?” He didn’t recognize the faces of the people he was questioning. Suddenly, everyone else in the dream was gone. Overhead a chopper rose into the sky and flew off, leaving him alone on the ground.
When Robert Oakley arrived in Mogadishu on October 8, Aidid was still in hiding. It took several days to arrange, but he eventually met with the warlord’s clan. He told the Habr Gidr leaders that the U.S. military operation against Aidid was over and that Task Force Ranger’s original mission had ended. The Somalis were skeptical.
“You’ll see for yourself over time that it’s true,” Oakley said. Then he told them that President Clinton wanted Durant released immediately, without conditions. The Somalis were incredulous. The Rangers had rounded up sixty or seventy men from their leadership. The top men, including the two most important men taken on October 3, Omar Salad and Mohamed Hassan Awale, were being held in a makeshift prison camp on an island off the coast of Kismayo. Any release of Durant would at least involve a trade. That was the Somali way.
“I’ll do my best to see that these people are released, but I can’t promise anything,” Oakley said, pointing out that the Somalis were, technically, in the custody of the UN. “I’ll talk to the president about it, but only after you’ve released Durant.”
Then the former ambassador delivered a chilling message. He was careful to say, “This is not a threat,” but the meaning was plain.
“I have no plan for this, and I’ll do everything I can to prevent it, but what will happen if a few weeks go by and Mr. Durant is not released? Not only will you lose any credit you may get now, but we will decide that we have to rescue him. I guarantee you we are not going to pay or trade for him in any way, shape, or form. ... So what we’ll decide is we have to rescue him, and whether we have the right place or the wrong place, there’s going to be a fight with your people. The minute the guns start again, all restraint on the U.S. side goes. Just look at the stuff coming in here now. An aircraft carrier, tanks, gunships ... the works. Once the fighting starts, all this pent-up anger is going to be released. This whole part of the city will be destroyed, men, women, children, camels, cats, dogs, goats, donkeys, everything. ... That would really be tragic for all of us, but that’s what will happen.”
The Somalis delivered this message to Aidid in hiding, and the warlord saw the wisdom of Oakley’s advice. He offered to hand the pilot over immediately.
Mindful of not upstaging his old friend Admiral Howe, Oakley asked them to delay for a few hours to give him time to leave the country. He asked them to turn Durant over to Howe, and he flew back to Washington.
Firimbi told Durant he was going to be released the next day. The propaganda minister was very happy to deliver this news, but also very nervous. He was happy for his friend and for himself. He joked that both of them were going to be released. Firimbi would be free to go back to his normal life. He thought releasing Durant without any conditions was a stunning demonstration of Aidid and Habr Gidr munificence. He got choked up just talking about it. This gesture, he said, would undo at a stroke the awful images of the mob mutilating dead American soldiers, a scene that embarrassed Firimbi and other educated men of his clan. He repeatedly urged Durant to reassure him that he would tell the world how well he had been treated in captivity.
The decision was such a good one, Firimbi grew afraid something would spoil it. What if an angry faction of Somalis got wind of the deal and came looking for Durant to kill him? What if the Americans were setting them up? The Americans could send someone to kill Durant, and the world would believe Aidid and the Habr Gidr had done it. Firimbi requested more protection, and the clan ringed the residence where Durant was held with armed men.
That morning, Firimbi helped Durant wash. This time, instead of being thrown in the back of a car and sat on, men arrived with a litter to carry him out gently and placed him in the back of a flatbed truck. Durant knew this was it. He would be nervous until he was back in American hands, but Firimbi was so happy and excited he knew that it was true.
They drove him to a walled compound and waited. When Red Cross officials arrived, an army doctor came in with the team and examined him. He wanted to give the pilot a shot for the pain, but Firimbi said no. He was afraid the doctor would poison Durant.
The pilot was handed over without ceremony. Red Cross officials gave him a letter from Lorrie and from his parents that they had been unable to deliver. The doctor who examined him emerged from the compound to tell reporters that the pilot had a broken leg, a shattered cheekbone, a fractured back, and relatively minor bullet wounds to his leg and shoulder, but had been treated well by his captors.
“The leg was in a splint, but it hasn’t been set and is quite painful,” the doctor said.
Then he was carried out by Red Cross officials. Durant clutched the letter and tears rolled from his eyes as he was carried past reporters and driven back to the airport Ranger base where he had taken off eleven days earlier.
Every American who survived the Battle of Mogadishu would be home within the month. Most would stay bitter about the decision to call off their mission. If it had been important enough to get eighteen men killed, and seventy-three injured, not to mention all the Somalis dead or hurt, how could it just be called off the day after the fight? Within weeks of Durant’s release, American Marines (at Oakley’s direction) would escort Aidid to renewed peace negotiations. President Clinton would accept Oakley’s plea on behalf of the Somali leaders. Several months later Omar Salad, Mohamed Hassan Awale, and every man captured by Task Force Ranger was released.
The reinforced task force was waiting for Durant when the Red Cross convoy arrived at the airport. They had turned out, a force now of more than a thousand, dressed in khaki fatigues and floppy desert hats, glad to at last have something to celebrate. They formed a corridor leading from the base driveway to the platform of the transport plane that would carry Durant to Germany, where Lorrie had flown and was waiting for him. The men all had paper cups with a swallow of bourbon, ostensibly from the fifth of Jack Daniels the pilot had stashed in his rucksack and warned his buddies, in his note from captivity, to keep their hands off.
It was a day of joy and enormous relief, but also a day of sadness. Durant had just learned that he would be the only man from the crew of Super Six Four and its two brave Delta defenders to come back alive. He smiled and fought back tears as he was carried through the corridor on a litter, an IV in his arm, clutching his unit’s red beret.
The men around him cheered and then, as the stretcher approached the ramp to the plane, they began to sing. The song started in one or two places at first, boldly, then spread to every voice.
They sang “God Bless America.”