Black Hawk Down

The medic cut open Rodriguez's uniform to assess the damage. Rodriguez had been hit by a round that entered his buttock and bored straight through his pelvis, blowing off one testicle as it exited through his upper thigh. The first goal was to stop Rodriguez from bleeding out. If his femoral artery had been hit (as with Smith, across the street), he knew there wasn't much chance of stopping the bleeding. Wilkinson began applying field dressings and stuffing wads of Curlex into the gaping exit wound. He wrapped the area tightly with an Ace bandage.

Wilkinson then

slipped rubber, pneumatic pants over Rodriguez's legs and pelvis, and pumped them with air to apply still more pressure to the wound. The bleeding stopped. He dosed Rodriguez with morphine and started an IV to replenish fluids, which he quickly exhausted trying to get the private stabilized.

He radioed over to Fales, “You guys got any more fluids?”

They did. Wilkinson told them to just bag them up and toss them as far as they could in his direction. He watched across the street as one of the men there wound up for the heave, and realized that was a bad idea. He called back over and told them not to throw it. If the contents broke open, or were hit by a round, they'd waste precious fluids. If the bags spilled out, he'd be stuck in the middle of Marehan Road gathering it all up. He decided it would be better to brave the road twice at full speed than stop in the middle of it.

He ran across, again moving at what seemed tortoise pace, and again arriving unscathed. The men watching from their positions hunkered down around the intersection were amazed at Wilkinson's bravery. Wilkinson told Fales that he would have to go back for good this time. Rodriguez was in a critical state. He needed to be taken out immediately. Wilkinson would care for him until that happened. Then, with the fluids cradled in his arms, head down, he dashed across the road for the third and last time. Again, he arrived unhurt.

As he burst back into the courtyard, one of the D-boys told him, “Man, God really does love medics.”

It was fast growing dark. Wilkinson got help moving Rodriguez and the others into a back room. He learned then that the convoy coming to rescue them had turned back, and that they were going to be spending the night.

Wilkinson sought out Captain Miller.

Look, I've got a critical here,“ he said. ”He needs to get out right now. The others can wait, but he needs to come out."

Miller gave him a look that said: We're in a bad spot here, what can I say?

6

Specialist Stebbins had his eyes closed but he still saw bright red when the grenade exploded. He felt searing flames and then he just felt numb.

He smelled burned hair and dust and hot cordite and he was tumbling, tumbling, mixed up with Heard, until they both came to rest sitting upright staring at each other.

“Are you okay?” Heard asked after a long moment.

“Yeah, but I don't have my weapon.”

Stebbins crawled back to his position, looking for his weapon. He found it in pieces. There was a barrel but no hand grip. The dust was still thick in the air he could feel it up his nose and in his eyes and could taste it. He could also taste blood. He figured he'd busted his lip.

He needed another weapon. He stood up and started for the door of the courtyard where the D-boys were holed up, figuring he'd grab one of the wounded's rifles, but he fell down. He got up and took a step and then fell down again.

His left leg and foot felt like they were asleep. After falling the second time he walked, dragging his leg, toward the courtyard. He found his buddy Heard standing in the doorway telling one of the D-boys, “My buddy Steb is still out there.”

Stebbins put his hand on Heard's shoulder.

“Brian, I'm okay.”

Wilkinson grabbed hold of Stebbins, who looked a fright.

He was covered with dirt and powder and dust, his pants were mostly burned off, and he was bleeding from wounds up and down his leg. He was groggy and seemed not to have noticed his injuries.

“Just let me sit down for a few minutes,” Stebbins said. “I'll be okay.”

The medic helped Stebbins limp into the back room where the other wounded were gathered. It was dark, and Stebbins smelled blood and sweat and urine. The RPG that had exploded outside had briefly set fire to the house, and there was a thick layer of black smoke now hanging from the ceiling about halfway to the floor. The window was open to air things out, and everyone was sitting low. There were three Somalis huddled on a couch. Rodriguez was in the corner moaning and taking short, loud sucking breaths. He had an IV tube in his arm and these weird inflated pants around his middle. Fucking got his dick shot off.

Heard was arguing with a medic, “Look, I've just got a little scratch on my wrist. I'm fine. Really. I should put a bandage on it and go back.”

The Somalis moved to the floor and Wilkinson eased Stebbins down on the couch and began cutting off his left boot with a big pair of shears.

“Hey, not my boots!” he complained. “What are you doing that for?”

Wilkinson slid the boot off smoothly and slowly, removing the sock at the same time, and Stebbins was shocked to see a golf ball-sized chunk of metal lodged in his foot. He realized for the first time that he'd been hit. He had noticed that his trousers looked burned and singed, and now, illuminated by the medic's white light, he saw that the blackened flaking patches along his leg were skin! He felt no pain, just numbness. The fire from the explosion had instantly cauterized all his wounds. He could see the whole lower left side of his body was burned.

One of the D-boys poked his head in the door and gestured toward the white light.

“Hey, man, you've got to turn the white light out,” he said. “It's dark out there now and we've got to be tactful.”

Stebbins was amused by that word, “tactful,” but then he thought about it-tactful, tact, tactics-and it made perfect sense.

Wilkinson turned off the white light and flicked on a red flashlight.

Stebbins thrust his hand back into his butt pack for a cigarette, and found the pack had been burned as well. Wilkinson wrapped Stebbins's foot.

“You're out of action,” he said. “Listen, you're numb now but it's gonna go away. All I can give you is some Percocet.” He handed Stebbins a tablet and some iodized water in a cup. Wilkinson also handed him a rifle. “Here's a gun. You can guard this window.”

“Okay.”

“But as your health care professional, I feel I should warn you that narcotics and firearms don't mix.”

Stebbins just shook his head and smiled.

He kept hearing sounds out the window, coming up the alley. But there was no one there. His mind was playing tricks on him. Once or twice he shouted in panic and blasted a few rounds at the window, but it was just shadows.

Stebbins's outbursts and the blast of occasional RPG hits against the outside wall roused Rodriguez from has morphine reverie. He laughed and shouted out the window what bad shots the Somalis were. As bad as his wound was, he felt no pain, just discomfort. The rubber pants had the lower half of his body in a vise. He asked Wilkinson once or twice if be would release some of the pressure. The medic said no.

One of the D-boys came in and asked Stebbins where the RPG had come from that got him, which direction? Stebbins wasn't sure.

“From down the alley west,” he said.

But that had been the direction he was facing, and his injuries were all on his back side. Then Stebbins remembered he had turned and looked back when he had seen it coming at him. It must have come from behind him.

“No, east. Not from over the bird though,” he said. “From farther up the street.”

Finally he was left to sit there alone, his pants blown off, clutching his rifle, listening to Rodriguez breathing steadily and to the Somali woman complaining with words be didn't understand that her husband's flex cuffs were too tight. He realized he had to urinate badly. There was no place to go. So he just released the flow where he sat. It felt great. He looked up at the Somali family and gave them a weak smile.

“Sorry about the couch,” he said.

7

Still out on the street one and a half blocks south, Private David Floyd was shooting at everything that moved. At first he had hesitated firing into crowds when they massed downhill to the south, but he had seen the Delta guy, Fillmore, get hit, and Lieutenant Lechner, and about three or four of his other buddies, and now be was just shooting at everybody. The world was erupting around him and shooting back seemed the only sensible response. But no matter how many rounds he and Specialist Melvin DeJesus poured down Marehan Road, the crowds kept on creeping in. Out in the street, still flat in his little dip in the middle of the road, Specialist John Collett was doing the same. They were the southernmost point on the perimeter and had no idea what was happening down around the crash site, or anywhere else for that matter. When Floyd hit someone with rounds from his SAW, he could see their bodies begin to twitch, like they were being zapped with electricity. They would usually make it only a step or two more before failing over.

A bullet or a casing or something hit him. Floyd jumped a foot. He fell down, afraid to take his eyes off the road ahead, and found that his pants had been ripped from his crotch to his boot, but the round hadn't even scratched him. It had evidently come through the tin wall.

“Whooo!” he said, looking over at DeJesus, grateful and frightened.

His ears were ringing but for some reason he could still hear. DeJesus was starting to freak out. He was getting jumpier and jumpier, saying he couldn't stay there anymore. He had to move. He and Floyd had felt safe for a time pressed behind the tin shed wall on the west side of the road in shadow, but as it grew darker now, DeJesus wasn't staying low. He was up on his feet, hopping up and down. He said he had to do something. He had a bad feeling. He had to be somewhere else. Now!

Floyd felt like slapping him.

“Sit yer ass down!” he screamed at him.

As it happened, across Marehan Road men were waving them into the courtyard. Captain Steele had given up for the time being catching up to Lieutenants Perino and DiTomasso in the next block. He wanted all the men at this southern end of the perimeter to consolidate in the courtyard. Already there were three Delta teams and a number of wounded in the small space, including Neathery and Errico, who both had gunshot wounds to their biceps, and Lechner, who was still howling with the pain of his shattered right lower leg. Goodale was still working the radio while a medic stuffed Curlex into the exit wound in his buttock. The courtyard was a haven, but the wide road that separated Floyd, DeJesus, and the other members of Chalk Three from it loomed like an impassable gulf.

One by one, they ran or it. Private George Siegler went first. Then Collett jumped up from his spot in the middle of the road and sprinted for the door. Private Jeff Young, his big glasses bouncing on his nose and long legs pumping high, made it across next. As each man ran, Floyd and DeJesus, who had settled down again, blasted rounds to the south to provide covering fire. Finally, only Floyd and DeJesus were left.

“You're gonna run across that road,” Floyd told his buddy.

DeJesus nodded.

“But, listen here. When you get across, don't you go through that doorway, see? You turn around and start shooting, because as soon as you're across, I'm coming. Okay?”

DeJesus nodded. Floyd wasn't at all sure he'd gotten through.

He must have blasted fifty rounds as DeJesus ran. And his friend didn't forget. Before entering the courtyard, DeJesus turned, dropped to one knee, and started shooting. Floyd felt like he had lead in his boots as he ran. His torn pants were flapping around him like a skirt, and he wasn't wearing any underwear, so he felt naked in more ways than one as his legs churned up the road. It seemed like the doorway to the courtyard was actually receding while he ran.

But he made it.

8

Across the city, back at the Rangers' airfield base an hour or so earlier, the truckloads of injured and dead off the lost convoy had arrived. This was the kind of catastrophe Major Rob Marsh had long planned for, hoping he would never see. He had entered the army in 1976 as a Special Forces medic, and then had gone on to medical school at the University of Virginia. His father, John Marsh, was then Secretary of the Army. Marsh was working as a flight surgeon in Texas when he had met General Garrison. The two had hit it off. A few years later, as Delta commander, Garrison invited Marsh to be the unit's surgeon - no doubt mindful of the family connection. Marsh said no, fearing that the offer might have more to do with his father than his medical skills. But when the offer was renewed about a year later, he'd accepted. He'd been doctoring for the unit ever since, eight years now.

One of Marsh's proudest innovations were four large trauma chests, four-by-two-foot trunks, packed with IV fluid bags, gauze, Curlex, petroleum jelly, needles, chest tubes . . . all the things needed for initial treatment of wounds. Instead of just filling the chests with the equipment, Marsh and his staff had packaged fifteen separate Ziploc bags in each trunk, five serious-wound packets and ten for lesser wounds. The idea was to assess the seriousness of an injury, then grab the appropriate packet.

Marsh had seen British forces do that during the Falkland Islands war. Delta had been lugging the trunks around with them now for years, not always happily. Officers had complained about how much space the trunks took up on pallets, and more than once had tried to have them removed. In Marsh's experience, it was always officers with actual combat experience like Garrison who would step in to save his chests. Now, for the first time, they needed them.

Marsh had been hovering around the JOC all afternoon as the mission deteriorated. At first, Garrison had been in the back of the room, chewing on his unlit cigar, listening and watching quietly. He was not one to interfere. Some top commanders insisted on calling most of the shots themselves, but Garrison wasn't like that. When they'd begun this deployment, the general had given a little speech explaining that, for the first time in his career, he'd been given command of men he felt he didn't need to lead. They knew how to lead themselves. Garrison told them his job was just to supply them with what they needed and stay out of their way. But as things began going wrong, the general had moved to the front of the room.

Marsh had to leave the JOC to tend to Private Blackburn-who had not, as the medic had feared, broken his neck when he fell from the Black Hawk. The young Ranger had suffered head and neck trauma, and had a few broken bones. Marsh was working on him when he got word that a Black Hawk was down in the city. When he returned to peek into the JOC, there was an anxious buzz about the place. Commanders seemed fixated on the TV screens. Garrison was fully engaged. Things had clearly gone amok.

The army field hospital at the U.S. embassy was alerted to be ready for casualties. There was some discussion about sending men directly there, but it was decided to do the primary care at Marsh's tent. He was ready. He had two surgeons, a nurse anesthetist, and two physician assistants. Nurses from the adjacent air force mobile surgical facility also volunteered to help. There would be a triage area just outside the tent. The most urgent cases would go directly inside. Those who could wait would go to a holding area out back. Those who were “expectant,” near death and beyond help, would go to a separate spot near the ambulance, away from the other wounded. Marsh had designated his unit's ambulance for the dead. It was cool in there. The bodies would be out of the sun and out of view. Pilla's body was already there.

When the convoy pulled up it was like a scene out of some nightmarish medieval painting. The back of one of the five-tons opened on a mass of bleeding, wailing, moaning men. Griz Martin sat to one side holding his entrails in his hands, his legs shattered, awake but groggy. There hadn't even been time in most cases for the wounds to have been bandaged. Marsh had just seconds to make a judgment call on each as the litter bearers lifted them out. Private Adalberto Rodriguez, who had been blown up and run over, went into the tent. A Delta sergeant, whose left calf had been shot off, went out back to wait. Into the tent went Sergeant Ruiz, who had a sucking wound in his chest. Some of the wounded Rangers were dazed. They wandered around the triage area, sputtering angrily. Marsh noted they all were still carrying weapons. He asked the chaplain to start gathering those guys and talking to them.

Delta medic Sergeant First Class Don Hutchinson confronted Marsh about Griz. Hutch and Griz were close.

“He's hurt real bad, Doc.”

Some of the other D-boys had come over to be with Griz, who was semiconscious with what Marsh recognized as a clearly non-survivable injury. His midsection was basically gone, and when Marsh tried to turn him over, he saw the whole back of his pelvis had been blown off. Griz obviously lost a tremendous amount of blood. It was amazing that he was still alive, much less semiconscious, but when Marsh took his hand, Griz gripped it as hard as the doctor's hand had ever been gripped. He should have labeled him “expectant,” or certain to die, and sent him back by the ambulance, but with all the guys from the unit pressing in, urging him to do something, Marsh felt compelled to act. He felt sure it was hopeless, but they'd give Griz a full-court press anyway.

Marsh sent into the tent Private Kowalewski, the Ranger driver whose torso had been penetrated by the unexploded RPG. Amazingly, he still had vital signs. Inside, Captain Bruce Adams, a general surgeon, examined the broken body of the soldier and recoiled at what he found. Kowalewski's left arm was gone-one of the air force nurses would find it, to her horror, in his pants pocket where Specialist Hand had placed it. Adams began working to restore Kowalewski's breathing while a nurse removed his clothing. They found the entrance wound of the RPG on one side of his chest, and, lifting a flap of skin under his right arm, Adams saw the tapered front end of the grenade.

Marsh came by for a quick second assessment and told Adams, “This guy's expectant. Don't waste any more time on him.”

Assigned to help carry the nearly dead man back out was Sergeant First Class Randy Rymes, a munitions expert. It was Rymes who recognized that Kowalewski had a live bomb embedded in his chest. The detonator was on the tip, just under his right arm. Instead of taking him out by the ambulance, Rymes and another soldier built a sandbag bunker and placed Kowalewski's body inside it. Rymes then stretched out beside the bunker on his stomach and reached his hand around to delicately remove the tip of the grenade from under the man's skin.

While all this was going on, commanders inside the JOC had watched with horror as triumphant Somalis overran the site of the second Black Hawk crash, pilot Mike Durant's, and were now getting frantic calls for a chopper to medevac Smith and Carlos Rodriguez from the first crash site. They had ninety-nine men pinned down in the city and no rescue force on its way. They knew it would be foolhardy to try to put another Black Hawk down there to evacuate the two badly injured Rangers. The volume of fire was much heavier there than anywhere else in Mogadishu, and the Somalis had already shot down four Black Hawks. Garrison had pilots who were willing to try, but there was no point in getting more men killed trying to save two.

It had been easy to believe, prior to this day, that the Somali warlord Aidid lacked broad popular support. But this fight had turned into something akin to a popular uprising. It seemed like everybody in the city wanted suddenly to help kill Americans. There were burning roadblocks everywhere. It was obvious Aidid and his clan had been waiting for the right moment, and this was it. At the second crash site, seen from high overhead, there was no sign of Shughart, Gordon, Durant, or the Super Six Two crew, only busy crowds of excited Skinnies still swarming over the wreckage. There was a brief flurry of hope when the observation birds picked up tracking beacons from Durant's and his copilot Ray Frank's flight suits, but it was quickly dashed when it became apparent that the beacons had been stripped from the pilots by canny Aidid militia and were being run all over the city to confuse the airborne search.

As for the men around the first crash site, they would be all right. Those ninety-nine were some of the toughest soldiers in the world. They were superbly trained, well armed, and mean as hell. They owned that neighborhood and nobody was going to take it away from them, certainly no armed force in Mogadishu.

Unless they ran out of ammo, that is, or keeled over from dehydration. The C2 helicopter had begun calling for help shortly before dusk.

-Need a resupply ... IV bags, ammo, and water.... Obviously we need them to hurry as fast as they can. Our boys on the ground are running out of bullets.

-Romeo Six Four [Harrell], this is Adam Six Four [Garrison]. You want us to put resupply on a halo?

-If you can. Put resupply on a helo. Try to take it out to the northern crash site. They're running out of ammo, IV bottles, and water, over.

Few of the Rangers had even bothered to take full canteens. They had been running and fighting now in sweltering heat for several hours. If they were going to make it through the night they would need more than skill and willpower. So even though it risked turning a bad situation worse, Garrison ordered a Black Hawk in. They could drop water and ammo and medical supplies, and, if possible, land and pull the two critical Rangers out. In the JOC, most of the officers believed the helicopter would be shot out of the sky. It would most likely crash-land right there on Marehan Road. Either way, the men on the ground would get their ammo and water.

Black Hawk Super Six Six, piloted by Chief Warrant Officers Stan Wood and Gary Fuller, moved down through the night just after seven o'clock, guided by infrared strobe lights set out on the wide street just south of the crash site. As the helicopter descended, machine-gun fire erupted again from points all around the Ranger perimeter, and RPGs flew. The men inside courtyards and houses were startled by how close the gunfire was to their positions, in some cases on the other side of the walls. The rotor wash from the Black Hawk kicked up a furious sandstorm.

It hovered for about thirty seconds, which was about twenty-eight seconds too long as far as Sergeant Howe was concerned. He held his breath as the deafening bird hung over the block, afraid that it was going to pancake in on them. Delta Sergeant First Class Alex Szigedi, who had survived the lost convoy earlier that afternoon, now hustled in the back of the helicopter with another operator to shove the kit bags filled with water, ammo, and IV bags overboard. The helicopter was getting riddled. Szigedi was hit in the face. Bullets poked holes in the rotor blades and the engine, which began spouting fluids. One round passed through the transmission gearbox. Super Six Six kept flying. As it pulled up and away, men scurried out of the buildings to retrieve the new supplies.

Back in the JOC they heard Wood announce, calmly:

-Resupply is complete.

The stranded force had been tucked in for the night.

9

The fight now raged around three blocks of Mogadishu real estate. The block immediately south of the crash was occupied in two places. The CSAR team and Lieutenant DiTomasso's Chalk Two Rangers, about thirty-three men in all, had moved in through the wall knocked over by Super Six One on its way down. They had begun spreading out to adjacent rooms and courtyards to the south. Abdiaziz Ali Aden was still hiding in one of those back rooms. Lieutenant Perino had led his men into a courtyard on the same block through a door on the east side of Marehan Road. He and about eight other soldiers were grouped where Sergeant Schmid was still working on Corporal Smith, who was slowly fading away. Perino still wasn't sure where the downed bird was or how close they were to DiTomasso, although they were separated now by only a few feet. Captain Miller and his contingent of D-boys and wounded Rangers were in the courtyard Howe had cleared on the west side of Marehan Road. Miller's twenty-five men had spread out into that block, moving into rooms off the courtyard. The third block was across a wide alley south on the same side of the street as Perino. There, in the courtyard they'd sought shelter in earlier, Captain Steele and three Delta teams were still stuck, unable to push farther down toward the wreck.

This ungainly distribution of forces was problematic. The Little Bird pilots, who were making frequent gun runs, were having a hard time clearly delineating friendly force locations from targets. From the C2 Black Hawk high above, Lieutenant Colonel Harrell radioed a request to Captain Miller.

-Scotty, is it possible for you to get everybody in one small tight perimeter? The problem we have is everyone is spread out. It's hard to get close accurate fire into you. And mark your location. We need to know exactly where you are. Is there any way you can accomplish that, over?

Miller explained that Steele seemed reluctant to move up, and that the Delta teams with Steele were also pinned down by heavy fire.

-Roger, I know it's tough and you're doing the best you can but try to get everyone at one site and have one guy talking down there if you can.

Miller conveyed the request to the team leaders cornered with Steele. Then, just before dark, he ordered Sergeant Howe to move across Marehan Road and into the courtyard opposite in order to improve their coverage of the street. Howe thought it was a poor idea. It did nothing he could see to improve their position. He'd been out on the street for long periods earlier, and had a plan of his own.

Steele and the others stranded at the southernmost tip of this awkward perimeter should move up and consolidate with them. This would shorten the long leg of the “L,” give them a single strong position to hold, and give the Little Birds a clearly defined one-block area to work around.

They could then establish strong interlocking fire positions at each of the key intersections, both in front of and behind the downed bird, and at the south end of the block. Looking around outside, Howe had seen three buildings that could be taken down and occupied, which would have expanded their fire perimeter. A two-story house at the northwest corner of the intersection off the bird's tail would have provided a shooting platform that could push the Somali gunmen to the north several blocks farther out. Howe felt this was so obviously the way to go it surprised him that the ground commanders hadn't begun it already. Instead, as Howe saw it, they seemed overwhelmed. They had followed him into the courtyard and then squatted there, just as Steele was now squatting in a worthless position off to the south. Everything in Howe's training said that survival depended on proactive soldiering. You constantly assessed your position and worked to improve it.

Howe knew there was no point arguing. He and the three men on his team ran across the road in groups of two. They barged through the front door of a two-room house and cleared it. There was no one inside. Through a barred window in back Howe saw Perino and his group. One of Howe's team members knocked out the bars and just pushed down the flimsy stone wall to open up a passage into their space. Perino and Schmid strapped the dying Corporal Smith to a board and passed him through the window into the room. There they would be sheltered from grenades lobbed over the walls.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-10-

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

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

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

He'd do it, but he dreaded it.

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

Collett heaved a quiet sigh of relief.

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

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

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

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

The C2 bird reported back to Steele:

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

That was good news. But nobody seemed to know where

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

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

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

Steele called up on the command net.

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

Word came back down minutes later.

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

Medic Kurt Schmid had relayed a request for blood, getting

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

“Was there any blood?”

“No,” Howe told him.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“About three o'clock.”

“How long have our missions been?”

“About two hours,”

“Is it still light out at five?”

“Yeah.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Hey, sir, uh-uh,” he said. “No way.”

Watson said he thought the idea was crazy. They could expect a hail of bullets and grenades the second they stepped out the door. They had five wounded men, two of whom (Lechner and Goodale) would have to be carried. Fillmore's body would also have to be carried. To move quickly, that would mean four men for each litter, which would make convenient cluster targets for Somali gunmen. What was wrong with the position they had? The shooting had died down and it would take one hell of a lot to overrun that courtyard. If they stayed where they were, they had a bigger perimeter. Why move?

The Rangers listened nervously to the discussion. To a man, they sided with Watson. Private Floyd thought Steele was nuts to even suggest moving. Goodale certainly didn't relish the thought of making such a trip on a litter. Moving was unnecessary and dangerous. It was asking for more trouble when they already had plenty. Steele took a deep breath and reconsidered.

“I think you're right,” he told Watson.

He conferred with the D-boys in the courtyard briefly, then radioed Harrell.