Black Hawk Down

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.

-7-

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.

-8-

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 on 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,” be 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-bays 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 racked 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 C2bird 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.

-9-

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 head. We're going to run through that? It was the same unit 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. Colette'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 Colette'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.

-10-

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 up 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 Frenchwoman 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.

-11-

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 home, 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 farther 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 Apes.

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.

-12-

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 rig 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 freshwater. 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 Kern 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 und 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, hyper-alert. 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 his 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.”

-13-

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, non-reflective, 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.

-14-

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.