Black Hawk Down
The khat chewers had crashed. So today's mission called for going to the worst place in Mog at the worst possible time.
Still, the chance of bagging two of Aidid's top men at the same time was too good to pass up. They had done three previous missions in daylight without a hitch. Risk was part of the job. They were daring men; that's why they were here.
The Somalis had seen six raids now, so they more or less knew what to expect. The~ task force had done what it could to keep them guessing. Three times daily, mission or no mission, Garrison would scramble the whole force onto helicopters and send them up over the city. The Rangers loved it at first. You piled into the back end of a Black Hawk and held on for dear life. The hotshot Night stalkers would swoop down low and fast and bank so hard it would stack your insides into one half of your body. They'd rocket down streets below the roofline, with walls and people on both sides lashing past in a blur, then climb hundreds of feet and scream back down again. Corporal Jamie Smith wrote to his folks back in Long Valley, New Jersey, that the profile lights were “like a ride on a roller coaster at Six Flags!” But with so many flights, it got old.
Garrison had also been careful to vary their tactics. They usually came in on helicopters and left by vehicles, but sometimes they came in on vehicles and left by helicopters. Sometimes they came and left on choppers, or on vehicles. So the template changed. Above all, the troops were good. They were experienced and well trained.
They had come close to grabbing Aidid several times, but that wasn't their only goal. Their six previous missions had struck fear into the Habr Gidr ranks, and more recently they'd begun to pick off the warlord's top people. Garrison felt they had performed superbly so far, despite press accounts that portrayed them as bumblers. When they'd inadvertently arrested a group of UN employees on their first mission-the “employees” had been in an off-limits area with piles of black market contraband- the newspapers had dubbed them Keystone Kops. Garrison had the stories copied and posted in the hangar. That sort of thing just fired the guys up more, but to the public, and to Washington officials keenly concerned about how things played on CNN, the task force was so far a bust. They had been handed what seemed like a simple assignment, capture the tinhorn Somali warlord Mohamed Farrah Aidid or, failing that, take down his organization, and for six weeks now, they'd had precious little visible success. Patience was wearing thin, and pressure for progress was mounting.
Just that morning Garrison had been stewing about it in his office. It was like trying to hit a curveball blindfolded. Here he had a force of men be could drop on a building--any building--in Mogadishu with just a few minutes' notice. These weren't just any men. They were faster, stronger, smarter, and more experienced than any soldiers in the world.
Point out a target building and the D-boys could take it down so fast that the bad guys inside would be hog-tied before the sound of the flashbang grenades and door charges had stopped ringing in their ears. They could herd the whole mess of them out by truck or helicopter before the neighborhood militia even had a chance to pull on its pants. Garrison's force could do alt this and even videotape the whole operation in color for training purposes (and to show off a little back at the Pentagon), but they couldn't do any of these things unless their spies on the ground pointed them at the right goddamn house.
For three nights running they had geared up to launch at a house where Aidid was either present or about to be (so the general's spies told him). Every time they had failed to nail it down.
Garrison knew from day one that intelligence was going to be a problem. The original plan had called for a daring, well-placed lead Somali spy, and the head of the CIA's local operation, to present Aidid an elegant hand-carved cane soon after Task Force Ranger arrived. Embedded in the bead of the cane was a homing beacon. It seemed like a sure thing until, on Garrison's first day in-country, Lieutenant Colonel Dave McKnight, his chief of staff, informed him that their lead informant had shot himself in the head playing Russian roulette. It was the kind of idiotic macho thing guys did when they'd lived too long on the edge.
“He's not dead,” McKnight told the general, “but we're fucked.”
When you worked with the locals there were going to be setbacks. Few people knew this better than Garrison, who was the picture of American military machismo with his gray crew cut, desert camouflage fatigues, and combat boots, a 9 mm pistol strapped to a shoulder holster and that unlit half cigar jammed perpetually in the side of his mouth. Garrison had been living by the sword now for about three decades. He was one of the least-known important army officers in America. He had run covert operations all over the world-Asia, the Middle East, Africa, Central America, South America, the Caribbean. One thing all these missions had in common was they required cooperation from the locals.
They also demanded a low threshold for bullshit. The general was a bemused cynic. He had seen just about everything, and didn't expect much-except from his men. His gruff informality suited an officer who had begun his career not as a military academy graduate, but a buck private. He served two tours in Vietnam, part of it helping to run the infamously brutal Phoenix program, which ferreted out and killed Viet Cong village leaders. That was enough to iron the idealism out of anybody. Garrison had risen to general without exercising the more politic demands of generalship, which called for graceful euphemism and frequent obfuscation. He was a blunt realist who avoided the pomp and pretense of upper-echelon military life. Soldiering was about fighting. It was about killing people before they killed you. It was about having your way by force and guile in a dangerous world, taking a shit in the woods, living in dirty, difficult conditions, enduring hardships and risks that could-and sometimes did-kill you. It was ugly work. Which is not to say that certain men didn't enjoy it, didn't live for it. Garrison was one of those men. He embraced its cruelty. He would say. this man needs to die. Just like that. Some people needed to die. It was how the real world worked. Nothing pleased Garrison more than a well-executed hit, and if things went to hell and you had to slug it out, then it was time to summon a dark relish for mayhem. Why be a soldier if you couldn't exult in a heart-pounding, balls-out gunfight? Which is what made him so good.
He inspired loyalty and affection by not taking himself too seriously. If he told a story-and the general was a hilarious storyteller-the punch line was usually at his own expense. He loved to tell about the time he went to great lengths to hire a rock band (with $5,000 out of his own pocket) to entertain his troops, mired for months in the Sinai Desert on a peacekeeping mission, only to have an unsuspecting soldier cheerfully inform him that the band “sucked.” He'd shift the cigar stub to the other side of his mouth and grin sheepishly. He could even joke about his own ambition, a rarity in the army. “If you guys keep pulling this shit” he'd whine to his executive staff, “how'm I ever gonna make general?” On his career climb to leadership of JSOC (Joint Special Operations Command) he'd served a stint as Delta commander. When he arrived at Bragg as a newly leafed colonel in the mid-eighties, his crew cut alone invited scorn and suspicion from the D-boys, with their sideburns and facial hair and civilian haircuts down over their ears. But soon after he started, Garrison saved their ass. Some of America's secret supersoldiers were caught double-dipping expenses, billing both the army and the State Department for their covert international travel. The scandal could have brought down the unit, which was despised by the more traditional brass anyway. The new bullet-headed colonel could have scored points and greased his own promotional path by expressing outrage and cleaning house. Instead, Garrison placed his career in jeopardy by defending the unit and focusing punishment on only the worst abusers. He'd salvaged a fair number of professional hides in that caper, and the men hadn't forgotten. In time, his insouciant Lone Star style and understated confidence rubbed off on the whole unit. There were guys from suburban New Jersey who after weeks with Delta were wearing pointy-toe boots, dipping tobacco, and drawling like a cowpoke.
Garrison had been living for six weeks now in the JOC, mostly in a small private office off the operations room where he could stretch his long legs and prop his boots up on the desk and shut out all the noise. Noise was one of the biggest problems in a deal like this. You had to separate out signals from the noise. There was nothing of the general's in this private space, no family photos or memorabilia. It was the way he lived. He could walk out of that building at a moment's notice and leave behind no personal trace.
The idea was to finish the job and vanish. Until then, it was an around-the-clock operation. The general had a trailer out back where he retreated at irregular intervals to grab about five hours of sleep, but usually he was camped in this command, post, poised, ready to pounce.
Take the previous night, for instance. First they were informed that Aidid, who had been code-named “Yogi the Bear,” was paying a visit to the Sheik Aden Adere compound, up the Black Sea. A local spy had been told this by a servant who worked there. So powerful cameras zoomed in from the Orion, the fat old four-prop navy spy plane that flew circles high over the city almost continually, and Garrison's two little observation birds spun up. The troops pulled on their gear. The Aden Adere compound was one of their preplanned targets, so the workup time was nil. But they couldn't commit-or at least Garrison refused to commit-without firmer intelligence. The task force had been embarrassed enough already. Before he launched, Garrison wanted two of the Somali spies to enter the compound and actually see Aidid. Then he wanted them to drop an infrared strobe by the target building. Two informants managed to get in the compound, but then exited without accomplishing either task. There were more guards than usual, they explained, maybe forty. They continued to insist that Aidid was in the compound, so why didn't the Rangers just move? Garrison demanded that one of them return with the strobe, find Yogi the fucking Bear, and mark the damn spot. Only now the informants said they couldn't get back in. It was dark, past 9 P.m., and the gates had been locked for the night. The guards wanted a password the spies didn't know.
Which was all just bad luck, perhaps. Garrison reluctantly scratched another mission. The pilots and crews shut down their helicopters and the soldiers all stripped back down and went back to their cots.
Then came a late bulletin. The same Somali spies said Aidid had now left the compound in a three-vehicle convoy with lights out. One of their number had followed the convoy west, they said, toward the Olympic Hotel, but lost it when the vehicles turned north toward October 21st Road. All of which sounded significant except that the two OH58s were still n place, equipped with night-vision cameras that lit up the view like green-tinted noon, and neither they nor anyone watching the screens back at the command canter were seeing any of this!
“As a result of this, we have experienced some weariness between [the local spy ring] and the Task Force,” Garrison wrote out longhand that morning at his desk in his operations center, venting a little of the frustration that had built up over forty-three days. The memo was addressed to Marine General Joseph Hoar, his commander at-CENTCOM (U.S. Central Command, located at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Florida.
“Generally, (the local spy ring] appears to believe that a secondhand report from an individual who is not a-member of the team should be sufficient to constitute current intelligence. I do not. Furthermore, when a [local spy ring] team member is reporting something that is totally different than what our helicopters are seeing (which we watch here back at the JOC), I naturally weigh the launch decision toward what we actually see versus what is being reported. Events such as last night, with Team 2 stating that Aidid had just left the compound in a throe-vehicle convoy,, when we know for a fact that no vehicles left the compound tend to lower our confidence level even more.”
There had been so many close calls and near misses. Too much time between missions. In six weeks they'd launched exactly six times. And several of those missions had been less than bang-up successes. After that first raid, when they'd arrested the nine UN employees at the Lig Ligato compound, Washington had been very upset. Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Colin Powell would later say, “I had to screw myself off the ceiling.” The United States apologized and all the captives were promptly released.
On September 14, the assault force had stormed what turned out to be the residence of Somali General Ahmen Jilao, a close ally of the UN and the man being groomed to lead the projected Somali police force. The troops were restless and just wanted to hit something, anything. In this frame of mind, it didn't take much of an excuse to launch. When one of the Rangers thought he'd spotted Aidid in the convoy of cars outside the Italian embassy, the assault force was rallied and a duly startled General Jilao was arrested along with thirty-eight others. Again an apology. All of the “suspects” were released. In a cable detailing the debacle for officials in Washington the next day, U.S. envoy Robert Gosende wrote, “We understand that some damages to the premises took place... Gen. Jilao has received apologies from all concerned. We don't know if the person mistaken for Gen. Aidid was Gen. Jilao. It would be hard to confuse him with Aidid. Jilao is approximately ten inches taller than Aidid. Aidid is very dark. Jilao has a much lighter complexion. Aidid is slim and has sharp, Semitic-like features. Jilao is overweight and round-faced.... We are very concerned that this episode might find its way into the press.”
That episode didn't, but among official circles the task force again looked like Keystone Kops. Never mind that every one of these missions was a masterpiece of coordination and execution, difficult and dangerous as hell. So far none of his men had been seriously hurt. Never mind that their latest outing had netted Osman Atto, Aidid's moneyman and one of his inner circle. Washington was impatient. Congress wanted American soldiers home, and the Clinton administration wanted to remove Aidid as a player in Somalia. August had turned to September and September had turned to October. One more day was one day too long for the wishes of America and the world to be stymied by this Mogadishu warlord; this man America's UN Ambassador Madeleine K. Albright had labeled a “thug.”
Garrison could ill afford another misstep, even though caution could mean missing opportunities. He knew that his superiors and even some people on his own staff thought he was being too tentative about choosing missions. With such shaky work on the ground, what could you expect?
“As a rule, we will launch if [a member of the local spy ring] reports he has seen Aidid or his lieutenants, our RECCE [reconnaissance] halo picture approximates what is being reported, and the report is current enough to be actionable,” Garrison wrote in his memo to Hoar. "There is no place in Mogadishu we cannot go and be
successful in a fight. There are plenty of places we can go and be stupid."
And just that morning, like manna, the general's rigid criteria had been met.
Every Sunday morning the Habr Gidr held a ra11y out by the reviewing stand on Via Lenin, where they hurled insults at the UN and its American enforcers. One of the main speakers that morning was Omar Salad, Aidid's top political adviser. The clan had not caught on yet that the Rangers had targeted the entire top rung of Aidid's gang, so Salad wasn't even trying to hide.
He was one of the UN's 'Tier One Personalities." When the rally broke up, his white Toyota Land Cruiser and some cars were watched from on high as they drove north toward
the Bakara Market. Salad was observed entering a house one block north of the Olympic Hotel. At about 1:30 P.M. came confirmation from a Somali spy who radioed that Salad was meeting with Abdi “Qeybdid” Hassan Awale, Aidid's ostensible interior minister. Two major targets! Aidid might also be there, but, again, nobody had actually seen him.
High above, the Orion zoomed its cameras in on the neighborhood, and the observation choppers took off. They moved up over the Black Sea to watch the same street. The TV screens in the JOC showed many people and cars on the streets, a typical weekend afternoon at the market.
To mark the precise location where Salad and Qeybdid were meeting, a Somali informant had been instructed to drive his car, a small silver sedan with red stripes on its doors, to the front of the hotel, get out, lift the hood, and peer into it as if he were having engine trouble. This would give the helicopter cameras a chance to lock on him. He was then to drive north and stop directly in front of the target house where the clan leaders had convened. The informant did as instructed, but performed the check under his hood so quickly that the helicopters failed to fix on him.
So he was told to do it again. This time he was to drive directly to the target building, get out, and open the car hoed. Garrison and his staff watched this little drama unfold on their screens. The helicopter cameras provided a clear color view of the busy scene as the informant's car entered the picture driving north on Hawlwadig Road.
It stopped before a building alongside the hotel. The informant got out and opened the hood. There was no mistaking the spot.
Word passed quietly to the hangar and the Rangers and D-boys started kitting up. The Delta team leaders met and planned out their attack, using instant photo maps relayed from the observation birds to plan exactly how they would storm the building, and where the Ranger blocking positions would be. Copies of the plan were handed out to all the chalk leaders, and the helicopters were readied. Just as Garrison was preparing to launch, however, everything was placed on hold.
The spy had stopped his car short. He was on the right street, but he'd chickened out. Nervous about moving so close to the target house, he'd stopped down the street a ways and opened the hood there. Despite Garrison's finicky precautions, the task force had been minutes away from launching an assault on the wrong house.
The commanders all hustled back into the JOC to regroup. The informant, who wore a small two-way radio strapped to his leg, was instructed to go back around the block and this time stop in front of the right goddamn house. They watched on the screens as the car came back up Hawlwadig Road. This time it went past the Olympic Hotel and stopped one block north, on the other side of the street. This was the same building the observation choppers had observed Salad entering earlier.
It was now three o'clock. Garrison's staff informed General Thomas Montgomery, second in command of all UN troops in Somalia (and direct commander of the 10th
Mountain Division's “Quick Reaction Force” [QRF], that they were about to launch. Then Garrison sought confirmation that there were no UN or charitable organizations (Non-Governmental Organizations, or NGOs) in the vicinity--a safeguard instituted after the arrests of the UN employees in the Lig Ligato raid. All aircraft were ordered out of the airspace over the target. The commanders of the 10th Mountain Division were told to keep one company on standby alert. Intelligence farces began jamming all radios and cellular phones--Mog had no regular working phone system.
The general made a last-minute decision to upload rockets on the Little Birds. Lieutenant Jim Lechner, the Ranger Company's fire support officer, had been pushing for it. Lechner knew that if things got bad on the ground, he'd love to be able to call in those rockets--the two pods on the AH-6s each carried six missiles.
In the quick planning session, Lechner asked again, “Are we getting rockets today?”
Garrison told him, “Roger.”
-4-
Ali Hassan Mohamed ran to the front door of his father's hamburger and candy shop when the choppers came down and the shooting started. He was a student, a tall and slender teenager with prominent cheekbones and a sparse goatee. He studied English and business in the mornings and afternoons manned the store, which was just up from the Olympic Hotel. The front door was across Hawlwadig Road diagonal from the house of Hobdurahman Yusef Galle, where the Rangers seemed to be attacking.
Peering out the doorway, Ali saw American soldiers sliding down on ropes to the alley that ran west off Hawlwadig. His shop was on the corner of that street and the gate to his family's home was just down from there. The Americans were shooting as soon as they hit the ground, shooting at everything. There were also Somalis shooting at them. These soldiers, Ali knew, were different from the ones who had come to feed Somalia. These were Rangers. They were cruel men who wore body armor and strapped their weapons to their chests and when they came at night they painted their faces to look fierce. Farther up Hawlwadig, to his left about two blocks over, another group of Rangers were in pitched battle. He saw two of them drag another who looked dead out of the street.
The Rangers across the street entered a courtyard there and were shooting out. Then a helicopter came down low and blasted streams of fire from a gun on its side. The gun just pulverized his side of the street. Ali's youngest brother, Abdulahi Hassan Mohamed, fell dead by the gate to the family's house, bleeding from the head. Abdulahi was fifteen. Ali saw it happen. Then the Rangers ran out of the courtyard and across Hawlwadig toward the house of Hobdurahman Yusef Galle, where most of the other soldiers were.
Ali ran. He stopped to see his brother and saw his head broken open like a melon. Then he took off as fast as he could. He ran to his left, down the street away from the Rangers and the house they were attacking. At the end of the dirt alley he turned left and ran behind the Olympic Hotel. The streets were crowded with screaming women and children. People were scrambling everywhere, racing around dead people and dead animals. Some who were running went toward the fight and others ran away from it. Some did not seem to know which way to go. He saw a woman running naked, waving her arms and screaming. Above was the din of the helicopters and all around the crisp popping of gunfire.
Out in the streets there were already Aidid militiamen with megaphones shouting, “Kasoobaxa guryaha oo iska celsa cadowga!” (“Come out and defend your homes!”)
Ali was not a fighter. There were gunmen, they called them mooryan, who lived for rice and khat and belonged to the private armies of rich men. Ali was just a strident and part-time shopkeeper who joined the neighborhood militia to protect its shops from the mooryan. But these Rangers were invading his home and had just killed his brother. He ran with rage and terror behind the hotel and then turning left again, back across Hawlwadig Road to the house of his friend Ahmed, where his AK-47 was hidden. Once he had retrieved the gun he met up with several of his friends. They ran back behind the Olympic Hotel, through all the Chaos. Ali told them about his brother and led them back to his house and shop, determined to exact revenge.
Hiding behind a wall behind the hotel, they fired their first shots at the Rangers on the corner. Then they moved north, ducking behind cars and buildings. All would jump out and spray bullets toward the Rangers, then run for cover. Then one of his friends would do the same. Sometimes they just pushed the barrels of their guns around the corners and sprayed bullets without looking. None of them was an experienced fighter.
The Rangers were better shots. Ali's friend, Adan Warsawe stepped out to shoot and was hit in the stomach by a Ranger bullet that knocked him fiat on his back. Ali and another friend risked the shooting to drag Adan to cover. The bullet had punched a hole in Adan's gut and made a gaping wound out his back that had sprayed blood on the dirt. When they dragged him it left a smear of blood on the street. Adan looked both alive and dead, as though he were someplace in between.
Ali moved on to the next street, leaving Adan with two friends. He would shoot a Ranger or die trying. Why were they doing this? Who were these Americans who came to his neighborhood spraying bullets and spreading death?
-5-
After bursting into the storehouse off Hawlwadig, Sergeant Paul Howe and the three other men on his Delta team rounded the corner and entered the target building from the southern courtyard door. They were the last of the assault forces to enter the house. A team led by Howe's buddy Matt Rierson had already rounded up twenty-four Somali men on the first floor, among them two prizes: Omar Salad, the primary target, and Mohamed Hassan Awale, Aidid's chief spokesman (not Abdi “Qeybdid” Hassan Awale, as reported, but a clan leader of equal stature).
They were prone and docile and Rierson's team was locking their wrists together with plastic cuffs.
Howe asked Sergeant Mike Foreman if anyone had gone upstairs.
“Not yet,” Foreman said.
So Howe took his four men up to the second floor.
It was a big house by Somali standards, whitewashed cinder-block walls and windows with no glass in them. At the top step Howe called for one of his men to toss a flashbang grenade into the first room. It exploded and the team burst in as they were trained to do, each man covering a different firing lane. They found only a mattress on the floor. As they moved around the room, a volley of machine-gun fire slammed into the ceiling and wall, just missing the bead of one of Howe's men. They all dropped down. The rounds had come through the southeast window, and had clearly come from the Ranger blocking position just below the window. One of the younger soldiers outside had evidently seen someone moving in the window and fired. Obviously some of these guys weren't clear which building was the target
It was what he had feared. Howe was disappointed in the Rangers. These were supposed to be the army's crack infantry? Despite all the hype and Hoo-ah horseshit, he saw the younger men as poorly trained and potentially dangerous in combat. Most were fresh out of high school! During training exercises he had the impression that they were always craning their necks to watch him and his men instead of paying attention to their own very important part of the job.
And the job demanded more. It demanded all you had, and more... because the price of failure was often death. That's why Howe and the rest of these D-boys loved it. It separated them from other men. War was ugly and evil, for sure, but it was still the way things got done on most of the planet. Civilized states had nonviolent ways of resolving disputes, but that depended on the willingness of everyone involved to back down. Here in the raw Third World, people hadn't learned to back down, at least not until after a lot of blood flowed. Victory was for those willing to fight and die. Intellectuals could theorize until they sucked their thumbs right off their hands, but in the real world, power still flowed from the barrel of a gun. If you wanted the starving masses in Somalia to eat, then you had to outmuscle men like this Aidid, for whom starvation worked. You could send in your bleeding-heart do-gooders, you could hold hands and pray and sing hootenanny songs and invoke the great gods CNN and BBC, but the only way to finally open the roads to the big-eyed babies was to show up with more guns. And in this real world, nobody had more or better guns than America. If the good-hearted ideals of humankind were to prevail, then they needed men who could make it happen. Delta made it happen.
They operated strictly in secret. The army would not oven speak the word “Delta.” If you had to refer to them, they were “operators,” or “The Dreaded D.” The Rangers, who worshiped them, called them D-boys. Secrecy, or at least the show of it, was central to their purpose. It allowed the dreamers and the politicians to have it both ways. They could stay on the high road while the dirty work happened offstage. If some Third World terrorist or Colombian drug lord needed to die, and then suddenly just turned up dead, why, what a happy coincidence! The dark soldiers would melt back into shadow. If you asked them about how they made it happen, they wouldn't tell. They didn't even exist see? They were noble, silent, and invisible. They did America's most important work, yet shunned recognition, fame, and fortune. They were modern knights and true.
Howe did little to disguise his scorn for lower orders of soldiering which pretty much included the whole regular U.S. Army. He and the rest of the operators lived like civilians, and that's what they told you they were if you asked-although spotting them down at Fort Bragg wasn't hard. You'd meet this guy hanging out at a bar around Bragg, deeply tanned, biceps rippling, neck wide as a fireplug, with a giant Casio watch and a plug of chew under his lip and he'd tell you he worked as a computer programmer for some army contract agency. They called each other by their nicknames and eschewed salutes and all the other traditional trappings of military life. Officers and noncoms in Delta treated each other as equals. Disdain for normal displays of army status was the unit's signature. They simply transcended rank. They wore their hair longer, than army regs. They needed to pose as civilians on some missions and it was easier to do that it they had normal haircuts, but it was also a point of pride with them, one of their perks. A cartoon drawn by a unit wit showed the typical D-boy dressed for battle with his hip holster stuffed, not with a gun, but a hair dryer. Every year they were obliged to pose for an official army portrait, and for it they had to get Ranger-style haircuts. They hated it. They'd had to sit for buzzes before this trip to better blend in with the Hoo-as, and the haircuts had just made them stick out even more; the sides and back of their beads were as white as frog bellies. They were allowed a degree of personal freedom and initiative unheard of in the military, particularly in battle. The price they paid for all this, of course, was that they lived with danger and were expected to do what normal soldiers could not.
Howe wasn't impressed with a lot of things about the regular army. He and others in his unit had complained to Captain Steele, the Ranger commander, about his men's readiness. They hadn't gotten anywhere. Steele had his own way of doing things, and that was the traditional army way. Howe found the spit and-polish captain, a massive former University of Georgia football lineman, to be an arrogant and incompetent buffoon. Howe had been through Ranger school and earned the tab himself, but had skipped straight over the Rangers when he qualified for Delta. He disdained the Rangers in part because he believed hard, realistic, stair-stepped training made good soldiers, not the bullshit macho attitude epitomized by the whole Hoo-ah esprit. Out of the 120 men who tried out for Delta in his class, (These were 120 highly motivated, exceptional soldiers), only 13 had made it through selection and training. Howe had the massive frame of a serious bodybuilder, and a fine, if impatient, analytical mind. Many of the Rangers found him scary. His contempt for their ways colored relationships between the two units in the hangar.
Now Howe's misgivings about the younger support troops were confirmed. They were shooting at their own men! Howe and his team left the room with the mattress and then moved out to clear the flat roof over the front of the house. It was enclosed by a three-foot concrete wall with decorative vertical slats. As the Delta team fanned out into sunlight, they saw the small orange fireball of an AK-47 erupt from a rooftop one block north. Two of Howe's team returned fire as they ducked behind the low wall for cover.
Then another burst of machine-gun rounds erupted. There were inch-wide slits in the perimeter wall. Howe and his men crouched and prayed a round didn't pass through an opening or ricochet back off the outside of the house. There were several long bursts. They could tell by the sound and impact of the rounds that the shots were being fired by an M-249, or SAW (Squad Automatic Weapon), this tune from the northeast Ranger blocking position. The Rangers were under fire, they were overeager and scared, and so when they saw men with weapons, they fired. Howe was furious.
He radioed Captain Scott Miller; the Delta ground commander down in the courtyard. He told him to get Steele on the radio immediately and tell him to stop his men from shooting at their own people!
-6-
Specialist John Stebbins ran as soon as his feet hit the ground. Just before boarding the helicopter Captain Steele had tapped him on the shoulder.
“Stebbins, you know the rules of engagement?”
“Yeah, roger, sir. I know 'em.”
“Okay. I want you to know I'm going to be on the fast rope right after you, so you better keep moving.”
The prospect of the broad-beamed commander fully laden with battle gear bearing down on his helmet had haunted Stebbins the whole flight in. After roping down, he scrambled so fast from the bottom of the rope that he collided with Chalk One's M-60 gunner, and they both fell down. Stebbins lay there for a moment, waiting for the dust to clear, and then spotted the rest of his team up against a wall to his right.
He was scared, but thrilled. He couldn't shake the feeling that this was all too good to be true. Here he was, an old timer in the Ranger company at age twenty-eight, having spent the last four years of his life trying to get late combat, to do something interesting or important, and now, somehow, through an incredible chain of pleading, wheedling, and freakish breaks, he was actually in combat--him, stubby Johnny Stebbins, the company's chief coffee maker and training room paper-pusher, at war!
His trip to this Mogadishu back alley had started in a bagel shop at home in Ithaca, New York. Stebbins was a short, stocky kid with pale blue eyes and blond hair and skin so white and freckly it never turned even the faintest shade darker in the sun. Here in Mog it had just burned bright pink. He had gone to Saint Bonaventure University, majoring in communications and hoping to work as a radio journalist, which he had in fact done for minimum wages at a few mom-and-pop stations in upstate New York. When the bagel shop offered to make him head baker, the hourly wage was enough to chuck his infant broadcasting career. So he made bagels and dreamed of adventure. Those “Be All You Can Be” commercials that came on during football games spoke straight to his soul. Stebbins had gone to college on an ROTC scholarship, but the army was so flooded with second lieutenants when he got out that he couldn't get assigned to active duty. When Desert Storm blew up in 1990, as his luck would have it, his National Guard contract was up. He started looking for a way out of the kitchen and into the fire. He put his name on three volunteer lists for Gulf service and never even got a response. Then he got married, and his wife had a baby, and suddenly the hourly wage at the bagel shop no longer covered expenses. What he needed was a medical plan. That, and some action. The army offered both. So he enlisted as a private.
“What do you want to do in the army?” the recruiter asked him.
Stebbins told him, “I want to jump out of airplanes, shoot a lot of ammo, and shop at the PX.”
They put him through basic training again. He'd done it once in the ROTC program. Then he had to do RIP (the Ranger Indoctrination Program) twice because he got injured on one of the jumps toward the end and had to be completely recycled. When he graduated he figured he'd be nut there jumping and training and roping out of helicopters with the younger guys, except somebody higher up noticed that his personnel form listed a college degree and, more important, typing ability. He was routed instead to a desk in the Bravo-company training room. Stebbins became the company clerk.
They told him it would just be for six months. He got stuck in it for two years.
He became known as a good “training room” Ranger, and fell prey to all the temptations of office work. While the other Rangers were out climbing cliffs and jumping out of planes and trying to break their records for forced marches through dense cover, old man Stebby sat behind a desk chain-smoking cigarettes, eating donuts and practically inhaling coffee. He was the company's most avid coffee drinker. The other guys would make jokes: “Oh yeah, Specialist Stebbins; he'll throw hot coffee at the enemy.” Ha, ha. When the company got tapped for Somalia, no one was surprised when ol' Stebby was one of those left behind at Fort Benning.
“I want you to know it's nothing personal,” his sergeant told him, although there was no way to disguise the implied insult. “We just can't take you. We have a limited number of spots on the bird and we need you here.” How more clearly could he have stated that, when it came to war, Stebbins was the least valuable Ranger in the regiment?
It was just like Desert Storm all over again. Somebody up there did not want John Stebbins to go to war. He helped his friends pack, and when it was announced the next day that the force had arrived in Mogadishu, he felt even more left out than he had two years before as he watched nightly updates of the Gulf action on CNN. At least he had company. Sergeant Scott Galentine had been left behind, too. They moped around for a few days. Then came a fax from Somalia.
“Stebby, you better grab your stuff,” his commanding officer told him. “You're going to war.”
Galentine got the same news. Some Rangers had received minor injuries in a mortar attack and they needed to be replaced.
On his way to the airport Stebbins stopped by his house to say a quick good-bye to his wife. It was the tearful scene you'd expect. Then when he got to the airport they told him he could go home, they wouldn't be leaving until the next day. A half hour after their emotional parting, Mr. and Mrs. Stebbins were reunited. He spent the night dreading a phone call that would change the order.
But it didn't come. A little more than a day later, he and Galentine were standing on the runway in Mogadishu. In honor of their arrival they were ordered to drop for fifty push-ups, a ritual greeting upon entering a combat zone.
Stebby was thrilled. He'd made it!
There weren't enough Kevlar vests (Ranger body armor) to go around so he got one of the big bulky black vests the D-boys wore. When he put it on he felt like a turtle. He was warned not to go outside the fence without his weapon. His buddies briefed him on the setup. They told him not to sweat the mortars. Sammy rarely hit anything; they had been on five missions at that point, and they were all a piece of cake. We go in force, they told him, we move quickly, the choppers basically blow everybody away from the scene, we let the D-boys go in and do their thing. All we do is provide security. They told him to watch out for Somalis who hid behind women and children. Rocks were a hazard. Stebbins was nervous and excited.
Then he got the news. See, they were glad to have him there and all, but he wouldn't actually be going out with the rest of the guys on missions. His job would be to stay back at the hangar and stand guard. Maintain perimeter security. It was essential. Somebody had to do it.
Who else?
Stebbins took out his ire on the folks trying to get past the front gate. He took the guard job as seriously as it was possible to be taken. He was a major pain in the ass. Every Somali got searched from head to toe, every time, in and out. He searched trucks and trunks and cars and climbed up under vehicles and had them open their hoods. It annoyed him that he couldn't figure out a way to search the big tanks on the back of the water trucks. Intel had said the Skinnies were smuggling heavy weapons across the border from Ethiopia. They were told the Ethiopians checked out all trucks. Stebbins doubted they were checking the Water trucks. You could put a lot of RPGs (rocket-propelled grenades) in the back of one of those things.
He finagled his way onto the helicopters for the profile flights, fastening the chin strap on his helmet tight as they zoomed low and fast over the city, cheering like kids on a carnival ride. He figured that was about as close to action as he was going to get, and compared to manning the coffeemaker in the training room back at Benning, it wasn't bad.
Then, this morning, just as the runner from the JOC showed up to shout, “Get it on!” one of the squad leaders strode up with news.
“Stebbins, Specialist Sizemore has an infected elbow. He just came back from the doctor's office. You're taking his place.”
He would be the assistant for 60-gunner Private. First Class Brian Heard. Stebbins ran through the hangar, trading in his bulky tortoiseshell vest for a Kevlar one. He'd stuffed extra ammo in his pouches, and gathered up some frag grenades. Watching the more experienced guys, he discarded his canteen--they would only be out an hour or so--and stuffed its pouch with still more M-16 magazines. He picked up a belt with three hundred rounds of M-60 ammo, and debated trying to stuff more in his butt pack, where he kept the goggles and the gloves he needed for sliding down the rope. He decided against that. He'd need someplace to put them when he took them off. He was trying to think through everything. Trying to stay calm. But damn! It was exciting.
“Talk to me, Steb. What you got? What's on your mind?” prodded Staff Sergeant Ken Boorn, whose cot was alongside his. Boorn could see his friend was in a state. He told him to relax. Keep it simple. His job was to secure whatever sector they asked him to point his rifle at, and give ammo to the 60 gunners when they needed it. They probably wouldn't even need it.
“Okay, fine,” said Stebbins.
Just before heading out to the Black Hawk, Stebbins was by the front door of the hangar sucking on a last cigarette, trying to get his nerves under control. This was finally it, what he'd been aiming for all this time. The guys all knew this was a particularly bad part of town, too. This was likely to be their nastiest mission yet, and it was his first! He had the same feeling in his gut that was there before his first jump at airborne school. I'm gonna live through this, he told himself. I'm not gonna die. One of the D-boys told him, “Look, for the first ten minutes or so you're gonna be scared shitless. After that you're going to get really mad that they have the balls to shoot at you.” Stebbins had heard the stories about the other missions, how the Somalis were hit-and-run fighters. There was no way they'd get in a real shitfight. Up on the profile flights, they'd never seen any big weapons. This was going to be an urban small-arms deal I'm surrounded by guys who know what they're doing.
I'm gonna be okay.
Now, hitting the street outside the target building and hearing the pop of distant gunfire, be knew he was in it for real. After untangling himself from the 60 gunner, he ran to the wall. He was assigned a corner pointing south, guarding an alley that appeared empty. It was just a narrow dirt path, barely wide enough for a car, that sloped down on both sides from mud-stained stone walls to a footpath at the center. There were the usual piles of random debris and rusted metal parts strewn along the way, in between outcroppings of cactus. He heard occasional snapping sounds in the air around him and assumed it was the sound of gunfire a few blocks away, even though the noise was close. Maybe the air was playing tricks on him. He also heard a peculiar noise, a tchew... tchew . . . tchew, and it dawned on him that this was the sound of rounds whistling down the street. That snapping noise? That was bullets passing close enough for him to hear the little sonic boomlet as they zipped past.