Black Hawk Down

“Okay, whatever,” said Struecker.

One of the company clerks, Sergeant Mark Warner, stepped up.

“Sergeant, can I go out?”

“You have a weapon and some ammo?”

“Yeah.”

“Go ahead, get in the backseat.”

Other volunteers were piling on vehicles down the convoy. Specialist Peter Squeglia, the company armorer, had pulled on fighting gear and climbed into a truck. He had injured his ankle playing rugby in the sand with some guys from New Zealand a few days before and had been relegated to guard duty at the hangar. There was no way he could use a sore ankle as an excuse to stay out of this. So now he sat with his M-16 pointed out the passenger-side window of a five-ton truck, wondering what he had gotten himself into. You joined the army and volunteered for the Rangers ostensibly because you were willing to go into combat, but in this day and age you didn't really expect them to call your bluff. Squeglia considered himself more realistic about battle than most of his Ranger buddies, even though be had never gotten close to one. He had been put off by some of the bravado he'd seen in the previous weeks.

He would caution his friends, “This is real stuff. One of us is probably going to get killed one of these times out.” And they all laughed at him. Well, now at least one of them had definitely been killed-he'd seen them unload Pilla's body-and here he was in the thick of it. Here it was, a Sunday afternoon in early fall, the kind of day back home where he and his buddies would spend the afternoon watching football on TV and then head out to the bars of Newport, Rhode Island, trying to pick up girls, and here he was, smart-guy twenty-five-year-old Peter Squeglia, riding shotgun in a truck out into the streets of Mogadishu with what appeared to be the entire indigenous population trying to kill him. He felt the truck start to move.

As Struecker steered out the east gate he waited for guidance from the C2 Black Hawk above.

--You need to turn left and then move to the first intersection and take another left.

Struecker made the left turn on Tanzania Street, but as he approached the intersection gunfire erupted all around.

They weren't more than eighty yards out the back gate.

In a Humvee behind Struecker's, Sergeant Raleigh Cash screamed, “Action left!”

His turret gunner swung around to face five Somalis with weapons, and Cash, who was in the front passenger seat, heard the explosion of gunfire and the zing and pop of rounds passing close. Cash had been taught that if you hear that crack it meant the bullet had passed near your bead. A zing, which sounded to him like the sound made when you hit a telephone-pole guy wire with a stick, meant the bullet had missed you by a far margin. The shots were answered by a roaring fusillade.

In another of the rear Humvees, reluctant Steve Anderson heard the eruption of gunfire and felt his stomach turn. Then he realized most of what he heard was Ranger guns. Any Somali with a weapon faced a crushing wave of American lead, .50 cals on three of the Humvees, SAWs and all those M-16s massed on the trucks.

Anderson tried to shoot his SAW, too, but the weapon jammed. He pulled and pulled on the charging handle, trying to get it unjammed, but it wouldn't budge. So he picked up the driver's M-16 and took aim out the back of the moving vehicle. An instant before he took aim he saw a Somali with a rifle dart through a doorway, but it was too late for him to take a shot.

The lead vehicles were taking the brunt of it. An RPG skipped across the top of Struecker's Humvee with a screech of metal on metal and exploded across the street against a concrete wall with a concussion that lifted the wide-bodied vehicle up on two wheels. Then his .50 gunner returned fire to a massed burst of AK-47s. It occurred to the sergeant that Sammy was unschooled in the art of ambush. The idea was to let the lead vehicle pass and suck in the whole column, then open fire. The unarmored flatbed trucks in the middle loaded with cooks and clerks and other volunteers would have made fat, vulnerable targets. By opening up on the lead vehicles, it gave the convoy a chance to back out before things got worse.

Struecker shouted for his driver to throw the Humvee in reverse. Those following would just have to figure it out.

They slammed into the front of the Humvee behind them, and then that driver threw his vehicle in reverse and backed into the first truck. Eventually they all got the message.

“You need to find a different route!” he told his eyes in the sky.

--Go back where you came from and turn right instead of left. You can get there that way.

Struecker got the whole column back up to the gate, and this time turned right. Looming ahead was a roadblock, a big one. While a lot of the people shooting at them were clearly amateurs, it was obvious there were some experienced military minds among them. This roadblock was nothing spontaneous. They had anticipated the routes a convoy might take from the Ranger base and had thrown up barriers of dirt, junk, furniture, vehicle hulks, chunks of concrete, wire, and whatever else was at hand. There were tires burning on it that threw churning clouds into the darkening sky. Struecker could taste the sting of the burning rubber. The convoy knew Super Six Four was down less than a mile away, directly ahead.

Durant would say later that he heard the sound of a .50 cal, which almost certainly was from Struecker's Humvee. The pilot believed deliverance was at hand. But the convoy could advance no closer. Beyond the roadblock, between where they sat and Durant's crippled Black Hawk, was a concrete wall surrounding the sprawling ghetto of huts and walking paths. Struecker knew his Humvees could roll over the roadblock, but there was no way the trucks behind him would make it. And even if they did, there wasn't going to be any way through the concrete wall.

-See where those tires are burning? That's where the crash is. Go in one hundred meters past it.

“You'll have to find us another route,” Struecker responded.

-There ain't another route.

“Well, you need to find one. Figure out a way to get there.”

-The only other route as to go all the way around the city and come in through the back side.

“Fine. We'll take it.” -

Struecker knew every minute mattered. Durant and his crew wouldn't last long. It seemed like it took forever for the five-tons to turn around on the narrow street. The trucks weren't delicate about it. They rammed into walls and ground gears. As the trucks fought their way around, most of the men moved out into the street to defend the convoy. On one knee in the dirt, Sergeant Cash took a whack on his chest that almost knocked him over. It felt like someone had punched him up near the shoulder. He ran his band inside his shirt, looking for blood. There was none. The bullet had skimmed off the front of his chest plate, tearing the straps of his load-bearing harness so that it was now hanging by threads.

Squeglia saw a round clip off the side-view mirror of the truck on the driver's side, and reached his M-16 across the chest of the driver to return fire. Sizemore unloaded on everything he saw, venting his pent-up rage. Anderson kept his head down, looking for specific targets. He shot a few times, but didn't think he'd hit anyone.

When they all got pointed at last in the right direction, the convoy spread out along a road that skirted the city to the southwest, driving through an occasional hail of AK-47 fire. From the peak of one rise they could see Durant's crash site. It was down in a little valley, but there seemed no easy way to get there.

8

Up in their Black Hawk, Goffena and Yacone could see both convoys in trouble. Lieutenant Colonel McKnight's battered main convoy was steering back toward the K-4 circle, away from both crash sites, and the emergency convoy of cooks and volunteers wasn't getting close.

They again asked to insert their Delta snipers. They were down to just two now. Sergeant Brad Hallings had manned one of Super Six Two's miniguns after one of the crew chiefs was injured. They would need him there.

Captain Yacone turned around in his seat to discuss the situation with the two Delta operators.

“Things are getting bad now, guys,” Yacone told them, shouting over the chopper's engines and the sound of the guns. “The second convoy is taking intensive fire, and it doesn't sound like it's gonna make it to the crash site. Mike and I have ID'ed a field about twenty-five to fifty yards away from where they're down. There are lots of shacks and shanties in between. Once you get there, you could either hunker down and wait for the vehicles, or try to get the wounded to an open area, where we could come back in and get you.”

Shughart and Gordon both indicated they were ready to go down.

Up in the command bird, Harrell pondered the request. It was terribly risky, maybe even hopeless. But one or two properly armed, well-trained soldiers could hold off an undisciplined mob indefinitely. Shughart and Gordon were experts at killing and staying alive. They were serious, career soldiers, trained to get hard, ugly things done. They saw opportunity where others could see only danger. Like the other operators, they prided themselves on staying cool and effective in extreme danger. They lived and trained endlessly for moments like this. If there was a chance to succeed, these two believed they would.

In the C2 bird, seated side by side, Harrell and Matthews weighed the decision. Their entire air rescue team was on the ground already at the first crash site. The ground convoy wasn't going to get to Durant and his crew fast enough. But dropping in Shughart and Gordon would most likely be sending them to their deaths. Matthews turned down the volume on their radios momentarily.

“Look, they're your guys,” he said to Harrell. “They're the only two guys we've got left. What do you want to do?”

“What are our choices?” Harrell asked.

“We can put them in or not put them in. Nobody else is going to get to that crash site that I can see.”

“Put them in,” said Harrell.

So long as there was even a tiny chance, they felt obliged to give it to the downed crew.

When Goffena's crew chief, Master Sergeant Mason Hall, passed word to the men that it was time to jump, Gordon grinned and gave an excited thumbs-up.

There was a small opening behind one of the huts. It was bordered by a fence and covered by some debris, but it might do. Goffena made a low pass at it, flaring up near the ground to blow over the fence and scatter the debris. He couldn't get rid of enough of it to land, so he held a hover at about five feet as Shughart and Gordon jumped. Shughart got tangled momentarily on the safety line connecting him to the chopper and had to be cut free. Gordon took a spill as he ran for cover. Shughart stood motioning with his bands, indicating confusion. They'd gotten disoriented jumping down, and were crouched in a defensive posture in the open trying to get their bearings. Goffena dropped the chopper back down low, leaned out his door, and pointed the way. One of his crew chiefs flung a smoke grenade in the direction of the crash.

The operators both turned thumbs up and began moving that way.

9

More than a mile to the northeast, back at Chalk Two's original blocking position by the target building, the war had slowed down for Sergeant Ed Yurek. After stumbling into the small Somali schoolhouse and coaxing the teacher and children to the floor, Yurek had been left in charge of the remnants of his chalk when Lieutenant DiTomasso and eight other Rangers had sprinted down to help out at the first crash site. Yurek had seen the ground convoy drive off. As the fighting shifted to the Black Hawk crash site three blocks east, things grew so quiet on Yurek's corner he got spooked. With the lieutenant and his radioman gone, he had no contact with the command radio net. He was worried the whole

force had forgotten them.

He used his personal radio to call DiTomasso.

“What's up, Lieutenant?”

-You need to find your way to me.

“Roger, sir. Where are you?”

-Take that big alley three blocks east, then turn left. Go about two hundred meters. You can't miss us.

“Roger.”

It was and it wasn't good news. It felt like they'd finally gotten this small corner of Mogadishu tamed. They'd grown familiar with angles of fire and potential danger spots and had found what seemed to be adequate cover. The kids in the little tin schoolhouse had been quiet as mice. Yurek had been keeping an eye out for them. Out in this very dangerous city, with bullets and RPGs flying, he was loathe to give up what seemed to have become a safe and quiet corner. They could hear heavy shooting over by the crash site, and once they were up and moving down the road, they'd have no cover. DiTomasso and the first men down the road had at least had the element of surprise. Yurek's would be the second team to pass through the same gauntlet. He had no doubt Sammy would be waiting.

“Come on, guys. We gotta go!” he reluctantly informed the men.

They began moving east down the alley. They walked fast, weapons aimed and ready, in single file spread out down the south side of the alley. They stayed a few steps off the stone walls on that side of the street. The natural inclination was to get as close to the wall as possible. The wall suggested at least a margin of safety. But Sergeant Paul Howe, one of the D-boys, had advised them against it. Bullets follow walls, he'd explained. The enemy can concentrate fire down an alleyway, and the walls on either side will act as funnels. Some rounds would actually ride the walls for hundreds of feet. Standing tight against a wall was actually more dangerous than being in the middle of the street.

At the intersections they would stop and cover each other.

Yurek ran while his men laid suppressive fire north and south. Then he covered for the next man, and so on. They leapfrogged across.

It didn't take long for the shooting gallery to open. Sammies would pop up in windows or doorways or around corners and spray bursts of automatic fire. Most were clearly amateurs. The kick of the weapon and their own desire to stay behind cover meant they were unlikely to hit anyone. Yurek figured these were guys just trying not to lose face with their group. They would let a burst fly with their head turned away and eyes closed, fling the weapon, and run. Yurek didn't even bother returning fire for some of these. But some of the men who popped up in windows were different. They didn't shoot instantly. They took aim. They meant business. He figured these were Aidid's militia guys. There was usually one militia guy for every four or five who shot at them.

Yurek and his men invariably shot first. During the long boring weeks before this mission, they had trained almost daily. Captain Steele had insisted on it. They had unlimited ammo to work with, and out in the desert they had set up a variety of shooting ranges, including this very drill. In practice, targets would pop out unexpectedly. They had different shapes and colors. The rules were, shoot if you see the blue triangle, but hold your fire if it's a green square. Yurek felt the benefit of all that practice. He and his men engaged in a running series of gunfights. He shot one man in a doorway just ten feet away. The man stepped out and took aim, a bushy-haired, dusty man with baggy brown pants and a lightweight blue cotton shirt with an AK. He didn't shoot instantly, and that's what killed him. Yurek's eyes met his for a split second as he pulled the trigger. The Somali just fell forward out into the alley without getting off a shot. He was the second man Yurek had ever shot.

Specialist Lance Twombly blasted at one man with the SAW, shooting the big gun from his hip. The Sammy had stepped out from a corner with an AK and started shooting. Both he and the Ranger blasted away at each other not more than fifteen yards apart. Twombly saw his rounds - there must have been forty of them -chipping the walls and spitting up dirt all around his target, and he never hit the man. Nor did the Somali hit Twombly. The Sammy ran off. Twombly just kept on moving, cursing himself for being such a bad shot.

Yurek could not believe it when they made it the entire three blocks without any of his men being hit. But there was no respite. At the intersection of the main road he looked downhill and saw Waddell against the wall on his side of the street. Across the street at the opposite corner, behind a big tree and car, were Nelson and Sergeant Alan Barton, who'd roped in from the CSAR bird. Twombly moved down that side of the street and crossed the road to add his SAW to Nelson's M-60. There were two dead Somalis stretched out on the ground by the car. Across the street from them, diagonally from Waddell, was a little green Volkswagen. DiTomasso and some men from the CSAR bird were crouched there.

Yurek ran across the road to the car to link up with DiTomasso. He passed the alley and saw the downed helicopter to his right. Just as he arrived, the Volkswagen began rocking from the impact of heavy rounds, thunk thunk thunk thunk. Whatever this weapon was, its bullets were poking right through the car. Yurek and the others all hit the ground. He couldn't tell where the shooting was coming from.

“Nelson! Nelson, what is it?” he shouted across the street.

“It's a big gun!” Nelson shouted back.

Yurek and DiTomasso looked at each other and rolled their eyes.

“Where is it?” he shouted across to Nelson.

Nelson pointed up the street, and Yurek edged out to look around the car. There were three dead Somalis on the street. Yurek stood and pulled them together, stacking them, which enabled him to slide out to his left a few feet behind cover. He saw two Somalis stretched out on the ground up the street north behind a big gun mounted on a biped. From that position the gun controlled the street. Behind the tree across the street, they couldn't see Nelson, and he'd have been a fool to expose his position.

Yurek had a LAW (Light Antitank Weapon) strapped to his back that he'd been carrying around on every mission for weeks. It was a lightweight disposable plastic launcher (it weighed only three pounds). He unstrapped it, then climbed up and leaned forward on the car, taking aim with the weapon's flip-up crosshairs. He guessed they were two hundred meters away. The rocket launched with a punch of a back blast, and Yurek watched it zoom straight in on his target and explode with a flash and a loud woom! The gun went flipping up in the air.

He was accepting congratulations on his shooting when the thunk thank thunk resumed. The rocket had evidently landed just short, close enough to send the weapon flying and kick up a cloud of dirt, but evidently not close enough to destroy it or stop its shooters. He saw them up the street now kneeling behind the weapon, which they'd righted again on its biped. Yurek picked up a LAW that someone had discarded nearby, but it looked bent and crushed. He couldn't get it to open up. So he loaded a 40 mm 203 round into the grenade launcher mounted under the barrel of his M-16. This time his aim was better. You could actually see the fat 203 round spiral into a target, and this one spun square into the center. The two Sammies just fell over sideways in opposite directions. He presumed the gun was destroyed. When the smoke cleared he could see it just lying there between the two men. No one else came out to get it. Yurek and the others kept a good eye on that gun until nightfall.

-10-

Barton and Nelson were behind a tree on the northeast corner of the big intersection directly west of the crash. A little Fiat was parked against the tree. It looked like the driver had left it with the gas cap wedged tightly against the tree to prevent Mogadishu's alert and enterprising thieves from siphoning the gas. Nelson had his M-60 machine gun propped on the roof of the car with belts of ammo draped over the side. From the two dead Somalis on the street alongside the car, blood formed red-brown pools in the sand.

“It can't get much worse than this,” Barton said.

Just then an RPG exploded against the opposite wall with a brilliant flash and a chest-wrenching blast. This made them laugh. Laughter was a balm. It held panic at bay and it seemed to come easily. In these extreme circumstances it became unbearably funny just to act normal. If they could still laugh they were all right. This was definitely more fire than they'd ever expected to experience in Mogadishu. Nobody had anticipated a serious fight from these characters. Nelson wondered where his friends Casey Joyce and Dom Pilla and Kevin Snodgrass were and how they were faring.

It was raining RPGs. They would drop down from the north and hit the side of the stone buildings and splash along the walls, great streaking explosions, like someone throwing fireballs.

“Goddamn, Twombly, this is unreal,” Nelson said.

He crouched down behind a two-foot concrete ramp between the tree and the wall and was fiddling with his M-60 when a Somali ducked out from behind a tin shed about ten feet up the street and fired at him and Twombly. Nelson knew he was dead. Rounds hit between his legs and he felt them passing next to his face.

Twombly dropped the man.

Nelson saw Twombly mouth the words, “You okay?”

“I don't know.”

Twombly had fired his SAW about two feet in front of Nelson's face, so close that his cheeks and nose had been singed by the muzzle's heat. The blast had hammered his eardrums, blinded him, and his head was still ringing.

“That hurt,” Nelson complained. “I can't hear and I can't see. Don't you ever fucking shoot your weapon off that close to me again!”

Just then another Somali took a shot at them and Twombly returned fire with his rifle directly over Nelson's head. After that, Nelson wouldn't hear a thing for many hours.

-11-

Sergeant Paul Howe and the three men of his Delta team had still been back on the target house roof when they saw the CSAR team roping down from a Black Hawk about a quarter mile northeast. They watched while the Black Hawk took the RPG hit with men still on its ropes, and were amazed at how the pilot held the bird steady after being hit until the last men were down. Howe knew something was going on over there, but since he had no radio link to the command net and had been too busy inside the target house to notice that a Black Hawk had been shot down, he didn't know why the CSAR team was roping in.

He got the full story when he was summoned downstairs by the Delta ground commander, Captain Scott Miller.

“We're going to move over there and secure it,” Miller said. He explained that the ground convoy, which was loading the Somali prisoners out front, would drive over to the crash site. The rest of them were going to move there on foot. Ranger Chalk One, led by Captain Steele, would take the lead. The operators would follow, and Ranger Chalk Three on the south end of the target, led by Sergeant Sean Watson, would bring up the rear.

Howe knew the fight was bad and worsening out on the streets. The idea of moving on foot over to where he'd seen the CSAR bird rope its crew in was daunting. He thought; this is going to be fun.

Captain Steele saw the operators come spilling out of the courtyard, moving east toward him. This posed a novel situation for the Ranger commander. He and his men had trained to provide protection for Delta, but the two units didn't mix. Each had its own chain of command, its own separate radio links, and, most important, its own way of doing things. Now they were being thrown together for this move over to the downed Black Hawk. Steele and Miller conferred briefly about how to proceed, and agreed that the Rangers should take front and rear positions.

This column of about eighty men would set off on foot just minutes after Lieutenant Colonel McKnight's ill-fated convoy departed the target building. While that convoy wandered hopelessly lost through the city, getting hammered, and while Durant's Black Hawk was crashing about a mile southwest, this force of D-boys and Rangers were having their own tragic difficulties moving on foot to the first crash site.

They hadn't run more than a block when Sergeant Aaron Williamson got hit. He had been shot earlier, the round had taken off the tip of his index finger, but Williamson had kept fighting. Lieutenant Perino heard someone scream, and turned to see Williamson rolling on the street, writhing and screaming, holding his left leg.

“I've got a man down,” Perino radioed up to Steele.

“Pick him up and keep on moving,” Steele said.

As Howe and his team ran past Williamson, there were five Rangers stooped around the wounded man.

“Keep moving and let the medic handle it!” Howe shouted at them.

Williamson was carried back up the street to one of the Humvees in the ground convoy, which was about ready to roll.

Specialist Stebbins, the company clerk along for his first real mission, was out in front. His blocking position had been at the southeast corner, and they were moving east now. He trotted crouched and careful, staying away from the walls as the D-boys had advised. Every few feet down the road a doorway would open into a small courtyard. As Stebbins came upon one door, a Somali came running out of the building into the courtyard and Stebbins fired. It was instinctive. The man startled him. Bang bang. Two rounds. The man dropped to a sitting position, clutching his chest and looking amazed. Then he slumped over forward and began to rock and moan. He was a big man with short hair.

He was wearing this disco-style bright blue shirt with long sleeves and a big collar. Most of the Sammies were dusty and wore shabby clothes but this man was dressed nicely, and he was clean. He had on corduroy bell-bottom pants and his belt had a big die-cast metal buckle. He seemed completely out of place. Stebbins had just shot him. He had never shot anyone before.

This all took place in seconds but it seemed much longer. Stebbins was readying to shoot the man again when Private Carlos Rodriguez grabbed his weapon.

“Don't waste your rounds on him, Stebby,” he said. “Just keep moving.”

Steele, who had a radio strapped to his broad back, fell farther and farther behind Lieutenant Perino and the rest of Chalk One. The idea was to stay spread out and provide covering fire for each other as they went through intersections. But right away, to Steele's dismay, the formation broke down. The D-boys ignored the marching orders and just kept moving forward. These were men trained to think for themselves, and act independently in battle, and now they were doing it. Each of the operators had a radio ear-piece under their little plastic hockey helmets -Steele called them “skateboard helmets” - and a microphone that wrapped around to their mouth. So they wore usually in constant touch with each other. When the radios were not working or when the noise level was too high, as it was now, the D-boys communicated expertly with hand signals.

Steele's Rangers relied on shouted orders from their officers and team leaders. They were younger, less experienced, and terrified. Some tended to just follow the operators instead of staying with their teams. Steele saw a complete breakdown of unit integrity before they'd moved two blocks.

It was typical of the problems he'd had with Delta from the start For better or worse, the attitudes and practices of the elite commandos started to rub off on his Rangers when they began bunking together in the hangar. Before long, everywhere you looked was a teenage soldier in sunglasses with rolled-up shirtsleeves. Privates would pull guard duty in helmet, flak vest, gym shorts, and their regulation brown T-shirts. Younger soldiers began showing more and more impatience with what they saw as meaningless robot-Ranger formality.

When Steele cracked down, a lot of them thought it was because their captain felt threatened by the D-boys. In the year before this deployment, the broad-beamed former lineman moved through his men like muttering Jove through his hinds, the meanest, manliest man in the army. When Specialist Dave Diemer had defeated all comers in an arm wrestling contest, Steele took him on and beat him -leaving Diemer whining that the captain had cheated.

Steele gave the unapologetic impression that he could break you with his bare hands if it weren't for his strict devotion to Jesus and army discipline. He was unbending even when his senior noncoms thought it was time to bend, like the time back at Fort Bragg when he'd ordered all the men awakened after midnight because they'd collapsed, with permission from their platoon sergeants, into bunks without cleaning their weapons after a days-long grueling training mission. But no matter how tough Steele was, of course, it was the D-boys who occupied the absolute pinnacle of the macho feeding chain. Most of them were NCOs, and not only did their very presence deflate any of the standard displays of gruff manhood, they were serenely and rather obviously unimpressed with Steele's captaincy.

The disdain was mutual. Steele accepted that these operators were good at their jobs, but he wasn't in awe of them. He found their civilian manner and contemptuous attitude toward Ranger discipline hard to take. Sure, it was a good idea to encourage individual initiative and creative thinking in combat, but some of these guys had strayed so far from traditional army norms it seemed unhealthy. They could be comically arrogant. When they'd gotten a list of potential target sites, for instance, the D-boys had divvied them up among different teams. Each was assigned to draw up an assault plan. Since his men were involved, Steele had sat in on the meeting when the various schemes were presented. The captain's experience with such a planning session was like this: You sat there and took notes and asked questions only to make sure you got things down correctly and then saluted on your way out. The D-boys' meeting was a free-for-all. One group would present its plan and somebody would pipe up, “Why, that's the stupidest thing I ever heard,” which would provoke a sturdy “Fuck you,” which quickly degenerated into guys screaming at each other. It looked to Steele like they were about to assume Kung Fu stances and have it out

Steele could imagine what would happen if a company of Rangers operated that way. Some of his men were still boys. As far as the captain could tell, most had just emerged from a lifetime of lounging on sofas eating Fritos and watching MTV. Basic and Ranger training had shaped most of them up reasonably well, but the average private in Bravo company still had a long way to go before qualifying as a professional soldier. There were good, time-tested reasons for Hoo-ah discipline.

It was easy to see why Steele was destined for the losing end of a popularity contest with the D-boys. Most of his men didn't think through the causes. They saw it all as an ego conflict.

Like the time Steele was standing in line with his men at mess, and spotted Delta Sergeant Norm Hooten carrying a rifle with the safety off. Ranger rules required that any weapon, loaded or unloaded, have the safety on at all times when at the base. It was an eminently sensible rule, a basic principle of handling weapons safely.

He tapped the blond operator on the shoulders and pointed it out.

Hooten had held up his index finger and said, “This is my safety.”

He showed Steele up right in front of his men.

Now the very breakdowns the captain had feared were happening when it mattered most. There was nothing he could do about it. As his men passed by helter-skelter, Steele fell back near the middle of the pack. They'd sort things out at the crash site. If they could find it. Nobody was sure exactly where it was.

In short order, Howe and his Delta team were in front of the force. Howe saw bullets skipping off the dirt and skimming down the walls, chipping the concrete. He was way past worrying about staying in formation. The street was a kill zone. Survival meant moving like your hair was on fire. It was time to lead by example. The goal was to punch through to the downed helicopter, and every second mattered. If they failed to link up, then there would be two weak forces instead of a single strong one. Two perimeters to defend instead of one. So they moved quickly but also smartly. As Howe moved he thought about making every one of his shots count, and keeping his back to a wall at all times. They were in a 360-degree battlefield; so keeping a wall behind him meant one angle he couldn't be shot from. At each crossroads he and his team would pause, watch, and listen. Were bullets hitting walls? Bouncing off the streets? Were the shots going left to right or right to left? Every bit of experience and practical knowledge was useful now for staying alive. Were they machine-gun bullets or AKs? An AK only has twenty-five to thirty rounds in a magazine, so if you waited for the lull, Sammy would be reloading when you ran. The most important thing was to keep moving. One of the hardest things in the world to hit is a moving target.

He and his team had spent years training with each other, had fought together in Panama and other places, and moved with confidence and authority. Howe felt that they were the perfect soldiers for this situation. They'd learned to filter out the confusion, put up a mental curtain. The only information that came fully through was the most critical at that moment. Howe could ignore the pop of a rifle or the snap of a nearby round. It was usually just somebody shooting airballs. It would take chips flying from a wall near him to make him react. As they moved down the street it was one fluid process - scan for threats, find a safe place to go next, shoot, move, and scan for threats.... The key was to keep moving. With the volume of fire on these streets, to stop meant to die. The greatest danger was in getting pinned down.

The Rangers followed as well as they could, leapfrogging across the intersections. Stebbins and 60-gunner Private Brian Heard kept up with them, reassured just to be close to the D-boys. These guys knew how to stay alive. Stebbins kept telling himself, this is dangerous, but we'll make it. It's okay. At the intersections he would take a knee and shoot while the man in front of him ran. Then the man behind him would tap his shoulder and he would take off, just closing his eyes and praying and running for all he was worth.

Sergeant Goodale, who had once bragged to his mother how eager he was for combat, felt terrified. He was waiting for his turn to sprint across a street when one of the D-boys tapped him on the shoulder. Goodale recognized him:

It was the short stocky one, Earl, Sergeant First Class Earl Fillmore, a good guy. Fillmore must have seen how scared Goodale looked.

“You okay?” he asked.

“I'm okay.”

Fillmore winked at him and said, “It's all right. We're coming out of this thing, man.”

It calmed Goodale. He believed Fillmore.

By the time they were three blocks over, Howe's team was way out front. With them were Stebbins, Heard, Goodale, Perino, Corporal Jamie Smith, and a few other Rangers. They turned left onto Marehan Road, where the alley ended. The wide dirt road sloped uphill slightly and then downhill for several blocks, so when they made the turn they were just shy of the crest of a hill. Downhill to the south they could see Sammies running every which way. Over the crest of the hill to the north, Howe saw signal smoke from what must have been the crash. They were about two hundred yards away.

There was a blizzard of fire at that intersection. Automatic rifle fire and RPGs came from all directions. Howe felt the force was in peril of getting stuck and cut to ribbons. He shouted back down the street to Captain Miller, “Follow me!” and plunged straight down the left side. Stebbins and several other Rangers followed. Perino, Goodale, Smith, and some others followed Hooten's Delta team across the street and started down the right wall. Immediately behind them was Sergeant First Class John Boswell's Delta team.

An RPG exploded on the wall near Howe and his men. Howe felt the wallop of pressure in his ears and chest and dropped to one knee. One of his men had been hit on the left side with a small piece of shrapnel. Howe abruptly kicked in the door to a one-room house on his left. He and his team had learned to move like they owned the world. Every house was their house. If they needed shelter, they kicked in a door. Anyone who threatened them would be killed. It was that simple. No one was inside. They caught their breath and reloaded their weapons. Running with all that gear was exhausting. The body armor was like wearing a wet suit. They were sweating profusely and breathing heavily. Howe drew his knife and cut away the back of his buddy's shirt to check the wound. There was a small hole in the man's back with about a two-inch swollen, bruised ring around it. There was almost no blood. The swelling had closed the hole.

“You're good to go,” Howe told him, and they were out the door and moving again.

Moving up in front of Perino, Goodale saw the familiar desert uniforms down the street and inwardly rejoiced. They'd made it! Once they'd linked up, the convoy would arrive and they could all roll out of this hell. The sun was getting low in the sky. Goodale had promised his fiancée, Kira, that he'd call tonight. He had to get back in time to make that call.

Goodale ran up behind Sergeant Chuck Elliot, who was squatting at the corner of the first intersection on the slope, shooting east. Goodale pointed his gun down Marehan Road. He saw Howe and his team pushing on ahead across the street, in shadow. The low sun still lit Goodale's side of the street brightly. Because they were on a slope, he could shoot over the heads of the men down the street at Somalis moving three or four blocks north. It was a long shot, but he had no other targets. It occurred to him that no one was shooting to the left, the alley west. It blinded him to look that way. Goodale turned to squint into the light and pop off a few suppressive rounds when he felt a shooting pain. His right leg seized up and he fell over backward, right into Perino.

He said, “Ow!”

A bullet had entered his right thigh and passed through him, leaving a big exit wound on his right buttock. What immediately flashed into Goodale's mind was a story he'd heard about this 10th Mountain Division guy who had lost his hand the week before when a round detonated the grenade in the LAW he was carrying. He struggled to get the LAW off his shoulder.

Perino couldn't tell what Goodale was doing.

“Where are you hit?” he asked.

“Right in the ass.”

Goodale dropped the LAW and yelled to Elliot, “There's a LAW right there!”

Eliot obligingly picked it up.

Perino got back on the radio to Steele, who was now trailing the column.

“Captain, I've got another man hit.”

“Pick him up and keep moving,” Steele insisted.

Instead, Perino moved on across the intersection with some of the other Rangers from Chalk One, and left Goodale with Sergeant Bart Bullock, the same Delta medic who had earlier in the fight helped patch up Ranger Todd Blackburn after his fall from the Black Hawk. Both Bullock and medic Kurt Schmid had rejoined their Delta units at the target house after sending Blackburn back to base in the three-Humvee convoy (the one on which Sergeant Pilla had been killed). Schmid was now moving a block north with Perino and several other Rangers. Goodale lay back on the dirt as Bullock looked him over.

“You got tagged,” Bullock said. “You're all right though. No problem.”

Goodale was disgusted. Game over. It was the same feeling he'd had getting injured in a football game. They carried you off the field and you were done. It was disappointing, but if the going had been particularly rough it could also be a relief. He took off his helmet, then saw an RPG fly past no more than six feet in front of him and explode with a stupendous wallop about twenty feet away. He put his helmet back on. This game was most definitely not over.

“We need to get off this street,” Bullock said.

He dragged Goodale into a small courtyard, and the Delta team headed by Sergeant Hooten hopped in with them. Goodale asked Bullock for his canteen, which the medic had taken off when removing his gear. Bullock fished it out of Goodale's butt pack and discovered a bullet hole clean through it from the same round that had passed through his body. There was still water in the canteen.

“You'll want to keep this,” Bullock said.

With the men at the rear of the column, Captain Steele's overriding goal was to consolidate his Ranger force and reestablish some order. Time was essential here. Steele had been told the convoy would probably reach the crash site before he and his men did. He had just heard on the radio

that another Black Hawk had gone down (Durant's), which meant things were that much more urgent. From the C2 bird, Harrell explained:

-We are going to try to get everyone consolidated at the northern site and exfil everyone off the northern site and move to the southern crash site, over.

Steele had about sixty men to account for when those vehicles arrived, and right now he had only a vague idea where they all were.

As he arrived at the intersection at the top of the rise, he ran across to the right side of the street with Lieutenant James Lechner and several other Rangers. Sergeant Watson and the remainder of Chalk Three were the last to turn the corner.

Steele moved over the slight rise and started down the hill. He had gone only about ten yards when a burst of fire forced him and those with him to drop. He was on his belly, with his wide face nearly in the sand. Alongside to his left was Sergeant Chris Atwater, his radioman. Prone to Atwater's left was Lieutenant Lecher, Steele's second-in-command. Atwater and Steele, both big men, were trying to take cover behind a tree with a trunk only about one foot wide.

About three strides to their right, Delta team leader Hooten was in a steel doorway to the small courtyard where Bullock had dragged Goodale. Steele was watching another team of operators working their way up the street ahead of him. He intended to follow, but just then one of the D-boys, Fillmore, went limp. His little helmet jerked up and back and blood came spouting out of his head. It was obviously fatal. Fillmore just crumpled.

An operator grabbed Fillmore and began dragging him into a narrow alley. Then he was shot, in the neck.

Steele felt the gravity of their predicament hit fully home. This is for keeps.

-12-

Mohamed Sheik Ali moved swiftly around his neighborhood. All had been fighting in these streets already for a decade, since he was fourteen years old and had been drummed into Siad Barre's army. He moved mostly in crowds, darting from hiding place to hiding place, usually staying far enough away to make himself a hard target, but occasionally stealing close enough to fire off a few well-placed rounds from his AK. If the Americans spotted him, they saw a short, dusty little man with nappy hair whose teeth were brownish orange from chewing khat and whose eyes were wide with the effects of the drug and adrenaline.