This was, of course, out of the question, but McKnight wasn’t giving up.
—Roger, understand. Can you give me some ... we just need a direction and distance from where I’m at, over.
There was no answer at first. The radio net was filled with calls related to Durant’s crash. When he did hear from his commanders again, McKnight was asked to report the number of Rangers he had picked up from Eversmann’s Chalk Four. He ignored that request.
—Romeo Six Four [Harrell], this is Uniform Six Four. From the crash site, where am I now? How far over?
—Standby. Have good visual on you now. ... Danny, are you still on that main hardball [paved road]?
—I’m on the exfil road. Down toward National.
Harrell apparently misunderstood. He gave McKnight directions as if he were still on Hawlwadig Road, out in front of the target house.
—Turn east. Go about three blocks east and two blocks north. They’re popping smoke, over.
—Understand. From my location I have to go east further about three blocks and then head north, over.
—Roger, that’s from the hardball road the Olympic Hotel is on, over.
But McKnight was already three blocks east of that road.
—I’m at the hardball road east of the Olympic Hotel. Do I just need to turn around on it and head north?
—Negative. They are about three blocks east, one block north of building one [the target building], over.
19
In the convoy’s second-to-last Humvee, where Ruiz was fighting for his life, Sergeant Burns couldn’t get through to McKnight on the radio so he took off on foot. He feared if they didn’t get Ruiz back to base immediately the young Texan was going to die. Burns noticed that the gunfire that had hurt his ears initially now sounded muffled, distant. His ears had adjusted to it. As he neared the front of the line he saw Joyce stretched out bloody and pale, with a medic working over him furiously on the back of a crowded Humvee. He was about to reach the front when a D-boy grabbed him.
“You’ve been hit,” the Delta operator said.
“No I haven’t.”
Burns hadn’t felt a thing. The D-boy slid his hand inside Burns’s vest at his right shoulder and the sergeant felt a vicious stab of pain.
“Having trouble breathing?” the D-boy asked.
“No.”
“Any tightness in your chest?”
“I feel all right,” Burns said. “I didn’t even know I was hit.”
“You keep an eye on it,” the D-boy said.
Burns made it up to McKnight, who was also bloody, and busy on the radio. So Burns told Sergeant Bob Gallagher about Ruiz. Burns thought they should allow a Humvee or two to speed right back to the base with Ruiz, as they had done earlier with Blackburn. But Gallagher knew the convoy could not afford to lose any more vehicles and firepower now. They still had roughly a hundred men waiting for them around the first crash site, then there was the second crash site. ... Gallagher was already kicking himself for sending those three vehicles back with Blackburn. While he knew this might be a death sentence for Ruiz, he told Burns there was no way anybody was leaving.
“We have to move to the crash site and consolidate forces,” he said.
Disgusted, Burns began to make his way back down the column to his vehicle. He had only gone a few steps when the convoy started rolling again. He jumped on the back of a Humvee. It was already jammed. The rear of the vehicle was slick and sticky with blood. Moaning rose from the pile of Rangers. Beside him, Joyce looked dead, even though a medic was still working on him. Sergeant Galentine was screaming, “My thumb’s shot off! My thumb’s shot off!” Burns did not want to be on that Humvee.
They were still pointed north. Some of the men were at the breaking point. In the same Humvee with Burns, Private Jason Moore saw some of his Ranger buddies just burying their heads behind the sandbags. Some of the unit’s most boisterous chest-beaters were among them. A burly kid from Princeton, New Jersey, Moore had a dip of snuff stuffed under his lower lip and brown spittle on his unshaved chin. He was sweating and terrified. One RPG had passed over the vehicle and exploded with an ear-smarting crack against a wall alongside. Bullets were snapping around him. He fought the urge to lie down. Either way I’m going to get shot.
Moore figured if he stayed up and kept on shooting, at least he’d get shot trying to save himself and the guys. It was a defining moment for him, a point of clarity in the midst of chaos. He would go down fighting. He would not consider lying down again.
Not long after he saw Joyce shot, which really shook him up, Private Carlson felt a sudden blow and sharp pain in his right knee. It felt like someone had taken a knife and held it to his knee and then driven it in with a sledgehammer. He glanced down to see blood rapidly staining his pants. He said a prayer and kept shooting. He had been wildly scared for longer than he had ever felt that way in his life, and now he thought he might literally die of fright. His heart banged in his chest and he found it hard to breathe. His head was filled with the sounds of shooting and explosions and visions of his friends, one by one, going down, and blood splashed everywhere oily and sticky with its dank, coppery smell and he figured, This is it for me. And then, in that moment of maximum terror, he felt it all abruptly, inexplicably fall away. One second he was paralyzed with fear and pain and the next ... he had stopped caring about himself.
He would think about this a lot later, and the best he could explain it was, his own life no longer mattered. All that did matter were his buddies, his brothers, that they not get hurt, that they not get killed. These men around him, some of whom he had only known for months, were more important to him than life itself. It was like when Telscher ran out on the road to pull Joyce back in. Carlson understood that now, and it was heroic, but it also wasn’t heroic. At a certain level he knew Telscher had made no choice, just as he was not choosing to be unafraid. It had just happened to him, like he had passed through some barrier. He had to keep fighting, because the other guys needed him.
In the second of the three Humvees behind the trucks, Private Ed Kallman sat behind the wheel amazed and alarmed by what he was seeing. He saw a line of trees on the sidewalk up ahead begin to explode, one after the other, as if someone had placed charges in each and was detonating them at about five-second intervals. Either that or somebody with a big gun was systematically taking out the trees, each about two stories high, thinking that they might be hiding snipers. He found it strange, anyway, the blasts walking their way toward him splintering the trees one by one.
Kallman, who had felt such a rush of excitement an hour earlier as he encountered battle for the first time, now felt nothing but nauseating dread. So far neither he nor anyone in his vehicle had been hit, but it seemed like just a matter of time. He watched with horror as the convoy disintegrated before him. He was a soldier for the most powerful nation on earth. If they were having this much trouble, shouldn’t somebody have stepped in? Where was a stronger show of force? Somehow it didn’t seem right that they could be reduced to this, battling on these narrow dirt streets, bleeding, dying! This wasn’t supposed to happen. He saw men he knew and liked and respected bellowing in pain on the street with gunshot wounds that exposed great crimson flaps of glistening muscle, men wandering in the smoke bleeding, dazed and seemingly unconscious, their clothing torn off. American soldiers. Those who were not injured were covered with the blood of others. Kallman was young and new to the unit. If these more-veteran soldiers were all getting hit, sooner or later he was going to get hit. Oddly, the surprise he felt overshadowed the fear. He kept telling himself, This is not supposed to happen!
And Kallman’s turn did come. As he slowed down before another intersection he looked out the open window to his left and saw a smoke trail coming straight at him. It all happened in a second. He knew it was an RPG and he knew it was going to hit him. Then it did. He awoke lying on his right side on the front seat with his ears ringing. He opened his eyes and was looking directly at the
radio mounted under the dash. He sat up and floored the accelerator. Up ahead he saw the convoy making a left turn and he raced to catch them.
Later, when he’d had a chance to inspect his Humvee, he saw that the RPG had hit his door, deeply denting it and poking a hole through the steel. He and the others inside had evidently been spared by the bulletproof glass panel behind the door—Kallman had the window rolled down. The brunt of the grenade’s force had been absorbed by the Humvee’s outer shell, and the glass barrier had been thick enough to stop it. Kallman’s left arm began to swell and discolor, but otherwise he was fine.
* * *
Dan Schilling felt better whenever they were moving. But the convoy seemed to inch along, stopping, starting, stopping, starting. Whenever they stopped the volume of fire would surge, so many rounds that at times it looked like the stone walls on both sides of the alley were being sandblasted. There were plenty of targets to shoot at. Up in the turret, Pringle unloosed the .50 cal on a group of armed Somalis. Schilling watched as one of them, a tall, skinny man wearing a bright yellow shirt and carrying an AK-47, came apart as the big rounds tore through him. Deep red blotches appeared on the yellow shirt. First an arm came off. Then the man’s head and chest exploded. The rest of the Somalis scattered, moving around the next corner, where Schilling knew they’d again be waiting for them to cross.
As the Humvee came abreast of the alley Schilling didn’t bother to use his sights, the men were that close. The first man he shot was just ten yards away. He was crouched down and had a painful grimace on his face. Maybe Pringle had hit him earlier. Schilling put two rounds in his chest. He shot the man next to him twice in the chest and as he did he felt a slam and a dull pain in his right foot. When they were through the intersection, Schilling inspected his boot. The door had taken two bullets. One had passed through the outer steel and been stopped by the bullet-proof glass window inside it. The second had hit lower, and had passed right through the door. The door, which was guaranteed to stop the AK-47’s 7.62 mm round, had not stopped either bullet. The glass got the first, and the second had been slowed enough so that it hit with enough force to hurt, but not enough to penetrate the boot.
Pringle had just put doors on the vehicle earlier that day. They’d done the previous six missions without them, and these had just arrived in a shipment from the States. Schilling had mixed feelings about them. He liked the protection, but the doors made it a lot harder to move. When he had checked them out that morning, he couldn’t get his window to roll down, so he’d started to remove the door. Pringle stopped him.
“Hey, I just put those on!” he shouted.
Schilling had showed him how the window stuck, and Pringle had fetched a hammer and simply whacked the frame until the window dropped down. Now, Schilling was glad they’d kept the door, but some of the sense of invulnerability he’d felt was gone. Both bullets had gone completely through.
They continued north for about nine blocks, all the way up to Armed Forces Road, one of the main paved roads in Mogadishu. They’d gone past the crash site, only a block west of it, without stopping. The helicopters had directed them to turn right, but the alleyways looked too narrow to Schilling and the others in the lead Humvee. If the trucks got stuck they’d probably all be killed. So they continued on. Some of the men in the convoy saw the downed Black Hawk just a block over as they went past, but no one had told them that it was their objective. Many of the men in the vehicles still thought they were heading back to base. As they approached Armed Forces Street, they stopped again.
Schilling fought back feelings of futility. McKnight seemed dazed and overwhelmed. He was bleeding from the arm and the neck, and not his usual decisive self. Schilling muttered to himself, “We’re going to keep driving around until we’re all fucking dead.”
He then decided to do something himself, since McKnight seemed stymied. Using a frequency he knew helicopter pilots used to talk among themselves, he bypassed the C2 Black Hawk and contacted the observation helicopters flying orbits higher up. Coordinating communications between the air and ground was Schilling’s specialty. He asked them to vector him to the crash site. The choppers were eager to oblige. They told him to steer the convoy west on Armed Forces Road, and then hang another left. McKnight gave permission for Schilling to direct them, and the convoy was moving once again.
They made the left turn off Armed Forces and drove through the storm of gunfire for about seven blocks before Schilling saw up ahead the smoldering remains of the five-ton they had torched in front of the target building. They’d come full circle. Schilling hadn’t told the observation bird pilots which crash site he wanted. The pilots could see how desperate things were around Durant’s crash, where Somali mobs had begun to encircle the unprotected downed Black Hawk, and had taken it upon themselves to direct the convoy there. Schilling hadn’t realized it until he saw the target house and the Olympic Hotel again.
“We’re headed for the second crash site,” he told McKnight.
The lieutenant colonel knew only what his orders were. He reiterated that they were to proceed to the first crash site.
On the command net, their wanderings had turned to black comedy. Matters were now complicated by the fact that a second vehicle convoy had been dispatched from the base to attempt a rescue at Durant’s crash site.
—Danny, I think you’ve gone too far west trying to look at the second crash. You seem to have gone about four blocks west and five blocks south, over.
—Romeo Six Four [Harrell], this is Uniform Six Four [McKnight]. Give me a right turn, right turn! Right turn!
—Uniform Six Four, this is Romeo Six Four. ... You need to go about four blocks south, turn east. There is green smoke marking the site south. Keep coming south.
A voice came over the busy command frequency pleading for order.
—Stop giving directions! ... I think you’re talking to the wrong convoy!
—This is Uniform Six Four, you’ve got me back in front of the Olympic Hotel.
— Uniform Six Four, this is Romeo Six Four. You need to turn east.
So the convoy now made a U-turn. They had just driven through a vicious ambush in front of the target house and were now turning around to drive right back through it. Men in the vehicles behind could not understand. It was insane! They seemed to be trying to get killed.
Things had deteriorated so badly that up in the C2 bird Harrell was considering just releasing the prisoners, their prize, the supposed point of this mission and of all this carnage. He instructed the Delta units on foot now closing in on the first crash site:
—As soon as we get you linked up with the Uniform element throw all the precious cargo. We’re going to try and get force down to the second crash site.
The voices from various helicopters now trying to steer poor McKnight recorded the frustration of his fruitless twists and turns.
—Uniform Six Four, this is Romeo Six Four. Next right. Next right! Alleyway! Alleyway!
—They just missed their turn.
—Take the next available right, Uniform.
—Be advised they are coming under heavy fire.
—Uniform Six Four, this is Romeo Six Four.
—God damn it, stop! God damn it, stop!
—Right turn! Right turn! You’re taking fire! Hurry up!
In this terrible confusion the men on the convoy saw strange things. They passed an old woman carrying two plastic grocery bags, walking along calmly through the barrage. As the convoy approached, she set both bags down gently, stuck fingers in her ears, and kept on walking. Minutes later, heading in the opposite direction, they saw the same woman. She had the bags again. She set them down, stuck fingers in her ears, and walked away as she had before.
At every intersection now Somalis just lined up, on both sides of the street, and fired at every vehicle that came across. Since they had men on both sides of the street, any rounds that missed the vehicle as it flashed past would certainly have hit the men on the other side of
the road. Sergeant Eversmann, who had found some better cover for himself in the back end of his Humvee, watched with amazement. What a strategy! He felt these people must have no regard for even their own lives! They just did not care!
The city was shredding them block by block. No place was safe. The air was alive with hurtling chunks of hot metal. They heard the awful slap of bullets into flesh and heard the screams and saw the insides of men’s bodies spill out and watched the gray blank pallor rise in the faces of their friends, and the best of the men fought back despair. They were America’s elite fighters and they were going to die here, outnumbered by this determined rabble. Their future was setting with this sun on this day and in this place.
Schilling felt disbelief, and now some guilt. He had steered the convoy the wrong way for at least part of this calamity. Stunned by the confusion, he struggled to convince himself this was all really happening. Over and over he muttered, “We’re going to keep driving around until we’re all fucking dead.”
20
Specialist Spalding was still behind the passenger door in the first truck with his rifle out the window, turned in the seat so he could line up his shots, when he was startled by a flash of light down by his legs. It looked like a laser beam shot through the door and up into his right leg. A bullet had pierced the steel of the door and the window, which was rolled down, and had poked itself and fragments of glass and steel straight up his leg from just above his knee all the way up to his hip. He had been stabbed by the shaft of light that poked through the door. He squealed.
“What’s wrong, you hit?” shouted Maddox.
“Yes!”
And then another laser poked through, this one into his left leg. Spalding felt a jolt this time but no pain. He reached down to grab his right thigh and blood spurted out between his fingers. He was both distressed and amazed. The way the light had shot through. He still felt no pain. He didn’t want to look at it.