Chapter One
At liftoff, Matt Eversmann said a Hail Mary. He was curled into a seatbetween two helicopter crew chiefs, the knees of his long legs up to hisshoulders. Before him, jammed on both sides of the Black Hawk helicopter,was his "chalk," twelve young men in flak vests over tan desertcamouflage fatigues.
He knew their faces so well they were like brothers. The olderguys on this crew, like Eversmann, a staff sergeant with five years in atage twenty-six, had lived and trained together for years. Some had comeup together through basic training, jump school, and Ranger school. Theyhad traveled the world, to Korea, Thailand, Central America ... theyknew each other better than most brothers did. They'd been drunk together,gotten into fights, slept on forest floors, jumped out of airplanes,climbed mountains, shot down foaming rivers with their hearts in theirthroats, baked and frozen and starved together, passed countless boredhours, teased one another endlessly about girlfriends or lack of same,driven out in the middle of the night from Fort Benning to retrieveeach other from some diner or strip club out on Victory Drive after gettingdrunk and falling asleep or pissing off some barkeep. Through allthose things, they had been training for a moment like this. It was thefirst time the lanky sergeant had been put in charge, and he was nervousabout it.
Pray for us sinners, now, and at the hour of our death, amen.
It was midafternoon, October 3, 1993. Eversmann's Chalk Four waspart of a force of U.S. Army Rangers and Delta Force operators who wereabout to drop in uninvited on a gathering of Habr Gidr clan leaders inthe heart of Mogadishu, Somalia. This ragged clan, led by warlordMohamed Farrah Aidid, had picked a fight with the United States ofAmerica, and it was, without a doubt, going down. Today's targets weretwo of Aidid's lieutenants. They would be arrested and imprisoned witha growing number of the belligerent clan's bosses on an island off thesouthern Somali coast city of Kismayo. Chalk Four's piece of thissnatch-and-grab was simple. Each of the four Ranger chalks had a corner of theblock around the target house. Eversmann's would rope down to thenorthwest corner and set up a blocking position. With Rangers on allfour corners, no one would enter the zone where Delta was working,and no one would leave.
They had done this dozens of times without difficulty, in practiceand on the task force's six previous missions. The pattern was clear inEversmann's mind. He knew which way to move when he hit the ground,where his soldiers would be. Those out of the left side of the bird wouldassemble on the left side of the street. Those out of the right side wouldassemble right. Then they would peel off in both directions, with themedics and the youngest guys in the middle. Private First Class ToddBlackburn was the baby on Eversmann's bird, a kid fresh out of Floridahigh school who had not yet even been to Ranger school. He'd needwatching. Sergeant Scott Galentine was older but also inexperiencedhere in Mog. He was a replacement, just in from Benning. The burdenof responsibility for these young Rangers weighed heavily on Eversmann.This time out they were his.
As chalk leader, he was handed headphones when he took his frontseat. They were bulky and had a mouthpiece and were connected by along black cord to a plug on the ceiling. He took his helmet off and settledthe phones over his ears.
One of the crew chiefs tapped his shoulder.
"Matt, be sure you remember to take those off before you leave,"he said, pointing to the cord.
Then they had stewed on the hot tarmac for what seemed an hour,breathing the pungent diesel fumes and oozing sweat under their bodyarmor and gear, fingering their weapons anxiously, every man figuringthis mission would probably be scratched before they got off the ground.That's how it usually went. There were twenty false alarms for everyreal mission. Back when they'd arrived in Mog five weeks earlier, theywere so flush with excitement that cheers went up from Black Hawk toBlack Hawk every time they boarded the birds. Now spin-ups like thiswere routine and usually amounted to nothing.
Waiting for the code word for launch, which today was "Irene,"they were a formidable sum of men and machines. There were four ofthe amazing AH-6 Little Birds, two-seat bubble-front attack helicoptersthat could fly just about anywhere. The Little Birds were loadedwith rockets this time, a first. Two would make the initial sweep overthe target and two more would help with rear security. There were fourMH-6 Little Birds with benches mounted on both sides for deliveringthe spearhead of the assault force, Delta's C Squadron, one of threeoperational elements in the army's top secret commando unit. Followingthis strike force were eight of the elongated troop-carrying BlackHawks: two carrying Delta assaulters and their ground command, fourfor delivering the Rangers (Company B, 3rd Battalion of the army's 75thInfantry, the Ranger Regiment out of Fort Benning, Georgia), one carryinga crack CSAR (Combat Search and Rescue) team, and one to fly thetwo mission commanders--Lieutenant Colonel Tom Matthews, whowas coordinating the pilots of the 160th SOAR (Special Operations AviationRegiment out of Fort Campbell, Kentucky); and Delta LieutenantColonel Gary Harrell, who had responsibility for the men on the ground.The ground convoy, which was lined up and idling out by the front gate,consisted of nine wide-body Humvees and three five-ton trucks. Thetrucks would be used to haul the prisoners and assault forces out. TheHumvees were filled with Rangers, Delta operators, and four membersof SEAL (Sea, Air, Land) Team Six, part of the navy's special forcesbranch. Counting the three surveillance birds and the spy plane highoverhead, there were nineteen aircraft, twelve vehicles, and about 160men. It was an eager armada on a taut rope.
There were signs this one would go. The commander of Task ForceRanger, Major General William F. Garrison, had come out to see themoff. He had never done that before. A tall, slender, gray-haired man indesert fatigues with half an unlit cigar jutting from the corner of hismouth, Garrison had walked from chopper to chopper and then stoopeddown by each Humvee.
"Be careful," he said in his Texas drawl.
Then he'd move on to the next man.
"Good luck."
Then the next.
"Be careful."
The swell of all those revving engines made the earth tremble andtheir pulses race. It was stirring to be part of it, the cocked fist of America'smilitary might. Woe to whatever stood in their way. Bristling with grenadesand ammo, gripping the steel of their automatic weapons, theirhearts pounding under their flak vests, they waited with a heady mix ofhope and dread. They ran through last-minute mental checklists, sayingprayers, triple-checking weapons, rehearsing their precise tacticalchoreography, performing little rituals ... whatever it was that preparedthem for battle. They all knew this mission might get hairy. It was anaudacious daylight thrust into the "Black Sea," the very heart of HabrGidr territory in central Mogadishu and warlord Aidid's stronghold.Their target was a three-story house of whitewashed stone with a flatroof, a modern modular home in one of the city's few remaining clustersof intact large buildings, surrounded by blocks and blocks of tin-roofeddwellings of muddy stone. Hundreds of thousands of clan members livedin this labyrinth of irregular dirt streets and cactus-lined paths. Therewere no decent maps. Pure Indian country.
The men had watched the rockets being loaded on the AH-6s.Garrison hadn't done that on any of their earlier missions. It meantthey were expecting trouble. The men had girded themselves withextra ammo, stuffing magazines and grenades into every available pocketand pouch of their load-bearing harnesses, leaving behind canteens,bayonets, night-vision goggles, and any other gear they felt would bedeadweight on a fast daylight raid. The prospect of getting into a scrapedidn't worry them. Not at all. They welcomed it. They were predators,heavy metal avengers, unstoppable, invincible. The feeling was,after six weeks of diddling around they were finally going in to kicksome serious Somali ass.
It was 3:32 P.M. when the chalk leader inside the lead Black Hawk,Super Six Four, heard over the intercom the soft voice of thepilot, Chief Warrant Officer Mike Durant, clearly pleased.
Durant announced, "Fuckin' Irene."
And the armada launched, lifting off from the shabby airport bythe sea into an embracing blue vista of sky and Indian Ocean. They easedout across a littered strip of white sand and moved low and fast overrunning breakers that formed faint crests parallel to the shore. In closeformation they banked and flew down the coastline southwest. Fromeach bird the booted legs of the eager soldiers dangled from the benchesand open doors.
Unrolling toward a hazy desert horizon, Mogadishu in midafternoonsun was so bright it was as if the aperture on the world's lens was stuckone click wide. From a distance the ancient port city had an auburn hue,with its streets of ocher sand and its rooftops of Spanish tile and rustedtin. The only tall structures still standing after years of civil war werethe ornate white towers of mosques--Islam being the only thing all Somaliaheld sacred. There were many scrub trees, the tallest just overthe low rooftops, and between them high stone walls with pale traces ofyellow and pink and gray, fading remnants of pre-civil war civility. Setthere along the coast, framed to the west by desert and the east by gleamingteal ocean, it might have been some sleepy Mediterranean resort.
As the helicopter force swept in over it, gliding back in from theocean and then banking right and sprinting northeast along the city'swestern edge, Mogadishu spread beneath them in its awful reality, acatastrophe, the world capital of things-gone-completely-to-hell. It wasas if the city had been ravaged by some fatal urban disease. The fewpaved avenues were crumbling and littered with mountains of trash,debris, and the rusted hulks of burned-out vehicles. Those walls andbuildings that had not been reduced to heaps of gray rubble were pockmarkedwith bullet scars. Telephone poles leaned at ominous angles likevoodoo totems topped by stiff sprays of dreadlocks--the stubs of theirsevered wires (long since stripped for sale on the thriving black market).Public spaces displayed the hulking stone platforms that once heldstatuary from the heroic old days of dictator Mohamed Siad Barre, thenational memory stripped bare not out of revolutionary fervor, but tosell the bronze and copper for scrap. The few proud old governmentand university buildings that still stood were inhabited now by refugees.Everything of value had been looted, right down to metal windowframes, doorknobs, and hinges. At night, campfires glowed from third- andfourth-story windows of the old Polytechnic Institute. Every openspace was clotted with the dense makeshift villages of the disinherited,round stick huts covered with layers of rags and shacks made of scavengedscraps of wood and patches of rusted tin. From above they lookedlike an advanced stage of some festering urban rot.
In his bird, Super Six Seven, Eversmann rehearsed the plan in hismind. By the time they reached the street, the D-boys would alreadybe taking down the target house, rounding up Somali prisoners andshooting anyone foolish enough to fight back. Word was there were twobig boys in this house, men whom the task force had identified as "TierOne Personalities," Aidid's top men. As the D-boys did their work andthe Rangers kept the curious at bay, the ground convoy of trucks andHumvees would roll in through the city, right up to the target house.The prisoners would be herded into the trucks. The assault team andblocking force would jump in behind them and they would all drive backto finish out a nice Sunday afternoon on the beach. It would take aboutan hour.
To make room for the Rangers in the Black Hawks, the seats inback had been removed. The men who were not in the doorways weresquatting on ammo cans or seated on the flak-proof Kevlar panels laidout on the floor. They all wore desert camouflage fatigues, with Kevlarvests and helmets and about fifty pounds of equipment and ammostrapped to their load-bearing harnesses, which fit on over the vests. Allhad goggles and thick leather gloves. Those layers of gear made eventhe slightest of them look bulky, robotic, and intimidating. Stripped downto their dirt-brown T-shirts and shorts, which is how they spent mostof their time in the hangar, most looked like the pimply teenagers theywere (average age nineteen). They were immensely proud of theirRanger status. It spared them most of the numbing noncombat-relatedroutine that drove many an army enlistee nuts. The Rangers trainedfor war full-time. They were fitter, faster, and first--"Rangers lead theway!" was their motto. Each had volunteered at least three times to getwhere they were, for the army, for airborne, and for the Rangers. Theywere the cream, the most highly motivated young soldiers of theirgeneration, selected to fit the army's ideal--they were all male and,revealingly, nearly all white (there were only two blacks among the140-man company). Some were professional soldiers, like LieutenantLarry Perino, a 1990 West Point graduate. Some were overachievers insearch of a different challenge, like Specialist John Waddell on ChalkTwo, who had enlisted after finishing high school in Natchez, Mississippi,with a 4.0 GPA. Some were daredevils in search of a physical challenge.Others were self-improvers, young men who had found themselvesadrift after high school, or in trouble with drugs, booze, the law, or allthree. They were harder-edged than most young men of their generationwho, on this Sunday in early autumn, were weeks into their fallcollege semester. Most of these Rangers had been kicked around some,had tasted failure. But there were no goof-offs. Every man had workedto be here, probably harder than he'd ever worked in his life. Those withtroubled pasts had taken harsh measure of themselves. Beneath theirbest hard-ass act, most were achingly earnest, patriotic, and idealistic.They had literally taken the army up on its offer to "Be All You Can Be."
They held themselves to a higher standard than normal soldiers.With their buff bodies, distinct crew cuts--sides and back of the headcompletely shaved--and their grunted Hoo-ah greeting, they saw themselvesas the army at its gung ho best. Many, if they could make it, aspiredto join Special Forces, maybe even get picked to try out for Delta,the hale, secret supersoldiers now leading this force in. Only the verybest of them would be invited to try out, and only one of every teninvited would make it through selection. In this ancient male hierarchy,the Rangers were a few steps up the ladder, but the D-boys ownedthe uppermost rung.
Rangers knew the surest path to that height was combat experience.So far, Mog had been mostly a tease. War was always about to happen.About to happen. Even the missions, exciting as they'd been, hadfallen short. The Somalis--whom they called "Skinnies" or "Sammies"--hadtaken a few wild shots at them, enough to get the Rangers' bloodup and unleash a hellish torrent of return fire, but nothing that qualifiedas a genuine balls-out firefight.
Which is what they wanted. All of these guys. If there were anyhesitant thoughts, they were buttoned tight. A lot of these men hadstarted as afraid of war as anyone, but the fear had been drummed out.Especially in Ranger training. About a fourth of those who volunteeredwashed out, enough so that those who emerged with their Ranger tabat the end were riding the headiest wave of accomplishment in theiryoung lives. The weak had been weeded out. The strong had steppedup. Then came weeks, months, years of constant training. The Hoo-ahscouldn't wait to go to war. They were an all-star football team that hadendured bruising, exhausting, dangerous practice sessions twelve hoursa day, seven days a week--for years--without ever getting to play a game.
They yearned for battle. They passed around the dog-eared paperbackmemoirs of soldiers from past conflicts, many written by formerRangers, and savored the affectionate, comradely tone of their stories,feeling bad for the poor suckers who bought it or got crippled or maimedbut identifying with the righteous men who survived the experiencewhole. They studied the old photos, which were the same from everywar, young men looking dirty and tired, half dressed in army combatfatigues, dogtags hanging around their skinny necks, posing with armsdraped over each other's shoulders in exotic lands. They could see themselvesin those snapshots, surrounded by their buddies, fighting theirwar. It was THE test, the only one that counted.
Sergeant Mike Goodale had tried to explain this to his mother onetime, on leave in Illinois. His mom was a nurse, incredulous at his bravado.
"Why would anybody want to go to war?" she asked.
Goodale told her it would be like, as a nurse, after all her training,never getting the chance to work in a hospital. It would be like that.
"You want to find out if you can really do the job," he explained.
Like those guys in books. They'd been tested and proven. It wasanother generation of Rangers' turn now. Their turn.
It didn't matter that none of the men in these helicopters knewenough to write a high school paper about Somalia. They took the army'sline without hesitation. Warlords had so ravaged the nation battlingamong themselves that their people were starving to death. When theworld sent food, the evil warlords hoarded it and killed those who triedto stop them. So the civilized world had decided to lower the hammer,invite the baddest boys on the planet over to clean things up. 'Nuff said.Little the Rangers had seen since arriving at the end of August had alteredthat perception. Mogadishu was like the postapocalyptic world ofMel Gibson's Mad Max movies, a world ruled by roving gangs of armedthugs. They were here to rout the worst of the warlords and restore sanityand civilization.
Eversmann had always just enjoyed being a Ranger. He wasn't surehow he felt about being in charge, even if it was just temporary. He'dwon the distinction by default. His platoon sergeant had been summonedhome by an illness in his family, and then the guy who replaced himhad keeled over with an epileptic seizure. He, too, had been sent home.Eversmann was the senior man in line. He accepted the task hesitantly.That morning at Mass in the mess he'd prayed about it.
Airborne now at last, Eversmann swelled with energy and pride ashe looked out over the full armada. It was a state-of-the-art military force.Already circling high above the target was the slickest intelligence supportAmerica had to offer, including satellites, a high-flying P3 Orionspy plane, and three OH-58 observation helicopters, which looked likethe bubble-front Little Bird choppers with a five-foot bulbous polypgrowing out of the top. The observation birds were equipped with videocameras and radio equipment that would relay the action live to GeneralGarrison and the other senior officers in the Joint Operations Center(JOC) back at the beach. Moviemakers and popular authors mightstrain to imagine the peak capabilities of the U.S. military, but here wasthe real thing about to strike. It was a well-oiled, fully equipped, late-twentieth-centuryfighting machine. America's best were going to war,and Sergeant Matt Eversmann was among them.
Continues...
Excerpted from Black Hawk Downby Mark Bowden Copyright © 2001 by Mark Bowden. Excerpted by permission.
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