Mark Bowden - Black Hawk Down

Not everyone was as eager as Sizemore. Spec. Steve Anderson, hearing the distant gunfire and the radio traffic, had a sick feeling. Anderson and Sizemore were both Rangers from Illinois, and were friends, but they were quite different. Anderson was slender and quiet, with a bad case of asthma. He had shrapnel in his legs from a night mission a few weeks earlier. Until then he had been as gung ho as the rest of the guys, but his wounds, while minor, had cracked his Hoo-ah spirit.

Anderson was dismayed by the confusion of shouting and shooting. It seemed to him that everybody was using the radio twice as much as usual, as if they needed to stay in touch, as if talk were a net to prevent their free fall. As much as it made Sizemore want to join the fight, it made Anderson want to be someplace else. He dared not show it. His stomach was churning, and he was in a cold sweat. Do I have to go out there?

Seeing Pilla dead and Blackburn busted up brought things into immediate and dire focus. What are we doing in this place? Then Anderson got a good look at Spec. Brad Thomas. Pilla had dropped dead in Thomas’ lap inside the humvee. Thomas rode the whole way back bathed in his dead friend’s blood.

As Thomas emerged from the humvee now, his eyes were red. He looked at Anderson and choked out, “Pilla’s dead.” Thomas was crying, and Anderson felt himself start to cry and he realized, I do not want to go out there. He was ashamed, but that’s how he felt.

He looked at the Commados and SEALs who had climbed off the little convoy. These guys were like machines. They were already rearmed and ready to charge back out. There was no hesitation whatsoever. But the Rangers were all shaken, to a man.

Thomas lost it. “I can’t go back out there!” he shouted. “I can’t! They’re shooting from everywhere!”

Even those Rangers who remained composed felt the same way. How could they go back out into that? They’d barely escaped with their lives. The whole damn city was trying to kill them!

The commander of Pilla’s tiny convoy, Staff Sgt. Jeff Struecker, felt his own heart sink. His vehicles were all shot up. His men were freaking out. One of the Commadno guys pulled him aside.

“Look, sergeant, you need to clean your vehicle up,” he said, pointing to the blood-splattered humvee. “If you don’t, your guys are going to get more messed up. It’s going to mess them up. They’re going to get sick.”

Struecker strode over to his Rangers.

“Listen, men. You don’t have to do this if you don’t want to. I’ll do it myself if I have to. But we have to clean this thing up right now because we’re fixing to roll right back out. Everybody else go resupply. Go get yourselves some more ammunition.”

Struecker asked his 50-gunner, “Will you help me clean up? You don’t have to.”

The gunner nodded glumly. Together they set off for buckets of water. Sizemore saw all this, and it made him wild with anger.

“I’m going out there with you guys,” he said.

“You can’t, you’re hurt,” said his team leader, Sgt. Raleigh Cash.

Sizemore didn’t argue. He was wearing gym shorts and a T-shirt. The rest of his gear had been packed away for his medevac flight home the next day. He ran into the hangar, pulled on pants and a shirt, and began grabbing stray gear.

He found a flak vest that was three sizes too big for him and a helmet that lolled around on his head like a salad bowl. He grabbed his SAW, his squad automatic weapon, and stuffed ammo into his pockets and pouches. He raced back out to the convoy with his boots unlaced and his shirt unbuttoned.

“I’m going out,” he told Cash.

“You can’t go out there with that cast on your elbow,” Cash said.

“Then I’ll lose it.”

Sizemore ran back into the hangar, found a pair of scissors, and cut straight up the inside seam and flung the cast away. Then he came back and climbed onto a humvee.

Cash just looked at him and shook his head. “OK,” he said.

Anderson saw Sizemore’s response and admired him enormously for it, and felt all the more ashamed. He had donned his own vest and helmet, and taken a seat in the back of a humvee, but he was mortified. He didn’t know whether to feel more ashamed of his fear or of his sheeplike acceptance of the orders.

He had decided he would go out into Mogadishu and risk his life, but it wasn’t out of passion or solidarity or patriotism. It was because he didn’t dare refuse. He showed none of this.

As the other men were about to board the humvees, Thomas pulled Struecker aside.

“Sgt. Struecker, I can’t go back out there,” Thomas said.

The sergeant knew this was coming. All the men watched for his response. Struecker was a model Ranger: strong, unassuming, obedient, tough and, above all, by the book. There was no doubt that, of all of them, Struecker fit the unit’s mold better than anyone else. He was like the prize pupil in class. The officers loved him, which meant that at least some of his men regarded him with a slightly jaundiced eye. With Struecker challenged like this, they expected him to explode.

Instead, he pulled Thomas aside and spoke to him quietly, man to man. He tried to calm him, but Thomas was calm. He’d made a calculated decision, a perfectly rational one. He’d taken all he could take. He’d just been married a few months before. He was not going to go out there and die.

He repeated very deliberately, “I can’t do it.”

However steep a price a man would pay for backing down like that—and for a Ranger it would be a steep price indeed—Thomas had made a decision.

“Listen,” Struecker said. “I understand how you feel. I’m married, too. Don’t think of yourself as a coward. I know you’re scared. I’m scared…. I’ve never been in a situation like this, either. But we’ve got to go. It’s our job. The difference between being a coward and a man is not whether you’re scared, it’s what you do while you’re scared.”

Thomas didn’t seem to like the answer. He walked away. As they were about to pull out, Struecker noticed to his relief that Thomas had climbed on board with the rest of the men.

November 26, 1997

PRIVATE CLAY OTHIC shot a chicken. In the melee that began as soon as the nine-vehicle ground convoy turned the corner at the Olympic Hotel, Othic had seen people running, men with AK-47s firing wildly, and chickens flying. He had opened up from the turret of his humvee with the powerful .50-cal, and one of the rounds turned a chicken into a puff of feathers.

Everything was getting blown apart in this battle—brick walls, houses, cars, cows, men, women, children. Othic felt besieged and disoriented. Anything seemed possible. He had already torn a man apart with the .50-cal, and he’d mowed down a crowd of men and women who had opened fire on the convoy.

Othic’s humvee was the last vehicle in the column. With all the gunfire and chaos around them, it was impossible for the Rangers in the vehicles to tell what was going on. But they all understood that this quick mission into Mogadishu was developing into the gunfight of their lives.

The convoy’s original mission had been to load up 24 Somalian prisoners seized in the raid and haul them back to the airport base, along with commandos and Ranger teams around the target house. The plan changed dramatically when Cliff Wolcott’s Blackhawk went down four blocks east of the target house.

Most of the men fighting in the vehicles didn’t know it, but they had just been given new orders. Gary Harrell, a Commando colonel in the command helicopter, instructed the convoy to load up the prisoners, as planned. But instead of returning to base, they were to wend their way through Mogadishu’s narrow streets and rescue Wolcott and his crew. All this while guarding two dozen prisoners and taking fire that was getting more intense by the minute.