Mark Bowden: Black Hawk Down

“We’re a little short of our desired position,” he told Eversmann. They were going in a block north of their assigned corner. Still, that wasn’t crucial. The sergeant thought it would be a lot safer on the ground.

“No problem,” he said.

“We’re about 100 meters short,” the pilot warned.

Eversmann gave him a thumbs-up. He would be the last man out.

When it was his time to jump, the strap on his goggles broke. Flustered, he tossed them and sprung for the rope, forgetting to take off his earphones. He jumped, ripping the earphone cord from the ceiling.

In the excitement, time slowed. All his movements became very deliberate. He hadn’t realized how high they were. The slide down on the rope was far longer than any they’d done in training. Then, on his way down, Eversmann spotted Todd Blackburn splayed out on the street at the end of the rope.

Eversmann’s feet touched down next to the fallen Ranger, and the crew chiefs in the copter released the rope. It fell twisting to the road. As the Blackhawk moved up and away, the noise eased and the dust settled. The city’s musky odor bore in.

Pvt. 2 Mark Good, Chalk Four’s medic, was already at work on Blackburn. The kid had one eye shut. Blood gurgled from his mouth. Good inserted a tube down Blackburn’s throat to help him breathe. Sgt. First Class Bart Bullock, a Commando medic, started an IV. Blackburn hadn’t been shot, he’d fallen. He’d somehow missed the rope and plummeted.

He was still alive, but unconscious. He looked pretty busted up. Eversmann stepped away. He took a quick count of his Chalk.

His men had peeled off as planned against the mud-stained stone walls on either side of the street. That left Eversmann in the middle of the road with Blackburn and the medics. It was hot, and sand was caked in his eyes, nose and ears. They were taking fire, but it wasn’t very accurate. Oddly, it hadn’t even registered with the sergeant. You would think bullets clipping past would command your attention, but he’d been too preoccupied.

Now he noticed. Passing bullets made a snapping sound, like cracking a stick of dry hickory. Eversmann had never been shot at before. As big a target as he made at 6-foot-4, he figured he’d better find cover. He and the two medics grabbed Blackburn under his arms, and, trying to keep his neck straight, dragged him to the edge of the street. They squatted behind two parked cars.

Good looked up at Eversmann. “He’s litter urgent, Sarge. We need to extract him right now or he’s going to die.”

Eversmann shouted to his radio operator, Pvt. Jason Moore, and asked him to raise Capt. Mike Steele on the company radio net. Steele, the Ranger commander, had roped in with two lieutenants and the rest of Chalk One to the block’s southeast corner.

Minutes passed. Moore shouted back to say he couldn’t get Steele.

“What do you mean you can’t get him?” Eversmann asked.

Neither man had noticed that a bullet had severed the wire leading to the antenna on Moore’s radio. Eversmann tried his walkie-talkie. Again Steele didn’t answer, but after several tries Steele’s lieutenant, Larry Perino, came on the line.

The sergeant made a particular effort to speak slowly and clearly. He explained that Blackburn had fallen and was badly injured. He needed to come out. Eversmann tried to convey urgency without alarm.

So when Perino said, “Calm down,” it really burned Eversmann. This is one hell of a time to start sharpshooting me.

Fire was getting heavier. To officers watching on screens in the command center, it was as if their men had poked a stick into a hornet’s nest. It was an amazing and unnerving thing to view a battle in real time. Cameras on the surveillance aircraft circling high over the fight captured crowds of Somalis erecting barricades and lighting tires to summon help. People were pouring into the streets, many with weapons. They were racing from all directions toward the spot where orbiting helicopters marked the fight. There wasn’t much the Joint Operating Command could do but watch.

Eversmann’s men had fanned out and were shooting in every direction except south toward the target building. He saw crowds of Somalis way up Hawlwadig to the north, and others, closer, darting in and out of alleys, taking shots at the Rangers. They were coming closer, wary of the Americans’ guns.

The Rangers had been issued strict rules of engagement. They were to shoot only at someone who pointed a weapon at them, but already this was getting unrealistic. Those with guns were intermingled with women and children. The Somalis were strange that way. Whenever there was a disturbance in Mogadishu, people would throng to the spot: men, women, children—even the aged and infirm. It was like some national imperative to bear witness. And over this summer, the Ranger missions had stirred up widespread hatred.

Things were not playing out according to the script in Eversmann’s head. His Chalk was still in the wrong place. He’d figured they could just hoof it down Hawlwadig, but Blackburn’s falling and the unexpected volume of gunfire had ruled that out.

Time played tricks. It would be hard to explain to someone who wasn’t there. Events seemed to happen twice normal speed, but from inside his personal space, the place where he thought and reacted and watched, every second seemed a minute long. He had no idea how much time had gone by. It was hard to believe things could have gone so much to hell in such a short time.

He kept checking back to see if the ground convoy had moved up. He knew it was probably too soon. It would mean that things were wrapping up. He must have looked a dozen times before he saw the first humvee—the wide-bodied vehicle that replaced the jeep as the Army’s all-purpose ground vehicle—round the corner three blocks down. What a relief! Maybe the boys are done and we can roll out of here.

He radioed Lt. Perino.

“Listen, we really need to move this guy or he’s going to die. Can’t you send somebody down the street?”

“No, the humvees, could not move to his position.“

“Good,” the medic, spoke up: “Listen, Sarge, we’ve got to get him out.”

Eversmann summoned two of Chalk Four’s sergeants, rock-solid Casey Joyce and 6-foot-5 Jeff McLaughlin. He addressed McLaughlin, shouting over the escalating noise of the fight.

“Sergeant, you need to move him down to those humvees, toward the target.”

They unfolded a compact litter, and with Joyce and McLaughlin in front and medics Good and Bullock in back, they took off down the street. They ran stooped. Bullock was still holding the IV bag connected to the kid’s arm. McLaughlin didn’t think Blackburn was going to make it. On the litter he was dead weight, still bleeding from the nose and mouth. They were all yelling at him, “Hang on! Hang on!” but, by the look of him, he had already let go.

They would run a few steps, put Blackburn down, shoot, then pick him up and carry him a few more steps, then put him down again.

“We’ve got to get those humvees to come to us,” Good said finally. “We keep picking him up and putting him down like this and we’re going to kill him.”

So Joyce volunteered to fetch a humvee. He took off running on his own.

AFTER THE HELICOPTER force had moved out over the beach, Staff Sgt. Jeff Struecker had waited several minutes in his humvee with the rest of the ground convoy at the base. His was the lead in a column of 12 vehicles. They were to drive to a point behind the Olympic Hotel and wait for the D-boys to wrap things up in the target house, which was just a five-minute drive from the base.

Struecker, a born-again Christian from Fort Dodge, Iowa, knew Mogadishu better than most guys at the compound. His platoon had driven out on water runs and other details daily. The stench was what hit him first. Garbage was strewn everywhere. People burned trash on the streets. They were always burning tires. They burned animal dung for fuel. That added to the mix.