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.
CHAPTER 11
Besieged, Disoriented As Bullets Fly
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.
Lost and wandering in Mogadishu’s confusing alleyways, they badly needed guidance. They were directed by officers watching from above on video screens, Col. Harrell in the command bird at 3,000 feet, and U.S. Navy pilots in a P-3 Orion spy plane about 1,000 feet higher than the helicopters.
Before they could carry out their revised orders, Mike Durant’s Blackhawk was shot down about a mile south of the convoy. The orders changed again. Now they were told to continue as planned to the Wolcott crash site. But after that they were to load up the soldiers who had rushed to Wolcott’s aid, and then fight their way to the Durant site a mile away.
But the convoy itself needed help. To an extent the commanders didn’t realize from watching on their screens above, the men in the vehicles were getting hammered.
Othic had been one of the first men hit. It happened just after he had seen an RPG launched from a crowd of Somalis. He watched the grenade explode on one of the five-tons, disabling it and mangling the legs of Staff Sgt. Dave Wilson, who had been standing alongside.
Othic had just turned to fire on the crowd when he heard a loud crack. It felt as if a baseball bat had whacked his right arm. A round had splintered the forearm. In a few blinding moments of pain he just went “cyclic” on the big gun, firing it on automatic, sweeping the street behind the convoy until Sgt. Lorenzo Ruiz stepped up to take the gun.
Othic wasn’t the only casualty. Sgt. First Class Bob Gallagher had been shot in the arm. Sgt. Bill Powell had been shot in the meaty part of his calf. In the back of one truck, Wilson held his weapon on the prisoners and propped up his mangled legs.
There weren’t enough vehicles to carry all four Chalk teams and the Commando guys from the target house. Three vehicles had been dispatched earlier to return an injured Ranger to the main base. Some of the soldiers were able now to jump on the remaining vehicles, but the others had to move out on foot.
The trucks had big, fluorescent-orange panels on top to help the surveillance birds keep an eye on them. The helicopters were the troops’ eyes in the sky, guiding them through the maze. If everything went well—the 20 -man convoy and ground units linking up at the Wolcott crash site with all the Rangers and Commando teams already there—there would be nearly 120 men to rescue the two downed crews and then fight their way out of the hornet’s nest.
Othic stretched out on his belly in back of the second-to-last humvee, which had its slope-backed hatch open so he and the others crammed in there could shoot out the back. He had a field dressing on his right arm, and he was using his left arm to shoot his M-16. He was a crack shot. An avid hunter from Holt, Mo., Othic had grown up with guns. The Rangers had nicknamed him “Little Hunter,” for he was the smallest man in the unit.
Next to Othic, Sgt. Ruiz was working the .50-cal steadily. The big gun’s recoil gently rocked the wide vehicle, which was comforting.
They started off following the soldiers who were on foot, but the helicopters steered them along a different route. A few turns later they found themselves right back where they had been minutes earlier. And that spot was just a few blocks north of the target house, where they had loaded up their prisoners as the mission began an hour earlier.
There they came upon Staff Sgt. Matt Eversmann, whose Chalk Four had been pinned down since the
