mission began. When a Ranger captain had ordered Eversmann to move his Chalk to Wolcott’s crash site on foot, the sergeant had said, “Roger,” but to himself had said facetiously, Right. His men were badly shot up. He had only about four or five still able to fight out of the original Chalk of about a dozen soldiers.
Eversmann was relieved to see the convoy approach. He spotted his buddy Sgt. Mike Pringle, a tiny guy, so low in the turret of the lead humvee that he was actually peering out from underneath the .50-cal. It brought a smile to Eversmann’s face despite his ordeal.
Eversmann loaded his bloodied men on the crowded vehicles, piling them on top of other guys. As he stood there taking a final mental count of his men, the column started moving. Eversmann had to make a running leap on the back of a humvee. He landed on top of somebody, and found himself flat on his back, looking up at the sky, realizing what a terrific target he was and that he couldn’t even return fire. As helpless as he felt, he was relieved to be back with the others, and moving. If they were together and rolling, it meant the end was near. Wolcott’s crash site was just blocks away.
Up ahead, in the second truck, Othic’s buddy, Spec. Eric Spalding, was firing away steadily with his M-16. He was amazed at the ferocity of the Somalian attacks. There were people with guns in alleyways, at windows, on rooftops. Each time his M-16 magazine was used up, Spalding shot with his 9mm Berretta pistol while he replaced the rifle magazine with his free hand.
As they crossed one alley, a woman in a flowing purple robe darted past on the driver’s side of the truck. The driver had his pistol resting on his left arm, and he was shooting at whatever moved.
“Don’t shoot,” Spalding shouted at him. “She’s got a kid!”
At that moment the woman turned. Holding a baby on one arm, she raised a pistol with her free hand. Spalding shot her where she stood. He shot four more rounds into her before she fell. He hoped he hadn’t hit the baby. They were moving fast, and he didn’t get to see whether he had. He thought he probably had hit the baby. She had been carrying the infant on her arm, right in front. Why would a mother do something like that with a kid on her arm? What was she thinking?
CHAPTER 12
Left, Right, Left—Lost and Bloody
IN ORDINARY circumstances, as close to Cliff Wolcott’s crash site as they were, the convoy would have just barreled over to it, running over and shooting through anything in its path. But with the surveillance helicopters and P-3 Orion spy plane overhead, the convoy was about to illustrate how too much information can hurt soldiers on a battlefield.
From above, commanders could see Somalis throwing up roadblocks and preparing ambushes in Mogadishu. A group of about 15 gunmen was running along streets parallel to the convoy, keeping up because the two five-ton trucks and six humvees were stopping and then darting across intersections one at a time. This gave the gunmen time to get to the next street and set up to fire at each vehicle as it came through.
The men in the vehicles had been ordered to fight their way to Wolcott’s crash site, help rescue the crew, then get over to pilot Mike Durant’s crash site about a mile south. But the convoy couldn’t get anywhere because it was lost—and getting riddled.
The choppers and the spy plane, flown by U.S. Navy aviators, tried to steer the convoy clear of Somalian gunfire, dodging the soldiers left and right on the labyrinthine streets. It was like negotiating a maze. But the Orion pilots were handicapped. They were not allowed to communicate directly with the convoy. Their orders were to relay all communications to the Joint Operations Center (JOC) back at the beach. So when the Orion pilots said, “Turn left,” that message went first to the JOC and then to the convoy. The pilots watched with frustration as the convoy drove past the place they had directed it to turn, then, getting the delayed message, turned left down the wrong street.
There was another problem. Watching on screens, the commanders weren’t hearing the pop of bullets and feeling the bone-rattling, lung-sucking blast of grenades. The convoy’s progress seemed orderly. The video images were’t conveying how desperate the situation was.
Lying helplessly on his back, Staff Sgt. Matt Eversmann felt his vehicle steer left when he knew the crash site was back to his right. There was another turn. Then another. It was easy to get lost in Mogadishu. Roads you thought were taking you one place would suddenly slant off in a different direction.
At the rear of the convoy, SEAL John Gay, his right hip still aching and bloody from where an AK-47 round had been stopped by his knife, was also getting frustrated. There were about seven wounded Rangers in his humvee who seemed to be in varying degrees of paralysis. As far as Gay could see, none had life-threatening or immobilizing injuries. All were capable of fighting, but few of them were. They seemed to believe that their mission had ended with the capture of the Somalis back at the target house. It was already evident to Gay that they were not on their way home but were fighting for their lives.
Sgt. First Class Matt Rierson, leader of the Commando team that had taken the Somalis, did not know where the convoy was going. He was riding blind. Standard procedure on a convoy was to tell each driver where he was headed. That way, if the lead vehicle got hit, the convoy could continue.
But convoy commander Danny McKnight, a lieutenant colonel more accustomed to commanding a battalion than a line of vehicles, hadn’t told anyone. McKnight was in his lead vehicle with a radio plugged in his ear, relying on his eyes in the sky to direct him. The inexperienced Ranger drivers kept stopping at intersections, or stopping just beyond them, leaving the vehicle immediately behind exposed to a wicked crossfire.
The convoy took several doglegs onto side streets and got no closer to Wolcott’s crash site. Every time they stopped, the able-bodied would jump out to pull security, or guard the column, and then more people would get shot. Those who were not wounded were smeared with the blood of those they had helped carry back to vehicles.
It was a nightmare. The sun was low now, so turning west meant a blinding stab of dusk. At one point, after driving through a hail of gunfire, the column stopped, then made a U-turn and drove straight back through the same maelstrom.
Every time the ungainly five-tons turned around, they would have to pull clumsily up and back, up and back, to negotiate the narrow streets. The whole exercise seemed maddeningly foolhardy. Veterans such as Gay and Rierson wondered, Who’s calling the shots here?
The driver of Gay’s humvee, Howard Wasdin, who had been shot in the left leg back by the target house, was hit in the right leg. Pfc. Clay Othic’s shattered right arm ached but wasn’t bleeding. He was shooting through his second magazine of M-16 ammo when Sgt. Lorenzo Ruiz, a tough little ex-boxer from El Paso, Texas, who had taken over the .50-cal, suddenly slumped down.
“He got shot! He got shot!” shouted the driver, who raced the humvee frantically up the column with the .50 -cal just spinning around in the empty turret.
“Get the .50-cal up!” screamed Sgt. First Class Bob Gallagher. “Get the .50 cal up ASAP!”
Packed in the way they were, with Ruiz now slumped on top of them, no one could climb into the turret from inside the humvee. Spec. Dave Ritchie got out and jumped up to the turret from the street. He couldn’t climb inside because Ruiz’s limp form was in the way, so he hung on from the outside as they began moving again. Ritchie swiveled and shot the big gun.
Inside, the men pulled Ruiz out of the turret. They tore off his flak vest and shirt, and found a hole in his lower right chest and a bigger exit wound in his back. He was bleeding heavily and seemed to be in shock. Ruiz, like many of the men in the vehicles, had taken the armored plates out of his flak vest to reduce the weight he had to carry in the African heat.
They made another stop. Rangers piled out to provide cover.
At opposite sides of one alley stood Spec. Aaron Hand and Sgt. Casey Joyce, the Ranger who had earlier run alone through gunfire to get help for Pvt. First Class Todd Blackburn, the Ranger who had fallen 70 feet off the fast rope at the start of the mission. That seemed like hours ago.
Joyce and Hand were in a furious firefight. Spec. Eric Spalding, who had just leaped from his truck to
