Ambush After Ambush: Fighting Just To Stay Alive
SOME OF THE VEHICLES were almost out of ammunition. They had expended thousands of rounds. One of the 24 Somalian prisoners had been shot dead and another was wounded. The back ends of the remaining trucks and humvees in the lost convoy were slick with blood. Chunks of viscera clung to floors and inner walls.
The second humvee in line was dragging an axle and was being pushed by the five-ton truck behind it. Another humvee had three flat tires and two dozen bullet holes. SEAL Sgt. Howard Wasdin, who had been shot in both legs, had them draped up over the dash and stretched out on the hood. Yet another humvee had a grenade hole in the side and four flat tires.
They were shooting at everything now. They had abandoned their new mission—to rescue downed pilot Cliff Wolcott and then try to reach pilot Mike Durant’s crash site. Now they were fighting just to stay alive as the convoy wandered into one ambush after another, trying to find its way back to base.
Up in a humvee turret and behind a Mark 19, a machine gun grenade launcher, Spec. James Cavaco was pumping one big round after another into the windows of a building from which they were taking fire. It was hard to shoot the Mark 19 accurately, but Cavaco was dropping grenades neatly into the second-story windows one after another.
From his seat in the second five-ton, Spec. Eric Spalding shouted out to his friend: “Yeah! Get ’em, ’Vaco!”
It was just after that when Cavaco, firing to his left down an alleyway, slumped forward. He had taken a round to the back of his head and was dead. Spalding helped load him on the back of the truck. They tossed his body up and it landed on the legs of an injured Ranger in back, who let out a shriek.
Sgt. Paul Leonard, one of the Commando soldiers, stepped up behind Cavaco’s Mark 19. He was even more of an expert shot. The big 40mm rounds were designed to penetrate two inches of steel before exploding. As Leonard fired, the rounds screamed right through the bodies of Somalian gunmen and exploded farther down the street.
But not long after he took over the gun, a bullet came through the side window of the humvee and took off the back of Leonard’s left leg just below the knee. He was standing in the turret, so all the men in the humvee were splattered with tissue and blood. The muscles of his leg hung open in oozing flaps. But Leonard was still standing, and still shooting. A Ranger tied a tourniquet around his leg.
The convoy was taking a beating, but it was also leaving a terrible swath of dead and wounded Somalis in its wake.
In another humvee, Pfc. Tory Carlson was shooting out the back, his .50-cal machine gun rocking the vehicle, when he saw three Somalian men cross the big gun’s range. Their bodies went flying, and as the rounds kept coming the bodies skipped and bounced along the ground until they were thrown against a wall. Then the men came apart.
Carlson was watching with horror and satisfaction when he felt a sudden blow and sharp pain in his right knee. It felt as if someone had taken a knife and held it to his knee and then driven it in with a sledgehammer. Carlson glanced down and saw blood rapidly staining his pants. He said a prayer and kept shooting. He had been wildly scared for longer now than he had ever been in his life, and now it was somehow worse. His heart banged in his chest and he found it hard to breathe and he thought he might die right then of fright.
His head was filled with the sounds of shooting and explosions and the visions of his friends going down, one by one. Blood splashed everywhere, oily and sticky with its dank, coppery smell. He figured, This is it for me. And then, in that moment of maximum terror, he felt it all abruptly, inexplicably fall away. He had stopped caring about himself. He would think about this a lot later, and his best explanation was that he no longer mattered, even to himself. He had passed through some sort of barrier. He had to keep fighting, because the other guys, his buddies, were all that mattered.
Spalding was sitting next to the passenger door in his truck with his rifle out the window, turned in the seat so he could line up his shots, when he was startled by a sudden flash of light down by his legs. It looked as if a laser beam had shot through the door and up into his right leg. Actually, a bullet had pierced the steel of the door and the window, which was rolled down, and had poked itself and fragments of glass and steel straight up his leg from just above his knee to his hip. He let out a squeal.
“What’s wrong, you hit?” shouted the truck’s driver, Pvt. 2 John Maddox.
“Yes!”
And then another laser poked through, this one into Spalding’s left leg. He felt a jolt this time but no pain. He reached down to grab his right thigh, and blood spurted out between his fingers. Still Spalding felt no pain. He didn’t want to look at it.
Then Maddox began shouting, “I can’t see! I can’t see!”
Spalding turned to see Maddox’s helmet askew and his glasses knocked sideways on his head.
“Put your glasses on, you dumb ass.”
But Maddox had been hit in the back of the head. The round must have hit his helmet, which saved his life, but hit with such force that it had rendered him temporarily blind. The truck was rolling out of control, and Spalding, with both legs shot, couldn’t move over to grab the wheel.
They couldn’t stop right in the field of fire, so there was nothing to do but shout directions to Maddox, who still had his hands on the wheel.
“Turn left! Turn left! Now! Now!”
“Speed up”
“Slow down!”
The truck was weaving and banging into the sides of buildings. It ran over a Somalian man on crutches.
“What was that?” asked Maddox.
“Don’t worry about it. We just ran over somebody.”
And they laughed. They felt no pity and were beyond fear. They were both laughing as Maddox stopped the truck.
One of the Delta men, Sgt. Mike Foreman, ran up and opened the driver’s side door to find the cab splattered with Spalding’s blood.
“Holy s-!” he said.
Maddox slid over next to Spalding, who was examining his wounds. There was a perfectly round hole in his left knee, but no exit wound. The bullet had fragmented on impact with the door and glass, and only the metal jacket had penetrated his knee. It had flattened on impact with his kneecap and just slid around under the skin to the side of the joint. The rest of the bullet had peppered his lower leg, which was bleeding. Spalding propped both legs up on the dash and pressed a field dressing on one. He lay his rifle on the rim of the side window and changed the magazine. As Foreman got the truck moving again, Spalding resumed firing. He was shooting at anything that moved.
Spalding’s buddy, Pfc. Clay Othic, was wedged between driver and passenger in the truck behind them when Pfc. Richard Kowalewski, who was driving, was hit in the shoulder. He absorbed the blow and kept on steering.
“Alphabet, want me to drive?” asked Othic. Kowalewski was nicknamed “Alphabet,” for his long surname.
“No, I’m OK.”
Othic was struggling in the confined space to apply a pressure dressing to Alphabet’s bleeding shoulder when a grenade rocketed in from the left. It severed Alphabet’s left arm and ripped into his torso. It didn’t explode. Instead the two-foot-long missile was embedded in Alphabet’s chest, the fins protruding from his left side under his missing arm, the point sticking out the right side. He was killed instantly.
The driverless truck crashed into the rear of the truck ahead, the one with the prisoners in back and with Foreman, Maddox and Spalding in the cab. The impact threw Spalding against the side door, and his truck rolled off and veered into a wall.
Othic, who had been sitting between Alphabet and Spec. Aaron Hand when the grenade hit, was knocked
