unconscious. He snapped back awake when Hand shook him, yelling that he had to get out.
“It’s on fire!” Hand shouted.
The cab was black with smoke, and Othic could see a fuse glowing from what looked like the inside of Alphabet’s body. The grenade lodged in his chest was unexploded, but something had caused a blast. It might have been a flash bang grenade—a harmless grenade that gives off smoke and makes noise—mounted on Alphabet’s armor. Hand got his side door open and swung himself out. Othic reached over to grab Alphabet and pull him out, but the driver’s bloody clothes just lifted off his pierced torso.
Othic stumbled out to the street and realized that his and Hand’s helmets had been blown off. Hand’s rifle had been shattered. They moved numbly and even a little giddily. Alphabet was dead and their helmets had been knocked off, yet they were virtually unscathed by the grenade. Hand couldn’t hear out of his left ear, but that was it.
Hand found the lower portion of Alphabet’s arm on the street. All that remained intact was the hand. He picked it up and put it in his side pants pocket. He didn’t know what else to do, and it didn’t feel right leaving it behind.
OTHIC CLIMBED INTO another humvee. As they set off again, he began groping on the floor with his good left hand, collecting rounds that guys had ejected from their weapons when they’d jammed. Then he passed them back to those still shooting.
They found a four-lane road with a median up the center that would lead them back down to the K-4 traffic circle, a major traffic roundabout in southern Mogadishu, and then home. In the truck, Spalding began to lose feeling in his fingertips. For the first time in the ordeal he began to panic. He felt himself going into shock. He saw a little Somalian boy cradling an AK-47, shooting it wildly from the hip. He saw flashes from the muzzle of the gun. Somebody shot the boy. Spalding felt as if everything around him had slowed down to half speed. He saw the boy’s legs fly up, as if he had slipped on marbles, and then he was flat on his back.
Foreman, the Commando sergeant, was a hell of a shot. He had his weapon in one hand and the steering wheel in the other. Spalding saw him gun down three Somalian men without even slowing down.
Spalding felt his fingers curling and his hands stiffening. His forearm had been shattered by a bullet earlier.
“Hey, man, let’s get the hell back,” Spalding said. “I’m not doing too good.”
“You’re doing cool,” Foreman said. “You’ll be all right. Hang in there.”
A humvee driven by SEAL Homer Nearpass was now in the lead. It was shot up and smoking, running on three rims. One dead and eight wounded Rangers were in the back. Wasdin, the wounded SEAL sergeant, had his bloody legs splayed out on the hood (he’d been shot once more, in the left foot).
They came upon a big roadblock. The Somalis had stretched two huge underground gasoline tanks across the roadway along with other debris, and had set it all on fire. Afraid to stop the humvee for fear it would not start up again, Nearpass shouted to the driver to just ram through it.
They crashed over and through the flaming debris, nearly landing on their side, but the sturdy humvee righted itself and kept on going. The rest of the column followed.
Staff Sgt. Matt Eversmann, the leader of a Ranger unit that had been rescued by the convoy, was curled up on one of the back passenger seats of his humvee, training his weapon out the window. At every intersection he saw Somalis who would open fire on any vehicle that came across. Because they had men on both sides of the street, any rounds that missed the vehicles as they flashed past would certainly have hit the Somalis on the other side of the road. What tactics, Eversmann thought. He felt these people must have no regard for even their own lives. They just did not care.
In his vehicle, Othic was on all fours now, groping around on the floor of the humvee with his good hand, looking for unspent shells. They were just about out of ammo.
As they approached K-4 circle, they all braced themselves for another vicious ambush.
CHAPTER 16
Furious Attacks on a Second Convoy
AS SOON AS Staff Sgt. Jeff Struecker drove his humvee out of the American beachfront compound, gunfire erupted all around. They weren’t more than 80 yards out the back gate.
“Action left!” Sgt. Raleigh Cash screamed from the passenger seat of Struecker’s humvee at the head of the convoy.
Struecker’s turret gunner swung around to face five Somalis with weapons. Cash heard the explosion of gunfire and the zing and pop of rounds passing close. He had been taught that if you heard that crack, it meant the bullet had passed within three feet of your head. A zing, which sounded to him like the sound made when you hit a telephone pole guy wire with a stick, meant the bullet had missed you by a far margin.
The shots were answered by a roaring fusillade from the men in the convoy.
This column—four humvees and three five-ton flatbed trucks—had been hastily assembled to rescue the crew of pilot Mike Durant’s downed Blackhawk. A larger convoy already in Mogadishu also had been ordered to rescue Durant, along with pilot Cliff Wolcott and his crashed Blackhawk crew. But the original convoy had finally given up and started back to base after wandering through the city under heavy fire, absorbing terrible casualties.
The Durant crash site was less than two miles from the base, but Struecker realized already that he would have to fight street by street to get there. They were driving out into hell.
The brunt of the shooting was aimed at Struecker’s lead vehicle. A rocket-propelled grenade scraped across the top of his humvee and exploded against a concrete wall. The concussion lifted the wide-bodied vehicle up on two wheels.
Clearly these Somalis didn’t know how to stage a proper ambush. The correct way was to let the lead vehicle pass and suck in the whole column, then open fire. The unarmored flatbed trucks in the middle, loaded with cooks and clerks and other volunteers, made vulnerable targets. But even with undisciplined enemy gunfire, going forward would invite slaughter.
He told his driver to throw the humvee in reverse. Everybody behind him was just going to have to figure it out. They rammed the humvee behind them, and then that driver rammed the truck behind him. Eventually they all got the message.
Struecker got on the radio to the officer directing him from a helicopter circling high above the city:
“You need to find a different route!”
The answer came back: “Go back where you came from and turn right instead of left. You can get there that way.”
Struecker got the whole column back up to the gate, and this time he steered out the opposite way. He drove straight into a roadblock, a big one. The Somalis had thrown up dirt, junk, chunks of concrete and wire.
The convoy knew Durant’s Super 64 was somewhere directly ahead. Where he lay beside his helicopter, Durant had heard the sound of the .50-cal on Struecker’s humvee and figured the rescue column was coming in. This was minutes before Durant’s site was overrun and he was taken captive.
But the convoy couldn’t advance. Beyond the roadblock was a concrete wall surrounding the vast ghetto of huts and walking paths into which Durant had crashed. The humvees could roll right over the roadblock but Struecker knew the five-ton trucks wouldn’t make it. And even if they did, there wasn’t going to be any way through the concrete wall.
“You’ll have to find us another route,” Struecker radioed to his guide high above.
“There ain’t another route.”
“Well, you need to find one. Figure out a way to get there,” Struecker said.
“The only other route is to go all the way around the city and come in through the back side.”
