“Fine. We’ll take it.”
It seemed to take forever for the five-tons to turn around on the narrow street. As they struggled to reverse direction again, most of the Rangers were out on the street, providing security in all directions. The trucks weren’t delicate about turning around. They rammed into walls and ground gears.
On one knee in the street, Cash took a whack to his chest that almost knocked him over. He knew he’d been shot, and he ran his hand inside his shirt, looking for blood. There was none. The bullet had skimmed off the front of his chest plate, tearing the straps of his load-bearing harness so that it was now hanging by threads.
Spec. Peter Squeglia, the company armorer who had donned fighting gear and volunteered for the convoy, sat with his M-16 pointed out the passenger side window of a truck, suddenly wondering what he was doing there. Only a year earlier, he had been bar-hopping with his buddies in Rhode Island trying to pick up girls.
A bullet clipped off the side mirror on the driver’s side. Squeglia pointed his rifle across the cab, right in front of the driver, and squeezed off several rounds.
When they were at last turned around, the convoy sped out a road that skirted the city to the southwest, driving through an occasional hail of AK-47 fire. At one rise they could actually see Durant’s crash site. It was less than a quarter of a mile away, down in a little valley, inside a squalid rag hut village. There was no way to get closer. They kept driving on their roundabout course until they came to the K-4 traffic circle, one of the major traffic intersections in southern Mogadishu.
Here they met up with the smoking, limping, bleeding remnants of Lt. Col. Danny McKnight’s lost convoy. It was a remarkable sight. The lead humvee was smoking and all of its tires were flat. The ones that followed looked almost as bad, and Struecker’s men were shocked to see that the vehicles were loaded with dead and shot-up Rangers.
The fresh convoy surrounded the battered vehicles, setting up a perimeter of fire while casualties on the worst of the vehicles were moved to the intact ones. They were less than a mile from the base, and less than a mile from Durant. One look at the lost convoy made it clear that they weren’t going to be able to break through Somalian roadblocks with just humvees and flatbed trucks.
So while the Command helicopter continued to reassure Delta soldiers who were holding off the mob around Durant’s downed Blackhawk that help was just minutes away, the two convoys were already headed the opposite way.
THE MEN IN THE LOST convoy had braced themselves for another vicious fight at K-4. But as they limped through the flaming barricades on Via Lenin, they saw instead, to their enormous relief, Jeff Struecker’s line of fresh vehicles and troops approaching them.
The lead humvee driven by SEAL Homer Nearpass, carrying John Gay and Howard Wasdin, with Wasdin’s bloody legs draped over the dash, could go no further. The dead and wounded were lifted from it and loaded on another humvee. Before they torched the battered vehicle, to prevent Somalis from looting it, Nearpass counted the bullet holes and Gay rooted around inside to find the handle of the broken knife that had saved his life by deflecting a bullet.
Squeglia saw his friend Sgt. Casey Joyce being lifted out of one of the vehicles, his eyes wide but empty, his mouth open. Joyce looked as if he was screaming, but he was dead. It really shook Squeglia. He and Joyce had been pals. Both of them were big guys, bulkier than most of the Rangers. They had shared a particular hatred for the daily morning run that seemed so easy for thinner Rangers. Now Casey was dead.
Then Sgt. Scott Galentine, normally a cheerful, funny guy, emerged from the back of a truck looking pale and shocked, still clutching his severed thumb in his bloody hand. The tough old master sergeant they called “Grizz,” Tim Martin, had been cut almost in half by a rocket-propelled grenade, but he was still, somehow, alive. Pfc. Adalberto Rodriguez was a bloody, broken mess, barely alive. The tough little ex-boxer, Sgt. Lorenzo Ruiz, had a breathing tube in his chest. On the litter he looked diminished, scared and small.
The dead and wounded were headed home, but they weren’t out of danger yet.
Sgt. Cash, now in the third humvee, saw a Somali with an RPG launcher pop up from behind a brick wall. There was a bright flash and a bang.
At the same moment, in the back of the humvee, Spec. Dale Sizemore had spotted a row of Somalis, their heads poking over a concrete wall. He had thrown himself backward in order to get a better shot at them when he felt the vehicle lurch. The blast underneath threw the humvee in the air. The men inside felt their stomachs drop. It was as if they had flown off the end of a ramp.
They crashed back to earth on all four wheels, unharmed and still moving. With no time to react to what had just happened, Cash pointed to a Somalian gunner up a tree. Both Sizemore and the humvee’s .50-cal gunner started blasting away. A Somali fell out of the tree to the street.
Then Cash felt a jab in the leg. He thought he’d been shot. He looked down and saw instead that a bullet had poked through the metal door of the humvee and had been caught by the window, which was rolled down, forming a second layer inside the door. The bulletproof glass had stretched out under the round’s impact to form what looked like a horizontal stalactite, four to five inches long. The tip of it had nudged Cash’s leg. He could see the bullet lodged inside the point. He marveled at it momentarily, then broke it off with the butt of his rifle and resumed shooting.
They shot their way back to the base, blasting everything they saw. Rules of engagement were off. Sizemore saw young boys, 7 and 8 years old, some with weapons, some without. He shot them all down. He saw women running in crowds alongside men who had rifles, and he mowed down the crowds. He didn’t care anymore. He just felt numb—numb and angry and full of fight. He just wanted to hit as many Somalis as he could. He didn’t even care anymore if he got shot. These Rangers were his buddies, his best friends in the world, closer to him than family had ever been, and he was going to do anything he could to return them safely.
They hammered every alley in both directions until, just blocks from the gate to the airport, all the shooting ceased. It was as if they had entered a different city. Crowds of Somalis were moving through open air markets, strolling, chatting, as if nothing had happened. As the vehicles approached, the crowds parted for the battered and bloody column with its crippled humvees and dead, wounded and horror-stricken soldiers. And as the soldiers moved the last hundred yards to the gate, Squeglia couldn’t believe what he was seeing. The Somalis in the street all turned to face them, grinning, and they applauded.
CHAPTER 17
At First Crash Site, More Bodies
JUST EIGHT MINUTES after Cliff Wolcott’s Blackhawk went down, a Blackhawk carrying a rescue team moved over the crash site in south Mogadishu. Inside were 15 men who had trained for months as a combat search-and-rescue unit. Their specialty was saving downed pilots.
But even professionals who practice the same moves a thousand times can overlook a detail in the heat of an actual mission. The team hit the fast ropes perfectly and slid down. It was the last man out, Air Force Tech. Sgt. Tim Wilkinson, who noticed that their medical kits had been left behind.
The oversight delayed Wilkinson’s slide down the rope. He had to wait until the men 30 feet below him reached the ground and got out of the way. Only then was it safe to throw down the kit bags. By the time he reached the rope, the timing was off by several crucial seconds.
It was just enough time to leave the big Blackhawk exposed to fire from crowds of Somalis converging on Wolcott’s crash site. As pilot Dan Jollota held his hover and Wilkinson slid down the rope, a rocket-propelled grenade exploded on the left side of the airframe. The Blackhawk was knocked slightly sideways, as if absorbing a roundhouse punch. Jollota instinctively began to pull up and away.
“Coming out. I think we have been hit,” Jollota radioed to the command helicopter circling overhead.
“You have been hit… Behind your engines… Be advised you are smoking.”
One of the crew chiefs screamed into the radio: “We still have people on the ropes!”
Hanging on the rope below Wilkinson was Master Sgt. Scott Fales. Wilkinson heard the explosion above, but
