classified stuff once Wolcott’s body was recovered and the Americans had pulled out.
All the avionics equipment and every piece of gear that hadn’t been strapped down had come to rest at the left side of the aircraft, which was now the bottom. In the heap Wilkinson noticed a scrap of desert battle dress uniform.
“There’s somebody else in there,” he told Sgt. First Class Bob Mabry, a Commando medic standing alongside the wreck.
Wilkinson leaned in farther and saw an arm and a flight glove. He called down into the wreck, and a finger of the flight glove moved. Wilkinson climbed back into the wreckage and began pulling the debris and equipment off the man buried there.
It was the left side gunner, Staff Sgt. Ray Dowdy. He was still in his seat. Part of the seat had been snapped off its hinges, but it was basically intact and in place.
When Wilkinson freed Dowdy’s arm from under the pile, the crew chief was sufficiently alert to start helping to shove things away. Dowdy still hadn’t spoken and was clearly dazed and disoriented. The last thing he remembered was noticing he didn’t have his seat belt fastened before hitting the ground.
Wilkinson was throwing things off and prying things back. He reached in to help Dowdy pull free of the seat. Mabry crawled down under the wreck and tried without success to make his way in through the bottom right-side doorway to reach Dowdy from below. He gave up and climbed in through the upper doors just as Wilkinson freed Dowdy.
The three men were standing inside the wreck when a storm of bullets tore through the skin of the craft. Mabry and Wilkinson danced involuntarily, hopping away from the sharp burst of snapping and crashing noises. Dowdy saw the tips of two fingers shot off, just the tip of his index finger and about half the first digit of his middle finger. He felt no pain and said nothing. Bits and pieces of debris were flying around them. To Wilkinson it looked like a sudden snowstorm. Then it stopped.
Wilkinson remembers noting, first, that he was still alive. Then he checked himself. He’d been hit in the face and arm. It felt as if he’d been slapped or punched in the chin. Everyone had been hit. Mabry had been hit in the hand. Wilkinson looked at Dowdy. The crew chief’s eyes were open wide, with a blank look. He was staring at his bloody hand.
Wilkinson put his hand over Dowdy’s bleeding fingertip and said: “OK, let’s get out of here!”
Mabry tore up the bullet-resistant floor panels and propped them up over the side of the craft where the bullets had burst through. To avoid the gunfire outside, Mabry and Wilkinson tunneled out of the aircraft, digging wider a hole where the rear corner of the left side door was above ground. They slid Dowdy out that way.
Then the two medics went back inside for a few more minutes, searching for more equipment to destroy. Mabry set to work handing out the bullet-resistant panels from the interior, which were being placed around the tail of the aircraft where a wounded sergeant, Scott Fales, had established a casualty collection point.
Fire was coming from all directions, but mostly straight up and down the alley. They were still expecting the arrival of the ground convoy at any moment. They had no way of knowing that the convoy was lost and taking heavy casualties.
Fales was too busy shooting from his position out by the tail to take notice of the placement of the floor panels. He had a pressure dressing on his calf and an IV tube in his arm.
“Scott, why don’t you get behind the Kevlar [floor panels]?” Wilkinson asked. Fales looked startled. Only now did he notice the barricade.
“Good idea,” he said.
Crouched down behind the panels, Wilkinson and Fales watched as the intense gunfire ripped first one hole through the tail boom, then another. Then another.
Wilkinson was reminded of the Steve Martin movie The Jerk, where Martin’s moronic character, unaware that villains are shooting at him, watches with surprise as bullet holes begin popping open a row of oil cans. Wilkinson shouted Martin’s line from the movie.
“They hate the cans! Stay away from the cans!’
Both men laughed.
After patching up a few more men—the wounded boys who had been in the crash, Dowdy, and his fellow crew chief—Wilkinson crawled back up into the cockpit from underneath, to see again if there was some way of pulling Wolcott’s body down and out.
There wasn’t.
CHAPTER 19
A Desperate Battle to Hold the Crash Site
THINGS WERE SO QUIET at the northeast corner of the target building that Staff Sgt. Ed Yurek got spooked. He was feeling abandoned and alone. Half of his Chalk Two had run off to help rescue the downed crew of Cliff Wolcott’s helicopter. Yurek was left with just half a dozen Rangers.
Once the ground convoy had rolled away from the target house with the 24 Somalian prisoners, there wasn’t much left for Yurek and his men to do. He decided to radio the Chalk leader, First Lt. Tom DiTomasso, for guidance. He was afraid the entire assault force had taken off and left them.
DiTomasso’s voice came over the radio: You need to find your way to me.
The lieutenant and his men had fought their way to Wolcott’s Blackhawk. Now, an hour into the mission, he wanted Yurek and the rest of Chalk Two to run the same gauntlet: three terrifying blocks, with Somalis firing madly down the alleyways in every direction.
Reluctantly, they abandoned the relative safety of their position and began moving east down an alley about 10 yards wide. Ahead they heard the sounds of pitched battle. Yurek stayed away from the walls. One of the boys had warned him that walls act as funnels for bullets. Rounds would ride walls for hundreds of feet. Huddling tight against a wall, while instinctual, was as dangerous as standing in the middle of the street.
As soon as the little group stepped out to move, the Somalis opened up. Gunmen popped up in windows, in doorways and around corners, spraying bursts of automatic fire. At each intersection the Rangers stopped and covered one another. Yurek ran while his men laid suppressive fire north and south. Then they ran while he covered them. In this way they leapfrogged across each street.
Yurek shot one man in a doorway just 10 feet away. The man had stepped out and taken aim. He was a bushy-haired, dusty man with baggy brown pants. He didn’t shoot instantly, and that’s what killed him. Yurek’s eyes met his for an instant as he pulled the trigger. The Somali pitched forward without getting off a shot.
It struck Yurek how similar killing a man was to shooting targets in training. In practice, targets would pop out unexpectedly. The rules were to shoot at blue triangles, but to hold fire if a green square appeared. Now, in actual battle, he had seen a target, identified it, and taken it out. He was grateful for all the tedious hours of training.
The fire grew so intense down the alley that Yurek was surprised that none of his men was hurt. They turned a corner three blocks down, and there was the crash site. The other half of their Chalk had set up a small perimeter. Lt. DiTomasso was crouched behind a green Volkswagen. Chalk Two’s M-60 gunner, Shawn Nelson, had taken cover behind another car and a tree across the street.
Yurek sprinted to DiTomasso. As he crouched to speak to the lieutenant, the Volkswagen began rocking from the impact of heavy rounds. Somebody with a very powerful weapon had a bead on them. The rounds were slicing through the car.
Yurek shouted across the street. Maybe Nelson had a better vantage point. “What is it?” he shouted.
“It’s a big gun!” Nelson called back.
Yurek and DiTomasso looked at each other and rolled their eyes.
“Where is it?” Yurek shouted.
Nelson pointed up the street, and Yurek edged out to look around the car. He saw three dead Somalis in the
