dirt. He stacked them into a little mound. Sliding out into the street behind the bodies, he was able to get a better view. Now he could see all the way up the street, where two Somalis were stretched out on the ground behind a big gun mounted on a tripod. From that position, they could control the whole street.
Yurek had a LAW, a light antitank weapon, strapped to his back. He’d been carrying it around on every mission for weeks. It was a disposable plastic launcher weighing only three pounds. He unstrapped the weapon and climbed up and leaned forward on the Volkswagen. He took aim through flip-up crosshairs.
The rocket launched with a powerful back blast. Yurek watched it zoom in on the target and explode with a flash and a loud whoom! The big Somalian gun flipped into the air.
Yurek was accepting congratulations from the other Rangers when the thunk thunk thunk resumed against the car. The rocket had evidently landed just short, close enough to send the weapon flying and kick up a cloud of dirt, but not close enough to destroy the gun or kill the gunners.
He saw them up the street now, kneeling behind the gun, which they had righted again on the tripod. Yurek picked up another LAW that someone had discarded. It was bent and crushed. He couldn’t get it to open up. So he loaded a fist-sized M203 round into the grenade-launching tube mounted under the barrel of his M-16.
This time his aim was better. He could actually see the fat 203 round spiral into the target. The two Somalis toppled over sideways in opposite directions. When the smoke cleared, Yurek could see the gun just lying there between the two dead gunners. No one else came out to get it. For the rest of the day, until just past dusk, Yurek kept a good eye on that gun.
AT THE CRASH SITE, Spec. Rob Phipps was feeling edgy. He was all alone, crouching next to the hole in the stone wall where Wolcott’s Blackhawk had hit on its way down. At 22, Phipps was the youngest of the men who had roped down on the combat search-and-rescue team. He would feel a lot better, he thought, if he had some of the veterans around him.
He got on his hand-held radio and called Sgt. First Class Al Lamb to ask for help. Lamb, 32, was an experienced member of the rescue team. He had taken cover on the other side of the Blackhawk, in one of the holes where the Somalis dumped their household garbage.
Before Lamb could respond, Phipps noticed a Ranger sergeant, Steven Lycopolus, move up and take cover across the alley. Within minutes, to Phipps’ relief, Lamb and several Rangers from Chalk Two also moved into position around the downed helicopter.
Their job was to pick off gunmen who were sending an almost steady flow of rounds up the alleyway, and to prevent any from approaching the crash site. Phipps saw a man in a loose white shirt and sandals creeping up the alleyway, crouching with his AK-47 held forward. Phipps shot him and he fell to the road. Minutes later, another Somali ran out to retrieve the gun. Phipps shot him. Then another man ran out to get the weapon. Phipps shot him, too.
Rounds were chipping the walls around him, and he could hear them puncturing the helicopter’s thin metal hull. They were coming from a clump of trees about 20 yards away. Lamb told the men to heave some grenades over the wall. A Ranger lit up the trees with his SAW while Phipps and some of the other Rangers flung grenades.
There were explosions, then silence. Then one of the grenades they had thrown came flying back. The Ranger who threw it had forgotten to take the safety strap off.
“Grenade!” several voices screamed.
Phipps dived away from it. The explosion was like a gut punch. It sucked all the air out of him. He felt as if he was on fire, and his ears rang from the blast. When the initial ball of fire was gone, he still felt terrible burning on both legs and on his back. His nose and mouth stung with a bitter taste. His face was blackened and bruised, and his eyes had begun to swell shut.
When Phipps regained his senses, he lifted his head to look over his shoulder just as a Somali ran into the roadway and picked up the AK-47 from the pile of dead and wounded where Phipps had been shooting earlier. The man was taking aim at him when one of the D-boys back by the wall dropped him with a quick burst. The man’s head just came apart.
A Commando medic shouted at Phipps from the hole in the wall across the alley. If Phipps could move, it wouldn’t be necessary to brave fire retrieving him.
“Come on! Come on!” the medic urged.
Phipps tried to stand, but his left leg gave out. He tried again and fell again. He started to crawl. He still felt a fierce burning along his back and legs, and his left leg wasn’t working right. When he crawled close enough, the medic grabbed his face and pulled him the rest of the way in.
“Holy s-! I’m hit! I got shot! I got shot!” Phipps screamed.
“You’re all right,” the medic reassured him. “You’ll be all right.”
He tore open Phipps’ pants and applied a field dressing. The young Ranger joined the growing ranks of the wounded at Crash Site One.
CHAPTER 20
Uneasy Partners Under Heavy Fire
MINUTES AFTER orders came for the Rangers and Commando teams to make their way on foot to Cliff Wolcott’s crash site, the formations broke down. The boys moved out on their own. Some of the Rangers ran to catch up with them, but others fell behind, uncertain and confused.
Capt. Mike Steele, the Ranger commander, was outraged. They had gone just two blocks from their original positions at the target house, and already unit integrity had collapsed. There had been bad blood for weeks between Steele and many of the Commando men. Now it was boiling over in the middle of the worst firefight of their lives.
Steele felt outflanked. He had given orders for the Ranger Chalks to occupy the front and rear positions of an orderly movement of men to the crash site. The Commando teams were to stay in the middle. But a team of boys led by Sgt. First Class Paul Howe took off. Howe, a powerfully built veteran, knew the streets were a killing zone. Staying alive meant moving as if his hair were on fire.
The boys all advanced with such authority that some of the Rangers left their Chalk groupings and just stayed with them. It was reassuring just to be around the more seasoned men.
Petrified by the escalating volume of gunfire, Sgt. Mike Goodale was waiting for his turn to sprint across a street when one of the boys tapped him on the shoulder. Goodale recognized him. It was the short stocky one, Earl, Sgt. First Class Earl Fillmore, a good guy.
Fillmore winked at him and said: “It’s all right, kid. We’re coming out of this thing, man.”
It calmed Goodale. He believed Fillmore.
Steele watched with mounting distress as his formation broke down. He despised some of the Commando operators for their arrogance and their cocksure bravado. He respected their expertise and courage, but not their professionalism. They were disdainful of authority and discipline, and cavalier toward orders issued by anyone outside their tight, secret fraternity.
For his part, Howe thought Steele was a buffoon—a huge, overmuscled ex-jock still wrapped up in the naive rah-rah of his years playing football for the University of Georgia Bulldogs. Steele was too spit-and-polish for his taste. And Howe, who was 34, considered many of Steele’s Rangers little more than frightened, impressionable teenagers.
Now, an hour into the mission, the Rangers and Commando men were operating as separate units under competing commands. They even had different radio connections. Each commando had a radio earpiece under his little plastic hockey-style helmet—Steele called them “skateboard helmets'—and a microphone that wrapped around to his mouth. The Commando men were in constant touch with one another, but not with the Rangers. The Rangers relied mostly on shouted orders. They hadn’t perfected the elaborate hand signals the boys used when the noise of battle drowned out their radio talk.
