Then Pfc. Peter Neathery was hit at the same wall where Fillmore had been shot. Neathery had been on the ground, working his big M-60 gun when he screamed and rolled away, clutching his right arm. Pfc. Vince Errico took over the M-60, and seconds later he let out a yelp. He, too, had been hit in the right arm. He joined Neathery on the ground. Both were moaning and writhing.
Spec. Richard Strous, a medic, dashed across the street to tend Errico and Neathery, but then he gestured wildly. He’d forgotten his medical kit. The men against the opposite wall all looked at one another. After some discussion, it was decided that Sgt. Jeffrey Hulst would run the kit across. He darted about halfway out into the road and flung the bag. Strous ran back out and retrieved it, then went to work on the two wounded Rangers.
On the same street, Capt. Mike Steele was on the ground, taking cover behind a tin shack. The big Ranger commander had edged up into the same concentrated field of fire that had felled Fillmore and Neathery. He was talking on the radio. Beside him on the ground was his lieutenant, James Lechner.
Sgt. Norm Hooten, a Commando team leader, tried to warn them away. Hooten was standing in the doorway of a courtyard, waving frantically. Steele saw him, but he put up his hand, gesturing for Hooten to wait until he had finished with the radio.
A spray of bullets kicked sand into Steele’s eyes. Lechner tried to roll out of the way. Steele saw rounds tear holes through the tin wall behind them, and he heard Lechner scream.
Steele was still rolling when he saw Hooten waving him toward the courtyard. The captain got up and ran for the doorway. There was a lip at the base of the entrance and he tripped over it, sprawling into a small courtyard head-first.
“We’ve got to get Lechner!” Steele shouted.
He stood to run back out, but Commando medic Bart Bullock had already dashed out. He and another soldier dragged Lechner through the doorway. The lieutenant’s shin had been shattered. He was howling with pain.
Steele grabbed the radio microphone. Shouting, his words delivered in gasped phrases that sharply contrasted with the even voices of the pilots and airborne commanders watching in aircraft high above. Steele didn’t even pretend to be calm:
“Romeo 64, this is Juliet 64. We’re taking heavy small-arms fire. We need relief NOW and start extracting!”
In the command helicopter, Lt. Col. Gary Harrell, the mission commander, responded evenly but with some impatience:
“I UNDERSTAND you need to be extracted. I’ve done EVERYTHING I CAN to get those vehicles to you, over.”
He, too, was frustrated by the convoy’s failure to find the crash site.
Steele responded wearily:
“Roger, understand. Be advised command element [Lechner] was just hit. Have more casualties, over.”
Sgt. Mike Goodale, who had been pulled into the same courtyard earlier after being shot through the thigh and buttock, had heard Lechner howl. It was a horrible sound, the worst sound he’d ever heard a human being make. Lechner’s wound looked terrible. The upper part of his right leg was normal, but the bottom half flopped grotesquely to one side. He was turning white. Goodale felt sickened as he saw a widening pool form under the leg. Blood flowed from Lechner’s wound as if from a jug.
In the doorway, Steele was motioning to his men across the street for them to join him in the courtyard. He was still trying to assemble everybody in one place.
But even after those few men were safely inside, the captain had no idea where the rest of the Rangers and D-boys had gone. And he had a courtyard full of wounded men to worry about.
A block away, several groups of Rangers and Commando soldiers had linked up at the crash site. They were pinned down under an intense barrage of small-arms and RPG fire. Most of them had taken cover along a wide street that formed an “L” at the intersection of the crash site. At the helicopter itself, the search-and-rescue team was collecting wounded and trying to extricate the body of pilot Cliff Wolcott from the wreckage.
ONE OF THE Commando team leaders, Sgt. Paul Howe, realized he had to get the men off the street and out of the line of fire. He and another soldier slammed their shoulders into the gate of a narrow courtyard between two houses and burst inside, weapons ready. They found a terrified family—a man, his wife and several children cowering in a room.
Howe stood in the doorway, pointing his weapon with his right hand and trying to coax the people out of the room with his left. It took awhile, but they came out slowly, clinging to one another. Howe searched them, and handed them back to his team to be handcuffed and herded into a side room.
When the rooms adjacent to the courtyard had been cleared, Howe waved in Commando ground commander, Capt. Scott Miller and the rest of the men on the street. Miller, who had finally caught up with Howe in his run to the crash site, knew from radio traffic that the ground convoy was hopelessly lost and badly mauled. He welcomed the cleared courtyard as a command post and casualty collection point. They might be stuck there all night.
As the men piled in, a sergeant major ordered Howe to go outside and help the Rangers still on the street. The directive angered Howe. It was the order of a soldier who didn’t know what to do next. Howe felt much more aggressive steps should be taken. He believed they should be looking for ways to strongpoint their position, expand their perimeter, identify other buildings to take over to give them better lines of fire. Instead he was being asked to just help hold the fort.
He didn’t mask his disgust. He began gathering up ammunition, grenades and antitank weapons from the wounded Rangers in the courtyard. He stomped angrily out on the street and began looking for Somalis to shoot.
He found one of the Rangers, Spec. Shawn Nelson, firing a handgun at the window of the house Howe had just cleared. Nelson had seen someone moving in the window.
“What are you doing?” Howe shouted across the alley.
Nelson couldn’t hear Howe. He shouted back, “I saw someone in there.”
“No s-. There are friendlies in there!”
When Nelson found out later that he had fired on his own men, he was mortified. No one had told him that Commando had moved into that space, but, then again, it was a cardinal sin to shoot before identifying a target.
Already furious, Howe now began venting at the Rangers, who he felt were hunkered down in defensive positions waiting for guidance. They weren’t shooting as much as Howe felt they should be. They did not seem to appreciate just how desperate their situation had become. Cut off and surrounded, their survival was at stake.
Howe watched several Rangers try to hit a Somali who kept darting out, shooting, and then retreating behind a shed about a block away. The big Commando sergeant picked up a LAW—a light antitank weapon—and hurled it across the road. It landed on Spec. Lance Twombly, who was on his belly, bruising his forearm. He turned angrily.
“Shoot the motherf-er!” Howe screamed.
Howe looked for a protected spot where he could fire. He found a sort of pocket of invisibility. There was nothing to protect him from fire, but the tree across the street at Nelson’s position and the slope of the hill behind him provided excellent, though not obvious, concealment. From there he was able to stand a yard or two away from the wall on the west side and cover the road north. He fired methodically, saving his ammunition, cursing viciously as he shot, still incensed by what he regarded as the Rangers’ hesitancy.
Even his ammunition angered him. Howe was firing the Army’s new 5.56mm green tip round. It had a tungsten carbide penetrator at the tip that could punch holes in metal. But that penetrating power meant his rounds were passing right through his targets. The rounds made small, clean holes in the Somalian gunmen, and unless they hit the head or spine the men didn’t go down. Howe felt that he had to hit each man five or six times just to get his attention.
Across the street, First Lt. Larry Perino and Cpl. Jamie Smith crept along a wall next to a tin shed. Howe watched as Smith and another Ranger moved out away from the wall to shoot up the street. It looked to him as though they were trying to emulate the position he had found, but there was no tree on their side to offer
