Despite the gunfire, he ran out and tried to pull Martin’s pants back up and give the man some dignity. Two bullets struck the pavement next to where he stopped, and Lepre scrambled back for cover.
He was pinned there for a long time, gazing out on Martin’s half-naked body. He wondered what it felt like to get shot in the head and killed. He pinched himself a couple of times, hard. Would it feel like that? He felt terrible.
“Sorry, man,” he said to Martin.
CHAPTER 26
At Rescue, Relief Tinged with Sorrow
CAPT. MIKE STEELE KNEW this was the most dangerous time of the night. The moon was high and the shooting had all but stopped. He and his men had been pinned down for more than nine hours.
There were a few pops, but otherwise the air had cleared of smoke and gunpowder. Now there was just that musky stench of Somalia, the trace of desert dust in the air, and the bitter aftertaste of the iodine pills the soldiers had dissolved in the local water to purify it.
Somalis would still inexplicably wander into the perimeter around Cliff Wolcott’s wrecked helicopter. The Commando soldiers would let them stroll and then drop them with a few quick shots. From time to time, the Little Birds would rumble in and unleash rockets and minigun fire. But the only noise that concerned Steele was the intensifying thunder of guns as the rescue column moved closer.
With that much shooting, with two jumpy elements of soldiers about to link up in darkness in a confusing city, the biggest threat to his pinned-down men was their rescuers.
By the sound of it, the convoy troops were coming fast now, and shooting at everything. Word came from the command helicopter shortly before 2 a.m.
“OK, start getting ready to get out of there, but keep your heads down. Now is a bad time.”
Steele answered: “Roger, copy. Positions are marked at this time. We are ready to move.”
“Roger, they are going to be coming in with heavy contact so be real careful.”
“You better believe it, over.”
Steele radioed First Lt. Larry Perino, who was in a house a block north: “I want everybody to back up out of the courtyards, and to stay away from the doors and windows.”
The Rangers drew back like hermit crabs into their shells, and listened. They were all terrified of the 10th Mountain Division, regarded by many Rangers as poorly trained regular-Army schmoes, just a small step removed from utterly incompetent civilianhood.
Five minutes passed, 10 minutes, 20 minutes.
Perino called Capt. Steele: “Where are they?”
“Any minute now,” Steele said, for the umpteenth time that night. Both men laughed.
When Steele heard vehicles making the turn onto Freedom Road, his men saw the dim outline of soldiers. Everyone called out, “Ranger! Ranger!”
“Tenth Mountain Division,” came the response.
Steele stuck his head out the door.
“This is Capt. Steele. I’m the Ranger commander.”
“Roger, sir, we’re from the 10th Mountain Division,” a soldier answered.
“Where’s your commander?” Steele asked.
IT TOOK HOURS to pry pilot Cliff Wolcott’s body from the wreck. It was ugly work. The rescue column had brought along a quickie saw to cut the metal frame of the cockpit away from Wolcott’s body, but the cockpit was lined with a layer of Kevlar that just ate up the saw blade. Next the soldiers tried to pull the copter apart, attaching chains to the front and back. Some of the Rangers, watching from a distance, thought the D-boys were using the vehicles to tear Wolcott’s body out. They turned away.
The dead were laid out on top of the armored personnel carriers, and the wounded were loaded inside. Sgt. Mike Goodale, who had been shot in the thigh and had a big exit wound on his buttock, hobbled painfully and was helped through the doors of an APC.
“We need you to sit,” he was told.
“Look, I got shot in the ass. It hurts to sit.”
“Then lean or something.”
Down the street at Commando Capt.Scott Miller’s courtyard, they carried wounded Pfc. Carlos Rodriguez out first. Then they loaded the rest of the men.
As the hours stretched on, the wounded men grew restless in the windowless chambers of the APCs. They couldn’t see what was going on, and they didn’t understand the protracted delay.
Painted white, parked in the center of the road, the APCs might as well have been giant bull’s-eyes. Goodale had only a small peek hole to see outside. It was so warm he started feeling woozy. He took off his helmet and loosened his body armor. They all sat in the small dark space just staring silently at one another, waiting.
“You know what we should do,” suggested one of the wounded D-boys. “We should kind of crack one of these doors a little bit so that if an RPG comes in here, we’ll all have someplace to explode out of.”
There was bitter laughter.
Goodale leaned up toward the Malaysian driver.
“Hey, let’s go,” he said.
“No. No. We stay,” said the driver.
“Goddamnit, we’re not staying! Let’s get the f- out of here!”
“No. No. We stay.”
“No, you don’t understand this. We’re getting shot at. We’re going to get f-d up in this thing!”
There were about 200 Americans now in and around these two blocks of Mogadishu, the vanguard of a convoy that stretched a half mile. There was joy and relief for the 99 men who had been pinned down overnight, but also pain. Sgt. First Class Paul Howe, one of the Commando team leaders, glanced up at the top of a vehicle and saw the soles of two small assault boots. There was only one guy in the unit with boots that small. It had to be Earl Fillmore, his D-boy buddy who had been shot in the head hours earlier.
When Cliff Wolcott’s body was at last freed from the wreckage, the exhausted remnants of Task Force Ranger who could still walk learned, to their dismay, that there wasn’t room enough on the vehicles for them to ride out of the city. They would have to run a half-mile back out to National Boulevard.
Shot at all along the way, they covered the ground the same way they had come in, running, leapfrogging intersections, returning fire down alleyways. Remarkably, only one Ranger, Sgt. Randy Ramaglia, was badly injured. He was loaded onto a vehicle and driven the rest of the way to the soccer stadium that served as the Pakistani headquarters, where a field hospital had been set up.
At the stadium, the soccer pitch was covered with wounded men. Many unhurt men walked among the litters with tears in their eyes or with thousand-mile stares. Helicopters with red crosses painted on the sides came and went, shuttling the wounded back to the main hospital by the hangar.
Pvt. Ed Kallman, who earlier had so thrilled at the chance to be in combat, now watched with horror as medics efficiently sorted the litters as they came off vehicles.
“Dead in that group there. Live in this group here.”
The medics and doctors cut off the bloody, dirty clothes, exposing awful wounds, guys with gaping, bruised holes in their bodies, limbs mangled, poor Carlos Rodriguez with a bullet through his scrotum, Goodale with his bare wounded butt up in the air, Spec. John Stebbins riddled with shrapnel, Lt. James Lechner with his leg ripped open, Ramaglia … the list went on and on.
Spec. Steve Anderson recoiled. When the APC pulled in with Donovan Briley’s body on top, he had to turn away. Briley had died in the crash of Super 61. His body was discolored. It looked yellow-orange, and through the deep gash in his head he could see brain matter spilled down the side of the carrier. When the medics asked for
