SEAL Team Six: Memoirs of an Elite Navy SEAL Sniper (31 page)

13.

Battle of Mogadishu

As we pulled back into the compound, everyone was jocking up for something big. Helicopters spun up, Humvees pulled into position, and everyone topped off their magazines. Although the sun shone brightly through clear blue skies, I knew the troops weren’t heading out on a picnic. “What’s going on?”

Commander Olson approached us before we stepped out of our “cutvee”—a cut Humvee without a top, doors, or windows, officially called the M-998 cargo/troop carrier. It had no special armor. Tech reps from the States had arrived less than a week earlier and put a Kevlar ballistic blanket underneath the vehicle to protect against land mines or other fragmentation. I sat in the driver’s seat with Casanova riding shotgun. Behind me was Little Big Man, Sourpuss beside him. To the rear of them we had two benches running parallel to the vehicle where two army guys sat—I think they were Rangers, but they could’ve been Delta operators. In addition, a Ranger manned the .50 caliber machine gun.

Commander Olson briefed us in just a few minutes. “You’ll be part of a blocking force. Delta will rope in and assault the building. You guys will grab the prisoners. Then get out of there.” Usually such a brief would last an hour to an hour and a half. Delta, the Rangers, and others got that briefing, but we missed it. Although the mission was important enough for us to be briefed on, it had popped up suddenly while we were out in town setting up repeaters for the CIA. Commander Olson slapped me on the shoulder. “Shouldn’t take long. Good luck. See you when you get back.”

Each of four light AH-6J Little Birds carried four snipers, two on either side of a helo. The Little Birds also carried rockets underneath—where we would be going wasn’t going to be good. The two AH-6Js, armed with 7.62 mm miniguns and 2.75-inch rockets, would guard the front of the target building from the air while two hovered to the rear. Delta’s C Squadron would fast-rope from two MH-6 Little Birds and assault the building.

Eight Black Hawks would follow, two carrying Delta assaulters and their ground command. Four of the Black Hawks would insert the Rangers. One would hover above with a Combat Search and Rescue team. The eighth Black Hawk contained the two mission commanders, one coordinating the pilots and one directing the men on the ground.

Three OH-58D Kiowa helos, distinctive for the black ball mounted above the rotor, would also fly in the airspace above the target. The black ball was a sight with a platform that contained a TeleVision System, a Thermal Imaging System, and a Laser Range Finder/Designator to provide audio and video of the ground to General Garrison at the Joint Operations Center. High above everyone circled a P-3 Orion.

I drove into position at about the third vehicle in the convoy. Behind our Humvees idled three 5-ton trucks, and five more Humvees brought up the rear. Rangers made up most of our convoy. In all, nineteen aircraft, twelve vehicles, and 160 men.

Aidid’s men had already seen how we did this six times before, and now we’d be operating under broad daylight on his home turf. Many of his militia would be pumped up on khat at this time of day, not coming down off their high until late in the evening. Risks that pay off are bold moves. Those that don’t pay off are stupid. Part of my job included taking risks.

At 1532, the helicopters took off first, following the coast. When we received word that the birds were headed inland, our convoy headed out. I wasn’t afraid—yet.
This is going to be a routine op
.

On the way, the lead Humvee took a wrong turn. Nobody followed. They would have to catch up to us later. We sped northeast on Via Gesira. Before reaching the K4 traffic circle, we encountered sporadic fire. Little Big Man yelled, “Aw hell, I’m hit!”

Are we driving into an ambush? Does Little Big Man have a sucking chest wound?
The needle on my fear meter was still close to zero. Little Big Man was shot, not me. All the same, I worried for Little Big Man’s life, and my alert level went up.

I pulled off the road underneath an overhang, slammed on the brakes, jumped out, and checked Little Big Man. He lay on the floor with part of his Randall knife blade beside him. I expected to see blood come from somewhere but only found a huge raspberry on his leg. An AK-47 round had hit that Randall knife he loved so much and carried everywhere. The blade lay on the floor. It saved his leg—worth all the kidding he had ever endured about that big-ass knife.

The convoy continued moving during the minute we were parked on the side of the road. I returned to the driver’s seat, then sped forward, catching up to our former position. The convoy passed the K4 circle and went north on Via Lenin, then east on National Street. Finally, we turned left on a dirt road parallel to and south of Hawlwadig Road.

At 1542, we arrived near the white five-story Olympic Hotel. I didn’t know that a mile west of the target, militia gathered at the Bakara Market, distributing smuggled weapons and ammo. To the east, a mile away, was where foreign insurgents had recently arrived. We were already being sandwiched and didn’t know it.

Our intel guys had probably already jammed all the cell phones in the target area. In a sandstorm kicked up by the helos, Delta operators roped down to the target building, a white building with two stories in front, three stories in back, an L-shaped structure on top, and trees in the courtyard—one of Aidid’s militia headquarters. Delta stacked up near the door, lining up behind each other in preparation to enter and snatch their target. Four groups of Rangers, twelve in each, fast-roped down and sealed the four corners of the city block around the target building. They made up the blocking force. No one gets in, and no one gets out.

I left the cutvee and took up a firing position in an alley parallel to the hotel. To the rear of the hotel, an enemy sniper moved behind a wall. Five stories above and to the left, another sniper moved on a veranda.

Shifting my position to get a better look, I realized we couldn’t get a clear shot from where we were. I told a Delta sniper, “We’re going to have to move on them.”

We bumped up, moving forward to within less than 100 yards. As we settled into our new position, the enemy had already begun firing into the target building where Delta assaulted. This felt like a setup to me. They were too well prepared. It seemed like too much of a coincidence that those snipers had set up so perfectly.
Probably a United Nations leak.

The ground sniper sticking his rifle over the wall, approximately 100 to 150 yards away, aimed his scope at the Rangers in my convoy. The sniper had a good shooting position, only exposing his head. With a squeeze of my trigger, I overexposed his head.

Through an alleyway, I saw the veranda of the nearby five-story building. Less than 200 yards away on the fifth floor, two men fired AK-47s into the back of the target house where the Delta assaulters were. From where I was, I couldn’t get a clear shot.

I looked over at the Delta operator. “We need to move on these two or it’s going to get real bad.”

We slipped through the alley and took positions behind a pillar to our right. Still didn’t have a good shot.

The two men on the fifth floor continued to pop out, spray at Delta’s assault force, then pop back inside.

The Delta operator and I moved forward again. Finding a good spot, I lay in the prone position while my partner protected the perimeter around me. I set the red dot of my sight on the spot where the bad guy had appeared on the right. In sniper talk, it’s called an ambush—aiming at a point and waiting for the target to appear there. The same technique could be used for a running target—aiming at a spot ahead of the runner’s path. When the man with the AK-47 appeared on the right, I squeezed the trigger, hitting his upper torso. He popped back into the building and didn’t pop out again. With a concrete divider hiding his demise, the second man with an AK-47 didn’t learn from the first one’s mistake. The second man popped out to spray with his AK-47 but also took one of my rounds to his upper torso and disappeared. If I hadn’t taken out those two, they would’ve had more opportunities to kill someone by shooting through the target building’s windows—an assaulter’s worst nightmare. While the assaulter takes down the building and controls everything inside, suddenly bullets come through the windows at him from the outside.

At least thirty minutes had passed since we’d arrived. Every minute we stayed in the target area increased the level of danger. Over the radio came the command to return to the convoy. On my way through the alley, heading back to the cutvee, a ricochet hit me in the back of the left knee, knocking me to the dirt. For a moment, I couldn’t move. On a fear scale of 1 to 10, 10 being out of my mind with fear, the needle jumped up between the 2 and the 3. The pain surprised me, because I had reached a point in my life when I really thought I was more than human. I was better trained. People around me got shot or injured, but not me. Even other SEALs got shot or injured because they were not me.
That’s why you fell off that caving ladder—because you’re not Howard Wasdin. That’s why you couldn’t pass me on the O-course—because you’re not Howard Wasdin.
Even after getting shot that first time in the Battle of Mogadishu, I clung to my arrogance. I was stunned with disbelief more than anything else.

Dan Schilling, the CCT, appeared. Casanova arrived and calmly shot one booger-eater. Then another. A medic had just started treating me when Dan grabbed my bandolier and pulled me out of the enemy’s kill zone. The medic stuffed my leg full of Kerlix gauze and wrapped it up. Then I was on my feet again.

The bad guys burned tires—a signal to their comrades to join the fight and a black smoke screen to obscure our vision. Militiamen with AK-47s popped up from behind smoke, side streets, and buildings—everywhere. As soon as I shot someone down, a replacement popped up. Unarmed women walked out as spotters, then pointed out our positions to the enemy. RPGs went off.

Aidid’s men yelled into megaphones. I didn’t understand that their words meant “Come out and defend your homes,” but I understood they meant us harm.

One of the 5-ton trucks in our convoy smoldered from being hit by an RPG. Someone in our convoy finished off the truck with a thermite grenade so it wouldn’t fall into enemy hands. The vehicle flamed brightly.

Delta loaded two dozen flexicuffed prisoners into two of the remaining 5-ton trucks. Included among the prisoners was Aidid’s top political adviser, Foreign Minister Omar Salad. Although Delta missed snatching Qeybdid, they’d captured a lieutenant of similar rank, Mohamed Assan Awale. They found a bonus, too, a clan chieftain named Abdi Yusef Herse. After returning to the compound, Delta would sort out the big fish from the others and release the little ones.

At thirty-seven minutes, word came over the radio, “Super Six One down.” An RPG had shot down a Black Hawk with a cartoon of Elvis Presley on its side, captioned
VELVET ELVIS
. Its pilot, Chief Warrant Officer Cliff Wolcott, had performed Elvis impersonations and was one of the pilots who’d taken us on safari. Now our mission shifted from a prisoner snatch to a rescue.

We loaded up in the convoy to move out again. Aiming a Squad Automatic Rifle down an alley lay a Ranger who didn’t look more than twelve years old.

I sat in the driver’s seat calling to him, “Load up, let’s go!”

The kid remained frozen.

I hopped out of the cutvee, ran over to the corner of the building, and kicked him.

He looked up at me with dazed eyes.

“Load your ass into the vehicle!”

He picked himself up and climbed into his Humvee.

Sometimes the young Rangers got so focused on the one thing they were supposed to do that they lost sight of the big picture. Their vision didn’t widen in response to changes in the environment, and their ears missed verbal commands. Experiencing sensory overload of the sympathetic nervous system, they couldn’t catch everything that was going on.

Fortunately, my father’s harshness to me as a child had prepared me for difficulties like this. Adding to that preparation were Hell Week, SEAL Team Two, SEAL Team Six, Marine Corps Scout Sniper School—intense training for years. The more you train in peace, the less you bleed in war. Desert Storm helped prepare me. I had developed a tolerance for sensory overload. Some of these Rangers had only been out of high school a couple of years, but every one of them fought bravely.

I loaded into the cutvee with Casanova, Little Big Man, and the others. Sourpuss wasn’t with us. My mind was so focused on the combat that I didn’t hear Little Big Man tell us that Sourpuss was tasked to three Humvees evacuating a Ranger casualty back to the compound. Little Big Man and Casanova stayed together with me in the cutvee, riding in the main convoy.