Black Hawk Down by Mark Bowden Read Free Book Online Page B

Howe and the three other
     men on his Delta team rounded the corner and entered the target building from the southern
     courtyard door. They were the last of the assault forces to enter the house. A team led by
     Howe's buddy Matt Rierson had already rounded up twenty-four Somali men on the first
     floor, among them two prizes: Omar Salad, the primary target, and Mohamed Hassan Awale,
     Aidid's chief spokesman (not Abdi “Qeybdid” Hassan Awale, as reported, but a clan leader
     of equal stature).
    They were prone and docile and Rierson's team was locking their wrists together with
     plastic cuffs.
    Howe asked Sergeant Mike Foreman if anyone had gone upstairs.
    “Not yet,” Foreman said.
    So Howe took his four men up to the second floor.
    It was a big house by Somali standards, whitewashed cinder-block walls and windows with
     no glass in them. At the top step Howe called for one of his men to toss a flashbang
     grenade into the first room. It exploded and the team burst in as they were trained to do,
     each man covering a different firing lane. They found only a mattress on the floor. As
     they moved around the room, a volley of machine-gun fire slammed into the ceiling and
     wall, just missing the bead of one of Howe's men. They all dropped down. The rounds had
     come through the southeast window, and had clearly come from the Ranger blocking position
     just below the window. One of the younger soldiers outside had evidently seen someone
     moving in the window and fired. Obviously some of these guys weren't clear which building
     was the target
    It was what he had feared. Howe was disappointed in the Rangers. These were supposed to
     be the army's crack infantry? Despite all the hype and Hoo-ah horseshit, he saw the
     younger men as poorly trained and potentially dangerous in combat. Most were fresh out of
     high school! During training exercises he had the impression that they were always craning
     their necks to watch him and his men instead of paying attention to their own very
     important part of the job.
    And the job demanded more. It demanded all you had, and more... because the price of
     failure was often death. That's why Howe and the rest of these D-boys loved it. It
     separated them from other men. War was ugly and evil, for sure, but it was still the way
     things got done on most of the planet. Civilized states had nonviolent ways of resolving
     disputes, but that depended on the willingness of everyone involved to back down. Here in
     the raw Third World, people hadn't learned to back down, at least not until after a lot of
     blood flowed. Victory was for those willing to fight and die. Intellectuals could theorize
     until they sucked their thumbs right off their hands, but in the real world, power still
     flowed from the barrel of a gun. If you wanted the starving masses in Somalia to eat, then
     you had to outmuscle men like this Aidid, for whom starvation worked. You could send in
     your bleeding-heart do-gooders, you could hold hands and pray and sing hootenanny songs
     and invoke the great gods CNN and BBC, but the only way to finally open the roads to the
     big-eyed babies was to show up with more guns. And in this real world, nobody had more or
     better guns than America. If the good-hearted ideals of humankind were to prevail, then
     they needed men who could make it happen. Delta made it happen.
    They operated strictly in secret. The army would not oven speak the word “Delta.” If you
     had to refer to them, they were “operators,” or “The Dreaded D.” The Rangers, who
     worshiped them, called them D-boys. Secrecy, or at least the show of it, was central to
     their purpose. It allowed the dreamers and the politicians to have it both ways. They
     could stay on the high road while the dirty work happened offstage. If some Third World
     terrorist or Colombian drug lord needed to die, and then suddenly just turned up dead,
     why, what a happy coincidence!