wounded man's shirt and sprinted back to his Humvee, where the rest of the men, hunkered
down and firing, eyed him with amazement.
One Humvee back, Private Ed Kallman felt a rush of adrenaline as he drove around the
corner into the melee. He had joined the army searching for excitement after getting bored
with high school in Gainesville, Florida. You started off in the army dreading the
prospect of actual combat, but little by little the hard training and discipline of
Rangering made you start wishing for it. And here it was. War. The real thing. From behind
the wheel, watching through the windshield, Kallman had to remind himself that this wasn't
a movie, and the realization filled him initially with a dark boyish glee. The smoke trail
of an RPG caught the corner of his eye, and he followed it as it zipped past his vehicle
and exploded into one of the five-tons in front. When the smoke cleared he saw Staff
Sergeant Dave Wilson, one of the only two black guys in the Ranger Company, propped
against the wall of a house alongside the truck. Wilson's legs were stretched stiff in
front of him and were splashed with bright red blood. Kaliman was horrified. One of his
guys! He gripped the steering wheel and focused on the vehicle in front of his, suddenly
eager to get moving again.
From his turret in the rear Humvee, Othic had seen the flash of the RPG tube. He swung
his .50 cal around and blasted the spot, mowing down a small crowd that had been standing
in front of the shooter.
Then what felt like a baseball bat came down on his right forearm. It felt just like
that. He heard the crack! and felt the blow and looked down to see a small hole in his
arm. The bone was broken.
He shouted, “I'm hit! I'm hit!”
He really did go cyclic on the .50 cal then, just fired continually for maybe as long as
a minute, taking down trees and walls and anyone in, around, or behind them, before
Sergeant Lorenzo Ruiz stood up in the turret and took the gun.
-13-
At Sergeant Eversmann's intersection, things continued to go badly for Chalk Four. First
Blackburn had fallen out of the helicopter, then they'd roped in well off target, then
they'd been pinned down so they couldn't get in the right position. He had sent five guys
with the litter carrying Blackburn, and none of them had come back yet.
Then Sergeant Galentine got hit.
Galentine was a kid from Xenia, Ohio, who had spent six months operating a press at a
rubber-molding plant after high school before deciding there was more that he could be.
He'd enlisted on the day the Gulf War started and it was over before he was out of basic
training. He'd been waiting for a chance at a real fight ever since. He'd been crushed
when he and Stebbins had gotten left back on this deployment. But now, here he was,
finally in battle. It had a strange effect on him. He turned giddy. He and his buddy,
Specialist Jim Telscher, sat behind two cars as rounds kicked up dirt between them.
Telscher had been smacked in the face by his own rifle coming down the rope and had blood
all over his mouth. Gunfire methodically shattered the windows on both cars and blew out
the tires. Galentine and Telscher sat behind the rear bumpers making stupid faces at one
another.
Galentine did not feel frightened. It didn't register that he could get killed. He just
pointed his M-16 at someone down the street, aimed at center mass, and squeezed off
rounds. The man would drop. Just like target practice, only cooler.
When they started catching rounds from a different direction, he and Telscher ran to an
alley. There, Galentine came face-to-face with a Somali woman. She had chosen that moment
to dash across the alley, and now stood staring in horror at Galentine and trying to open
a door to get inside. His first instinct had been to shoot her, but he hadn't. The woman's
eyes were wide. It startled him, that moment.
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