My Life Profile: Howard Wasdin

Surviving Black Hawk Down
By Randy Southerland

After more than a year in the chiropractic program at Life University, Howard Wasdin never complains about the stresses and inconveniences of being a chiropractic student. In fact, when classmates say how hard their lives are he has a simple response.

“Somebody will be complaining about something that we’ve got to do and I will just pull them aside and say, ‘Hey look, anybody shoot at you yet? And they say “no” and I say ,‘Well, it is not that bad, it could be worse.’ So, it is kind of a little joke in our class.”

In fact, it isn’t a joke. In 1993, this former Navy SEAL was part of a team of Army Rangers and Delta operators sent to the war-ravaged nation of Somalia on the Horn of Africa. On that Sunday in October, they embarked on what most thought would be a routine mission into the capital city of Mogadishu. The goal was to capture lieutenants of the brutal warlord Mohammed Farah Aideed. During briefings, soldiers were told the mission would last an hour. Soon after it began, everything went terribly wrong and the small band of soldiers found themselves fighting for their lives, cut off from help and desperately trying to rescue downed comrades.

Wasdin’s exploits and those of his fellow soldiers in the Battle of Mogadishu are vividly chronicled in Mark Bowden’s book “Black Hawk Down” and the movie of the same name. The conflict left 18 American soldiers dead and 73 wounded, while as many as 1,000 Somalis lost their lives. The reverberations from the 15-hour fight altered American foreign policy, cost the then- U.S. Secretary of Defense his job, and left the impoverished and chaotic nation of Somalia in even more desperate straits than before. It also changed the lives of men like Wasdin who survived.

The battle unfolded less than a year after U.S. Marines landed as part of a humanitarian effort to feed starving Somalis cut off by the country’s long running civil war, which had effectively made the country ungovernable. When U.S. forces departed, Aideed moved in and began routinely stealing international food shipments and using starvation as a weapon to keep the populace in line. United Nations peacekeepers seeking to keep nearly half a million people from starving were attacked and slaughtered.

A few months later Task Force Rangers arrived with the mandate to capture the warlord and hopefully restore order.

On this day in October of 1993, the mission was simple. The targets had been located in a building in central Mogadishu. Four teams of Rangers fast roped down from hovering MH-60 Black Hawk ?helicopters to set up protective cover. Simultaneously, 40 members of the elite 1st Special Forces Operational Detachment-Delta, quickly stormed the building. Rounding up the prisoners, they herded them outside to meet a waiting convoy.

Wasdin was driving a Humvee manned by SEALs and Delta operators. Their job was to reinforce the assault team if needed.

Despite earlier misgivings, everything seemed to be going smoothly. Old hands such as Wasdin were concerned that the raid was taking place in broad daylight. Operating in-country for several months, running a safe house for Somali informers, he knew how unpredictable the city could be.

As they drove in to pick up prisoners, everything was going according to plan. Within minutes, all hell broke loose. Arriving at the site, Wasdin saw Somali gunmen shooting into the back of the building. During this initial firefight, he suffered his first wound.

The city erupted in a cascade of gunfire and explosions. Somali militiamen brandishing rocket propelled grenades (RPGs) brought down two circling Black Hawks. Wasdin joined other soldiers trying to reach one of the downed choppers. They found themselves fighting their way through narrow streets, under constant attack by gunfire and RPGs coming from every building. One man after another fell dead or wounded.

Surrounded and pinned down, the hours began to drag by and still the fighting seldom let up. The only relief came when helicopter gun ships flew in, strafing and rocketing the attackers.

Wasdin, like many of the others, realized they were unlikely to make it out of the city alive. “My one regret was not that I was going to die, my one regret was that I didn’t tell the people that I loved I loved them enough,” he recalls.

Early the next morning, reinforcements from the U.S. 10th Mountain Division, aided by U.N. forces with tanks and armored personnel carriers, broke through. The men, battered and bloody, were safe.

Having survived this violent battle, Wasdin emerged a changed man. The transformation began when the first bullet ripped into his knee. He looked down in amazement that he had been shot. That happened to ordinary soldiers—like the Rangers—but not to him. Later he would be sitting in a wheelchair demanding to know why God had let this happen to him. It would be the lowest point of his life. But from those depths came something better.

“This was God’s way of reaching down and telling Howard Wasdin, ‘You are only a man.’” he says. “I was an arrogant ego-inflated operator, but you know it is the way you are trained to think. I had done search and rescue. I was one of the best snipers on the planet. I was with an elite tier one hostage rescue team. I was the man. I didn’t even talk to common people.”

All those delusions washed away and he came to realize that being a SEAL was only a job “no matter how noble I might think it is or was.” After five rounds of surgery, skin grafts and months of physical therapy, his days as an elite warrior were over. He was recognized for his bravery with the Silver Star—the military’s second highest honor. He was able to walk again and return to duty, serving as a bodyguard for Ambassador to the Philippines John Negroponte [later appointed the first Director of National Intelligence].

“Once a week we would take him over to his chiropractor and I asked him about it and he said, ‘Oh, yeah, I am a tennis player and if I don’t get to the chiropractor I’m in pain,’” he recalls. “So, I just filed that away.”

After leaving the service, he joined a Florida police force. Yet, the daily pain and sleepless nights were constant reminders of the injuries he sustained in Somalia. A friend on the SWAT team urged him to visit a chiropractor.

Wasdin admits that he’s a skeptical guy. “You have to prove things to me,” he says. But endorsements ranging from Negroponte to his fellow officers finally convinced him to give it a try. After a few adjustments, he saw results. His hip pain subsided, and for the first time in years, he was able to sleep through the night.

The results were so dramatic that he quickly became a believer. He even urged fellow soldiers to seek care as well, including three comrades wounded in the battle.

With chiropractic giving him a new and pain-free outlook on life, his thoughts began to turn toward the idea of becoming a chiropractor himself. His military benefits would pay for school, but still he hesitated. After leaving the service, Wasdin got married. With a family to support, he had to think carefully about giving up his job to go back to school. That’s when his new wife, an accountant, challenged him to follow his dream.

“She pulled the pin on this grenade when she sat down and showed me mathematically how we could make it work,” he explains.

They had been married two years and she already knew him well. When he still hesitated about making the commitment, she called him on it.

“She told me, ‘You want to do something fun and challenging with your life and you know this is what you want, but if you are too chicken to do it, then don’t give me any excuses,” he recalls with a laugh. “She loves telling this story.”

Since enrolling at Life, he’s been on the Dean’s List every quarter. Of course, he isn’t the first SEAL to come through the program—several others have preceded him and two graduated with honors.

“The bar has been set,” he says with typical SEAL focus and dedication. “So I got that little extra pressure that I put on myself.”

©2006 Today's Chiropractic

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