Black Hawk Down: A Story of Modern War

by Mark Bowden

Taking down a house like this was Delta’s specialty. Speed was critical. When a crowded house was filled suddenly with explosions, smoke, and flashes of light, those inside were momentarily frightened and disoriented. Experience showed that most would drop down and move to the corners. So long as Delta caught them in this startled state, most would follow stern simple commands without question. The Rangers had watched the D-boys at work now on several missions, and the operators had moved in with such speed and authority it was hard to imagine anyone having the presence of mind to resist. But just a few seconds made a difference. The more time those inside had to sort out what was happening, the harder they would be to subdue.

Passing bullets made a loud snap, like cracking a stick of dry hickory.

Whenever there was a disturbance in Mogadishu, people would throng to the spot. Men, women, children—even the aged and infirm. It was like some national imperative to bear witness.

Darkness made the speed and precision of the D-boys and Rangers that much more deadly. Night afforded still another advantage. Many Somali men, particularly the young men who cruised around Mog on “technicals,” vehicles with .50-caliber machine guns bolted in back, were addicted to khat, a mild amphetamine that looks like watercress. Mid-afternoon was the height of the daily cycle. Most started chewing at about noon, and by late afternoon were wired, jumpy, and raring to go. Late at night it was just the opposite. The khat chewers had crashed. So today’s mission called for going to the worst place in Mog at the worst possible time.

Garrison knew from day one that intelligence was going to be a problem. The original plan had called for a daring, well-placed lead Somali spy, the head of the CIA’s local operation, to present Aidid an elegant hand-carved cane soon after Task Force Ranger arrived. Embedded in the head of the cane was a homing beacon. It seemed like a sure thing until, on Garrison’s first day in-country, Lieutenant Colonel Dave McKnight, his chief of staff, informed him that their lead informant had shot himself in the head playing Russian roulette. It was the kind of idiotic macho thing guys did when they’d lived too long on the edge. “He’s not dead,” McKnight told the general, “but we’re fucked.”

On his career climb to leadership of JSOC (Joint Special Operations Command) he’d served a stint as Delta commander. When he arrived at Bragg as a newly leafed colonel in the mid-eighties, his crew cut alone invited scorn and suspicion from the D-boys, with their sideburns and facial hair and civilian haircuts down over their ears. But soon after he started, Garrison saved their ass. Some of America’s secret supersoldiers were caught double-dipping expenses, billing both the army and the State Department for their covert international travel. The scandal could have brought down the unit, which was despised by the more traditional brass anyway. The new bullet-headed colonel could have scored points and greased his own promotional path by expressing outrage and cleaning house. Instead, Garrison placed his career in jeopardy by defending the unit and focusing punishment on only the worst abusers. He’d salvaged a fair number of professional hides in that caper, and the men hadn’t forgotten. In time, his insouciant Lone Star style and understated confidence rubbed off on the whole unit. There were guys from suburban New Jersey who after weeks with Delta were wearing pointy boots, dipping tobacco, and drawling like a cowpoke.

He heard occasional snapping sounds in the air around him and assumed it was the sound of gunfire a few blocks away, even though the noise was close. Maybe the air was playing tricks on him. He also heard a peculiar noise, a tchew ... tchew ... tchew, and it dawned on him that this was the sound of rounds whistling down the street. That snapping noise? That was bullets passing close enough for him to hear the little sonic boomlet as they zipped past.

From his position behind the car, peering down one of the streets at their intersection, Nelson saw a man with a weapon ride out into the road on a cow. There were about eight other men around the cow, some with weapons, some without. It was the strangest battle party he’d ever seen. He didn’t know whether to laugh or shoot at it. He and the rest of the Rangers at once started shooting. The man on the cow fell off, and the others ran. The cow just stood there.

Othic was the smallest guy in the company, and looked about thirteen, so he was assigned (per standard operating procedure) to the biggest gun, a “Ma-Deuce,” the Browning M-2 .50-caliber machine gun, which was mounted in the roof turret of his Humvee. Othic had made a bit of a name for himself early on in the deployment by inadvertently stealing General Garrison’s personal Humvee. The turret on his own kept sticking and his sergeant told him to trade it in for another one “over there,” pointing toward the motor pool. So Othic had just picked out the one that looked cleanest. They got it back before the general found out.

When the force had first moved in, the pigeons had owned the hangar, crapping at will all over people, cots, and equipment. When one of the D-boys got nailed while sitting on his cot cleaning his weapon, the elite force declared war. They ordered up pellet guns. The birds didn’t have a prayer. The D-boys would triangulate fire and send a mess of blood and feathers plopping down on somebody’s cot. Did these guys know how to kill time on a deployment or what? They all had custom-built weapons with hand-rifled barrels and such. Gun manufacturers outfitted them the way Nike supplies pro athletes. Some days Delta would commandeer a Black Hawk and roar off to hunt wild boar, baboons, antelope, and gazelles in the Somali bush. They brought back trophy tusks and game meat and held cookouts. They called it “realistic training.”

On the night of September 25, the Skinnies shot down a 101st Division Black Hawk. Three crew members were killed when the downed chopper burst into flames, but the pilot and copilot escaped. They exchanged fire with gunmen on the street until friendly Somalis steered them to a vehicle and got them out. Othic had been on guard duty that night. “When I came on guard duty at 2 am me & another guy saw a flaming orange ball moving across the sky, it went down & there was a big explosion & there was a secondary explosion,” he wrote. “Today the flag was at half mast for 3 101st pilots who died in the crash, they were shot down by an RPG. ... Later they had a ceremony for our fallen comrades as they loaded their bodies on the bird home, makes you realize your mortality.”

There was just too much shooting from all directions for Othic to sort out what was going on. Bullets were zinging around him and RPGs had started to fly. He would see a cloud of smoke and a flash and then track the fat arc of the grenade as it rocketed home. Brass shell casings were piling up around him in the turret. A Somali round hit the pile and one of the casings flipped up and stung him in the face. When two more rounds hit ammo boxes right next to him, Othic was alarmed. Somebody had a bead on him. He began shooting everywhere. There was a Ranger saying that went, “When the going gets tough, the tough go cyclic.”

RPGs were meant for ground fighting. It was difficult and dangerous, almost suicidal, to point one skyward. The violent back blast could kill the shooter, and the grenade would only fly up a thousand feet or so, with a whoosh and a telltale trail of smoke pointing back to the shooter. So if the back blast didn’t get him one of the quick guns of the Little Birds surely would. They were all but useless against a fast-moving, low-flying helicopter, so the logic went.

So most of the foot soldiers who rode in the birds regarded the downing of a Black Hawk as a one-in-a-million event. Not the pilots. Since that first Black Hawk had gone down they’d seen more and more of those climbing smoke trails and sudden airbursts. Going down was suddenly notched from possible to probable and entered their nightmares.

Aidid had kept up the pressure. From his southern stronghold, mortar rounds were lobbed daily into UN compounds. Somali employees of the UN mission were terrorized and executed. The warlord proved to be a formidable adversary. His name, Aidid, meant “one who tolerates no insult.” He had been schooled in Italy and the old Soviet Union and had served as army chief of staff and then ambassador to India for Siad Barre before turning on the dictator and routing him. Aidid was a slender, fragile-looking man with Semitic features, a bald head, and small black eyes. He could be charming, but was also ruthless. Howe believed Aidid had two distinct personalities. One day he was all smiles, a warm, engaging, modern, educated man fluent in several languages with an open mind and a sense of humor. Aidid had fourteen children who lived in America. (One, a son named Hussein, was a Marine reservist who had come to Somalia with UNITAF forces in the December intervention.) It was this cosmopolitan side of Aidid that had encouraged earlier hopes for success. But the next day, without apparent reason, Aidid’s black eyes would show nothing but hatred. There were times when even his closest aides avoided him. This was Aidid the son of a Somali camel herder who had risen to success as a clever and ruthless killer. He thought nothing of ordering people killed, even his own people. Howe had evidence that Aidid’s henchmen were inciting demonstrations, then gunning down their own supporters in order...

Howe was outraged, and adamant that Aidid be stopped. The admiral was accustomed to having his way. He wasn’t a screamer, but once he bit into something he held on. Many old Africa hands regarded this trait as ill-suited to this part of the world. In Somalia, warlords who feuded one day could be warm old friends the next. Howe was unyielding.

The number of Somalis killed in the attack was disputed. Mohamed Hassan Farah, Abdullahi Ossoble Barre, Qeybdid, and others present claimed 73 dead, including women and children who had been on the building’s first floor. They said hundreds were wounded. The reports Howe got after the attack placed the number of dead at 20, all men. The International Committee of the Red Cross set the number of dead at 54, with total casualties at 250. But the dispute over the number of dead Somalis was quickly eclipsed by the deaths of 4 Western journalists who rushed to the Abdi House to report on the attack, only to be killed by an enraged Somali mob. The journalists’ deaths focused worldwide anger on the Somalis, but in Mogadishu the shock and outrage was over the surprise attack. The massacre bolstered Aidid’s status, and badly undercut the UN’s humanitarian image. Moderates opposed to Aidid now rallied behind him. From the Habr Gidr’s perspective, the UN and, in particular, the United States, had declared war.

All of the men had heard veterans talk about “the fog of war,” which was shorthand for how even the best-laid plans went to hell fast once shooting started, but it was shocking nevertheless to see how hard it was to get even the simplest things done. Staff Sergeant Dan Schilling, the air force CCT in the convoy’s lead Humvee, finally got fed up waiting and went looking for what was holding things up. It turned out the D-boys had been waiting with the prisoners for some signal from the convoy, while the convoy had been waiting for the D-boys to come out. Schilling ran back and forth a few times and finally got things moving.

Aidid’s men received some expert guidance in shooting down helicopters from fundamentalist Islamic soldiers, smuggled in from Sudan, who had experience fighting Russian helicopters in Afghanistan. In the effort they had resolved to focus their entire arsenal of RPGs, the most powerful weaponry left Aidid after the summer’s air attacks on his tanks and big guns. This was problematic. The grenades burst on impact, but it was hard to hit a moving target with one, so the detonators on many were replaced with timing devices to make them explode in midair. That way they wouldn’t need a direct hit to cripple a chopper. Their fundamentalist advisers taught them that the helicopter’s tail rotor was its most vulnerable spot. So they learned to wait until it passed over, and to shoot up at it from behind. It was awkward and dangerous to point the tubes at the sky, and suicidal to aim from rooftops. The helicopters spotted an armed man on a rooftop quickly, usually before he had a chance to aim his weapon and fire. So Aidid’s fighters devised methods to safely shoot up from the ground. They dug deep holes in the dirt streets. The shooter would lie supine with the back of the tube pointed down into the hole. Sometimes he would cut down a small tree and lean it into the hole, then cover himself with a green robe so he could lie under the tree waiting for one to fly over.

But with all the help overhead, Task Force Ranger was about to demonstrate how too much information can hurt soldiers on a battlefield. High in the C2 Black Hawk, Harrell and Matthews could see one group of about fifteen gunmen racing along streets that paralleled the eight-vehicle convoy. The running Somalis could keep pace with the vehicles because the trucks and Humvees stacked up at every intersection. Each driver waited until the vehicle in front completely cleared the cross fire before sprinting through it himself. To get stuck in the open was suicidal. Every time the convoy stalled, it gave the bands of shooters time to reach the next street and set up an ambush for each vehicle as it gunned through. The convoy was getting riddled. From above, Harrell and Matthews could see roadblocks and places where Somalis had massed to ambush. So they steered the convoy away from those places. There was an added complication. Flying about a thousand feet over the C2 helicopter was the navy Orion spy plane, which had surveillance cameras that gave them a clear picture of the convoy’s predicament. But the Orion pilots were handicapped. They were not allowed to communicate directly with the convoy. Their directions were relayed to the commander at the JOC, who would then radio Harrell in the command bird. Only then was the plane’s advice relayed down to the convoy. This built in a maddening delay. The Orion pilots would see a direct line to the crash site. They’d say, “Turn left!” ...

And Kallman’s turn did come. As he slowed down before another intersection he looked out the open window to his left and saw a smoke trail coming straight at him. It all happened in a second. He knew it was an RPG and he knew it was going to hit him. Then it did. He awoke lying on his right side on the front seat with his ears ringing. He opened his eyes and was looking directly at the radio mounted under the dash. He sat up and floored the accelerator. Up ahead he saw the convoy making a left turn and he raced to catch them. Later, when he’d had a chance to inspect his Humvee, he saw that the RPG had hit his door, deeply denting it and poking a hole through the steel. He and the others inside had evidently been spared by the bulletproof glass panel behind the door—Kallman had the window rolled down. The brunt of the grenade’s force had been absorbed by the Humvee’s outer shell, and the glass barrier had been thick enough to stop it. Kallman’s left arm began to swell and discolor, but otherwise he was fine.

Wilkinson and the other air force guys practiced emergency medicine like an extreme sport. Their job was primarily rescuing downed pilots, and since there was no telling where or when a plane would crash, from midocean to mountaintop, from frozen tundra to the middle of a crowded city, their unit’s motto, “Anytime, anywhere,” was a point of pride. They were trained to climb cliffs, search deserts, and to dive out of airplanes at extremely high altitudes, if necessary, sometimes far behind enemy lines, to track lost and wounded flyers, patch them up, and bring them home. Their training was designed to push them beyond normal human constraints. Men sometimes died trying to pass the PJ course in the early 1980s when Wilkinson volunteered. He was twenty-five then, an avid outdoorsman. He decided to ditch a tamer career as an electrical engineer for something to make his heart pump faster. His personal nightmare had been the water drill at the army Special Forces SCUBA training facility. It was called “crossovers.” Trainees were weighted down with water-filled tanks and dropped in a deep pool. Holding their breath, they had to walk twenty-five meters to the other end without coming up for air. For Wilkinson, it was hard enough just to go that distance without blacking out, but the instructors would deliberately detain him, push him backward, disorient him, pull off his mask and fins, rough him up, tangle him up with other trainees ... simulating the helter-skelter, life-threate...

And what could be cooler than living with the Delta operators, the “Dreaded D”? They were the pros, totally squared away. On the eighteen-hour flight aboard the giant C-141 Starlifter, when the air force blueshirts insisted that they all stay in their seats, the D-boys just blew them off. Right after takeoff they unrolled thermal pads (the shiny metal floor of the bird turns ice cold at altitude) and insulated ponchos, stuck earplugs in their ears, donned eye patches, swallowed “Blue Bombers” (Halcyon tablets), and racked out. They taught little tricks like wrapping tape around the pins of their grenades to make sure none accidentally snagged and pulled on a piece of equipment. They wore knee pads when they went into a fight, which made it easy to quickly drop and shoot, and stay there for hours if necessary. If it was hot, they didn’t walk around in full battle gear. They wore T-shirts or no shirts at all, and shorts and flip-flops. They all had sunglasses. If they’d been up until all hours, they slept in a little in the morning. When they went out on a mission, they took the weapons they thought they’d need and left behind the stuff they didn’t. With the D-boys, all of whom were ranked sergeant first class or higher, rank meant nothing. They all, officers and noncoms, called each other by their first names or nicknames. They were trained to think and act for themselves. Nothing was done by the book for its own sake; they were guided by their own experience. They knew the...

Listening to the sounds on the radio had a different effect on Specialist Steve Anderson. It scared him. Anderson had wanted to be a soldier so bad that he had lied about having severe asthma when he joined. He carried his inhaler with him everywhere. On the first day of basic training they were all warned sternly that any drugs were contraband and if caught with any they were in deep, dark shit. A box was passed around the barracks and they were told they had one last chance, an amnesty, to chuck anything they weren’t supposed to have. Anderson panicked and threw in his inhaler, and then suffered such a terrible asthma attack three or four days later that he had to confess and was shipped out to a hospital. The next day the drill sergeant told Sizemore and the rest of the guys in the platoon that Anderson had died. A month later, at airborne school, Sizemore spotted this tall, skinny ghost doing KP duty, walked over, and rubbed his eyes for a better look. Anderson had not only survived the asthma attack, somebody in the chain of command had admired his determination enough to let him stay in and keep his inhaler.

The natural inclination was to get as close to the wall as possible. The wall suggested at least a margin of safety. But Sergeant Paul Howe, one of the D-boys, had advised them against it. Bullets follow walls, he’d explained. The enemy can concentrate fire down an alleyway, and the walls on either side will act as funnels. Some rounds would actually ride the walls for hundreds of feet. Standing tight against a wall was actually more dangerous than being in the middle of the street.

He crouched down behind a two-foot concrete ramp between the tree and the wall and was fiddling with his M-60 when a Somali ducked out from behind a tin shed about ten feet up the street and fired at him and Twombly. Nelson knew he was dead. Rounds hit between his legs and he felt them passing next to his face. Twombly dropped the man. Nelson saw Twombly mouth the words, “You okay?” “I don’t know.” Twombly had fired his SAW about two feet in front of Nelson’s face, so close that his cheeks and nose had been singed by the muzzle heat. The blast had hammered his eardrums, blinded him, and his head was still ringing. “That hurt,” Nelson complained. “I can’t hear and I can’t see. Don’t you ever fucking shoot your weapon off that close to me again!” Just then another Somali took a shot at them and Twombly returned fire with his rifle directly over Nelson’s head. After that, Nelson wouldn’t hear a thing for many hours.

The idea was to stay spread out and provide covering fire for each other as they went through intersections. But right away, to Steele’s dismay, the formation broke down. The D-boys ignored the marching orders and just kept moving forward. These were men trained to think for themselves and act independently in battle, and now they were doing it. Each of the operators had a radio earpiece under their little plastic hockey helmets—Steele called them “skateboard helmets”—and a microphone that wrapped around to their mouth. So they were usually in constant touch with each other. When the radios were not working or when the noise level was too high, as it was now, the D-boys communicated expertly with hand signals. Steele’s Rangers relied on shouted orders from their officers and team leaders. They were younger, less experienced, and terrified. Some tended to just follow the operators instead of staying with their teams. Steele saw a complete breakdown of unit integrity before they’d moved two blocks.

The disdain was mutual. Steele accepted that these operators were good at their jobs, but he wasn’t in awe of them. He found their civilian manner and contemptuous attitude toward Ranger discipline hard to take. Sure, it was a good idea to encourage individual initiative and creative thinking in combat, but some of these guys had strayed so far from traditional army norms it seemed unhealthy. They could be comically arrogant. When they’d gotten a list of potential target sites, for instance, the D-boys had divvied them up among different teams. Each was assigned to draw up an assault plan. Since his men were involved, Steele had sat in on the meeting when the various schemes were presented. The captain’s experience with such a planning session was like this: You sat there and took notes and asked questions only to make sure you got things down correctly and then saluted on your way out. The D-boys’ meeting was a free-for-all. One group would present its plan and somebody would pipe up, “Why, that’s the stupidest thing I ever heard,” which would provoke a sturdy “Fuck you,” which quickly degenerated into guys screaming at each other. It looked to Steele like they were about to assume Kung Fu stances and have it out. Steele could imagine what would happen if a company of Rangers operated that way. Some of his men were still boys. As far as the captain could tell, most had just emerged from a lifetime of lounging on sofas eating Fritos and watching MTV. Basic and Ranger train...

Bullet hole after bullet hole poked through the broken tail boom. Wilkinson was reminded of the Steve Martin movie The Jerk, where Martin’s moronic character, unaware that villains are shooting at him, watches with surprise as bullet holes begin popping open a row of oil cans. He shouted Martin’s line from the movie. “They hate the cans! Stay away from the cans!” Both men laughed.

As he reentered the courtyard, one of the master sergeants with Miller told Howe to go back out to the street and help his team. Howe resented the order. He felt he was, at this point, the de facto leader on the ground, the one doing all the real thinking and moving and fighting. They had reached a temporary safe point, a time for commanders to catch their breath and think. They were in a bad spot, but not critical. The next step would be to look for ways to strongpoint their position, expand their perimeter, identify other buildings to take down to give them better lines of fire. The troop sergeant’s command was the order of a man who didn’t know what to do next.

Take this setup in Mogadishu, for instance. It was asinine. At the base, the huge hangar front doors wouldn’t close, so the Sammies had a clear view inside at all hours of the day or night. The city sloped gradually up from the waterfront, so any Somali with patience and binoculars could keep an eye on their state of readiness. Every time they scrambled to gear up and go, word was out in the city before they were even on the helicopters. If that weren’t bad enough, you had the Italians, some of them openly sympathetic to their former colonial subjects, who appeared to be flashing signals with their headlights out into the city whenever the helicopters took off. Nobody had the balls to do anything about it.

Down on one knee, Howe swore bitterly as he fired. Everything about this situation was pissing him off, the goddamn Somalis, his leaders, the idiot Rangers ... even his ammunition. He drew a bead on three Somalis who were running across the street two blocks to the north, taking a progressive lead on them the way he had learned through countless hours of training, squaring them in his sights and then aiming several feet in front of them. He would squeeze two or three rounds, rapidly increasing his lead with each shot. He was an expert marksman, and thought he had hit them, but he couldn’t tell for sure because they kept running until they crossed the street and were out of view. It bugged him. His weapon was the most sophisticated infantry rifle in the world, a customized CAR-15, and he was shooting the army’s new 5.56 mm green-tip round. The green tip had a tungsten carbide penetrator at the tip, and would punch holes in metal, but that very penetrating power meant his rounds were passing right through his targets. When the Sammies were close enough he could see when he hit them. Their shirts would lift up at the point of impact, as if someone had pinched and plucked up the fabric. But with the green-tip round it was like sticking somebody with an ice pick. The bullet made a small, clean hole, and unless it happened to hit the heart or spine, it wasn’t enough to stop a man in his tracks. Howe felt like he had to hit a guy five or six times just to get his attention. They ...

Wilkinson wrapped Stebbins’s foot. “You’re out of action,” he said. “Listen, you’re numb now but it’s gonna go away. All I can give you is some Percocet.” He handed Stebbins a tablet and some iodized water in a cup. Wilkinson also handed him a rifle. “Here’s a gun. You can guard this window.” “Okay.” “But as your health care professional, I feel I should warn you that narcotics and firearms don’t mix.” Stebbins just shook his head and smiled.

One of Marsh’s proudest innovations were four large trauma chests, four-by-two-foot trunks, packed with IV fluid bags, gauze, Curlex, petroleum jelly, needles, chest tubes ... all the things needed for initial treatment of wounds. Instead of just filling the chests with the equipment, Marsh and his staff had packaged fifteen separate Ziploc bags in each trunk, five serious-wound packets and ten for lesser wounds. The idea was to assess the seriousness of an injury, then grab the appropriate packet. Marsh had seen British forces do that during the Falkland Islands war. Delta had been lugging the trunks around with them now for years, not always happily. Officers had complained about how much space the trunks took up on pallets, and more than once had tried to have them removed. In Marsh’s experience, it was always officers with actual combat experience like Garrison who would step in to save his chests. Now, for the first time, they needed them.

The Little Birds made wall-rattling gun runs throughout the night. One of the birds shot at a Somali carrying an RPG who must have been toting extra rounds on his back. They placed a seventeen-pound rocket on him, which killed him and must have blown the extra rounds, because he went up like a Roman candle. When the chopper went back to refuel they found pieces of the man’s body pancaked on their windshield.

Before the fight began, the Volunteer Hospital was virtually empty. It was located down near the Americans’ base by the airport. After the trouble had started with the Americans most Somalis were afraid to come there. By the end of this day, Monday, October 4, all five hundred beds in the hospital would be full. One hundred more wounded would be lined in the hallways. And Volunteer wasn’t the biggest hospital in the city. The numbers were even greater at Digfer. Most of those with gut wounds would die. The delay in getting them to the hospital—many more would come today than came yesterday—allowed infections to set in that could no longer be successfully treated with what antibiotics the hospital could spare. The three-bed operating theater at Volunteer had been full and busy all through the night. Elmi was part of a team of seven surgeons who worked straight through without a break. He had assisted in eighteen major surgeries by sunrise, and the hallways outside were rapidly filling with more, dozens, hundreds more. It was a tidal wave of gore. He finally walked out of the operating room at eight in the morning, and sat down to rest. The hospital was filled with the chilling screams and moans of broken people, dismembered, bleeding, dying in horrible pain. Doctors and nurses ran from bed to bed, trying to keep up. Elmi sat on a bench smoking a cigarette quietly. A French woman who saw him sitting down approached him angrily. “Why don’t you help these people?” she shouted ...

She’d met Ray on her birthday twenty-two years earlier, when she was managing a bar in Newport News. Her employees had surprised her with a cake, and everybody ate it except Ray. When she’d asked him why, he’d told her, like it was something everybody in the world with any sense would know, “You don’t eat cake when you’re drinking beer.”

He was given a box of gifts from the Red Cross. One of the items in the box was a pocket Bible. Keeping track of time was one of the skills Durant had been taught in survival training. Prisoners of war in Vietnam had found that having some sense of time elapsed and ordering the events of each day, no matter how mundane, helped to keep them sane. Keeping a record was an act of faith. It implied you would eventually be released and have a story to tell. He was not an especially religious man, but Durant found his own use for the Bible. He began reconstructing the events of his captivity in the margins of it, using code words, beginning with his crash. He wrote: “Bump,” recalling the sensation of being hit by the RPG. “Spin.” “Horizon,” for the blurring of earth and sky as the chopper spun down. And so forth. He pressed on, eventually reconstructing the entire term of his captivity almost hour by hour. The margins of the Bible were beginning to fill with his jottings. Firimbi watched the pilot studying and making notes in his Bible and assumed Durant was a very religious man. “If you convert to Islam, you will be freed,” the captor said. “You pray to your God, and I’ll pray to mine, and maybe we’ll both be released,” Durant joked.

In Washington a whiff of failure is enough to induce widespread amnesia.

Since I was starting my work three years after the battle, I expected the historical portion of the work had already been done. Surely somewhere in the Pentagon or White House there was a thick volume of after-action reports and exhibits detailing the fight and critiquing our military performance. The challenge, I thought, would be fighting to get as much of it as possible declassified. I was wrong. No such thick volume exists. While the Battle of the Black Sea may well be the most thoroughly documented incident in American military history, to my surprise no one had even begun to collect all that raw information into a definitive account.

One reason why the battle had not been seriously studied is that the units involved, primarily Delta Force and the Rangers, operate in secrecy, and so much official information about the battle remains classified. It seems the military is best at keeping secrets from itself. But the bigger reason, I suspect, is the same one that sent politicians diving for cover. The Battle of the Black Sea was perceived outside the special operations community as a failure. It was not, at least in strictly military terms. Task Force Ranger dropped into a teeming market in the heart of Mogadishu in the middle of a busy Sunday afternoon to surprise and arrest two lieutenants of warlord Mohamed Farrah Aidid. It was a complex, difficult, and dangerous assignment, and despite terrible setbacks and losses, and against overwhelming odds, the mission was accomplished. It was, of course, a Pyrrhic victory. The mission was supposed to take about an hour. Instead, a large portion of the assault force was stranded through a long night in a hostile city, surrounded and fighting for their lives. Two of their high-tech MH-60 Black Hawk helicopters went down in the city, and two more crash-landed back at the base. When the force was extricated the following morning by a huge multinational rescue convoy, eighteen Americans were dead and dozens more were badly injured. One, Black Hawk pilot Michael Durant, had been carried off by an angry Somali mob and would be held captive for eleven days. News of the ca...

The fight itself was a terrible mismatch. The Somali death toll was catastrophic. Conservative counts numbered five hundred dead among more than a thousand casualties. Aidid could and did claim that his clan had driven off the world’s mightiest military machine. The Habr Gidr had successfully resisted UN efforts to force him to share power. The clan now celebrates October 3 as a national holiday—if such a thing is possible where there is no nation. The pullout of American forces, months after the battle, aborted the UN’s effort to establish a stable coalition government there. Aidid died in 1996 without uniting Somalia under his rule, a victim of the factional fighting the UN had tried to resolve. His clan still struggles with rivals in Mogadishu, trapped in the same bloody, anarchic standoff. Clan leaders I spoke with in that destroyed city in the summer of 1997 seemed to think that the world was still watching their progress anxiously. Photographer Peter Tobia and I were the only guests at the Hotel Sahafi during most of our stay there. We were the first and only Americans who have returned to Mogadishu trying to piece together exactly what happened. I told the Habr Gidr leaders who were hostile to our project that this would likely be their only chance to tell their side of the story, because there weren’t journalists and scholars lined up at the border. The larger world has forgotten Somalia. The great ship of international goodwill has sailed. The bloody twists and tu...

Nobody won the Battle of the Black Sea, but like all important battles, it changed the world. The awful price of the arrests of two obscure clan functionaries named Omar Salad and Mohamed Hassan Awale rightly shocked President Clinton, who reportedly felt betrayed by his military advisers and staff, much as an equally inexperienced President Kennedy had felt in 1961 after the Bay of Pigs. It led to the resignation of Defense Secretary Les Aspin and destroyed the promising career of General Garrison, who commanded Task Force Ranger. It aborted a hopeful and unprecedented UN effort to salvage a nation so lost in anarchy and civil war that millions of its people were starving. It ended a brief heady period of post–Cold War innocence, a time when America and its allies felt they could sweep venal dictators and vicious tribal violence from the planet as easily and relatively bloodlessly as Saddam Hussein had been swept from Kuwait. Mogadishu has had a profound cautionary influence on U.S. military policy ever since. “It was a watershed,” says one State Department official, who asked not to be named because his insight runs so counter to our current foreign policy agenda. “The idea used to be that terrible countries were terrible because good, decent, innocent people were being oppressed by evil, thug-gish leaders. Somalia changed that. Here you have a country where just about everybody is caught up in hatred and fighting. You stop an old lady on the street and ask her if she wa...

So, for better or worse, the USS Harlan County was turned away from the dock at Port-au-Prince one week after the Mogadishu fight by an orchestrated “riot” of fewer than two hundred Haitians. The U.S. government (and the UN) looked on as genocidal spasms killed a million people in Rwanda and Zaire, and as atrocity was piled on atrocity in Bosnia. There was some cynical posturing in the White House and Congress after the Battle of the Black Sea about never again placing U.S. troops under UN command, when everyone involved understood perfectly well that Task Force Ranger and even the QRF were under direct U.S. command at all times. Even the decision to target Aidid and his clansmen was driven by the U.S. State Department. The single most forceful advocate for Task Force Ranger’s mission in Mogadishu was U.S...

Hack-worth devotes a chapter of his 1996 book, Hazardous Duty, to the battle. Pausing to vent his disappointment with not having been invited to observe the action with the Rangers, he calls Garrison “inept” and accuses the White House and military brass of “striking heroic poses,” by not putting “their weapons systems where their mouths were.” Hackworth calculated that tanks would have spared six killed and thirty wounded. There are telling inaccuracies in Hackworth’s account, and it lacks even the pretense of fairness, but the colonel’s critique has nevertheless shaped understanding of the fight both in and out of the military. Garrison is the butt of his assault. He incorrectly suggests that the general was directing the battle from a helicopter overhead, and even quotes one of the platoon sergeants on the ground wishing that he’d had a “Stinger,” to shoot the general down (anyone who fought in Mogadishu that day would have known Garrison was not in the command helicopter). Hackworth concludes that Garrison should have refused to conduct the operation when the initial force package was trimmed. He quotes Joyce as follows: “Initially, I gave Garrison the benefit of the doubt, but the more Rangers I’ve talked to, the clearer it became that he had no good reason to launch the raid the way he did. The tactics were completely flawed. Garrison was a cowboy going for his third star at the expense of his guys.” From a man who lost his son in the fight, this is a terrible accusa...

The men who undertook the raid on October 3 were confident of their tactics and training and committed to their goals. While many offered incisive criticism of decisions large and small made before and during the fight, and differed substantially with their commanders on some points, they remain proud of successfully completing their mission. I was struck by how little bitterness there is among the men who underwent this ordeal. What anger exists relates more to the decision to call off the mission the day after the battle than anything that happened during it. The record shows that in the weeks prior to this raid, Garrison took more heat for being too careful about launching missions than doing so recklessly. The general, who retired in 1996 after a stint heading the JFK School of Special Warfare at Fort Bragg, is held in universally high regard by the men who served under him.

Aidid’s tactics were well-known, and the task force’s planning was effective, but only to a point. The Black Hawk helicopter proved more vulnerable to RPG fire than anticipated. Once two of them crashed (three others were crippled but made it back to friendly ground), the task force’s “techniques, tactics and procedures” were stretched beyond their limits. There was clearly insufficient reaction force standing by to rescue the pilots and crew of Super Six Two, Michael Durant’s helicopter. The CSAR bird was the primary contingency for a helicopter crash. It was a well-stocked, superbly trained chopper full of expert rescuers and ground fighters. They were deployed minutes after the crash of Cliff Wolcott’s Super Six One, and were instrumental in rescuing a portion of the crew and recovering the bodies of Wolcott and copilot Donovan Briley. But when Durant’s Black Hawk crashed twenty minutes later, there was no such rescue force at hand.

The men I interviewed who spent the night around the first crashed Black Hawk say they were pinned down. In strictly military terms, being pinned down means a force can do nothing. Arguably, if Task Force Ranger’s commanders had wanted to move the force out of the city they could have. More intensive air support was available in the form of Cobra attack helicopters attached to the QRF. But no such decision was made, and from the perspective of the men on the ground, they were pinned down. This is the opinion of everyone I interviewed, from the ranking officers to the lowliest privates. While it may have been possible to fight their way back to the base on foot, the men believe they would have sustained terrible losses. The men on the lost convoy took better than 50 percent casualties moving through the streets in vehicles. The force at crash site one would have had to carry their dead and wounded. The men holed up with Captain Steele at the southern end of the perimeter on Marehan Road balked at having to move one block on foot at the height of the battle. There is no doubt Garrison’s men, if so ordered, would have tried to fight their way out, but they stayed put for reasons that went beyond loyalty to the pinned body of Chief Warrant Officer Cliff Wolcott. Arguing otherwise puts a noble cast to the predicament, but falls short of the facts.

The president and Secretary of Defense of course bear ultimate responsibility for any actions of the U.S. military, but without the advantage of hindsight, their decisions regarding the deployment of Task Force Ranger are defensible. Trimming the AC-130 gunship from the initial force request, in light of growing congressional pressure to bring the troops home from Somalia, seems particularly so. Garrison himself felt the gunship was not only unnecessary, but likely to be a less effective firing platform over a densely populated urban neighborhood than the AH-6 Little Birds. If both the Little Birds and the gunship had been in the air, one or the other would have been severely restricted. The small helicopters, flying below the gunship, would have had to clear out to avoid crossing the gunship’s fire. As it was, the Little Birds provided extremely effective air support throughout the battle. To a man, the soldiers pinned down around the first crash site credit brave and skillful Little Birds’ pilots with keeping the Somali crowds at bay. The Somali fighters we interviewed in Mogadishu agreed. They believe the helicopters were the only thing that prevented a total rout of the pinned-down force. Soldiers trapped around the wrecked chopper understandably found themselves longing for the devastating firepower of the AC-130, which could have carved out a corridor of fire for their escape. But command concerns about limiting collateral damage were legitimate. The corridor of fire...

The suggestion that Garrison and his men should have refused to fight without getting their full force request puts me in mind of General George McClellan, whose battle-shy Union army stayed safely encamped for years demanding more and more resources. President Lincoln finally fired him for suffering a terminal case of “the slows.” The men of Task Force Ranger were daring, ambitious soldiers. They were more inclined to think in terms of working with what they had than refusing to work until they got everything they wanted.