Day of the Rangers: The Battle of Mogadishu 25 Years On

by Leigh Neville

  CHAPTER 8

  THE MOGADISHU MILE

  “I can remember how tired everyone looked and how I felt. As we came to major intersections, I watched Rangers summon all their energy to sprint across the intersection. Bullets strafed the streets, kicking dirt up around their feet.”

  Lieutenant Tom DiTomasso, Chalk 2 and 2nd Platoon Commander

  0542 HOURS: ASSAULT MOVING ALL ELEMENTS OUT OF TARGET SITE. AH-6 ELE CONTINUES FIRE SUPPORT.

  After Wolcott’s body was finally released, the first APCs set off from the Super 61 crash site carrying the wounded as the surviving Rangers, operators and 10th Mountain soldiers began to collapse their perimeter. Tom DiTomasso recalled the bittersweet feeling:

  As we moved across the street to link up with the rest of the company, I could hear the explosions [of the charges placed on Super 61] and see the black smoke rising above the helicopter where friends had died.

  Captain Steele briefed us that we would have to move by foot to National Street, approximately two miles away. From there we would link up with Malaysian and Pakistani armored vehicles, Humvees from the 10th Mountain Division and 3rd Platoon. Everyone was exhausted. Lieutenant Perino’s platoon, Chalks 1 and 3, would lead the run out; my Chalk 2 would pull rear security. Chalk 4, the other element of my platoon, had exfiltrated back to the airfield on Humvees, after numerous attempts to link up with me at the crash site.

  “It was communicated by Scott Miller and Van Arsdale – we loaded up the KIAs first and then we put the wounded on and did a combined foot and vehicle movement. The APCs were moving and we were moving alongside of them like a mechanized infantry unit,” remembered Norm Hooten. Unfortunately, once the first Condors reached Hawlwadig and began taking small-arms fire, several sped away, leaving many of the Rangers and operators dangerously exposed.

  0605 HOURS: NOT ENOUGH TRANSPORT, 50 PAX [PEOPLE] STILL DISMOUNTED. ASSAULT REQUESTING MORE APCS.

  Kurt Smith recalled:

  There was no room inside the APCs for the 40–50 TF members who were able to move on their own. Norm [Hooten] instructed the team that we would run alongside the APCs and use them for cover on the way out. The APCs began moving down the street past the target building and turned south on Hawlwadig Road. At this point, they accelerated to about 30 miles per hour and left us behind.1

  A number of the Rangers were hit as they attempted to run along with the departing APCs. One of the Ranger medics Richard “Doc” Strous, who had been wounded earlier by an RPG fragment, was struck by a round that ignited a flashbang on his webbing. It detonated and the medic disappeared in the explosion, only to reemerge unharmed moments later. Sergeant Randy Ramaglia was hit by gunfire as he crossed one of the intersections:

  I remember just running across the road, just blindly shooting and hoping sounds of the shots is enough to get somebody’s head down. We get to the intersection where we set up our initial blocking position … They’re still shooting; I’m beside this wall … and this is when it felt like somebody had walked up behind me and just hit me with a ball bat in the shoulder. It slung me forward … I just remember, you know, kinda recovering for a moment and “what happened?”

  I’m figuring somebody shot a piece off the building or threw … a rock. And that’s when [Specialist John] Collett said he’d been shot … and then his eyes just got huge. And, he’s like, “Sergeant, you’ve been shot” … I did all my vital signs. [Shoulder] just felt tight, it just felt like somebody had wrapped it up in a bandage. But it didn’t hurt … And I’m thinking I got shot in the back, in the torso. And if it came through it more likely is gonna penetrate a lung or at least bust a rib. And that was like the biggest thing I was concerned about.2

  With some of the Condors gone, around 25 Rangers and operators were left with none of their rolling cover. The men on foot fought their way out on the infamous “Mogadishu Mile.” They paused at each intersection and placed suppressive fire down each thoroughfare to enable their teams to cross. Smith recalled:

  The situation was desperate. If we had taken a single casualty on the run out of the area, the TF could have been rendered immobile again. We had also had enough of allowing the Somalis to exploit the ROE [rules of engagement] to their advantage. On this run down Hawlwadig Road, if we saw a single Somali trying to interfere with our movement, he was put down immediately: man, woman, or child. We moved down Hawlwadig Road for eight blocks before turning east on National Street. There, a number of Humvees were lined up on the side of the road. We were still taking fire from Somali militia. F-Team consolidated behind a Humvee.3

  0620 HOURS: ALL PAX LOADED, CONVOY MOVING OUT.

  In one of the Condors, wounded Delta operator Mike Moser was considering his chances of survival in the lightly armored vehicle:

  When we were at last under way, I recall no rounds striking our APC during the drive to the Pakistani stadium. There was certainly a great deal of shooting going on outside – I attributed this to the revised ROE – we were quite ready to suppress [or] destroy anything at all in order to move safely. I remember being consumed with the question of what my final milliseconds might feel like if an RPG were to pierce the skin of our APC. I really preferred to take my chances moving on foot rather than ride inside this massive target. My legs were still working fine and I always regret not voicing my wish to run alongside my team.

  Ranger Lieutenant Perino was moving with his men from the crash site: “AH-1 Cobras and our AH-6 Little Birds began to strafe the streets parallel to us. The whole force moved from building to building, using doorways and the APCs for cover. Each time a Ranger would reach an alleyway, he would fire down it while another Ranger would leapfrog around him.”4 Awaiting the Ranger chalks, operators and CSAR team were “approximately five Humvees and three APCs.” Perino and his men clambered aboard a Pakistani M113.

  John Belman from the CSAR team said: “I do recall Malay vehicles with their guns elevated just shooting, not actually shooting at anybody but guns elevated at a 45-degree angle and firing. When I saw that I was like, ‘Are they really doing that?’ but they were. Those rounds have to come down somewhere.” Jeff Struecker agreed. “They are just tearing everything up – twin MAG58s, I get it, you want fire superiority but you’re going to run out of ammunition.”

  Struecker was waiting with the Task Force vehicles. He explained:

  The plan was for [Lieutenant] Larry Moores and I to be the last two vehicles to leave and we didn’t have any hatches, we didn’t have any doors [on the Humvees]. Everybody else drives away. The guys on foot were told to go down National Street, the vehicles are waiting there. The plan was never “You run all the way out of the city.” Somehow the word came down that we got everybody, everybody is on the Malaysian APCs so we make the decision to leave. Tanks leave, APCs leave, 10th Mountain leaves, and we are the last vehicles.

  I told Paulson who was on the .50 cal., who at this point had been shot twice, to face the gun to the rear because we were the last vehicle. Paulson said, “Hey Sergeant, there’s like 50 guys running down the road chasing after us.” I said “Paulson, light them up, man, because we’ve got everyone on the vehicles” and he says, “No, those are our dudes.”

  Larry Moores and I backed up, back to the target building and as many guys as physically could jumped into our Humvees, and I mean jumped into the back, jumped into the doors, literally hanging off the bumper with their feet dangling on the ground and probably 15 to 17 guys on each Humvee but we couldn’t take everyone – they had to run out the rest of the way on foot. Jeremy Kerr had the pedal to the floor and the vehicle was going 30 kilometers an hour.

  He remembers it was as if the population of Mogadishu had woken up and all decided to shoot at them again: “It was crazy – getting shot from both directions as you crossed the intersection. The intersections were bad, real bad and the fire was overwhelming. We kind of split the convoy up so no one would be in the intersections.”

  Combat Controller Jeff Bray was one of the last running along
on foot, often running backwards to direct AH-6 strikes as the Little Birds flew top-cover for the embattled column, trying to suppress enemy fire. “There was a lot [of fire] on the way out, RPGs and all sorts of stuff,” confirmed Belman. “I didn’t have any ammunition, I got a little bit from the 10th Mountain guys but I was on my last magazine. There was a Delta guy called John B and he threw one to me as we were running toward where the vehicle pick-ups were.”

  Up ahead, Norm Hooten and his team were trying to keep pace with the APCs. Hooten explained:

  When the armor stopped at intersections, we’d shoot under the wheels. We were much more aggressive going out than going in. Going in we’d only shoot identified targets, going out we’d shoot suppressively down intersections. Instead of waiting to find a target, suppress whilst your team is crossing. Suppress the road then move to the next road and suppress that one. I remember [earlier] talking to my team, one of my team mates fired a 203 and I said, “Hey, careful where you shoot that, make sure you have a target,” and on the way out I really didn’t care where he shot it!

  A number of 10th Mountain Humvees were waiting at the eastern end of National Street, some 1200 meters from the intersection where the Olympic Hotel was located, to carry out those who couldn’t fit into the APCs. “We moved out maybe a half mile and we linked up with 10th Mountain. They had a lot of vehicles in and around a parking garage and when we got there some of us loaded into vehicles, some of us went on foot and we moved back to the Pakistani stadium,” Hooten added.

  John Belman recounted:

  [Sergeant First Class] Al Lamb and I jumped on the same 10th Mountain Humvee on the way out but other than that everybody else [from the CSAR team] came out on a collection of three Humvees. We ended up getting separated from the main convoy going to the Pakistani stadium and went off on our own lost patrol back to the airfield. I don’t know how we got separated but we drove into the far end of the airfield. Then we had to go back out because one of their vehicles [from 10th Mountain] was missing and we had to go find them. And just as we’re about to go back out, with no ammo, we heard the [missing vehicle] had made it to the Old Port.

  “Captain Steele put Chalk 2 at the rear of the foot movement and we were the most wounded. When Chalk 2 got to the link-up point, all the vehicles were gone. The crowd kept coming so we just kept running,” recounted Tom DiTomasso. He was down to his last magazine and most of his Rangers were out of ammunition for the last 45 minutes of the exfiltration. Delta Sniper Troop Sergeant Major Rick W even used his custom .45 pistol to shoot a number of gunmen after his CAR15 ran dry. “I heard the story of Rick W, the Delta Sergeant Major on our bird, pulling his .45 and taking a couple of people out,” confirmed Belman.

  After the QRC commander learned of the dismounted Rangers and operators, he called an immediate halt for all vehicles not yet at the stadium to ensure that those running the “Mogadishu Mile” were retrieved. DiTomasso and his men, however, were finally picked up by other Rangers. He explained:

  Larry Moores, the platoon leader for 3rd Platoon, was at the Pakistani stadium looking for me. When the guys rolled in with the Malaysians and Pakistanis, Larry’s saying “Where’s Chalk 2?” So he took his guys, loaded them back up in their Humvees and drove back into the city. Basically he saw us running down the road, he stopped, did a U-turn, we jumped on his Humvees and they took us to the Pakistani stadium.

  “It took us probably until 8 o’clock the next morning. We went to the soccer stadium. It would have been too much of a fight to go back to the base so we took everyone to the nearest UN [location] which was the Pakistani soccer stadium,” remembered Struecker. He recalled the peculiar sensation of the enemy fire ceasing as they left Habr Gidr territory:

  Seven warlords had split the city up and said, “This city block is mine [and] that city block is yours,” and when we crossed the line we were no longer in that warlord’s territory and it was like somebody flipped the switch. We had rough ideas where those lines were but we didn’t know exactly where they were.

  The imagery that I’ll never forget was driving away with all of these [Rangers] hanging off Larry Moore’s vehicle, the sun is coming up and the road has so many bullet casings on it that the road looks like it’s glittering from gold. It dawned on me that those were bullet casings – that’s how many bullets we fired tonight – and then you cross the line and the firing stops completely.

  Norm Hooten was similarly taken aback:

  I can distinctly remember being in a gunfight and then being in a friendly neighborhood where everyone was cheering for us. It was like crossing a line – from running down the street shooting at every intersection and then linking up with 10th Mountain and into an area where all the Somalis are on the side of the road cheering – it was just surreal. It sums up Mogadishu, it’s split up by tribe and clan. So we’d rolled out of the control of the Habr Gidr clan …

  Finally, after 18 hours of pitched battle, Task Force Ranger returned to the Pakistani-controlled soccer stadium. “As much as the UN weren’t exactly our friend up until that point, I will say on the day the Malaysians and Pakistanis they put themselves in the line of fire and were able, along with 10th Mountain and the residual forces from Task Force Ranger, to put something together that was pretty remarkable,” recalled John Belman.

  0630 HOURS: CONVOY PULLING INTO PAKISTANI STADIUM.

  At the stadium they were greeted by a scene of devastation. Colonel Boykin said years later he recalled: “A five-ton truck, and we had it stacked with bodies, dead and wounded. My soldiers. And we dropped the tail on that truck and the blood poured out the back of it, like water.” The CIA Station Chief was horrified at the thought that his intelligence and his recently recruited Somali source in Team Three may have led Task Force Ranger into an ambush. He asked SEAL Captain Eric Olsen, “Did I take these guys into an ambush?” “No, it wasn’t an ambush,” Olsen replied, “It was just a shootout.”5

  Belman remembered:

  I walked over to where they had a bunch of ammunition stacked and grabbed a bunch of magazines so that I had all the ammo and everything else that I needed and then I walked back and started talking to [Ranger Sergeant] Alan Barton who was another guy who’d been on the CSAR team. He started telling me all the people who’d been killed and that’s when it first hit me.

  Tom DiTomasso summed up the feelings of his men, saying: “It was an immense feeling of sorrow, that’s the best way I can describe it. It was not celebration.”

  Wounded Delta operator Mike Moser recalled the moment they arrived:

  At the Pakistani stadium, upon exiting the APC I was greeted with the sight of a much larger CCP than our little neighborhood courtyard [back near at the Super 61 crash site]. I saw quite a few guys covered up, and many more on litters being tended to. [Delta surgeon] Doc Marsh may have been right there but I have no memory of him. I needed no real treatment since my little scratch was certainly not getting worse.

  Steve D, a sniper from Super 61 – who also happened to be an 18D Special Forces medic – and who was relatively unscathed, [I] think his back was damaged though, was treating several guys, including our Squadron Sergeant Major, Tommy C, who was shot following his exit from the CSAR Black Hawk onto Super 61. I walked over to Tommy to check on him and give him a thumbs up and a smile. I made a half-assed attempt to be useful to Steve, but he and the other medical folks had things under control.

  I began to review the corpses, curious who we had lost, Ranger or ours, but for some reason felt it was bad taste to peek under the tarps. Through a few conversations here and there I tried to gain an understanding of who was hurt [or] killed. Maybe here I learned about Super 64. As this triage process was still unfolding, there was an evacuation shuttle which began to transport guys back to the Task Force HQ area at the airport.

  Within an hour or so I was loaded onto an old Huey MEDEVAC bird outfitted with litter racks and lifted out. At the airfield, I was met by our CI [Counter-Intelligence] guy, who took custody of m
ost of my kit. At some point I was triaged. My wound was relatively minor, so I was sent to the Swedish combat hospital for surgical exploration/cleaning – our JSOC medical team concentrated on the urgent folks.

  Great narcs [drugs] – I remember a very slow, hallucinatory return to consciousness watching a ceiling fan spin above me. No real repairs done, [the surgeons] just opened me up to accommodate the swelling to come. Despite the small geography of the elbow, that round did not blast the joint apart as I had thought – just a tiny bone chip. Radial nerve trauma, however, made the arm useless and it would remain so for months to come.

  Struecker also recalled the Hueys:

  We coordinated with some Huey UH-1Hs to fly the guys who were really, really bad back to our surgeon [Doctor Rob Marsh, Delta’s surgeon, was located at the airfield with his JMAU]. Those helicopters just kept on flying turn after turn, fully loaded with wounded and that’s when it kind of overwhelmed me – “Holy crap, a lot of people just got killed or wounded” – and I walked away without a scratch.

  0810 HOURS: BEGIN SHUTTLE OF RANGERS, FROM STADIUM RTB. NET MONITORING WEAK INTERMITTENT TRANSMISSIONS FROM VIC OF CRASH SITE #2.

  The surviving lift Black Hawks ferried the survivors back from the Pakistani stadium to the Task Force Ranger hangar. “We were cycling back and forth from the stadium to bring guys back. I think I did three round trips and [Super] 67 did four,” recalled Izzo. The Star flight MH-6s also flew the Delta operators back to the hangar.

  The most serious casualties were flown to the US military medical facility in Germany. Moser explained:

  At some point I was returned to a bay full of Task Force wounded and saw some other familiar faces including Rick Lamb, who amazingly caught the sliver of RPG steel between the halves of his brain and lived, though at the time I think he was still unaware of his wound’s severity and told me it was a scratch. Don’t recall how many days it took, but we all were lifted out to Landstuhl on a C-141 STRATEVAC [Strategic Evacuation].