by Mark Bowden
Chief Warrant Officer Cliff Wolcott, the pilot of Super Six One, was not one to complain about anything. His unflappable cool had earned him the nickname “Elvis,” that and his dead-on impression of the late rock idol. There was a crude cartoon profile of Presley painted on his cockpit door, with the words “Velvet Elvis” underneath. He was a popular pilot. It was his Black Hawk and crew that had decided to go on several unauthorized aerial safaris, and after killing and butchering a two-hundred-pound boar (Wolcott helped hide the carcass from the commanders), they went back out and killed about a dozen more to hold a surprise barbecue for the task force. The shooting got so furious on that hunt that one of the snipers put a hole through the Black Hawk’s rotor. Wolcott took the heat, which was mild, because the pig roast was a huge hit with the men, who had been eating MREs and cafeteria food for more than a month. Wolcott brought back a two-hundred-pound kudu that he himself bagged from the seat of his Black Hawk—he planned to have the trophy head mounted. Wolcott was the kind of pilot who would complain to his crew chiefs that he wished he could change places with them— “I have to fly the helicopter while you guys in back get to have all the fun.”
His exploits were legendary. He had flown secret missions hundreds of miles behind enemy lines into Iraq during the Gulf War, refueling in flight, to infiltrate troops searching for Saddam Hussein’s SCUD missile sites.
When the grenade hit, Super Six One was in a low orbit over the target area, varying speed between fifty and seventy knots, trying to avoid moving over the same streets on every pass.
In back were Dowdy and the other crew chief, Staff Sergeant Charlie Warren, and four Delta snipers seated on ammo cans. They were busy selecting targets below, the crew chiefs with their miniguns and the snipers with their custom rifles. At first they shot only at armed Somalis who were moving toward the target area, but as the volume of fire intensified they’d begun targeting anyone with a weapon. Since many of the armed men stayed in crowds, pretty soon Dowdy was mowing down whole crowds of Sammies.
He felt justified. When the QRF’s Black Hawk had gone down, Somali mobs had mutilated the corpses of the dead crew chiefs. This being the first mission since then, as a fellow Black Hawk crewman, Dowdy was in full payback mode. Whenever he saw a Somali fall under his guns he’d scream the name of one of the men killed in the crash, something he had vowed to do. The D-boys in back kept looking up at him, wondering what he was doing. Dowdy wasn’t being choosey about his targets. He figured anybody moving toward the fight at that point wasn’t bringing flowers.
He dropped one Somali with the best shot he’d ever made. One round hit the man in the left buttock and another splashed into his right upper torso. The man ran but then stumbled, dropped his gun, and then collapsed in the road.
“Nice shot, Ray,” said pilot Wolcott over the intercom.
When he was close to using the last of his own ammunition, after expending thousands of rounds, Dowdy reached across to the right side of the aircraft where Warren sat, fishing for one of his partner’s ammo cans.
“Hey, I’ve got a guy with an RPG,” said Warren. “He’s five o’clock moving to six o’clock,” which meant, since the chopper was in a left-turning orbit, the guy ought to be showing up on Dowdy’s side any second.
He couldn’t spot him.
“Is he by a building or something you can describe?”
Warren started to answer when they felt the jolt. Dowdy had that second or two of feeling all right about it, but when the chopper started its spin, he knew they were in trouble. He gripped his seat and looked forward to the cockpit. Dowdy knew that the correct emergency procedure for a tail rotor hit was to pull back on the power control levers, taking the engines off line. This eliminated torque, which was what caused the craft to spin counter to the direction of the rotors.
He heard Elvis ask his copilot, Chief Warrant Officer Donovan “Bull” Briley:
“Hey, Bull, you gonna pull the PCLs off line or what?”
Wolcott delivered this line in his typically teasing fashion. Briley was already pulling the levers. He yanked them back so hard the whole aircraft shook.
The spin continued. The second turnabout was more violent. This was all happening in seconds but to Dowdy it seemed much longer.
Elvis made a last radio transmission.
—Six One going down.
Dowdy and Warren shouted at the D-boys in back to get down and to hold on. The crew chiefs were on seats that could absorb at least some of the impact, but the snipers were sitting upright in back without protection. The impact could crush their spines. The operators scrambled off the ammo cans and spread-eagled—the better to spread the impact out over their bodies. As the spin accelerated, they reached for something to hold on to. One of them, Sergeant First Class Jim Smith, grabbed hold with one hand to a bar behind Warren’s seat, and just then the accelerating spin sent his feet flying out the side door. Smith’s shoulder wrenched with pain but he hung on.
Dowdy glanced down and noticed he hadn’t fastened his seat belt.
The helicopter clipped the top of a house; then it flipped over hard and slammed into the alley nose first and tilted on its left side.
4
Nelson watched dumbstruck as the chopper fell.
“Oh, my God, you guys, look at this,” he shouted. “Look at this!”
Waddell gasped, “Oh, Jesus,” and fought the urge to just stand and watch the bird go down. He turned away to keep his eyes on his corner.
Nelson shouted, “It just went down! It just crashed!”
“What happened?” called Lieutenant DiTomasso, who came running.
“A bird just went down!” Nelson said. “We’ve gotta go. We’ve gotta go right now!”
Word spread wildly over the radio, voices overlapping with the bad news. There was no pretense now of the deadpan military cool, that mandatory monotone that conveyed everything under control. Voices rose with surprise and fear:
—We got a Black Hawk going down! We got a Black Hawk going down!
—We got a Black Hawk crashed in the city! Six One!
—He took an RPG!
—Six One down!
—We got a bird down, northeast of the target. I need you to move on out and secure that location!
—Roger, bird down!
It was more than a helicopter crash. It cracked the task force’s sense of righteous invulnerability. The Black Hawks and Little Birds were their trump card in this God-forsaken place. The choppers, more than their rifles and machine guns, were what kept the savage mobs at a distance. The Somalis couldn’t shoot them down!
But they had seen it, the chopper spinning, falling, one of the D-boys hanging on with one hand, both feet in the air, riding it down.
5
Super Six One had clipped the roof of Abdiaziz Ali Aden’s house as it crashed. Aden was a slip of a teenager with thick bushy hair and glossy black skin, one of eleven children, eight of whom still lived in the house about six blocks east of the Bakara Market. That Sunday afternoon most of them were at home, napping or relaxing after a late lunch, staying out of the hot sun.
Aden had heard the helicopters coming in low, so low that the big tree that stood in the central courtyard of his stone house was uprooted. Then he heard shooting to the west, near Hawlwadig, the big road that passed before the Olympic Hotel three blocks over. He ran toward the noise, crossing Marehan Road outside the door and then Wadigley Road, keeping to the north walls of the alley. The sky was dark with smoke. As he neared the hotel, the air around him sizzled and cracked with gunfire. Above him were helicopters, some with lines of flame coming from their guns. He ran two blocks with his head down, staying against the wall, until he saw American trucks and Humvees, with machine guns mounted on them, shooting everywhere.
The Rangers wore body armor and helmets with goggles. Aden could see no part of them that looked human. They were like futuristic warriors from an American movie. People were running madly, hiding. There was a line of Soma
li men in handcuffs being loaded onto big trucks. On the street were dead people and a donkey dead on its side, its water cart still attached and upended.
It terrified him. As he started back toward his house, one of the Black Hawks flew over him at rooftop level. It made a rackety blast, and wash from its rotors swept over the dirt alley like a violent storm. Through this dust, Aden saw a Somali militiaman with an RPG tube step into the alley and drop to one knee.
The militiaman waited until the helicopter had passed overhead. Then he leaned the tube up and fired at the aircraft from behind. Aden saw a great flash from the back end of the tube and then saw the grenade climb and explode into the rear of the helicopter, cracking the tail. It began turning, so close that Aden could see the pilot inside struggling at the controls. It was tilted slightly toward Aden when it hit the roof of his house with a loud crunch, and then slammed on its side into the alley with a great scraping crash in a thick cloud of dust.
Fearing it had crushed his house and killed his family, he ran back. He found his parents and brothers and sisters trapped under a broad sheet of tin roof. They had stepped outside and had been standing against the west wall when the helicopter hit and the roof came down on them. They were not badly hurt. Aden worked his way past the huge black body of the crashed helicopter, which had fallen sideways so that the bottom faced him. He helped pull the roof off his family. Afraid that the helicopter would explode, they all ran across Marehan Road, the wide, rutted dirt road just out their front door, to a friend’s house three doors up.
When a few minutes passed with no flames and no explosion, Aden came back to guard his house. In Mogadishu, if you left your house open and undefended it would be looted. He entered through the front door and stood in the courtyard by the uprooted tree. The wall that faced the alley where the helicopter had fallen was now just a heap of stones and dusty mortar. Aden saw an American soldier climb out of the hulk, and then another with an M-16. He turned and ran back out the door to a green Volkswagen parked against the wall across the same alley where the helicopter had fallen. He crawled under it, curling himself up into a ball.
When the American soldier with the gun rounded the corner he saw Aden, peered at him closely, probably looking for a weapon, and then moved on. He stopped near the front end of the car—Aden could have reached out and touched the soldier’s boots—and pointed his gun at a Somali man with an M-16 across the wide street. The two men fired at the same time but neither fell. Then the Somali man’s gun jammed and the American didn’t shoot. He ran over to the wall across Marehan Road, closer, and shot him. The bullet went in the Somali man’s forehead. Then the American ran over and shot him three more times where he lay on the road.
As he did this a big Somali woman came running from a narrow alley beside the house, right in front of the soldier. Startled, he quickly fired his weapon. The woman fell face forward, dropping like a sack, without putting out her arms to break the fall.
More Somalis came now, with guns, shooting at the American. He dropped to one knee and shot them, many of them, but the Somalis’ bullets also hit him.
Others came out from hiding then, and moved toward the crash. Then a helicopter landed right on Marehan Road and these Somalis scattered. It seemed impossible that a helicopter could fit in such a small space. It was one of the little ones. The roar of the helicopter was deafening and dust swirled around. Aden couldn’t breathe. Then the shooting got worse.
One of the pilots was leaning out of the helicopter aiming his weapon south, toward the crest of the hill. Another ran from the helicopter toward the one that had crashed. The shooting was even worse then. It was so loud that the sound of the helicopter and the guns was just one ongoing explosion. Bullets hit and rocked the old car. Aden curled himself up tight and wished he was someplace else.
6
Cameras on the three observation choppers captured the disaster close-up and in color. General Garrison and his staff watched on screens at the JOC. They saw Wolcott’s Black Hawk moving smoothly, then a shudder and puff of smoke near the tail rotor, then an awkward counterrotation as Super Six One fell, making two slow turns clockwise, nose up, until its belly bit the top of a stone building and its front end was cast down violently. On impact, its main rotors snapped and went flying. The body of the Black Hawk came to rest in a narrow alley on its side against a stone wall in a cloud of dust.
There wasn’t enough time for anyone to consider all the ramifications of that crash, but the sick sinking feeling that came over officers watching on screen went way beyond the immediate fate of the men on board.
They had lost the initiative. The only way to regain it now would be to bolster strength at the crash site, but that would take time and movement, which meant casualties. There were already casualties on the downed bird. There was no time to reflect on causes or consequences. If Elvis’s chopper had gone down in flames, the general could just pull everybody out with the prisoners as planned and mount a second mission to retrieve the bodies and make sure the chopper was completely destroyed—there were sensitive items on the bird that the army didn’t want just anybody to have.
But seeing men climb out of the wreckage, and watching as the unscripted battle now joined around it, the ground shifted beneath Garrison’s feet. The next moves were part of a contingency they had rehearsed. Another Black Hawk would take Super Six One’s place over the target area, and the CSAR bird would move in and drop its team. Those fifteen men would give emergency medical treatment and provide some protection for the crash survivors, but they couldn’t hold out long. Already mobs of Somalis were moving toward the crash site from all directions. Securing it would take all of the men on the ground. The mission had been designed for speed: swiftly in, swiftly out. Now they were stuck. The entire force at the target building and on the convoy would have to fight their way to the crash site. They had to move fast, before Aidid’s forces surrounded it and cut it off. If that happened, the crash survivors and the CSAR team would have no hope. Delta Force and the Rangers were the best the army had to offer. Now they were going to be tested.
It was hard to imagine any other force of 150 men trapped in a hostile city, besieged on all sides by a heavily armed populace, who had a reasonable chance of surviving. They were at the eye of a terrible storm. The observation birds showed burning tires sending tall black columns of smoke around the perimeter of the contested blocks. Many thousands of armed Somalis were thronging toward those plumes from all directions, on vehicles and on foot. People were erecting barricades and digging trenches across roads, laying traps for American vehicles, trying to seal them in. The streets surrounding the target house and crash site were already mobbed. You could see the ring closing.
Word was sent to the 10th Mountain Division troops across the city to mobilize immediately. This was going to be one hell of a gunfight.
7
“We gotta go,” Nelson told Lieutenant DiTomasso. “We gotta go right now.”
From Chalk Two’s position at the target block’s northeast corner, Nelson had gotten a pretty good fix on where Super Six One had crashed. He could see crowds of Somalis already running that way.
“No, we’ve got to stay here,” said the lieutenant.
“There’s a crowd over there,” argued Nelson, the impending disaster overcoming his deference for rank.
“Stand fast,” DiTomasso said.
“I’m going,” said Nelson.
Guns poked out of a window across the street, and just then he spotted two Somali boys running, one with something in his hand. Nelson dropped to a knee and fired a burst with the M-60. Both boys fell. One had been holding a stick. The other got up and limped for cover.
Specialist Waddell was feeling the same urge to run toward the crash. They had all heard about the way the Somalis had mutilated the remains of the men who died in the previous Black Hawk crash. In the hangar they had talked it over. They resolved that such a thing would never happen to their guys.
DiTomasso held
Nelson back. He raised Captain Steele on the radio.
“I know where it is. I’m leaving,” the lieutenant said.
“No, wait,” said Steele. He could understand the urge to go help, but if Chalk Two just took off, the target building perimeter would break down. He tried to get on the command net, but the airwaves were so busy he couldn’t be heard.
He waited fifteen seconds.
“We need to go!” Nelson was shouting at DiTomasso. “Now!”
As he started running, Steele called back.
“Okay, go,” he told DiTomasso. “But I want somebody to stay.”
DiTomasso shouted, “All right, Nelson. Make it happen.”
With some of the men already in pursuit of Nelson, the lieutenant ran down the street to Sergeant Yurek. He would leave half the chalk.
“You keep the fight here,” he told Yurek.
Eight Rangers moved at a trot. DiTomasso caught up with Nelson and his M-60 in front. Waddell was in the rear with his SAW. They moved with their weapons up and ready. Somalis took wild shots at them from windows and doorways as they moved, but no one was hit. Twice on their way east, Nelson dropped to a knee and opened fire on the crowd moving parallel to them one block north.
When they rounded the corner three blocks over, there was a wide sand road that sloped down to the intersection of the alley where Super Six One lay. Straight in front of them—and this just astonished Nelson—one of the Little Birds had landed. Its rotors were turning in a space so small the tips were just inches from the stone walls.