Black Hawk Down

by Mark Bowden

  8

  Piloting the Little Bird Star Four One, Chief Warrant Officers Keith Jones and Karl Maier searched for and found the fallen Black Hawk minutes after it went down. They could tell by the way the front end of the bird had crumpled that Elvis and Bull were probably dead. Jones saw one soldier, Staff Sergeant Daniel Busch, on the ground propped against a wall bleeding from the stomach with several Somalis splayed on the ground around him.

  Landing in the big intersection near Busch would have been easier, but Jones didn’t want to be a fat target from four different directions. He eased the bird up the street between two stone houses and set it down on a slope. He and Maier felt themselves rock back when they touched down.

  As soon as they landed, Sammies came at them. Both pilots opened fire with handguns. Then Sergeant Smith, the operator who had hung on with one hand as the Black Hawk fell, and the second of the two soldiers Abdiaziz Ali Aden had seen climb out of the wreckage (Busch had been the first), appeared alongside Jones’s window.

  Over the din he mouthed to Jones, “I need help.” His one arm hung limp. Jones hopped out and followed Smith back to the intersection, leaving Maier to control the bird and provide cover up the alley.

  Just then, Lieutenant DiTomasso and his men rounded the corner and came face-to-face with the Little Bird. Maier nearly shot the lieutenant. When the pilot lowered his weapon, the startled DiTomasso tapped his helmet, indicating he wanted a head count on casualties.

  Maier gestured that he didn’t know.

  Nelson and the other Rangers hurried down the slope, ducking under the blades of the Little Bird. Nelson saw Busch leaning against a wall one block down with a bad gut wound. The Delta sniper had his SAW on his lap and a .45 pistol on the ground in front of him. There were two Somali bodies nearby. Busch, a devoutly religious man, had told his mother before leaving for Somalia, “A good Christian soldier is just a click away from heaven.” Nelson recognized him as the guy who beat all comers in the hangar at Scrabble. One poor guy had lost forty-one straight games to him. There was a mass of blood in his lap now. Busch looked ghostly white, gone.

  Nelson shot one of the Somalis on the ground who was still breathing and then lay behind the bodies for cover. He picked up Busch’s .45 handgun and stuck it in his pocket. The hulking frame of the Black Hawk was across the wide road to his right in the alley. Somalis climbing on the wreckage fled when they saw the Rangers round the corner.

  As the rest of the squad fanned out to form a perimeter, Jones and Smith dragged Busch’s limp body toward the Little Bird. Jones helped Smith into the small space behind the cockpit, and then stooped and lifted Busch to the doorway, setting him in Smith’s lap. Smith wrapped his arms around the more badly wounded Delta sniper as Jones tried to apply first aid.

  Busch had been shot just under the steel belly plate of his body armor. His eyes were gray and rolled up in his head. Jones knew there was nothing he could do for him.

  The pilot stepped out and climbed back into his seat. On the radio he heard air commander Matthews in the C2 bird.

  —Four One, come on out. Come out now.

  Jones grabbed the stick and told Maier, “I have it.”

  He told the command net:

  —Four One is coming out.

  9

  Under the steady drone of his rotors, layered deep in the overlap of urgent calls in his headphones, Chief Warrant Officer Mike Durant had picked out the voice of his friend Cliff.

  —Six One going down.

  Just like that. Elvis’s voice was oddly calm, matter-of-fact.

  Durant and his copilot, Chief Warrant Officer Ray Frank, were circling barren land north of Mogadishu in Super Six Four, a Black Hawk just like the one Elvis had been flying. They had two crew chiefs in back, Staff Sergeant Bill Cleveland and Sergeant Tommie Field, waiting behind silent guns. For years they had done little but prepare rigorously for battle, but here they were stuck in this calm oval flight pattern over sand, a good four-minute flight from the action.

  The shadow of their chopper glided over the flat, empty landscape. Mogadishu ended abruptly and turned to sand and scrub brush north of October 21st Road. From there to the blazing horizon was little but stubby thorn trees, cactus, goats, and camels in a hazy ocean of sand.

  Durant thought about his friends, Elvis and Bull. They were skilled, veteran warriors. It didn’t seem possible that a motley rabble of Somalis had managed to shoot them out of the air. Bull Briley had seen action from Korea to the invasion of Panama. Durant remembered seeing Bull angry the night before. He’d gotten a chance to phone home, the first chance in months, and had gotten the damned answering machine. God, wouldn’t it be sad if ...

  Durant continued his methodical turns. Every time he banked west it felt like he was flying straight into the sun.

  Going down over Mog was bad news but not catastrophic. It was a contingency. They had practiced it since their arrival, with Elvis’s own helicopter, in fact—which was weird. It wasn’t even that shocking, at least not to the pilots, who had a finer sense of the risks they ran than most of the men they flew. Most of the Rangers were practically kids. They had grown up in the most powerful nation on earth, and saw these techno-laden, state-of-the-art choppers as symbols of America’s vast military might, all but invulnerable over a Third World dump like Mog.

  It was a myth that had survived the downing of the QRF’s Black Hawk. That was chalked up as a lucky shot. 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. And the Black Hawk was damn near indestructible. It could take a hammering without even changing course. It was designed to stay in the air no matter what.

  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. Not that it deterred Durant and the other pilots in the least. Taking risks was what they did. The 160th SOAR, the Night Stalkers, chauffeured the most elite soldiers in the U.S. military into some of the most dangerous spots on the planet.

  Durant was a compact man. He was short, fit, dark-haired, and had this way of standing ramrod straight, feet set slightly wider than his shoulders, as if daring someone to knock him down. If he looked better rested than most of the guys back at the hangar it was because Durant had searched out a sleeping space in the small cooking area of a trailer behind the JOC. All the pilots slept in the trailers, which were relatively luxurious compared to the cots in the hangar. Given the precision and alertness flying demanded, not to mention the responsibility for their crew and their multimillion-dollar high-tech flying machines, Garrison considered well-rested pilots a priority. Durant had done better than most. The cooking trailer was air-conditioned. His part of the deal was he had to break down his bunk every night and clear the space for the cooks, but it was well worth the hassle.

  Durant had been with the Night Stalkers long enough to be a veteran of dangerous low-flying night missions in the Persian Gulf War and the invasion of Panama. He had grown up in Berlin, New Hampshire, with a reputation for being a cutup and an athlete, a football and hockey player. Age and experience had changed him. Many of the people in his neighborhood in Tennessee, just over the state line from the Night Stalkers’ base at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, didn’t even know what he did for a living. His own family often didn’t know where he was.

  It was hard to keep track. If Durant wasn’t on a real mission like this one, he was off somewhere in the world practicing for one. Practice defined
the lives of the Night Stalkers. They practiced everything, even crashing. When they were done they flew off someplace new and practiced it again, again, and again. Their moves in the electronic maze of their cockpits were so well rehearsed they had become instinctive.

  On the day Durant’s unit was dispatched to Somalia they had gotten only two hours’ notice. Enough time to drive home and spend fifteen minutes with his wife, Lorrie, and year-old son, Joey. Never mind that his parents were due in town the next day for a long-planned, weeklong visit, that Joey’s first birthday was in three days, and Lorrie was due to resume schoolteaching in a week, or that the house they were building was only half finished (with Durant playing subcontractor). Lorrie knew better than to protest. She had just pitched in to help him pack. It wasn’t immediately apparent, but Durant was also an emotional man. He fit in with his daring aviation unit, men whose allegiance was as much to action as flag, but the sentiment he felt for his wife and baby son, who had just started to crawl, was closer to the surface than with some of these guys. There were men in his unit who made a show of how hard it was to leave but who secretly lived for missions and weren’t happy unless in danger. Durant wasn’t that way. It was hard to leave Lorrie and his baby boy, to miss his parents and the birthday party. He had been looking forward to it. He phoned his folks to tell them, and to say how sorry he was. He was not allowed to say where he was going. There was no time even to write out a list of the things that needed doing on the new house (he would send that via E-mail from Mogadishu, way overusing his allotted number of bytes in the batch-mailing). Durant stood with his travel bag in the doorway of their home with that stiff posture of his, kissed Lorrie good-bye, and went off to war. Even his leavings were well practiced.

  After Elvis crashed, Durant knew three things would happen quickly. The ground forces would begin moving to the crash site. Super Six Eight, the CSAR bird, one of the Black Hawks in the holding pattern with Durant, would be summoned to deliver a team of medics and snipers. His bird, Super Six Four, would be asked to fill Elvis’s vacant slot flying a low orbit over the action providing covering fire.

  For now, they waited and circled. On a mission like this one, with so many birds in the air, breaking discipline meant becoming a greater hazard than the enemy. For Durant, the most harrowing part of his mission was done. Inserting Chalk One, his fifteen-man portion of the ground force, had meant descending into an opaque cloud of dust to rooftop level over the target building, avoiding poles and wires and squinting down through the Black Hawk’s chin bubble into the brown swirl to stay lined up while the men slid down ropes to the ground. All Durant could do was hold blind and steady, and pray that none of the other birds flitting around him in the cloud got thrown off schedule or bumped off course. A complex mission like this one was choreographed as carefully as a ballet, only dangerous as hell. Guys got killed all the time just training for exercises like this, much less ducking RPGs and small-arms fire. Durant had inserted Chalk One without incident. The rest was supposed to be easy.

  Now nothing was going to be easy.

  10

  Admiral Jonathan Howe’s first inkling that something was amiss in Mogadishu came when air traffic controllers at the UN compound forced his plane to circle out over the ocean for a time before landing.

  Howe was returning from meetings in Djibouti and Addis Ababa, exploring a plan for bringing Aidid peacefully to heel. When they were cleared to land, Howe saw attack helicopters refueling and uploading ammo on the tarmac by the Task Force Ranger hangar. When he landed, Howe telephoned his chief of staff. He was told about the Ranger raid and the downed helicopter. The aide told him there was a big fight going on in the city and he would probably be stuck for a while at the airport.

  Howe was a slender, white-haired man whose pale complexion hadn’t even pinked after seven months in Mogadishu. His staff joked that it was from all those years aboard submarines, although in Howe’s distinguished naval career he had commanded his share of surface vessels, everything from battleships to aircraft carriers. Whatever the cause, he seemed immune to sunlight, even Somalia’s. Aidid’s propaganda sheets had dubbed him “Animal Howe,” but the envoy’s calm, polite manner belied the nickname. He had served as deputy national security adviser for President Bush and had helped with the transition in the White House to the Clinton administration, so impressing the new team that he had been talked out of a comfortable Florida retirement to assume the unenviable task of supervising an even trickier transition in Somalia. He was Boutros-Ghali’s top man in Mog, effectively running the mission on the ground.

  It was not an easy assignment. Howe had slept for months on a cot in his office on the first floor of the old U.S. embassy building, which was falling apart. For some of the time he had a tin-roofed cabin, but regular shellings generally drove him and the other civilians at the compound inside the stone walls of the main building. There were no toilets in the embassy, and so few portable ones outside, that the men toted plastic bottles to relieve themselves. They ate three meals a day out of a cafeteria on the grounds. A story in The Washington Post that suggested the UN staff enjoyed luxurious accommodations had provoked bitter laughter.

  More than anyone, Howe had been responsible for bringing the Rangers to Mogadishu. He had pushed his friends in the White House and Pentagon so hard that summer for a force to snag Aidid that in Washington they were calling him “Jonathan Ahab.” He was convinced that getting rid of the warlord—not killing him, but arresting him and trying him as a war criminal—would cut through the tangle of tribal hatred that sustained war, anarchy, and famine.

  The state of the city had shocked him when he arrived eight months earlier. It was a savage place. Everything had been shot up, nothing worked, everything of value had been looted, and nobody was in charge. Here was a country not just at ground zero, but below zero. The very means of recovery had been destroyed. The hobbled predicament of the place was reflected in the number of land-mine victims, men, women, and children pulling themselves around on crutches. The UN intervention had ended the famine, but where would Somalia go from there? Efforts to build a coalition government out of the nation’s feuding clans were still far from successful. Nine out of ten Somalis were unemployed, and most of those who did work were employed by the UN and the United States. The factional fighting had gone beyond anything rational or even understandable from the admiral’s perspective. He felt contempt for the men responsible, for men like Aidid, Ali Mahdi, and the other warlords, the very leaders needed to set Somalia back on its feet.

  It soon became clear to Howe that power sharing was not in the plans of Aidid and his Somalia National Alliance (SNA), the political/military arm of the Habr Gidr. Having been the principal engine of Barre’s defeat two years earlier, Aidid and his clan felt it was their turn to rule. They had purchased that right with blood, the ancient currency of power. Ali Mahdi and all the other lesser faction leaders were enthusiastic about nation-building plans. Why wouldn’t they be? The UN was offering them a share of power they could never wrest from Aidid on their own.

  With the 38,000-strong military force of UNITAF (Unified Task Force) in the country, the backbone being U.S. Marines and the army’s 10th Mountain Division, the warlords had stopped fighting. But when the last of the Marines pulled out on May 4 and the 10th was relegated to backup duties as the QRF, the situation predictably deteriorated. The worst incident had been the June 5 slaughter of twenty-four Pakistanis. The next day the UN had pronounced the SNA an outlaw faction. Aidid was officially dealt out of the nation-building process. Over the next few weeks, Howe had authorized a $25,000 bounty for the warlord as gunships flattened Aidid’s Radio Mogadishu and UN troops invaded the warlord’s residential compound. To no avail. The Habr Gidr was insulted by the paltry sum being offered for its leader. They countered with a defiant $1 million reward for the capture of “Animal” Howe. Radio Mogadishu continued broadcasting its propaganda with mobile antennae, and the wily old general just melted into his city.
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  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 to accuse the UN of genocide. Aidid had certainly used starvation as a weapon against rival clans, hijacking and withholding world food shipments. The warlord also knew the value of terror—some of the dead Pakistani soldiers had been disemboweled and skinned.

  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. If he lacked the means to remove Aidid, he would get the means. He still had friends, friends in very high places, friends who owed him, who had talked him into this job. One of them was Anthony Lake, President Clinton’s national security adviser. Another was Madeleine Albright, America’s emissary to the UN, who was an unabashed enthusiast of New World Ordering. Flush with success against Saddam Hussein and the collapse of the Soviet Union, there were plenty of politicians, diplomats, and journalists with bright hopes for a new millennium of worldwide capitalist free markets. America’s unrivaled big stick could right the world’s wrongs, feed the hungry, democratize the planet. But the generals, most notably outgoing Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell, demanded more solid reasons for getting their soldiers killed. Howe found some allies in the administration, but strict opposition from the Pentagon brass.