Black Hawk Down

by Mark Bowden

  —Six Four is inbound.

  Moving in fast and low over the city, Durant caught glimpses of the action beneath his chopper’s chin bubble through the swirling clouds of smoke and dust. The neat box-structure they had outlined earlier, with Rangers positioned on all four corners of the target block, had completely broken down. It was hard to make sense of the action below. He could see the general area where Elvis’s bird had gone in, a dense neighborhood of small stone houses with tin roofs in a crosshatch of dirt alleyways and wide cross streets, but the crashed Black Hawk was in such a tight spot between houses he couldn’t spot it. He caught glimpses of small Ranger columns moving up the dusty alleys, crouched defensively, rifles up and ready, taking cover, exchanging fire with the swarms of Somalis who were also running in that direction. Durant flipped a switch in the cockpit to arm his crew chiefs’ guns, two six-barreled 7.62 mm miniguns capable of firing four thousand rounds per minute, but warned them to hold fire until they figured out where all the friendlies were. Durant fell into Elvis’s vacant place in a circular pattern opposite Super Six Two, the Black Hawk piloted by Chief Warrant Officer Mike Goffena and Captain Jim Yacone, and began trying to get in sync with them.

  —Six Four, say location, Goffena asked.

  —We are about a mile and a half to your north.

  —Six Four, keep a good eye on the west side.

  —Roger.

  The idea was to maintain a “low cap,” a sweeping circle over the battle area. On the radio Durant heard that the CSAR bird had been hit, but had managed to rope in the rescue team and was still flying. On the radio Goffena and Yacone were already pointing out targets for Durant’s gunners, but it was hard to get visually oriented. Durant’s seat was on the right side of the airframe, and he was flying counterclockwise, banking left, so mostly he was seeing sky. It was maddening. When he leveled off, he was flying so low and fast that the view down through the chin bubble was like peering down through a tube. Flashing fast beneath his feet were rusty tin roofs, trees, burning cars and tires. There were Rangers and darting Somalis everywhere. He couldn’t tell if he was being shot at. What with the roar of his engines and the radio din Durant could never tell for sure if he was being shot at. He assumed he was. Two birds had been hit already. He was doing all this and listening and also varying his airspeed and altitude, trying to make his Black Hawk a more challenging target.

  It was on his fourth or fifth circle, just as things were starting to make sense below, that he felt his chopper hit something hard.

  Like an invisible speed bump.

  14

  After they had delivered Private Blackburn, the Ranger who had fallen from the helicopter, to the small rescue column that would return him to base, Sergeants Jeff McLaughlin and Casey Joyce had set off north on Hawlwadig to rejoin their element, Chalk Four. They hadn’t gotten far. They were distracted by a gunman down an alley who would pop out to shoot and then duck back before they could return fire. McLaughlin covered the alley so Joyce could scamper across. Then they both got down on one knee at opposite sides of it waiting to nail this guy. From a distance, all the Somali fighters looked the same, skinny black guys with dusty bushes of hair, long baggy pants, and loose, oversized shirts. While most of them would wildly spray bullets and then run, some were fiercely persistent. Occasionally one would run right out into the open, blazing away, and invariably be mowed down. This one was smart. He would lean out just long enough to take aim and shoot, then duck back behind the corner. McLaughlin tried to anticipate him. The shooter’s head would appear, the sergeant would squeeze off a well-aimed round, and the man would duck away again.

  McLaughlin was determined to get him. He stayed down on one knee around a corner trying to hold his M-16 perfectly steady, drawing a bead on the spot down the alley where the shooter would briefly appear. Sweat stung the sergeant’s eyes. He grew so absorbed in this fruitless duel that he lost track of time and place and was startled when a platoon sergeant yelled his name.

  “Hey, Mac! Come on!”

  The convoy was moving on the street behind him, rolling north on Hawlwadig. Everybody seemed to be on it except him. He looked over for Joyce and he was gone, too. He had already climbed into a vehicle. McLaughlin crossed the road and trotted along on the far side of one Humvee, past the contested alley. The Humvee was full.

  “Jump on the hood!” shouted one of the men inside.

  McLaughlin got one long leg up before it occurred to him that this was a bad idea. Vehicles were bullet magnets. He pictured himself threading through this deadly madness spread-eagled on top of a Humvee. It was bad enough to be in one of these streets, and quite another to be a six-five Ranger bull’s-eye mounted on top. He ran around the vehicle and opened the door and insisted that Private Tory Carlson shove over. Carlson did, and McLaughlin crawled on the seat and set his M-16 on the rim of the open right rear window.

  About a hundred yards farther up, the convoy came upon the remainder of Sergeant Eversmann’s beleaguered Chalk Four. Eversmann and his men had been pinned down ever since Blackburn fell from the chopper. They had seen the helicopter crash. When he pulled himself up to his considerable height, Eversmann could see the wreckage of Super Six One from one of the angled alleys leading east. Captain Steele had radioed with orders for the sergeant to move his chalk down to it on foot.

  “Roger,” Eversmann had said ... meaning, like, yeah, right. There was little chance of their moving anywhere. In the distance he could already see men in helmets and flak vests and desert uniforms around the wreckage, so he knew Americans had gotten there. They were near enough for him to instruct his men to hold their fire in that direction. He was down to only about four or five men who could still fight.

  The convoy arrived like an answer to his liftoff Hail Mary. Eversmann saw his friend Sergeant Mike Pringle in the turret of McKnight’s lead Humvee, working the .50 cal hard with his head down so far he was actually peering out under the gun. It brought a smile to Eversmann’s face in spite of everything.

  “Hey, Sergeant, get in! We’re driving to the crash site,” shouted McKnight.

  “Captain Steele wants us to move over on foot; it’s right down there,” said Eversmann, pointing.

  “I know,” said McKnight. “Get in. We’re driving over.”

  Schilling provided covering fire up Hawlwadig as Eversmann and his men moved across the road. The chalk leader herded his men aboard the crowded vehicles, loading the wounded first, literally piling them in the back on top of other guys, then finding room for the others. He was the last man standing on the street as McKnight shouted for him to hurry up. Eversmann checked off the list of names in his head, determined to account for every man in his chalk. He’d lost track of McLaughlin and Joyce and the medics he’d sent off with Blackburn, but they were not at his intersection or anywhere down the block. The column was rolling again. There was nothing for him to do but leap on the back of one. He landed on somebody, and found himself flat on his back looking up at the sky, moving through the streets with Somalis still shooting at them, realizing what a terrific target he was and that he couldn’t even return fire. I’m going to get shot and there isn’t a damn thing I can do about it. As helpless as he felt, he was relieved to be back with the others and moving. If they were together and rolling it meant the end was near. The crash site was just blocks away. Then he would position himself better for the ride out.

  While Eversmann had been loading his men, Schilling ran out to the middle of the road to gather up Chalk Four’s two fast ropes, which were still stretched across Hawlwadig. The task force had been drilled to recover the three-inch-thick ropes, which were hard to replace. Despite the gunfire, he fetched one. It was hard work hauling it back and he was already sweaty and dirty and tired, so Schilling asked John Gay, a SEAL in the Humvee behind his, if he’d help him with the other. Gay was crouched behind cover returning fire. He gave Schilling a shocked stare and then rolled his eyes.

  “Forget the fucking ropes!” he shou
ted.

  It dawned on Schilling that he’d just risked his life for a long strand of braided nylon. He got back into the Humvee wondering at himself. As the convoy started up again, the gunfire was heavier than ever. Rounds pinged off the armored sides of the vehicles, and every few minutes the wobbly smoke trail of an RPG would zip past. Schilling spotted a donkey tied to an olive tree in an alleyway. The animal stood perfectly still in the maelstrom, clearly distressed, long ears folded back and tail pointing straight down. He’d seen the donkey when they first pulled up and assumed it would eventually be hit. As they pulled away he caught another glimpse of it, still standing stock still, unscathed.

  Nobody in the rear vehicles knew where they were going. Many of the men didn’t know that a helicopter had been shot down. One who did not was Eric Spalding, the Ranger who had designed the successful rat trap back in the hangar. Spalding was in the passenger seat in the cab of the second truck, the one with the prisoners. He assumed when they began moving, that was it. The mission was over. They were on their way home. Driving was Specialist John Maddox. They had the front windshield flipped up and out so Spalding could shoot forward.

  He leaned his M-16 out the truck window. Although an expert marksman, he was no longer just squeezing off one careful round after the next. There were too many targets, too many people shooting at him. It was as if “Kill-an-American Day” had been declared in Mog. It seemed like every man, woman, and child in the city was out trying to get them. There were people in alleyways, in windows, on rooftops. Spalding kept shooting his rifle dry. Then he would shoot with his 9 mm Beretta pistol with one hand while he replaced the rifle magazine with the other. He just wanted to get the hell out of there. When the column took a turn to the right, he wondered what was up. The mission is over. Why aren’t we going back? There wasn’t enough time to find somebody to ask.

  After going two blocks east, the convoy made another right turn. They’d lost track of the men moving to the crash site on foot. Now the convoy was bearing south, heading toward the back end of the target house and toward National Street, the paved road they’d come in on. At least Spalding thought that was where they were headed. Most of the streets in Mogadishu looked the same, rutted orange sand with big gouges in the middle and treacherous mounds of debris, shabbily mortared stone walls on both sides, stubby olive trees and cactus bushes and crisscrossing dirt alleys. The intersections were the problem. Every time the truck approached an alley Spalding would lie out across the warm hood and just open up as they rolled through. He could hear nothing but the sound of automatic weapons fire and bullets snapping around him and pinging off the truck.

  A woman in a flowing purple robe darted past on the driver’s side of the truck. Maddox had his pistol resting on his left arm, pretty much shooting at whatever moved.

  “Don’t shoot,” Spalding shouted. “She’s got a kid!”

  The woman abruptly turned. Holding the baby in one arm, she raised a pistol with her free hand. Spalding shot her where she stood. He shot four more rounds into her before she fell. He hoped he hadn’t hit the baby. They were moving and he couldn’t see if he had or not. He thought he probably had. She had been carrying the baby on her arm right in front.

  Why would a mother do something like that with a kid on her arm? What was she thinking? Spalding couldn’t get over it. Maybe she was just trying to get away, saw the truck, panicked, and raised the gun.

  There wasn’t time to fret over it.

  15

  Black Hawk pilot Mike Goffena was coming up behind Mike Durant’s Super Six Four when the grenade hit. It blew a chunk off the tail rotor. Goffena saw all the oil dump out of it in a fine mist, but the mechanism stayed intact and everything seemed to still be functioning.

  —Six Four, are you okay? Goffena asked.

  The Black Hawk is a heavy aircraft. Durant’s weighed about sixteen thousand pounds at that point, and the tail rotor was a long way from where he sat. The question came before he had even figured out what happened. Goffena explained that he had been hit by an RPG and that there was damage to the tail area.

  “Roger,” Durant radioed back, coolly.

  Nothing felt abnormal about the bird at first. He did a quick check of all his instruments and the readings were all okay. His crew chiefs, Cleveland and Field, were unhurt in the back. So after the initial shock, Durant felt relief. Everything was fine. Goffena told him he had lost his oil and part of the gearbox on the tail rotor, but the sturdy Black Hawk was built to run without oil for a time if necessary, and it was still holding steady. Matthews, the air mission commander, had also seen the hit from his seat in the orbiting C2 bird. He told Durant to put the Black Hawk on the ground, so the pilot of the stricken chopper pulled out of his left-turning orbit and pointed back to the airfield, about a four-minute flight southwest. Durant could see the base off in the distance against the coastline. He noted, just to be safe, that there was a big green open area about halfway there, so if he had to land sooner he had a place to put it. But the bird was flying fine.

  Goffena followed Durant for about a mile, to a point where he felt confident Super Six Four would make it back. He had just started to turn around when Durant’s tail rotor, the whole thing, the gearbox and two or three feet of the vertical fin assembly, just turned into a blur and evaporated.

  Inside Super Six Four, Durant and copilot Ray Frank felt the airframe begin to vibrate. They heard the accelerating high-speed whine of the dry gear shaft in its death throes. Then came a very loud bang as it blew apart. With the top half of the tail fin gone, a big weight was suddenly dropped off the airframe’s back end. Its center of gravity pitched violently forward, and the bird began to spin. After a decade of flying, both Durant’s and Frank’s reactions were instinctive. To make the airframe swing left meant pushing gently on the left foot pedal. Durant now noticed he had already jammed his left pedal all the way to the floor and his craft was still spinning rapidly to the right—with no tail rotor there was no way to stop it. The spin was faster than Durant ever imagined it could be. Details of earth and sky blurred like patterns on a spinning top. Out the windshield he saw just blue sky and brown earth.

  Durant tried to do something with the flight controls. Frank, in the seat next to him, had the presence of mind to do exactly the right thing. The power control levers for the engines were on the ceiling of the cockpit. Frank had to fight the spin’s strong centrifugal force to raise his arms. In those frantic seconds he somehow managed to pull one lever back, shutting off one engine, and to pull the other one halfway back. Durant shouted into his radio.

  —Going in hard! Going down! Raaaay!

  The plummeting helicopter’s spin rate suddenly slowed. Just before impact its nose pulled up. Whether for some aerodynamic reason or something Durant or Frank did inside the cockpit, the falling chopper leveled off. With the spin rate down to half what it had been, and with the craft fairly level, the Black Hawk made a hard, but flat landing.

  Flat was critical. It meant there was a chance the men in the helicopter were still alive.

  16

  Yousuf Dahir Mo’alim was near the man who fired the grenade. Mo’alim was behind a tree in an alley that went behind the Bar Bakin Hotel, a smaller white stone building that was one block south of the Olympic Hotel. He ducked behind the tree to hide from the Black Hawk overhead. As he did one of his men, part of a group of twenty-six militia who had come running from the neighboring village of Hawlwadigli, dropped to one knee in the middle of the alley and pointed up his Russian antitank weapon. The tube had been fitted with a metal funnel, which was welded on the back end at an angle to direct the back blast away from the shooter’s body.

  “If you miss, I’ve got another round!” Mo’alim shouted.

  They were veteran fighters, guns for hire, mostly, although everybody was now fighting the Americans for free. Mo’alim’s father had died in 1984 in fighting between Somalia and Ethiopia, and at age fifteen the son was recruited to take his place. He was a ske
letal young man, lost in oversized shirt and pants, with deep hollow cheeks and a goatee that filled out his narrow chin. He had fought for two years as one of Siad Barre’s soldiers, but as the tide of that insurrection changed, he had slipped away from his unit to join Aidid’s rebel troops. He was a veteran of many street fights, but none as fierce as this.

  He had organized the men in his village, a labyrinth of twisting cactus-lined dirt paths around rag huts and tin-roofed shanties just south of the Bakara Market area, into an irregular militia for hire. They remained primarily allied to Aidid, because they belonged, as he did, to the Habr Gidr clan. Mainly they defended their village from other marauding bands of young fighters. They provided security for anybody willing to pay, including, at times, the UN and other international organizations. Occasionally they went looking for loot themselves. Men like Mo’alim and his crew were called mooryan, or bandits. They lived by the gun, mostly M-16s and the Russian AK-47s that could be bought at the market for a million Somali shillings, or about two hundred dollars. They also carried antitank weapons, everything from World War II–era bazookas to the more reliable and accurate Russian-made RPGs. They took payment for their services in rice or khat. The drug took its toll. Another word for the mooryan was dai-dai, or “quick-quick,” for their jumpy ways and nervous tics. They were fearless fighters, and they often died young. But these days all the mooryan in southern Mogadishu had a common enemy. Some had begun calling themselves, in a play on the word “Rangers,” Revengers.

  They knew the best way to hurt the Americans was to shoot down a helicopter. The helicopters were a symbol of UN power and Somali helplessness. When the Rangers arrived they had seemed invincible. The Black Hawks and Little Birds were all but invulnerable to the small arms that made up most of the Somali arsenal. They were designed to punish with impunity from a distance. The Rangers, when they came, descended from helicopters quickly, grabbed their captives, and were gone before a significant force could be formed to fight them. When they traveled on the ground, it was in armed convoys that moved fast. But every enemy advertises his weakness in the way he fights. To Aidid’s fighters, the Rangers’ weakness was apparent. They were not willing to die.