Black Hawk Down

by Mark Bowden

  The war wasn’t over yet in Mogadishu, however. The soldiers who had come through the fight unscathed expected things to get worse before they got better. They did what they could to salute their fallen brothers and move on. In the days following the battle the Night Stalkers erected a makeshift memorial before the JOC in memory of the men they’d lost. General Garrison assembled all of the men for a memorial service, and captured their feelings of sadness, fear, and resolve with the famous martial speech from Shakespeare’s Henry V:

  Whoever does not have the stomach for this fight, let him depart. Give him money to speed his departure since we wish not to die in that man’s company. Whoever lives past today and comes home safely will rouse himself every year on this day, show his neighbor his scars, and tell embellished stories of all their great feats of battle. These stories he will teach his son and from this day until the end of the world we shall be remembered. We few, we happy few, we band of brothers; for whoever has shed his blood with me shall be my brother. And those men afraid to go will think themselves lesser men as they hear of how we fought and died together.

  24

  Willi Frank got the word about her husband exactly a week after he was reported missing. It had been a terrible week. Those who hadn’t gotten final word on the fate of their men had continued to scrutinize the news photos and videotapes of the dead.

  One of the most widely circulated shots of a body being dragged through the streets, the one with the left leg bent up awkwardly, was Tommie Field. The other of the dragged bodies, the one most often seen on TV, was Randy Shughart. The still photo of a body draped backward over a handcart was Bill Cleveland. There was no official confirmation from the army, but the families knew.

  Willi was attending the funeral service for Cliff Wolcott when she heard beepers go off in several places around the church. Two of the beepers that sounded were held by members of her support unit.

  They took her aside after the service. Willi thought they were escorting her to spend a few minutes with Chris Wolcott. Instead, they told her Ray’s body had been identified.

  “How do you know it was Ray?” she asked them. “Was his hair gray?”

  The hair was gone on the body, they said, but they described his remains. The body had been clothed, they told her. She asked them to describe the pants, the underpants. Ray had left on such short notice that Willi hadn’t had time to dry out his military skivvies. Instead she’d packed his civilian underwear. When they told her what kind of shorts he was wearing, she knew.

  25

  In his second week of captivity, Durant was moved again, this time to what appeared to be a private residence with a perimeter fence. 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.

  On the radio they played selections of music that Durant liked.

  During one of his nights in captivity, Durant had a dream. He dreamed he was one of the Rangers, and that he was supposed to get on a chopper with Chalk Four. Instead he stumbled blindly, asking, “Where’s Chalk Four? Where’s Chalk Four?” He didn’t recognize the faces of the people he was questioning. Suddenly, everyone else in the dream was gone. Overhead a chopper rose into the sky and flew off, leaving him alone on the ground.

  26

  When Robert Oakley arrived in Mogadishu on October 8, Aidid was still in hiding. It took several days to arrange, but he eventually met with the warlord’s clan. He told the Habr Gidr leaders that the U.S. military operation against Aidid was over and that Task Force Ranger’s original mission had ended. The Somalis were skeptical.

  “You’ll see for yourself over time that it’s true,” Oakley said. Then he told them that President Clinton wanted Durant released immediately, without conditions. The Somalis were incredulous. The Rangers had rounded up sixty or seventy men from their leadership. The top men, including the two most important men taken on October 3, Omar Salad and Mohamed Hassan Awale, were being held in a makeshift prison camp on an island off the coast of Kismayo. Any release of Durant would at least involve a trade. That was the Somali way.

  “I’ll do my best to see that these people are released, but I can’t promise anything,” Oakley said, pointing out that the Somalis were, technically, in the custody of the UN. “I’ll talk to the president about it, but only after you’ve released Durant.”

  Then the former ambassador delivered a chilling message. He was careful to say, “This is not a threat,” but the meaning was plain.

  “I have no plan for this, and I’ll do everything I can to prevent it, but what will happen if a few weeks go by and Mr. Durant is not released? Not only will you lose any credit you may get now, but we will decide that we have to rescue him. I guarantee you we are not going to pay or trade for him in any way, shape, or form. ... So what we’ll decide is we have to rescue him, and whether we have the right place or the wrong place, there’s going to be a fight with your people. The minute the guns start again, all restraint on the U.S. side goes. Just look at the stuff coming in here now. An aircraft carrier, tanks, gunships ... the works. Once the fighting starts, all this pent-up anger is going to be released. This whole part of the city will be destroyed, men, women, children, camels, cats, dogs, goats, donkeys, everything. ... That would really be tragic for all of us, but that’s what will happen.”

  The Somalis delivered this message to Aidid in hiding, and the warlord saw the wisdom of Oakley’s advice. He offered to hand the pilot over immediately.

  Mindful of not upstaging his old friend Admiral Howe, Oakley asked them to delay for a few hours to give him time to leave the country. He asked them to turn Durant over to Howe, and he flew back to Washington.

  27

  Firimbi told Durant he was going to be released the next day. The propaganda minister was very happy to deliver this news, but also very nervous. He was happy for his friend and for himself. He joked that both of them were going to be released. Firimbi would be free to go back to his normal life. He thought releasing Durant without any conditions was a stunning demonstration of Aidid and Habr Gidr munificence. He got choked up just talking about it. This gesture, he said, would undo at a stroke the awful images of the mob mutilating dead American soldiers, a scene that embarrassed Firimbi and other educated men of his clan. He repeatedly urged Durant to reassure him that he would tell the world how well he had been treated in captivity.

  The decision was such a good one, Firimbi grew afraid something would spoil it. What if an angry faction of Somalis got wind of the deal and came looking for Durant to kill him? What if the Americans were setting them up? The Americans could send someone to kill Durant, and the world would believe Aidid and the Habr Gidr had done it. Firimbi requested more protection, and the clan ringed the residence where Durant was held with armed men.

  That
morning, Firimbi helped Durant wash. This time, instead of being thrown in the back of a car and sat on, men arrived with a litter to carry him out gently and placed him in the back of a flatbed truck. Durant knew this was it. He would be nervous until he was back in American hands, but Firimbi was so happy and excited he knew that it was true.

  They drove him to a walled compound and waited. When Red Cross officials arrived, an army doctor came in with the team and examined him. He wanted to give the pilot a shot for the pain, but Firimbi said no. He was afraid the doctor would poison Durant.

  The pilot was handed over without ceremony. Red Cross officials gave him a letter from Lorrie and from his parents that they had been unable to deliver. The doctor who examined him emerged from the compound to tell reporters that the pilot had a broken leg, a shattered cheekbone, a fractured back, and relatively minor bullet wounds to his leg and shoulder, but had been treated well by his captors.

  “The leg was in a splint, but it hasn’t been set and is quite painful,” the doctor said.

  Then he was carried out by Red Cross officials. Durant clutched the letter and tears rolled from his eyes as he was carried past reporters and driven back to the airport Ranger base where he had taken off eleven days earlier.

  Every American who survived the Battle of Mogadishu would be home within the month. Most would stay bitter about the decision to call off their mission. If it had been important enough to get eighteen men killed, and seventy-three injured, not to mention all the Somalis dead or hurt, how could it just be called off the day after the fight? Within weeks of Durant’s release, American Marines (at Oakley’s direction) would escort Aidid to renewed peace negotiations. President Clinton would accept Oakley’s plea on behalf of the Somali leaders. Several months later Omar Salad, Mohamed Hassan Awale, and every man captured by Task Force Ranger was released.

  The reinforced task force was waiting for Durant when the Red Cross convoy arrived at the airport. They had turned out, a force now of more than a thousand, dressed in khaki fatigues and floppy desert hats, glad to at last have something to celebrate. They formed a corridor leading from the base driveway to the platform of the transport plane that would carry Durant to Germany, where Lorrie had flown and was waiting for him. The men all had paper cups with a swallow of bourbon, ostensibly from the fifth of Jack Daniels the pilot had stashed in his rucksack and warned his buddies, in his note from captivity, to keep their hands off.

  It was a day of joy and enormous relief, but also a day of sadness. Durant had just learned that he would be the only man from the crew of Super Six Four and its two brave Delta defenders to come back alive. He smiled and fought back tears as he was carried through the corridor on a litter, an IV in his arm, clutching his unit’s red beret.

  The men around him cheered and then, as the stretcher approached the ramp to the plane, they began to sing. The song started in one or two places at first, boldly, then spread to every voice.

  They sang “God Bless America.”

  EPILOGUE

  The Battle of the Black Sea, or as the Somalis call it, Ma-alinti Rangers (The Day of the Rangers), is one that America has preferred to forget. The images it produced of dead soldiers dragged by jeering mobs through the streets of Mogadishu are among the most horrible and disturbing in our history, made all the worse by the good intentions that prompted our intervention. There were no American reporters in Mogadishu on October 3–4, 1993, and after a week or so of frenzied attention, world events quickly summoned journalists elsewhere. President Clinton’s decision just days after the fight to end Task Force Ranger’s mission to Somalia accomplished what he intended; it slammed the door on the episode. In Washington a whiff of failure is enough to induce widespread amnesia. There was a Senate investigation and two days of congressional hearings that produced a partisan report blaming the president and Secretary of Defense Les Aspin, who resigned two months later, but that was it.

  Even inside the military, where one might expect to find strong professional interest in the biggest firefight involving American soldiers since Vietnam, there appears to have been little in the way of a detailed postmortem. Proper respects were paid to the dead, and the heroism of many soldiers formally honored, but beyond that, if the battle’s decorated veterans are to be believed, the battle is a lost chapter.

  When I began working on this project in 1996, my goal was simply to write a dramatic account of the battle. I had been struck by the intensity of the fight, and by the notion of ninety-nine American soldiers surrounded and trapped in an ancient African city fighting for their lives. My contribution would be to capture in words the experience of combat through the eyes and emotions of the soldiers involved, blending their urgent, human perspective with a military and political overview of their predicament. With the exception of great fiction and several extremely well written memoirs, the nonfiction accounts of modern war I’d read were primarily written by historians. I wanted to combine the authority of a historical narrative with the emotion of the memoir, and write a story that read like fiction but was true. 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. So instead of just writing a more vivid version of the story, I found myself in the lucky and exciting position of breaking new ground.

  In the months since portions of this book premiered as a newspaper series in The Philadelphia Inquirer, I have spoken to hundreds of active U.S. military officers whom I met at conferences or seminars, or who contacted me seeking copies of the newspaper series or more detailed information about certain aspects of the fight. Among that number have been teachers at the military academies and the Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, the National Defense Analysis Institute, the Military Operations Research Society, officers at the U.S. Marine Corps’ training base at Parris Island, the Security Studies Program at MIT, and even the U.S. Central Command, where the commander, General Anthony Zinni, invited me to take part in a seminar before his staff at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Florida. I was flattered in every instance, but uneasy with the idea that our armed forces would rely on a journalist with no military background to inform them about a battle fought by many men who are still on active duty. As one of the former Delta team leaders remarked after hearing of yet another invitation I’d received, “Why aren’t they talking to us?”

  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 casualties and images of gleeful Somalis abusing American corpses prompted revulsion and outrage at home, embarrassment at the White House, and such vehement objections in Congress that the mission against Aidid was immediately called off. Major General William F. Garrison’s men may have won the battle, but, as he’d predicted, they lost the war.

  The victory was even more hollow for Somalia, although it’s not clear even five years later how many people there understand that. 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 turns of Somali clan politics no longer concern us. Without natural resources, strategic advantage, or even potentially lucrative markets for world goods, Somalia is unlikely soon to recapture the opportunity for peace and rebuilding afforded by UNOSOM. Rightly or wrongly, they stand as an enduring symbol of Third World ingratitude and intractability, of the futility of trying to resolve local animosity with international muscle. They’ve effectively written themselves off the map.