Black Hawk Down

The rescue column would have had to have left tour or five hours before it did to save his life, assuming surgeons could have saved him--by no means a definite thing. Again, the quarrel is over Garrison's call, not with weak-kneed Washington politicians undercutting forces in the field. Maybe Garrison, General Wayne Downing, General Joseph Hoar General Powell, and the rest of the military command should have insisted on armor and the AC-130 from the start. They didn't. I believe these are issues over which well-meaning military experts differ. But it was, as the general noted in his letter, his call.

The suggestion that Garrison and his men should have refused to fight without getting their full force request puts me in mind of General George McClellan, whose battle-shy Union army stayed safely encamped for years demanding more and more resources. President Lincoln finally fired him for suffering a terminal case of “the slows.” The men of Task Force Ranger were daring, ambitious soldiers. They were more inclined to think in terms of working with what they had than refusing to work until they got everything they wanted.

As battles go, Mogadishu was a minor engagement. General Powell has pointed out that the deaths of eighteen American soldiers in Vietnam would not have even warranted a press conference. Old soldiers may snort over the fuss generated by this gunfight, but it speaks well of America that our threshold for death and injury to our soldiers has been so significantly lowered. This does not mean that military action is never worth the danger, or the price. Our armed forces will be called upon again to intervene in obscure parts of the world-as they already have in Bosnia. To prepare for these twenty-first-century missions, there are probably few more important case studies than this one.

The mistakes made in Mog weren't because people in charge didn't care enough, or weren't smart enough. It's too easy to dismiss errors by blaming the commanders. It assumes there exists a cadre of brilliant officers who know all the answers before the questions are even asked. How many airborne rescue teams should there have been? One for every Black Hawk and Little Bird in the sky? Some of the failures deserve further study. During the battle, efforts to steer the lost convoy from the air turned into a black comedy. At risk of a cliché, how is it that a nation that could land an unmanned little go-cart on the surface of Mars couldn't steer a convoy five blocks through the streets of Mogadishu? Why did it take the QRF fifty minutes to arrive at the task force's base when things started to go bad? Shouldn't they have been better positioned at the outset? But these are all questions that are only obvious in retrospect. The truth is, Task Force Ranger came within several minutes of pulling off its mission on October 3 without a hitch. If Black Hawk Super Six One had not been hit, the “bad” choices made by Garrison would have been called bold. We will never know if Admiral Jonathan Howe was right to believe a lasting peace might have been achieved in Somalia if Aidid had been captured or his clan dismantled as a military force. It seems unlikely. In the years since the warlord's death, little in Mogadishu has changed. The Habr Gidr is a large and powerful clan planted deep in Somalia's past and present political culture. To think that 450 superb American soldiers could uproot it violently, thereby clearing the way for, as General Powell puts it, “an outbreak of Jeffersonian democracy,” seems far-fetched. In the end, the Battle of the Black Sea is another lesson in the limits of what force can accomplish.

I began working on this story about two-and-a-half years after the battle was fought. I had been intrigued by the early accounts of the fight, both as a citizen and as a writer.

It was clearly an important and fascinating episode, one with tragic consequences for many and lasting implications for American foreign policy. Given the fierce but limited nature of the gunfight-a small force of Americans pinned down overnight in an African city-I realized that it might be possible to tell the whole story. But the undertaking intimidated me. I had no military background or sources, and assumed that someone with both would tell the story far better than I could.

Nevertheless I remained curious enough to read whatever stories I saw about the incident. I was especially intrigued by President Clinton's subsequent struggles to deal with it. Particularly poignant were newspaper accounts I read of Clinton's meetings with the parents of the men killed in the battle. Larry Joyce and Jim Smith, the father of Corporal Jamie Smith, had reportedly questioned the president sharply in one of those meetings. I wondered about the informal visit the president paid to soldiers wounded in Mogadishu as they recuperated at Walter Reed Army Hospital. How did those men feel about meeting with the man who had sent them on the mission, and then abruptly called it off? At the Medal of Honor ceremony for the two Delta soldiers, I read that the father of posthumous honoree Sergeant Randy Shughart insulted the president, telling him he was not fit to be commander in chief.

When I was asked by The Philadelphia Inquirer to profile President Clinton in its magazine as he ran for reelection, I tried to answer some of these questions. Interviewing some of the families for an account of their session at the White House, I drove up to Long Valley, New Jersey, one spring afternoon to meet with Jim Smith, a retired U.S. Army captain and former Ranger who had lost a leg in Vietnam. Jim and I sat in his den for several hours. He described the meeting with Clinton, and then talked at length about his son Jamie, how it had felt to lose him, and what little he knew about the battle and how his son had died. I left his house that day determined to find out more.

My initial requests to the Pentagon media office were naive and went nowhere. I filed Freedom of Information requests for documents that, two years later, I have not received. I was told the men I wanted to interview were in units off-limits to the press. My only hope of finding the foot soldiers I wanted was to ask for them by name, and I knew only a handful of names. I combed through what little had been written about the battle, and submitted the names I found there, but I did not receive a response. Then Jim Smith sent me an invitation. The army was dedicating a building at the Pixatinny Arsenal near his home in memory of Jamie. I debated whether to drive up. It would take the whole day and, with my lack of success, the story had receded in priority. Still, I had been moved by my conversation with Jim. I have sons just a few years younger than his Jamie. I couldn't imagine losing one of them, much less in a gunfight someplace like Mogadishu. I made the drive.

And there, at this dedication ceremony, were about a dozen Rangers who had fought with Jamie in Mogadishu. Jim's introduction helped break down the normal suspicion soldiers have for reporters. The men gave me their names and told me hew to arrange interviews with them. Over three days at Fort Benning that fail I conducted my first twelve interviews. Each of the men I talked to had names and phone numbers for others who had fought there that day, many of them no longer in the army. My network grew from there. Nearly everyone I contacted was eager to talk. In the summer of 1997, the Inquirer sent Peter Tobia and me to Mogadishu. We flew to Nairobi, paid our weight in khat, climbed in the back of a small plane with sacks of the drug, and flew to a dirt airstrip outside Mogadishu. Accompanied by Ibrahim Roble Farah, a Nairobi businessman and member of the clan, we spent just seven days in the city, long enough to walk the streets where the battle had taken place and to interview some of the men who had fought against American soldiers that day. We learned how Somalis had perceived the sometimes brutal tactics in the summer of 1993, as UN troops led a clumsy manhunt for Aidid, and how widespread appreciation for the humanitarian intervention had turned to hatred. Peter and I left with a feel for the place, for the futility of it. local politics, and some insight into why Somalis fought so bitterly against American soldiers that day.

In the months after I returned, I found military officers who were eager to hear what I could tell them about the Somali perspective, and about the battle. My work from the ground up eventually led me to a treasure of official information. The fifteen-hour battle had been videotaped from a variety of platforms, so the action I had painstakingly pieced together in my mind through interviews could be checked against images of the actual fight. The hours of radio traffic during the battle had been recorded and transcribed. This would provide actual dialogue from the midst of the action and was invaluable in helping to sort out the precise sequence of events. It also conveyed, with frightening immediacy, the horror of it, the feel of men struggling to stave off panic and stay alive. Other documents fleshed out the intelligence background of the assault, exactly what Task Force Ranger knew and was trying to accomplish. None of the men on the ground, caught up completely in their own small corner of the fight, had a complete vision of the battle. But their memories, combined with this documentary material, including a precise chronology and the written accounts of Delta operators and SEALS, made it possible for me to reconstruct the whole picture. This material gave me, I believe, the best chance any writer had ever had to tell the story of a battle completely, accurately, and well.

Every battle is a drama played out apart from broader issues. Soldiers cannot concern themselves with the forces that bring them to a fight, or its aftermath. They trust their leaders not to risk their lives for too little. Once the battle is joined, they fight to survive as much as to win, to kill before they are killed. The story of combat is timeless. It is about the same things whether in Troy or Gettysburg, Normandy or the Ia Drang. It is about soldiers, most of them young, trapped in a fight to the death. The extreme and terrible nature of war touches something essential about being human, and soldiers do not always like what they learn. For those who survive, the victors and the defeated, the battle lives on in their memories and nightmares and in the dull ache of old wounds. It survives as hundreds of searing private memories, memories of loss and triumph, shame and pride, struggles each veteran must refight every day of his life.

No matter how critically history records the policy decisions that led up to this fight, nothing can diminish the professionalism and dedication of the Rangers and Special Forces units who fought there that day. The Special Forces units showed in Mogadishu why it is important for the military to keep and train highly motivated, talented, and experienced soldiers. When things went to hell in the streets, it was in large part the men of Delta and the SEALS who held things together and got most of the force out alive.

Many of the young Americans who fought in the Battle of Mogadishu are civilians again. They are beginning families and careers, no different outwardly from the millions of other twenty-something members of their generation. They are creatures of pop culture who grew up singing along with Sesame Street shuttling to day care, and navigating today's hyper adolescence through the pitfalls of drugs and unsafe sex. Their experience of battle, unlike that of any other generation of American soldiers, was colored by a lifetime of watching the vivid gore of Hollywood action movies. In my interviews with those who were in the thick of the battle, they remarked again and again how much they felt like they were in a movie, and had to remind themselves that this horror, the blood, the deaths, was real. They describe feeling weirdly out of place, as though they did not belong here, fighting feelings of disbelief, anger, and ill-defined betrayal, This cannot be real. Many wear black metal bracelets inscribed with the names of their friends who died, as if to remind themselves daily that it was real. To look at them today, few show any outward sign that one day not too long ago they risked their lives in an ancient African city, killed for their country, took a bullet, or saw their best friend shot dead. They returned to a country that didn't care or remember. Their fight was neither triumph nor defeat; it just didn't matter. It's as though their firefight was a bizarre two-day adventure, like some extreme Outward Bound experience where things got out of hand and same of the guys got killed.

I wrote this book for them.

AFTERWORD

It makes perfect sense for people to assume that someone who has written a book about a battle has some experience and expertise with the military. I have spent a lot of time since the publication of Black Hawk Down explaining to people that I don't. Nevertheless, people continue to make that assumption and to seek out my presumably trenchant insights into the battle's strategy and tactics. I have had officers at the U.S. Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, asking whether General Garrison ought to have requested armor as part of his force protection package, and officers at the Special Operations Warfare School at Ft. Myers, Florida, ask me whether the air support package was adequate. I continue to plead ignorance on these issues. I think before anyone holds a strong opinion about, say, a Bradley Armored Vehicle, he ought to at least know what one looks like. I don't qualify.

One caller, inviting me to address the Military Operations Research Society at their annual convention, called back after I accepted to find out what my security clearance was. It turned out that the whole conference was classified.

“I don't have a security clearance,” I said. “I suppose you could say I have something like a negative security clearance. I'm a reporter. I'm the sort of person they try to keep secrets from.”

The conference kindly rented a separate hall so that they could hear me talk about the battle.

Response to the book has been nearly overwhelming, far beyond anything I expected. It has been hard keeping up with the letters, phone calls, E-mails, and personal thanks extended by thousands of readers. I am most proud of having salvaged Task Force Ranger from the dusty footnotes of military history and placing it more squarely in modern memory. The men who fought there are less likely today to meet people who never heard of their engagement.

Some of the men I wrote about have been good enough to show up at my promotional appearances at bookstores around the country. Clay Othic drove out to a tiny bookstore in Kansas and wound up-quite appropriately-taking over the presentation. He told the audience that when he first came home from Somalia, people would stare at the terrible scar on his forearm and ask him, “How did that happen?”

“I was wounded in that battle in Mogadishu,” he'd tell them.

“And they'd look at me with this blank stare,” said Clay. “What battle in Mogadishu? We fought a battle in Africa?” Jeff Young and Tory Carbon came to an appearance in Tampa, and after my talk they sat and answered questions for hours.

Dan Schilling and Clay Othic joined me in Los Angeles for Book Expo, and even came along when my publisher threw a party at the Playboy Mansion. The last time I saw Clay he was posing with the Playmate of the Year. At least partly inspired by Black Hawk Down, Schilling has become a writer. He wrote a brief account of his experiences during the battle for Cigar magazine. He also joined Shawn Nelson and me for a joint appearance on The Charlie Rose Show.

Kurt Schmid, the medic who fought so hard in vain to save the life of Jamie Smith, finally met Jamie's father and mother and told them firsthand of their son's last moments. He had promised Jamie to do so, but had never been able to bring himself to do it. The army based him in Japan, which made it more difficult. But as the publication date of Black Hawk Down approached, he made the effort on a trip back to the States. Both he and Jamie's parents found the meeting important and helpful.

When I was signing books at Ft. Lewis, outside Seattle, one of the soldiers showed me a battered copy of the book signed by John Macejunas, one of the silent professionals of Delta Force whose heroism is recorded in Black Hawk Down.

“You don't need my signature in this,” I told him.

A VFW post in Piano, Texas, was dedicated this Veterans Day to Casey Joyce; a TV special on courage recently featured the stories of Medal of Honor winners Randy Shughart and Gary Gordon; Matt Eversmann has been invited to lecture the cadets at the US. Military Academy at West Point; and other members of Task Force Ranger have found that their losses and sacrifices are no longer completely forgotten. Keni Thomas has formed a band, whose most recent CD, Headspace and Timing (terms familiar to Ranger gunners), is dedicated to “The men of Task Force Ranger.”

“Through your work you have helped to tell our story,” he wrote in a letter shortly before the book came out. “You have given people an understanding. You have given me, in a sense, validity. Validity to say, 'This is what I did, and it is important you know about it. This is what I did and I can be proud of that. I need not feel guilty anymore.' The solutions to my healing process have begun thanks mostly to you. And that, my friend, is why I thank you.”

This sentiment, expressed so many times through official and unofficial military channels, has been the biggest and most pleasant surprise to me since the book was published. Black Hawk Down is hardly the version of this battle that would have been produced by some arm of military public relations. It tells of miscalculations and embarrassing inter-unit squabbling. It offers at least a glimpse of the Somali point of view during the fighting, and of alarmingly ill considered United Nations and U.S. actions that led up to this battle. It reveals simple blunders like failing to take sufficient water and night-vision devices on the raid, and soldiers leaving armored plates out of their bulletproof vests and wearing little plastic hockey helmets instead of the heavy Kevlar helmets that are standard issue. It deals unblinkingly with the horrors of combat, with death and dismemberment, with fear and indecision. There are plenty of instances of hesitation, second thoughts, and even callous actions by American soldiers. It reveals details of the battle that the army still regards as classified, not least of which is the role played by its top secret Delta Force unit. If you had asked me before Black Hawk Down was published, I would have predicted an angry response from the military, even though I knew the book accurately reflected the experiences of the men who fought there.

Instead, the military has embraced Black Hawk Down. It is now one of the mandatory books on the curriculum of the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College at Ft. Leavenworth, Kansas, where I have received three separate invitations to speak. The book has received several honors from the U.S. Marine Corps and has been personally recommended by the corps commandant. I have lectured twice at Central Intelligence Agency headquarters as well as at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point (where I was invited to dine with the cadets as a guest of honor), and have signed books at the Pentagon Mall bookstore before being taken off for a personal meeting with U.S. Army Secretary Louis Caldera. I have received personal notes of thanks from General Henry Shelton. chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and General Anthony Zinni, USMC, commander in chief of the U.S. Central Command. President Bill Clinton even sent me a handwritten note thanking me for writing it. I am deeply flattered and grateful for all these things, and still surprised.

One reason for the resonance of Black Hawk Down is that it illustrates a central problem of our time. One of the many kind reviews I have received about the book concluded by calling it “an adventurous look at the predicament of being an American at the turn of the century.” I think that's right. It is too easy to dismiss what happened in Mogadishu as the work of incompetent politicians, diplomats, and generals. You can't just blame President Clinton, Madeleine Albright, Les Aspin, or General Garrison. The policy that led Task Force Ranger to Somalia in the summer of 1993 was the result of America's new and uncomfortable role in the world. President Bush committed the United States to the mission. and the decision to nation-build once the famine ended was the perfectly logical outgrowth of that policy. The famine in Somalia had not been caused by a natural disaster, it was man-made, a result of cynical, feuding warlords deliberately using starvation as a weapon. It would not have made much sense to simply walk away after delivering food for a few weeks or months and allow the crisis to renew. There were those (they seem prescient in retrospect) who argued that there are limits to what America can accomplish, but if the United States erred in overreaching, it was for laudable reasons. Our intervention begged the central issue: As the world's only military superpower, should we stand by and let terrible human tragedies unfold? Aren't we morally obligated to do something? And in this age of instant global communication, there isn't much that happens in the world that Americans don't witness, in color, in our living rooms.

The decision to go after Mohamed Farrah Aidid was not some foolhardy adventure in Clintonian nation-building, although there certainly was some overreaching involved. Its primary advocate was Admiral Jonathan Howe, a former member of Bush's National Security Council who was then the United Nations' top man in Somalia. Howe was rightly indignant when Aidid's militias began attacking and killing the UN peacekeepers he supervised. If Aidid was responsible for the deaths of twenty-four Pakistani soldiers on June 24, 1993, as he appears to have been, he deserved to be branded an outlaw. Bringing him to justice was a worthy cause, and Howe was precisely the person who ought to have been forcefully advocating it.

None of the steps that led us to the Battle of Mogadishu were wild departures from the normal course of post-cold war foreign policy. The battle came at the end of a chain of eminently defensible decisions made carefully by sensible people. The same could be said of the military decisions. Task Force Ranger was dispatched to Mogadishu reluctantly, but if the United States was serious about going after Aidid. then Delta Force and the Rangers were the best-trained men for the job. To dismiss the incident as a blunder and those who were responsible as fools assumes that different leaders would have seen things more clearly and known better what to do. The foreign policy lesson I take from this story is like the old prayer. “Lord, grant me the strength to change the things I can, to accept the things I can't, and the wisdom to know the difference.” Learning what America's power can and can't accomplish is a major challenge in the post-cold war world. The answers are not easy.

Still, everywhere I've gone people have asked me for answers. Mine are no better or more significant than those of anyone who has studied this incident and thought seriously about it, but here they are. I believe it would have been hard for the United States not to go after Aidid, but it would have been better not to try. Ending a famine was a good deed, one that Americans can take pride in, and making efforts to resolve the interclan fighting in Somalia through negotiation was advisable and admirable. But Aidid's hard line forced the Clinton administration to take sides in what was nothing more than a civil war. We should have said no. Once a peacekeeping force starts shooting, it becomes part of the problem. Arresting Aidid would most likely have just given the Habr Gidr leader a more fervently motivated following, and would have elevated a two-bit Somali warlord to the status of an anti-imperialist hero in many parts of the world. I acknowledge that it would not have been easy to back away from this fight with Aidid. If the United States and the UN had tried to simply phase out their involvement in Somalia, critics all over the world would have accused Americans of leaving an important humanitarian task undone, and they would have been right.

That said, once we had committed ourselves to the effort, I believe the United States should have seen the mission through even after the battle on October 3-especially after the battle. There was every indication that Aidid was on the ropes. The story would have had a much more satisfying ending if he had been delivered up in chains (and ironically, if he had, he would probably still be alive today). Arguing in favor of the decision to withdraw was the memory of Vietnam, where the generals felt victory was always within reach so long as the country kept notching up its commitment. The American public and its elected officials were led down a primrose path in that war, and the nation paid a terrible price. In Somalia the chances of success were far greater and more tangible because the mission was so limited. There was little danger of American troops being drawn into a quagmire in Somalia. No matter what ultimate impact Aidid's arrest would have had on the UN's goals in Somalia, it was important to see the mission through once Task Force Ranger was committed. The lesson our retreat taught the world's terrorists and despots is that killing a few American soldiers, even at a cost of more than five hundred of your own fighters, is enough to spook Uncle Sam. Perhaps more important, however, is the lesson it sent to Americans, and in particular the men and women who serve. It's hard enough convincing Americans that events in some distant part of the world are worth jeopardizing American lives without being halfhearted about intervention. Try rallying troops with the battle cry. “We'll fight them on the beaches, we'll fight them on the cliffs.. . but we'll give up if they fight back.” Military credibility is not just a matter of national pride. It lessens the chances of war because enemies are less inclined to challenge America. This principle is especially important in a world with only one military superpower. The eight-hundred-pound gorilla's only weakness is his will. Routing Aidid would have, in the long run, saved American lives.

It is easy, of course, to say that now. President Clinton would have faced a rebellion in Congress and a firestorm of criticism in the press if he had attempted to stay the course in October 1993.

Beyond these policy issues, I attribute the military's warm response and the book's larger success to something else. Thanks to the exceptional candor of the men whose stories make up Black Hawk Down, what comes through most strongly is their determination, their willingness to put themselves at risk-indeed, to die-in service of their country and out of loyalty to their fellows. Beyond the politics of the situation, beyond the critical debate over strategy and tactics, the story of what happened in Mogadishu resonates with the nobility of military service.

Nobility is not a word often associated with the military these days. For the last three decades, most of the stories about soldiers that have made their way into popular culture have been about atrocities, failures, and scandals, from My Lai to Desert One to Tailhook. The public image of the military is of a vast, impersonal, callous, dangerous, and often inept bureaucracy. Even when victorious, as in the Persian Gulf, Panama, and Grenada, the U.S. military is seen as just bigger, richer, and more powerful than the army of any other nation. America is often perceived as the world's bully.

Black Hawk Down is a reminder that the seemingly inhuman machine of the American military is made up of individual men and women, often serving at great personal sacrifice even when not thrust into war. The men of Task Force Ranger gave more than will ever be asked of most of us. They deserve to be honored and remembered.

Mark Bowden

November, 1999

SOURCES

So many of the men who fought in this battle agreed to tell me their stories that most of the incidents related in this book were described to me by several different soldiers. Where there were discrepancies, one man's memory generally worked to improve the others'. In some cases, comparing stories was a useful check on embellishment. I found most of the men I interviewed to be extraordinarily candid. Having had this experience, they seemed to feel entrusted with it. Most were forthright to the point of revealing things about themselves they found deeply troubling or embarrassing. Once or twice, having been unable to corroborate a story, when I pressed the soldier who originally related it to me, he backed down and apologized for having repeated something he himself did not witness. I have stayed away from anecdotes told secondhand.

With very few exceptions, the dialogue in the book is either from the radio tapes or from one or more of the men actually speaking. My goal throughout has been to recreate the experience of combat through the eyes of those involved; to attempt that without reporting dialogue would be impossible. Of course, no one's recollection of what they said is ever perfect. My standard is the best memory of those involved. Where there were discrepancies in dialogue they were usually minor, and I was able to work out the differences by going back and forth between the men involved. In several cases I have reported dialogue or statements heard by others present, even though I was unable to locate the actual speakers. In these cases the words spoken were heard by more than one witness, or recorded in written accounts within days after the battle.

For understandable reasons, very few of the Delta operators who played such an important role in this battle agreed to talk to me about it. Their policy and tradition is silent professionalism. Master Sergeant Paul Howe, who has left the unit, obtained official permission, but risked the opprobrium of his former colleagues for speaking so candidly with me. Several current members of the unit also found ways to communicate with me. I am grateful to them. I also obtained the written accounts of several key members of the Delta assault force. It enabled me to provide a rare picture of these consummate soldiers in action, from their own perspective. All told, this input represents a small fraction of the unit, so the Delta portion of this story is weighted more heavily from Howe's and the others' perspectives than I would have liked.

INTERVIEWS

Hassan Yassin Abokoi; Abdiaziz Mi Aden; Aaron Ahlfinger, a state trooper now in Colorado; Abdikadir Dahir Al; Steve Anderson; Chris Atwater, W. F. “Jack” Atwater, Abdi. “Qeybdid” Hassan Awale; Mohamed Hassan Awale; Abdullahi Ossoble Barre; Alan Barton, who received the Bronze Star with Valor Device and now works for the Phoenix City Post office; DeAnna Joyce Beck; Maj. Gen. B. R. “Buck” Bedard, U.S. Marine Corps; John Belman, who received the Bronze Star with Valor Device and now works for a newspaper publishing company in Cincinnati; Anton Berendsen., who received the Bronze Star with Valor Device and is now attending college in Georgia; Matthew Bryden; John Burns, who received the Bronze Star with Valor Device and is attending college in Georgia; LTC. L H. “Bucky” Burruss, U.S. Army, ret.; Tory Carlson, who received the Purple Heart and now works as a high-line electrician in Florida; SSGT Raleigh Cash, U.S. Army, who is still serving with the Ranger Regiment; John Colett; COL Bill David, U.S. Army, who is now garrison commander at Fort Bragg; David Diemer, who received the Bronze Star with Valor Device and now does construction work with his father in Newburgh, New York; CPT Torn DiTomasso

U.S. Army, who received the Silver Star and still serves with the Ranger Regiment; Col Peter Dotto, U.S. Marine Corps; GEN Wayne Downing, U.S. Army' ret.; CWO Michael Durant, U.S. Army, still with the 160th SOAR, who received the Distinguished Flying Cross and the Bronze Star with Valor Device; Abdullahi Haji Elia; Abdi Mohamed Elmi; Mohamed Mohamud Elmi; SSGT Matt Eversmann, who received the Bronze Star with Valor Device and still serves with the Ranger Regiment; Abdi Farah, Halima Farah; Hussein Siad Farah; Ibrahim Roble Farah; Mohamed Hassan Farah; David Floyd, who in attending college in South Carolina; Willi Frank; Scott Galentine, who received a Purple Heart and is now attending a community college in Auburn, Georgia (surgeons reattached Galentine's thumb and he has partial use of it); Hobdurahman Yusef Galle; Chief John Gay, U.S. Navy, who is still a SEAL; CWO Mike Goffena, U.S. Army, who received a Silver Star and was killed in February 1998 in a helicopter crash; Kira Goodale; Mike Goodale, who received the Purple Heart and Bronze Star with Valor Device and now lives with his wife Kira in Illinois and is completing studies to become a high school social studies teacher (he still serves in the National Guard); Gregg Gould, who now works as a police officer in Charleston, South Carolina; Jim Guelzow; Mi Gulaid; SFC Aaron Hand, U.S. Army; Abdullahi “Firimbi” Hassan; Bint Abraham Hasten; Hassan Adan Hassan; Mohamed Ali Herse; Adm. Jonathan Howe, U.S. Navy, ret.; MSO Paul Howe, U.S. Army, who received the Bronze Star with Valor Device; Mark Huband; Abdullahi Mohamed Hussein; All Hussein Mark Jackson; Omar Jest; CWO Keith Jones, U.S. Army, who received the Silver Star, and is still flying with the 160th SOAR; LTC Larry Joyce, U.S. Army' ret.; SOT Ed Kallman, U.S. Army; Jim Keller; Michael Kurth, who is working as a waiter in Houston, Texas; Abdizirak Hassan Kutun; SEC Al Lamb, U.S. Army, who received the Silver Star and is still with Special Forces based in Tampa, Florida; Anthony Lake, who teaches at Georgetown University; CPT James Lechner, U.S. Army, who received the Purple Heart (doctors were able to stimulate enough bone growth to save Lechner's leg and he is now based in Hawaii); Phil Lepre, who works for an advertising firm near Philadelphia; SEC Steven Lycopolus, who works as a senior instructor at Fort Lewis, Washington; SEC Bob Mabry, US. Army; MM Rob Marsh, M.D., US. Army, ret.; COL Thomas Matthews, U.S. Army; LTC Dave McKnight, dec.; SOT Jeffrey McLaughlin, U.S. Army; Lt. James McMahon, U.S. Navy. ret.; CPT Drew Meyerowich, U.S. Army, who received the Silver Star; Yousuf Dahir Mo'alim; Elmi Aden Mohamed; Kassin Sheik Mohamed; Nur Sheik Mohamed; Sharif Mi Mohamed; Abdi Karim Mohamud; Jason Moore, who works for an investment company in New Jersey; Gunnery Sgt. Chad D. Moyer, U.S. Marine Corps; Shawn Nelson, who was working as a trail guide in the Grand Tetons before getting married and moving to Atlanta; Ambassador Robert Oakley; Clay Othic, who received the Bronze Star with Valor Device and the Purple Heart and now works as a special agent for the Immigration and Naturalization Service in Wichita, Kansas; CPT Larry Perino, U.S. Army, who received the Bronze Star with Valor Device and still serves with the Ranger Regiment; Rob Phipps, who received the Purple Heart and now lives in Augusta, Georgia; Benjamin Pilla; GEN Colin Powell, U.S. Army, ret.; Randy Ramaglia, who received the Bronze Star with Valor Device and now helps manage a rock band in Columbus, Georgia; SSGT Carlos Rodriguez, U.S. Army, based at Fort Lewis, Washington; Omar Salad; Daniel Schilling, who works as an administrator at the University of Phoenix in Provo, Utah, and is finishing his master's degree; SFC Kurt Schmid,

U.S. Army, based in Japan; LTC Mike Sheehan. U.S. Army, ret.; Stephanie Shughart; SSG George Siegler, who is still with the Ranger Regiment; Dale Sizemore; CPT Jim Smith, U.S. Army, ret.; Eric Spalding, who serves as a special agent for the Immigration and Naturalization Service in Arizona; LT Scott Spellmeyer, U.S. Army; Peter Squeglia, who works for an investment company in Boston, Massachusetts; SOT John Stebbins, U.S. Army, who received the Silver

Star; MM Mike Steele, US. Army, who received the Bronze Star with Valor Device and now serves with the 82nd Airborne; MM David Stockwell, U.S. Army; SOT Jeff Struecker, US. Army, who received the Bronze Star with Valor Device and still serves with the Ranger Regiment (in 1997, Struecker won the coveted. “Best Ranger” award); Osman Mohamud Sudi; Abdi Tahalil; Jim Telscher, SSG Brad Thomas, who still serves with the Ranger Regiment; Kern Thomas, who received the Bronze Star with Valor Device and now works with delinquent children and plays in a rock band in Columbus, Georgia; Lance Twombly; SPC John Waddell, who is in training to become a Special Forces medic and is bound for medical school; SFC Sean Watson, U.S. Army, who received the Bronze Star with Valor Device; T. Sgt. Tim Wilkinson, who received the Air Force Cross and still serves as a pararescueman based at Hurlburt Field, Florida; Jason Wind; LT Damon Wright, U.S. Army; CPT Becky Yacone, U.S. Army, ret.; CPT Jim Yacone, U.S. Army, ret., who received the Silver Star, who now works for the FBI; Jeff Young; SSG Ed Yurek, U.S. Army, who still serves with the Ranger Regiment at Fort Benning; Bashir Haji Yusuf; Brig. Gen. Anthony Zinni, USMC, who is now commanding general of USCENTCOM.

BOOKS

_Hazardous Duty_ COL David H. Hackworth, U.S. Army, Avon Books, 1997. Hackworth herein continues his war against the status quo in the U.S. Army, and offers a brief but fairly accurate account of the battle in Chapter Six, “Unfortunate Casualties.” There are inaccuracies (as noted below and in the Epilogue) and some slippery reasoning, but Hackworth's highly opinionated account is basically correct and makes for spirited reading.

_Losing Mogadishu_ Jonathan Stevenson, Naval Institute Press, 1995. This is a critique of the overall UN/U.S. effort in Somalia and is a classic exercise in summing up policy mistakes in retrospect, rife with “flagrant misreadings” and “precisely wrong” approaches, which is the easiest of all academic sports. The battle itself gets very short shrift.

_Mogadishu, Heroism and Tragedy!_ Kent Delong and Steven Tuckey, Bergin & Garvey, 1994. A hasty, sincere effort at a re-creation of the battle based on interviews with a few of the participants, most of them pilots. it is full of mistakes, everything from misspelled soldiers' names to screwed-up time sequences, but it is well-meaning and right out of the old rah-rah school of military reporting.

_On the Edge_, Elizabeth Drew, Simon & Schuster, 1994. Drew's book is an account of President Clinton's first two years in office, and affords the best insights into the decision making (or lack of same) that led to the battle, and the administration's reaction in its aftermath.

_Out of America_, Keith Richburg, A New Republic Book, Basic Books, 1997. Richburg is a Washington Post reporter who wrote about the events in Somalia as they happened. His book records his mounting disillusion, as an African-American, with Africa after traveling and reporting there for several years. Some of his insights into Aidid and the situation that led up to the battle are excellent, although understandably much colored by his anger over the brutal deaths of Dan Eldon and Hos Maina on July 12 at the hands of a Somali mob.

_The Road to Hell_ Michael Maren, The Free Press, 1997. This is a well-written book about the international policies that led to the complete collapse of Somalia, and ultimately to the UN intervention and this battle. Maren offers fresh insights into the sometimes destructive role played by international goodwill.

_Savage Peace_, Americana at War in the 1990s, Daniel P. Bolger, Presidio, 1995.1 found this to be a very impressive and accurate ~ok. Chapter Seven on Somalia, “Down Among the Dead Men” is the best thing I had read about the battle and the entire intervention from a military point of view. Bolger is fair, thorough, and accurate.

_Somalia and Operation Restore Hope_, John L Hirsch and Robert B. Oakley, United States Institute of Peace Press, 1995. This is the definitive narrative account of the UN and U.S. intervention in Somalia, much of it through Oakley's eyes (he is a former U.S. ambassador to Somalia and served as President Clinton's envoy to Somalia after the battle).

_The United Nations and Somalia_, 1992-1994 The United Nations Blue Books Series, Volume III, Department of Public Information, UN, 1996. This is the definitive reference book for the UN interventions in Somalia.

ARTICLES

“Experiences of Executive Officer from Bravo Company, 3rd Battalion, 75th Ranger Regiment and Task Force Ranger during the Battle of the Black Sea on 3-4 October, 1993 in Mogadishu, Somalia,” Capt. Lee A. Rysewyk (published in-house by the Combined Arms and Tactics Division, U.S. Army Infantry School, Fort Benning, Georgia). A good overview of the battle that includes the official operational time line.

“Fast Rope into Hell,” Dale B. Cooper, Soldier of Fortune, July 1994. A spirited account of part of the fight, in true guts-and-glory style, primarily based on interviews with air force PJs Fales and Wilkinson.

“Heroes at Mogadishu,” Frank Oliveri, Air Force Magazine, June 1994. An account of the actions of air force personnel Wilkinson, Fales, and Bray.

“Mission to Somalia,” Patrick J. Sloyan, Newsday, December 5-9, 1993. A superb analysis of how and why the battle took place, with some good bits from the fight itself.

“Mogadishu, October 1993: A Personal Account of a Rifle Company XO,” Capt. Charles P. Ferry, Infantry, October 1994. A rather dry account of the actions of the 10th Mountain Division.

“The Raid That Went Wrong,” Rick Atkinson, The Washington Post, January 30,1994. An excellent and amazingly accurate account of the battle from both the American and Somali paints of view.

“Rescue of the Rangers,” Ed Perkins, Watertown Daily Times October Z 1994. A very ambitious, readable, and accurate account of the actions of the 10th Mountain Division.

“A Soldier's Nightmare,” Philip F. Rhodes, Night flyer, 1st Quarter 1994. Another account of Fales's experiences, also packaged as “Courage Under Fire” in Airman, May 1994.

“Task Force Ranger Operations in Somalia 3-4 October 1993,” U.S. Special Operations Command and U.S. Army Special Operations Command History Office, June 1, 1994 (unpublished). The official twelve-page summary of the battle with fifty-six pages of brief accounts of individual heroism.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank my friends Max King and Bob Rosenthal at The Philadelphia Inquirer for their exceptional vision and support. Black Hawk Down began as a newspaper project and is the kind of story no other newspaper in America would have undertaken. Max and Rosey saw the potential for it early on, and enlarged my own ambitious for it. By helping to craft my first draft of this story into an episodic newspaper series, David Zucchino was its first editor and substantially contributed to this book's final shape. I owe a great deal to photographer Peter Tobia who made the very difficult trip to Mogadishu with me in the summer of 1997, and returned with a stunning collection of work documenting that blasted city.

I have made several friends for life reporting this story. Since I had no military experience of my own the last two years have been a crash course in martial terminology, tactics, and ethics. I have learned a great deal from Lieutenant Colonel L. H. “Bucky” Burruss, U.S. Army (ret.), a great soldier and fine writer, who was kind enough to seek me out and act as a first reader and. expert adviser. Master Sergeant Paul Howe and Dan Schilling, a former air force combat controller, were also early readers and made thoughtful and helpful suggestions. I would not have been able to get started on this story without the help of Jim Smith, a former Ranger captain whose son, Jamie, was killed in Mogadishu. Jim kindly introduced me to some of his son's fellow Rangers. Walt Sokalski and Andy Lucas of the U.S. Special Operations Command public relations office set up the initial interviews with Rangers and 160th SOAR helicopter pilots that launched this project. Thanks to Jack Atwater of the U.S. Army Ordnance Museum for his quick course in Weaponry 101. These are just a few of the hundreds of military people who have generously shared their time and expertise, some of whom have asked me not to name them. I am grateful to Ibrahim Robles Farah for his help in getting Peter and me in and out of Somalia.