Black Hawk Down

Others came out from hiding then, and moved toward the crash. Then a helicopter landed right on Marehan Road and these Somalis scattered. It seemed incredible that a helicopter could fit in such a small space. It was one of the little ones. The roar of the helicopter was deafening and dust swirled around. Aden couldn't breathe. Thin the shooting got worse.

One of the pilots was leaning out of the helicopter aiming his weapon south, toward the crest of the hill. Another ran from the helicopter toward the one that had crashed. The shooting was even worse then. It was so loud that the sound of the helicopter skid the guns was just one ongoing explosion. Bullets hit and rocked the old car. Aden curled himself up tight and wished he were someplace else.

-6-

Cameras on the three observation choppers captured the disaster close-up and in color. General Garrison and his staff watched on screens at the JOC. They saw Wolcott's Black Hawk moving smoothly; then a shudder and puff of smoke near the tail rotor, then an awkward Counter rotation as Super Six One fell, making two slow turns clockwise. Nose up, until its belly hit the top of a stone building and its front end was cast down violently. On impact, its mass rotors snapped and went flying. The body of the Black Hawk came to rest in a narrow alley on its side against a stone wall in a cloud of dust.

There wasn't enough time for anyone to consider all the ramifications of that crash, but the sick sinking feeling that came over officers watching on-screen went way beyond the immediate fate of the men on board.

They had lost the initiative. The only way to regain it now would be to bolster strength at the crash site, but that would take time and movement, which meant casualties.

There were already casualties on the downed bird. There was no time to reflect on causes or consequences. If Elvis's chopper had gone down in flames, the general could just pull everybody out with the prisoners as planned and mount a second mission to retrieve the bodies and make sure the chopper was completely destroyed--there were sensitive items on the bird that the army didn't want just anybody to have.

But seeing men climb out of the wreckage, and watching as the unscripted battle now joined around it, the ground shifted beneath Garrison's feet. The next moves were part of a contingency they had rehearsed. Another Black Hawk would take Super Six One's place over the target area, and the CSAR bird would move in and drop its team. Those fifteen men would give emergency medical treatment and provide some protection for the crash survivors, but they couldn't hold out long. Already mobs of Somalis wore moving toward the crash site from all directions. Securing it would take all of the men on the ground. The mission had been designed for speed: swiftly in, swiftly out. Now they were stuck. The entire force at the target building and on the convoy would have to fight their way to the crash site. They had to move fast, before Aidid's forces surrounded it and cut it off. If that happened, the crash survivors and the CSAR team would have no hope. Delta Force and the Rangers were the best the army had to offer. Now they were going to be tested.

It was hard to imagine any other force of 150 men trapped in a hostile city, besieged on all sides by a heavily armed populace, who had a reasonable chance of surviving. They were at the eye of a terrible storm. The observation birds showed burning tires sending tall black columns of smoke around the perimeter of the congested blocks. Many thousands of armed Somalis were thronging toward those plumes from all directions, on vehicles and on foot. People were erecting barricades and digging trenches across roads, laying traps for American vehicles, trying to seal them in. The streets surrounding the target house and crash site were already mobbed. You could see the ring closing.

Word was sent to the 10th Mountain Division troops across the city to mobilize immediately. This was going to be one hell of a gunfight.

-7-

“We gotta go,” Nelson told Lieutenant DiTomasso. “We gotta go right now.”

From Chalk Two's position at the target block's northeast corner, Nelson had gotten a pretty good fix on where Super Six One had crashed. He could see crowds of Somalis already running that way.

“No, we've got to stay here,” said the lieutenant. “There's a crowd over there,” argued Nelson, the impending disaster overcoming his deference for rank. “Stand fast,” DiTomasso said.

“I'm going,” said Nelson.

Guns poked out of a window across the street, and just then he spotted two Somali boys running, one with something in his hand. Nelson dropped to a knee and fired a burst with the M-60. Both boys fell. One had been holding a stick. The other got up and limped for cover.

Specialist Waddell was feeling the same urge to run toward the crash. They had all heard about the way the Somalis had mutilated the remains of the men who died in the previous Black Hawk crash. In the hangar they hut talked it over. They resolved that such a thing would never happen to their guys.

DiTomasso held Nelson back. He raised Captain Steele on the radio.

“I know where it is. I'm leaving,” the lieutenant said.

“No, wait,” said Steele. He could understand the urge to go help, but if Chalk Two just took off, the target building perimeter would break down. He tried to get

on the command net, but the airwaves were so busy he couldn't be heard.

He waited fifteen seconds.

“We need to go!” Nelson was shouting at DiTomasao. “Now!”

As he started running, Steele called back.

“Okay, go,” he told DiTomasso. “But I want somebody to stay.”

DiTomasso shouted, "All right, Nelson. Make it happen.

With some of the men already in pursuit of Nelson, the lieutenant ran down the street to Sergeant Yurek. He would leave half the chalk.

“You keep the fight here,” he told Yurek.

Eight Rangers moved at a trot. DiTomasso caught up with Nelson and his M-6O in front. Waddell was in the rear with his SAW. They moved with their weapons up and ready. Somalis took wild shots at them from windows and doorways as they moved, but no one was hit. Twice on their way east, Nelson dropped to a knee and opened fire on the crowd moving parallel to them one block north.

When they rounded the corner three blocks over, there was a wide sand road that sloped down to the intersection of the alley where Super Six One lay. Straight in front of them and this just astonished Nelson--one of the Little Birds had landed. Its rotors were turning in a space so small the tips were just inches from the stone walls.

-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 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 be 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 Make 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 Prank, 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 blaring horizon was little but stubby tress, cactus, goats, and camels in a hazy ocean of sand.

Diurnal 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 be was flying straight into the sun.

Going down over Mog was had 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 course. It was designed to stay in the air no matter what.

So most of the foot soldiers that 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 his 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 school-teaching 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 to 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 mailing). Durant stood with his travel bag in the doorway of their home with that stiff posture of his, kissed Lorrie good-by, 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 far 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 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 had his share of surface vessels, everything from battleship, to aircraft carriers. Whatever the cause, he seemed immune to sunlight, even Somalia's. Aidid's propaganda sheets had dubbed him “Admiral 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 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 (United 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 Jun 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.

Aidid had kept up the pressure. From his southern stronghold, mortar rounds were lobbed daily into UN compounds. Somali employees of the UN mission wore 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 as 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 UN1TAF 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 un-abashed 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 world wide capitalist free markets.

America's unrivaled big stick could right the world's wrongs, feed the hungry, and 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.

When Washington denied Howe's request for Delta in June, he began a fruitless effort to catch Aidid with the forces already in place. At first, to avoid harming innocent people, helicopters with loudspeakers broadcast warnings of impending UN action, a gesture thought ridiculous by most Somalis. After administering such a warning, a multinational force descended on Aidid's compound on June 17. A house-to-house search was conducted by Italian, French, Moroccan, and Pakistani troops, and an armored cordon was thrown around the site by the French and Moroccans. Aidid easily slipped away. Legend on the streets had the general rolling out under the noses of UN troops on a donkey cart, wrapped up in a sheet like a dead body. The UN was not only incapable of capturing Aidid, they were turning him into a folk hero.

The decision to attack the Abdi House on July 12 reflected mounting UN frustration. After the Pakistani ambush, the clan escalated its sniping and mortar attacks. The Turkish commander of UN troops, General Cevik Bir, and his second,

U.S Army Major General Thomas Montgomery, wanted to take the kid gloves off. This would be an attack without warning, a chance to chop off the SNA's head. The clan leadership had taken to meting regularly at the Abdi House. The plan called for helicopters to encircle it from the air, fire missiles and cannons into it, then raid the house to arrest survivors.

Howe opposed it. Why, he asked, couldn't troops simply surround the place and order those inside to come out, or why not just storm the house and arrest everybody? Such approaches would subject the UN forces to too much risk, he was told. None of the units in-country were capable of policing a “sanitized” cordon, so issuing a warning would be self-defeating. The officials would just flee--as Aidid had earlier. And the force lacked the capability to perform the kind of lightning snatch-and-grab tactics used by Delta. When the Pentagon and White House signed off on the attack, Howe. Relented.

The number of Somalis killed in the attack was disputed. Mohammed Hassan Farah, Abdullahi Ossoble Barre, Qeybdid, and others present claimed 763 dead, including women and children who had been on the building's first floor.

They said hundreds were wounded. The reports Howe got after the attack placed the number of dead at 20, all men. The International Committee of the Red Cross set the number of dead at 54, with total casualties at 250. But the dispute over the number of dead Somalis was quickly eclipsed by the deaths of 4 Western journalists who rushed to the Abdi home to report on the attack, only to be killed by an enraged Somali mob.

The journalists' deaths focused worldwide anger on the Somalis, but in Mogadishu the shock and outrage was over the surprise attack. The massacre bolstered Aidid's status, and badly undercut the UN's humanitarian image. Moderates opposed to Aidid now rallied behind him. From the Habr Gidr's perspective, the UN and, in particular, the United States, had declared war.

Howe kept pushing for Delta. It was the clearest way out he could see. At Fort Bragg, teams of Night Stalker pilots and Delta officers worked up a plan in June that would require only about twenty men. They would slip into the country surreptitiously and use the QRF's helicopters and equipment. An Intelligence assessment found Aidid still snaking public appearances and moving around Mogadishu with his conspicuous escort of technicals.

But through July and most of August there was no green light from Washington.

Howe's pleas won out finally in August when remote-controlled land mines first killed four American soldiers and then, two weeks later, injured seven more. Vacationing on Martha's Vineyard, President Clinton assented. Delta would go. Aidid became America's white whale.

Task Force Ranger arrived on August 23 with a three-phase mission. Phase One, which would last until the thirtieth, was just to get the force up and running. Phase Two, which would last until September 7, would concentrate exclusively on finding and capturing Aidid. The command staff already suspected this would be futile, since widespread publicity about the Rangers intentions quickly drove Aidid underground. Phase Three would target Aidid's command structure. This was the meat of Task Force Ranger's mission. It the D-boys couldn't catch the warlord, they were going to put him out of business.

Howe had initially envisioned a small unit of stealthy operators, but he was delighted to get the whole 450-man task force. He weathered with patience, its early missteps. As September rolled on, despite the glitches, the force achieved mounting success. Howe was especially pleased on September 1l when a surprise daylight assault on a convoy of cars resulted in the capture of Osman Atto, the arms dealer and Aidid's chief banker, who was now imprisoned with a growing number of other SNA captives on an island off the coast of the southern port city of Kismayo, in pup tents surrounded by razor wire.

Aidid was feeling the heat. A Habr Gidr leader cooperating with U.S. forces told them, “He [Aidid] is very tense; the situation out there is very tense.” In late August the Somali warlord sent a letter to former president Jimmy Carter pleading for him to intervene with President Clinton. The general wanted an independent commission “composed of internationally known statesmen, scholars and jurists from different countries,” to investigate the allegations that he was responsible for the June 5 incident--Aidid claimed it had been a spontaneous uprising of Mogadishu citizens who feared the UN was attacking Radio Mogadishu. He also called for a negotiated solution to his standoff with the UN.

Carter had taken this message to the White House, and the suggestion was received warmly by Clinton, who directed that efforts to resolve matters peacefully be renewed. The State Department began quietly working on a plan to intercede through the governments of Ethiopia and Eritrea. The plan called for an immediate cease-fire, and for Aidid to remove himself from Somalia until the international inquiry was done. It set a new round of nation-building talks in November. There were other feelers being put out in Mogadishu by Howe through Habr Gidr elders alarmed at the recent turn of events. Howe and his supporters in Washington were convinced that Aidid's sudden flexibility was a direct result of Garrison's pressure.

Peace had been the reason for Howe's journey this weekend. On his long flight over the dry wasteland, watching the shadow of his plane racing ahead of it across the dunes, he felt like the UN at last was dealing from a position of strength.

After circling out over the water for nearly an hour, Howe's plane was finally cleared to land at the Ranger base late Sunday afternoon. He knew there was a battle raging, but he didn't get the full picture until he returned to the UN compound early that evening. General Montgomery was at work there piecing together an enormous international convoy to go in and rescue the downed Rangers and pilots.

There was little for Howe to do but to find a place to sit and observe.

Montgomery had his hands full. The Malaysians and Pakistanis, who had the necessary armor, wanted no part of the Bakara Market. These were the same troops that had effectively backed out of the city streets after the Marines had left. They did want to help, but were balking at the idea of sending big armored vehicles into the hornet's nest. In those densely populated neighborhoods, moving slowly through narrow streets, armor was highly vulnerable.

The Italians, whom loyalties had been at best suspect throughout the intervention, were nevertheless ready to commit, as were the Indians, who had tanks of their own they could throw into the fight. It would take longer to get the Italians and Indians into position, so Montgomery warn pushing the Malays end Pakis hard.

Howe couldn't help but wonder what would have happened if such a determined international response had greeted the June 5 slaughter of the Pakistani troops, as he had urged. Still, he was pleated to see it now. It was a shame the task force had gotten stung, but once the bleeding there would be more of an appetite in Washington to get rid of this upstart warlord once and for all.

-11-

Word that there was big trouble in the city spread quickly through the Somali staff at the U.S. embassy compound. Abdi Karim Mohamud worked as a secretary for Brown & Root, one of the American companies providing support services to the international military force. He had had been a twenty-one-year-old college student when the Barre regime was toppled. He had furthered his education on his own ever since. He wore wire-rimmed glasses, spoke fluent English, wore neatly pressed blue oxford shirts, and had about him and air of eager, cheerful efficiency that won him increasing responsibility. He was also a pair of smart eyes and ears for the Habr Gidr, his clan.

Abdi had been hopeful about the UN when the humanitarian mission began. He'd found a job and the effort seemed good for his country. But when the attacks began on his clan and General Aidid, and every week there was a mounting toll of Somali dead and injured, he saw it as an unwarranted assault on his country. On July 12, the day of the Abdi House attack, he had seen victims of the bombing who were brought to the U.S. embassy compound. The Somali men, elders of his clan, were bloody and dazed and in need of a doctor. Instead the Americans photographed them and interrogated them and then put them in jail. Abdi kept his job but for a different reason.

He could hear waves of gunfire crackling over the city, and heard the fight was at the Bakara Market.

At Brown & Root, all Somali employees were sent home.

“Something has happened,” Abdi was told.

Abdi lived with his family between the market and the K-4 traffic circle, which was just north of the Ranger base. The rickety jitneys, so crammed with passengers that the American soldier called them “Kling-on Cruisers” (a nod to Star Trek), were still running up Via Lenin. The sounds of gunfire increased and the sky was thick with helicopters speeding low over the rooftop, flying great looping orbits over the market area. There were bullets snapping over his head when he got home. He found his father there with his two brothers and sister. They were in the courtyard of their home with their backs against a concrete wall, which was the piece they always went when bullets flew.

It seemed to Abdi that there were a hundred helicopters in the sky. The shooting was continual sad seemed to be directed everywhere. Aidid's militia would fight from hundreds of places in the densely populated neighborhood, not in any one place. So the fight raged in all directions. As bad as it was, Abdi found that he grew accustomed to the shooting after a while. It all seemed to be passing overhead anyway. After waiting an hour or so with his family against the wall, he became restless and began moving around the house, looking out windows. Then he ventured outside.

Some of his neighbors said the Rangers had taken Aidid. Many people were running toward the fight. Abdi wanted to see for himself, so he joined the crowds moving that way. He had relatives who lived just a few b1ocks from the Olympic Hotel and he was eager for news of them. With all the bullets and blasts it was hard to believe anyone in the market area had not been hit.

When he got close to the shooting there was terrible confusion on the streets. There were dead people on the road, men, women, and children. Abdi saw an American soldier up one alley lying in the road, bleeding from the leg and trying to hide himself. When a woman ran out in front of Abdi, the American fired. The woman was hit but got off the street. Abdi ran around the corner just as one of the Little Birds zoomed down that alley. He pressed himself against a stone wall and saw bullets kick up in a line at the alley's center toward and then past him. Venturing out like this had been a bed idea. He could not have imagined such madness. After the helicopter passed, a of Somali men with rifles ran to the corner, trying to find a better angle to fire at the American.

Abdi ran then to the house of a friend. They let him in and he got on the floor with everyone else.

-12-

In the minutes before Super Six One was shot down, the Rangers and Delta operators back at the target house had boon preparing to leave. It was taking longer than it should have. First, they had the wounded Ranger, Blackburn, who had fallen from a Black Hawk. Three Humvees had been separated from the ground convoy to return Blackburn to bus. Sergeant Pilla had been killed on that ride. After those three vehicles departed, the convoy just sat.

All of the men had heard veterans talk about the fog of war," which was shorthand for how even the best laid plans went to hell fast once shooting started, but it was shocking nevertheless to see how hard it was to get even the simplest things done. Staff Sergeant Dan Schilling, the air force CCT in the convoy's lead Humvee, finally got fed up waiting and went looking for what was holding things up. It turned out, the D-boys had been waiting with the prisoners for some signal from the convoy, who had been waiting for the D-boys to come out. Schilling ran back and forth a few times and finally got things moving.

Schilling was a laconic man from southern California, a lean, athletic former army reservist who, eight years earlier, had gambled his pay grade and rank to join the air force and see if he could get past the rigorous selection process for combat controllers. It was a quicker path into special ops than any the army offered, and it sounded like fun. CCTs specialized in dropping into dangerous places and directing pinpoint air strikes from the ground. Since this mission called for clone coordination between forces on the pound and I the air, Schilling had been assigned to ride with the convoy commander, Lieutenant Colonel Danny McKnight It was exactly the kind of adventure Schilling had sought. He was now thirty, a six-year veteran of special ops, and he was earning his danger pay today. He fidgeted while the flex-cuffed Somalis were packed into one of the flatbeds. The rest of the assault force had set off on foot for the crash site. The longer the convoy waited like this out on the street, the more vulnerable they were. Every minute of delay gave Aidid's militia and the armed mob time to amass. There was a noticeably steady increase in the volume of fire. From the outset they'd assumed a thirty-minute window. If they could get in and out in that time, they'd probably be okay. Schilling looked at his watch. They'd been on the ground now for thirty-seven minutes.

Then Super Six One went down and everything changed. They were ordered to move to the crash site, pronto.

There were already wounded men in nearly every vehicle. Thick smoke was in the air and there was the odor of gunpowder and flames. Up alleys and in the main road and before some of the buildings along Hawlwadig there were Somali bodies and parts of bodies. There were upended carts and burning riddled hulks of automobiles. One of the convoy's three flatbed five ton trucks was hugely aflame. It had been hit and disabled by an RPG, and a thermite grenade had been ignited to completely destroy it. Big holes had been blasted in the cinder-block walls of the Olympic Hotel and surrounding buildings. Trees had been leveled with gunfire. In the alleyways and at intersections the sandy soil had soaked up of blood and turned brown. The noise was deafening, but had increased gradually enough that the men had grown accustomed to it. A loud snap or the chip of nearby stone would signal alarm, but the mere sound of gunfire no longer stopped anyone. They moved cautiously but without fear in the din. McKnight seemed particularly heedless of the danger. He strode confidently across streets and up to men crouched behind cover as though nothing was out of the ordinary. Shortly he began waving Rangers into the vehicles.

--This is Uniform Six Four [McKnight]. I am ready for exfil. . . I am loaded with everything I can get here and I am ready to move to the crash site, over.

--Roger, go ahead and move [this from Lieutenant Colonel Gary Harrell, the Delta Squadron commander in the C2 Black Hawk.] The streets are fairly clear. We have been getting reports of sniper fire from the north of the crash site. --Roger. We'll take a right out of here and we'll head down to the crash site to the east, over.

It sounded simple enough. Two blocks north, three blocks east. The convoy started rolling, six Humvees and the two remaining flatbed trucks. There were three Humvees in front of the trucks and three behind them. The trucks had big fluorescent orange panels on top to help the surveillance birds track them. The helicopters would be their eyes in the sky, guiding them through the city.

They were driving into tic bloodiest phase of the battle.

-13-

Black Hawk pilot Mike Durant had seen a Little Bird ascend from the crash site as he swung Super Six Four back south on its holding pattern. Straight ahead was the bright white front of the Olympic Hotel, one of the city's few tall buildings, which was across the street from the target building. In the far distance was the darkening green of the