Gary Keeney on C-Team noted:
The [target] building itself was on a corner and when the four Little Birds landed in the street, we were the second in the order of movement. We kinda landed like an L-shape. We landed on the corner. Everything’s browned out but we were the closest ones right there by that entrance courtyard so C-Team was essentially the first ones to get to the courtyard door and enter the building.
Each operator on the four-man teams on the Little Birds had a specific role. Along with the team leader, the assault teams included the team medic, known as an 18D in reference to the military occupational specialty code of Special Forces medic; the grenadier carrying the M203 grenade launcher; and the specially trained and equipped breacher who carried a shotgun for ballistic breaching of doors and pre-configured explosive charges for “loopholing” or “mouseholing” through walls or reinforced doors.
No breaching was required on the objective on October 3 as both the external courtyard door and the main door to the target building were inexplicably unlocked. Paul Leonard recalled:
It seemed like a long time before another team came up behind us. There were several people trying to come down the stairs. But we were blocking the entrance. Once E-Team arrived, C-Team went up three stories of stairs. C-team entered the building first. The first room to the right, which only had curtain for door cover, and Gary Keeney and I cleared the room and found the guy we were looking for that day, probably Salad. He was trying to take his pants off and change into the local garment. I threw him to the floor in the main room. I vaguely remember a very large women running at me when I did this and [another operator] Scott S knocking her to the ground.
The Somalis within the target building gave up immediately as the operators made entry. The Somalis were happy to fire away at Task Force Ranger from a distance but once faced with operators at close quarters breaching into their building they quickly surrendered. Smith remembered:
I never had to shoot anyone or heard of anyone shooting a Somali inside a building on the assault.
It took us [F-Team] several minutes to move to the target building. We had been set down at least a block away. As we moved to the target building, I could hear the first reports of the distinctive sonic crack made by bullets passing nearby. The bullets could be passing next to my ear or 50 feet away. It’s impossible to tell, especially when wearing earplugs, except that the bullets are definitely out there. We finally turned the corner to the target building and proceeded inside. We were the last assault team into the building, having been dropped off the farthest from the objective. We moved up to the second floor and joined the assault in progress.13
As the assaulters started to search and secure the prisoners, the two Black Hawks carrying the remainder of the assault force came to a hover north of the objective on Hawlwadig and began fast-roping to the ground. A-Team along with Staff Sergeant Jeff Bray (their attached Air Force Combat Controller) and Captain Scott Miller’s command team descended from Super 61, nicknamed “Thunderstruck”.
Behind them came G-Team from Super 62, nicknamed “Black Widow.” G-Team at the time had a full complement of six operators so wasn’t one of the original assault teams as they had too many operators for an MH-6: “They weren’t super happy about that one,” Hooten laughed. “Everyone wants to be on a Little Bird going in!”
Once the operators roped to the ground, the two Black Hawks cut the ropes and ascended into what was known as a “low CAP” or combat air patrol. Super 61 carried four snipers from 3 Troop, the squadron’s recce/sniper troop, whilst Super 62 carried three, all of whom would stay on board after the insertion.
The two helicopters would then conduct aerial sniper support over the objective at a typical height of around 150 feet to allow the snipers to take their shots targeting RPG gunners and militia leaders. The doorgunners were also able to fire their miniguns should suppressive fire be required. Tom DiTomasso explained:
We’d been using two Black Hawks for airborne security and surveillance locally around the target. On board those two helicopters were US Army SMU [special mission unit] snipers. If they needed to shoot from the helicopter they could; they provided critical airborne situational awareness with the capability to employ precision marksmanship fire as required.
Above the two sniper helicopters was Super 63 carrying the command and control or C2 element who would manage the battle from the air. Inside Super 63 was the Air Mission Commander, Lieutenant Colonel Tom Matthews; the Ground Mission Commander, Lieutenant Colonel Gary Harrell; and Staff Sergeant Ray Benjamin, their assigned Air Force Combat Controller.
Also orbiting nearby was Super 68, nicknamed “Razor’s Edge,” flown by Chief Warrant Officer Dan Jollota and Major Herb Rodriguez. On board Super 68 was the specialist Combat-Search-and-Rescue or CSAR team who would fast-rope in should the unthinkable occur and a helicopter was shot down over the city.
Directly behind Super 61 and 62 were the Black Hawks carrying the Ranger chalks. In the film and book Black Hawk Down, much is made of the numerous fires lit using burning tires and identified as signals by the SNA that the Americans were approaching. As they flew toward the objective on October 3, Mike Durant in the lead Black Hawk, Super 64 nicknamed “Venom,” didn’t “recall a noticeable difference” in the amount of fires that were burning below in the city.
Both Durant and Gerry Izzo in Super 65 confirmed that neither saw anything that they considered out of the ordinary on their approach to the target and certainly nothing to the scale of that shown in the movie. Izzo explained:
It wasn’t that really thick black smoke like they did in the movie – the main thing that we noticed was that when the assault force went in, they threw up a tremendous amount of dust and that was the thing that was limiting our visibility.
Truthfully I don’t think they had those fires going until after the battle started. When I saw that in the movie I was sitting there going, “Huh, must’ve missed that!” You do get a little tunnel vision when you’re scared but I would have seen all of that smoke! When the assault group went in, the Little Birds they get in and they get out very, very quickly and on this particular day they had a little difficulty getting in, they threw up so much dust that one aircraft had to go around and come back in. So that delayed their assault.
With the blocking force, you want to come in right on the heels of the assault force, but you got to let them get in and get out. So while all of this was going on, Mike [Durant] brought us to a hover a quarter mile short of the objective area. We were in a box formation so Mike was in front of me, I was behind him, the number three aircraft was 90 degrees out Mike’s right side, and the number four aircraft was right behind him. We were approaching the target in a box formation so that we could put our Rangers in on the four corners. So as we came to a hover, we started throwing up a tremendous amount of dust and finally when we got the radio call that the assault Little Birds had come out, then we moved forward and we flew out of our dust cloud into the clear and then we plunged into the dust from the assault.
As we were groping along, from block to block, all of us had a photocopy of an overhead photograph of the objective area so that we all knew what our insertion point was going to look like. Mine was like a little sidewalk café with a white fence around it – as we got closer and closer I could start to hear a lot of gunfire, I could hear rounds snapping past the aircraft. At first I was thinking, “Oh, this is our guys really letting them have it,” but they were shooting at us.
My co-pilot said, “Is this it? Is this the intersection?” and I said no, there’s no fence, there’s no patio, we’re going to keep going. While we were doing this, I couldn’t see Mike in the aircraft in front of me because of the dust. I had two concerns; one, I didn’t want to ram him from behind and the other was I didn’t want to put my guys in short either, I wanted to put them in the right spot.
Aircraft collisions between special operations helicopters are a very real risk in these types of operations. 160th SO
AR aircrew had lost their lives training for similar missions, as had Allied SOF. In fact two Australian Army Black Hawks would collide in midair during a nighttime exercise only three years later in October 1996 resulting in the deaths of some 18 soldiers, most from the Special Air Service Regiment. Izzo, Durant, and the other pilots were all acutely aware of the danger posed by collisions and strived to maintain their distances, even in close-to-zero visibility.
All of the aircraft had begun taking ground fire on their approach but most of the aircrew and passengers were unaware of the amount of RPGs being launched against them as the dust rose up around them. The brownouts obscured almost everything. Mike Durant confirmed that the brownout concealed the RPGs spiraling skyward, plus “the fact that most often they were firing after we went by” meant that he wasn’t aware of the number of RPGs being launched. Tom DiTomasso distinctly remembers the ground fire, however: “As we were making that approach the helicopters were all being shot at.”
A Somali militia leader saw the helicopters arrive: “We saw the aircrafts flying over us. As soon as we saw them flying over us, we starting firing at them immediately because they were flying on a very low level. They responded to the fire and troops from two aircrafts descended into the house.” The SNA had developed an ingenious method for remaining hidden from the helicopters:
Each of those militia men was taking cover from the aircrafts in the manner which we’re accustomed to take cover from the aircrafts. The easiest way to take cover from an aircraft is to have a piece of sheet over the person and he fires from under the sheet of cloth. If necessary, two small boys or two women [are] used to stretch the piece of cloth over the militia men.14
The Black Hawks continued to edge forward, peering through the dust to try to identify their insertion points. In the rear, nervous Rangers watched for the signal from the crew chiefs to throw the fast ropes out the doors. Ranger Sergeant Keni Thomas noted in his memoir: “Super 66 stayed over Hawlwadig Road, one of the only paved main roads in the city. Across from me, a block over to the east, I could see the other Black Hawks slow down and begin creeping above the street just like we were doing.”15
Super 66, nicknamed “Gunslinger” and piloted by Chief Warrant Officer Stan Wood and Chief Warrant Officer Gary Fuller, finally flared over Chalk 3’s assigned insertion point and the crew chiefs shouted “Ropes!” With that, the Rangers hurled the three-inch-thick ropes from the open doors. In the other Black Hawks, an identical process was being followed as the Rangers leapt out into midair, grabbed onto the rope and descended quickly to the ground.
Sergeant First Class Sean “Tim” Watson’s Chalk 3 successfully inserted into the southeast corner of the target block, directly outside the objective. Already they too could hear enemy gunfire. Chalk 3 followed their well-rehearsed drills and quickly established overwatch positions to cover the western and southern approaches to the intersection. To their east at another intersection, Chalk 1, led by Lieutenant Larry Perino and accompanied by Captain Steele’s command element, had landed and were also taking enemy fire.
In “Heavy Metal,” Super 65, Izzo brought the aircraft to a careful hover. He explained:
I called “Ropes” and all the while I could hear rounds cracking past the aircraft. They sound exactly like pneumatic nail guns – a very sharp crack like that. Normally I would get down to about 20 or 30 feet and as I was trying to come down lower both of my crew chiefs said, “Whoa, whoa, don’t come any lower.” There was a wire or a cable or something beneath us that I couldn’t see that they could.
Tom [DiTomasso] would sit on the center console and I would reach around and squeeze his arm or pat him on the back and I’d say, you know, “Be careful Tom.” He always said he would wait until he got that “Go get ‘em” before taking his headset off. He got superstitious about it. So Tom, just before he went out the door, said, “I heard a double explosion” and I thought it was somebody blowing a door on a building. One of my gunners said “That was close. They just fired an RPG at us.”
It missed us and detonated about 75 feet behind us. The two explosions I’d heard; the first was the launch and the second was when it exploded. What saved our bacon I think was four 20,000-pound helicopters blowing up a hurricane of dust and sand and the guy probably couldn’t see, probably couldn’t breathe … I wouldn’t be surprised if he just pointed in the general direction with his eyes closed and fired. He was very close, certainly within a block of us.
As Tom was fast-roping down he said it felt like someone snapped a wet towel onto his face, the shockwave and the concussion hit him [from another RPG]. When he got on the ground he thought we were going to come crashing down on top of his head! He looked up and saw us hightailing it out of there and thought, “Okay, they got away.”
Not surprisingly the Rangers felt very vulnerable whilst they were on the aircraft. Conversely the pilots naturally felt more secure whilst the Rangers were on board, “because if we got shot down, I have 15 Rangers around me,” explained Izzo.
Although the helicopters were by now receiving significant RPG and small-arms fire, the dust also had the effect of making return fire from their doorgunners difficult. With the large numbers of Somali civilians on the ground, target identification was equally problematic: “My gunners never had a clear shot, never fired a shot. They maintained good fire control and fire discipline. I was very proud of them because they could have just started hosing up and down the streets,” added Izzo, continuing:
I had to come up about 20 feet to come out of the dust and Mike and Ray were already out on their way [to the holding area to the north] and I looked over at my co-pilot Captain [Richard “Trey”] Williams and I said,”‘I think we’re wearing out our welcome here!” They would take pot shots at us but that was most definitely the first time they were shooting at us on the way in. I was very, very lucky that throughout the whole operation, I didn’t take a single hit on the aircraft. It was just luck.
Tom DiTomasso on board Izzo’s Super 65 recounted:
We approached the objective from the north. As we got closer, I was again amazed at how the pilots could navigate and avoid obstacles as they “flared hard” to stop on a dime. They put us exactly where they said they would. Gerry [Izzo], Trey [Williams], and the crew of Super 65 were great to work with. Absolute professionals. I could hear explosions that sounded rather close and I fought to swallow my heart again. Small-arms fire cracked overhead as the helicopter, Super 65, “pulled away.” As we were fast-roping in I could hear rounds going off, I could hear explosions … We were a good half block away from the target building. There was no shooting going on at the target building, all of the shooting was occurring outside at the blocking positions.
His chalk established their overwatch positions: “Staff Sergeant [Ed] Yurek’s team was oriented east and Staff Sergeant [Steven] Lycopolus’s oriented north with Specialist [Shawn] Nelson and his M60 crew. Both elements of Chalk 2 emplaced their chase teams, consisting of two riflemen, on the inside corners of the intersection facing the objective.”
DiTomasso’s men almost immediately found themselves in a vicious close-quarters fight at the northeast corner of the objective. DiTomasso recounted:
A bunch of enemy drivers and bodyguards were throwing hand grenades over a wall from a [parking] garage – we had literally fast-roped in outside this garage. I think they were the drivers to the folks that were at the enemy meeting we were attacking.
Chalk 2 consisted of 15 Rangers. Six on one team with Staff Sergeant Yurek, and six with Staff Sergeant Lycopolus. The last three were me, my Radio Telephone Operator (RTO) Specialist Jason Coleman, and my Forward Observer (FO) Specialist Joe Thomas. Joe was with Staff Sergeant Yurek’s team positioned to the north and saw the enemy throwing grenades over the wall on top of us. Some exploded and some didn’t. He screamed at me, “They’re in there!” as he pointed to the garage.
At that time, myself, Specialist Coleman, Sergeant Struzik, and Staff Sergeant Lycopolus were closest
to the open gate. We needed to go into the garage to fight those guys. We moved across the street and stacked near the half-open gate. It all happened very fast. I took out a fragmentation grenade; pulled the pin; let the spoon go; counted “1000, 2000, 3000”; and threw it through the gate. As soon as it exploded, we moved through the gate and scanned our sectors. We cleared the lot, killed two, and captured two.
DiTomasso attributes this early success to the extra training they had received from the operators, often conducted covertly without the knowledge of Captain Steele. DiTomasso disclosed:
Days earlier, we sneaked out of the hangar and met Norm and Kyle, SMU operators that bunked adjacent to me in the hangar, for training. They told us to meet them down on the beach at night, where they would show us how to tactically enter a room and move inside structures, something we did not do a lot of in the Rangers at that time. This training saved our lives.
To the northwest, Super 66 with Matt Eversmann’s Chalk 4 was now approaching their insertion point. Eversmann recounted:
As we were going in, we came to a very abrupt halt on the approach. The pilot gave us a time warning and about 30 seconds out we start getting really into that focus: “Hey this is really going to happen here very shortly.” So the helicopter comes to a stop and the pilot says “I can’t see shit,” those were his words and I’m thinking, “What does he mean?” I look out the window and we’re in the middle of this sandstorm, it really was like going into a sandstorm. You don’t have to be an expert to think, “That’s not a great situation to be in.”
We’re pretty low and we know the enemy has rocket-propelled grenades so this is not a good place to be and I remember that sort of anxiety jumping out of me: “Holy smokes, we need to get on the ground!” The pilot is trying to maneuver the aircraft and I guess wait for the brownout to settle and there was some confusion whether we could advance or not.
Day of the Rangers: The Battle of Mogadishu 25 Years On Page 11
