Day of the Rangers: The Battle of Mogadishu 25 Years On

by Leigh Neville

  Because of the urgent nature of Blackburn’s injuries, Struecker said, “I was tasked to take Blackburn back before we got the all clear signal [from the objective]. I drove my two Humvees and the cargo Humvee up into the middle of it and we started to get it on [began firing] from the Humvees because the blocking positions down the street were taking some pretty intense fire.”

  In fact McKnight’s GRF had been taking enemy fire as they waited for the signal to move and most of his Rangers had dismounted to return fire. Struecker recounted:

  Humvees were easy targets – I referred to them as “bullet magnets.” It wasn’t uncommon for us to take a little small-arms fire [on earlier missions] but it was very, very inaccurate. On that day it was heavier small-arms fire than normal and more accurate small-arms fire than normal and that was from the moment we got close to the target building.

  There’s a definite ping when it goes to your left and to your right. There’s a sound like slapping a tight metal wire with a piece of steel – like a suspension bridge, if you hit the wire on a suspension bridge it makes a very distinctive sound – that’s the sound a bullet makes right as it passes over the top of your head. The louder that sound, the closer it is.

  The three-vehicle convoy would be led by Struecker with his Humvee mounting a .50 cal. Driving an open-back cargo Humvee carrying Blackburn was Delta Master Sergeant Chuck E. Delta operator John M and a SEAL rode along with him as did the Ranger Medic Marcus Good. “It was basically a driver and a couple of guys in the back working on Blackburn while he was on an Israeli litter, trying to keep him alive.” The third vehicle was commanded by Ranger Sergeant Danny Mitchell with an Mk19 mounted on the roof. An AH-6 was assigned to provide air cover for the convoy.

  Struecker continued:

  The route that I take is down along an alleyway next to the target building and then down Hawlwadig Road down to the port and then over to our base. We’re getting shot at down Hawlwadig Road – we did get shot at just trying to get Blackburn on the litter into the Humvee. People are just having a field day shooting at these three Humvees …

  At this point we are getting hit from 360 degrees, from dozens of different weapons and most of them from 20 or 30 feet away. RPGs going both sides of the road, people are lobbing hand grenades off of rooftops at us, and heavy and light small arms.

  All three crew-served weapons on the Humvees were returning fire along with the passengers, who were firing as best they could out of the windows of the Humvees. Jeff Struecker explained how the vehicles had been optimized as firing platforms:

  We had modified the Humvees to take the back hatch off, we took the back doors off and put a bomb plate between the gunner/driver compartment and the back of the Humvee. [Sergeant] Dominick Pilla and [Specialist] Tim Moynihan were sitting in the back, [they] were in the back hatch and Moynihan’s got the rear of the Humvee [with an M16] and Pilla’s got the right side [with his M60] because the guy on the .50 [Paulson] is manning the left side. There’s no hatch but we put some sandbags in there to give some protection but we wanted to have as much field of fire as we can.

  In the crescendo of small-arms fire, Sergeant Dominick Pilla was fatally shot soon after leaving the objective. Task Force Ranger had suffered their first death on the October 3 operation. “Dominick Pilla was killed within a minute of turning the corner onto National Street. He was wearing a ballistic helmet but he was shot just above his right eye, probably from a heavy weapons system [PKM] from the looks of the wound,” recounted Struecker. It was obvious to the Rangers that Pilla had been killed instantly. Struecker continued:

  [Platoon Sergeant] Bob Gallagher calls me up to get a status. Our SOP [standard operating procedure] at the time was “If I’m in a fight, don’t bother me, I’ll call you back when I get a chance” and he called me in the fight of my life. He was calling me again and again and finally to get him off my back, and to be honest I never should have said anything over the radio, I said “It’s Pilla, he’s dead.” There’s 14 conversations going on over that radio net and when I said “Pilla’s dead,” total silence for about 30 seconds.

  Struecker regrets naming the casualty over the radio: “We had what we referred to as line numbers and technically I should have given his line number over the radio. I was not authorized to give his real name. I did that just to get my boss off my back. To this day, Danny McKnight reminds me ‘Jeff, we had line numbers for a reason.’”

  The three-Humvee evacuation convoy was receiving little support from the air. Struecker said:

  The Little Birds are pretty much committed to the guys who are on foot or McKnight’s convoy. The snipers on the Black Hawk are taking shots when they see them but they’re flying big circles around the city, they’ll pass over our head about every three minutes and take a shot but basically there is no support from the air at this point.

  Struecker recounted that even when the firing decreased as they neared the port facility controlled by the United Nations (“The port just equalled not getting shot at”), a new problem emerged: “It was feeding time and the United Nations had a food distribution site on National Street – I didn’t know that – so at one point the road had 10,000 people in front of us and the only way to part the crowd was to fire my .50 cal right across the top of their heads.”

  “There’s roadblocks but not roadblocks set up to stop this three-vehicle convoy, the roadblocks are there to channel the traffic the way the warlords want the traffic to go.” Struecker was forced to deploy concussion and flashbang grenades to clear the crowds out from in front of his convoy. All three Humvees had sustained significant damage; “the Humvees are shot to pieces even before we get down to the port,” and at least three of his Rangers had by now been wounded by enemy gunfire and RPG fragments.

  As they finally neared the New Port, Struecker’s Humvee had to ram a pick-up truck that refused to pull out of their way. Eventually the battered convoy arrived at the port, out of Habr Gidr territory, and immediately headed for the airfield. Struecker had radioed ahead to alert the medical unit and the shot-up Humvees were met by Doc Marsh and his team. As Marsh treated the wounded, the two Delta operators along with the SEAL sniper began resupplying themselves with ammunition, in anticipation of returning to the battle.

  At the blocking positions back at the target building, the situation was worsening. Matt Eversmann remembered:

  They were throwing everything at us. We got it all. What we realized after the battle was that Aideed’s militiamen and all the other bad guys with guns came around to the west of the target building and started to move in and were generally moving from the northwest toward our target. So where Chalk 4 was, and I don’t want to say “Gosh, we took all of the fire,” but we took a massive amount of fire in a very short order of time.

  We wound up taking fire from three directions – the north, the west, and the east – almost immediately. That sound of RPGs going off is just one that you don’t forget. I remember at the point that Blackburn was getting evacuated, we’re fighting guys who are 25 meters away.

  Eversmann’s chalk was already a man down and was missing Joyce and McLaughlin who had accompanied Blackburn to Struecker’s Humvees. Eversmann was relieved when they returned, running up Hawlwadig. “Casey Joyce got back and said they’d got him [Blackburn] on a vehicle and he’d been evacuated. Clearly we couldn’t land a helicopter because of all the fire we’re under now so we do the next best thing.” Eversmann remembered:

  [Sergeants] Telscher and Joyce, to their credit, great young Rangers, they were fighting tooth and nail with the enemy from three directions. It’s a testament to their tenacity and their courage that I didn’t even have to give them any guidance. They were following the rules of engagement immediately. It was really reassuring to know that that was the quality of young soldiers – they’d never been in battle before although we had been in a firefight on one of the [earlier] missions [the September 6/7 raid on the former Russian Embassy compound] so everyone knew that they could
do their job in a crucible. It was a tremendous psychological advantage, certainly for me.

  I remember thinking “Holy shit, there are a lot of bad guys and there’s a lot of fire going on.”

  Eversmann even joined the fray himself, firing his M16A2: “Historically when you read books about battles … leaders fight with their radio but not with their weapon. Unfortunately we were at the point that we all gotta shoot. That was an interesting experience, the guy who should be leading and organizing this fight is now kneeling behind a vehicle shooting at bad guys.”

  It was later established that the majority of Somali reinforcements were entering the battlespace from the north and were running directly into Chalk 4’s blocking position in the process. This accounted for the incredible amount of enemy small-arms and RPG fire encountered at the northwest blocking position. A Somali militia fighter later noted: “Immediately afterwards all the people in the neighborhood took their guns and participated in the fight because the area was one of the largest markets in Mogadishu, and there were many people having their properties there.”27

  Matt Eversmann’s Rangers were deployed at either side of the intersection, using whatever sparse cover they could while they returned fire at the growing numbers of Somali militia. Eversmann said:

  Cover for me was behind a car, some crappy old Somali car, right next to a building. The other guys were behind vehicles or wherever you could make yourself small enough to have something metal or brick in front of you.

  They [the Rangers] put a lot of lead down against a lot of bad guys to allow us to accomplish the commander’s intent which was not to let bad guys in to influence the objective where the Delta guys are capturing the targets. It is a testament to the intensity of training we had done and I know that sounds like a Ranger TV ad but it really was true. Something kicked in and the only answer is training.

  We [were] always making sure that you’re only shooting at bad guys. This isn’t just a free-for-all, you can’t just shoot at every window, every door or every corner. This was, granted, a large volume of fire being returned at the bad guys, but I’ll go to my grave saying that one thing we did well [was that] we followed the rules of engagement in Chalk 4- empirically.

  With the incredible weight of incoming enemy fire, casualties to Chalk 4 were only a matter of time. Private Anton Berendsen was the first to be hit. He recalled in an interview:

  I put my selector switch to semi, and I had a bead on him [a Somali gunman] and I knew if he popped his head out again I would take him. And it so happened he didn’t do that again, what he did was, instead of peeking out, he darted out through the alleyway and as he was turning I just remember him slowly going like this, it was almost like a slow motion … he just started firing rapidly, automatic AK47, and at that point I remember it was like dust, like somebody had just taken some dust and hit it at your face. I remember looking at him, and I saw blood on my nose, and I remember looking at my shoulder.28

  Matt Eversmann recounted the shooting and the incredible tenacity of his young grenadier:

  Berendsen takes one in the arm. Thankfully not a deadly wound, it didn’t hit a bone. He was still able to engage the enemy. He was a grenadier and I remember I was trying to put a bandage right over his arm just to stop the bleeding and he was sitting on the ground behind this vehicle and he’s fumbling around with his grenade tube, he’s got an M203 and I’m like, “What the fuck are you doing?” Another of these surreal moments.

  He was trying to place an HE round into the tube of his grenade launcher and he couldn’t do it one-handed. So while the other guy’s working on him, I put the round into the tube, close it and hand the weapon to him. He’s sitting on the ground with this 203 balanced on his leg and there’s a bad guy about a block away on this corner of a building, like an aluminum shed attached to the corner of this building, and the bad guy keeps putting his weapon out and shooting toward us. Berendsen puts this HE round right on the corner. Unbelievable, absolutely a gold medal shot – one-handed while he’s getting bandaged up!

  It’s difficult to ascertain the exact order of the casualties so many years after the fact but Sergeant Scott Galentine, M60 gunner Specialist Kevin Snodgrass, and Eversmann’s Forward Observer, McLaughlin, were all hit in a very short space of time after Berendsen. Eversmann remembered the details of each of the wounds:

  I saw Scott Galentine right across the street from me get shot right in the thumb. I watched it explode like a tomato and to his credit, he didn’t panic. He just ran across the street to me with his thumb dangling off. I remember just putting his thumb back in place and saying “Scott, hold it while we bandage it.” You’re in that mode, wrap a gauze around it, tie it in close and put him behind cover.

  Snodgrass had been shot in the thigh, a round skips off the ground I suspect [under the car he was using for cover], thankfully it doesn’t hit an artery, didn’t hit his femur so [we] stop the bleeding and work on evac. Jeff [McLaughlin] I think he got shot in the hand as I recall.

  Including Blackburn, Chalk 4 had now suffered five casualties within the first several minutes of the operation. Eversmann added:

  To this day, people ask, “When did you start losing your hearing?” and I’m like, “October 3rd, 1993!” I wear hearing aids today. It was so loud. When we were in the blocking position and one of the Black Hawks went across right above us and just opened up with the miniguns. It was so loud the molars in your teeth hurt!

  Despite the enemy fire directed toward the blocking positions, the aircrews in the Black Hawks were showing considerable restraint. Super 64 Pilot Mike Durant recalled:

  So, we’re having a heck of a time sorting out where everybody is. We’ve got these miniguns that’ll fire over 4000 rounds a minute. We don’t want to just go crazy, hosing down the countryside until we know where all the friendlies are. So, in the end, we never fired a round. And I don’t regret that at all. We never had sufficient understanding of the tactical situation to do it. I armed the crew chief’s guns, but we all talked about how we weren’t going to shoot until we all agreed we had it all figured out, because there were just too many friendlies down there.29

  At Sergeant Tim Watson’s position immediately southwest of the objective and north of Eversmann’s Chalk 4, the amount of enemy fire was still relatively sporadic. Chalk 3’s SAW and M60 gunners would regularly engage individual gunmen who darted out of alleyways to empty a magazine in the direction of the blocking position. Large crowds had gathered at each of the main junctions but were largely staying at least a block back, content to watch the spectacle. Gunmen used the cover of the crowds to spray bursts at the Rangers, knowing that they would be protected by the Americans’ adherence to their rules of engagement.

  Some of these bullets struck home. Sergeant Keni Thomas was one of Watson’s team leaders and was up against the wall outside of the target location when he was hit twice, miraculously surviving both gunshots. One round struck a magazine pouch and was stopped by one of his M16 magazines whilst another also struck a magazine pouch but exited only to strike his RBA’s (Ranger Board Armour) trauma plate.

  Lieutenant Larry Perino, co-located with Captain Steele and Chalk 1 at the southeast blocking position, later wrote that he experienced a similar phenomenon:

  At my position, small crowds of Somalis had begun to form. The crowd was mostly men and women, curious to find out who had just landed in their neighborhood. We cleared them out of the way by gesturing and throwing flashbang grenades.

  Gradually, the direct fire around the area began to increase. Shortly after scattering the curiosity seekers, my blocking position began to receive sporadic fire from the south and west. I diverted my attention from the radio and concentrated on the fight at hand. No one in my chalk could identify exactly where the fire was coming from, but I could see that the AH-6 Little Bird helicopters were engaging enemy targets to the south with their 7.62-caliber miniguns.

  The situation became even more intense when a woman stepped out into
the street south of our location and began walking toward us with her arms outstretched. Behind the woman was a man with an AK47, apparently using her as a human shield. Private First Class [Brian] Heard cried out, “I can see him. Right behind her. He’s got an AK” … Heard fired a long burst from his M60 machine gun, killing the two Somalis.

  A couple of minutes later, several children walked out and began pointing out our locations. Not wanting to take any chances, I placed several well-aimed shots at the feet of the children and sent them running for cover. Bullets began cracking over our heads from the east, and my other M60 gunner, Specialist [Mike] Hawley, fired in the general direction of the enemy fire. Another burst of fire impacted mere feet from Specialist Hawley, but he still continued to engage enemy targets down the street.

  By this time, almost everyone in my chalk began to engage armed Somalis as they ran out into the streets. Somalis were firing RPGs at us and the helicopters overhead from every direction. Out of the corner of my eye, I spotted a woman carrying an RPG across the street about 150 meters away. I aimed my CAR15 and fired three rounds. The first shot was behind her, but the next two found their mark, and the woman fell down in a heap.30

  Chalk 1 had also suffered their first casualty when Sergeant Aaron Williamson was struck in a finger on his right hand. He ignored the wound and kept shooting. Williamson would join a unique club, the small number of the Rangers who would suffer more than one gunshot wound that day but thankfully survive the ordeal. One of the Ranger team leaders in Chalk 3, Staff Sergeant Doug Boren, had also been hit by a round that grazed his neck. All of the Ranger blocking positions apart from Chalk 2 now had wounded.

  At DiTomasso’s position, the fire was also increasing. They too encountered the militia using human shields. Unwilling initially to engage the gunmen hiding behind civilians, they instead used flashbang grenades to frighten the civilians away. They also shot at least one militiaman who stood in the street firing west at Eversmann’s Chalk 4, unaware of the Rangers to his southeast. Eventually the mobs began to advance toward their position and the Rangers were forced to engage the crowds. An AH-6 added its minigun fire to the fusillade.