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

by Leigh Neville

  The other crew chief was sitting against a wall and it appeared he had a back injury. Somalis were running all over the helicopter. The two pilots were still inside the helicopter and [the body of ] Cliff Wolcott was trapped. We pulled [the body of ] Donovan Briley [the co-pilot] out. Initially we were just fighting the Somalis, trying to get them off the helicopter.

  Whilst his men secured the site, DiTomasso radioed Staff Sergeant Yurek commanding the remainder of his team back at the blocking position to move up and link up at the crash site, following the same route they took. At the objective, the assault force was making plans to join DiTomasso’s men at the crash. A Delta operator explained: “Through contingency training we knew that we would move on foot to that crash site and secure the dead and wounded, we knew what these Somalia fighters would do to their bodies so that was a focus.”

  1626 HOURS: GRF #1 WILL MOVE TO CRASH SITE WITH ASSAULT FORCE AND PC; MOVE TO CRASH SITE #1 APPROXIMATELY 1635. PC EN-ROUTE BACK TO TF RANGER COMPOUND VIA 5 TON WITH HMMWV SECURITY. QRF ASSISTANCE REQUESTED; QRF TO REPORT TO TF RANGER COMPOUND TO LINK-UP.

  Back at the objective, Mike Moser was still loading the trucks. He said:

  I do not recall precisely how I learned of Super 61, I believe I got word through the Assault frequency [radio] I’m pretty sure that was broadcast, however, in the moments following the clearing of the target, most of us were collected in a courtyard and there was considerable face-to-face communication between the team leaders/Ground Force Commander [Miller] as they definitively established the situation and formulated a plan to move towards the crash site.

  During this time I was employed with several other guys trying to load our cargo – the various detainees obtained in the target [known by the brevity codeword Precious Cargo] – into the back of a truck in the alley outside the courtyard. It was during this period that I definitely was aware of 61 and the proposed foot movement toward its location. The vehicle convoy, which included the truck into which I just loaded the detainees, would attempt to move to the same location via a separate route. In relatively short order we began to move into the alleys toward 61. This is the interval at which I recall a growing volume of fire, most noticeable as I made forays in to the street to load the trucks. It seemed the vehicle column attracted a lot of attention.

  Delta Captain Scott Miller issued clear orders to his men: “Okay, we’re moving. Find the crash and secure it.” Another operator noted: “Scott M [Miller] was the squadron operations officer at the time and was acting as the Ground Force Commander. He organized the assault force and got it moving east down the road toward the crash.”

  Norm Hooten, at the time a five-year veteran of Delta, noted:

  We rehearsed prior to going to Mogadishu … and one of the things that happened during our rehearsal was we had an aircraft go down … and that’s where we came up with the plan that we would move on foot to that crash site immediately. Not in vehicles as we couldn’t move through the tight streets in vehicles.

  We [Delta] understood the plan. Delta had crashed a helicopter on every operation I’d ever been on! The original mission in Iran [Operation Eagle Claw], they crashed birds. Crashed birds in Grenada. We crashed one in Panama. Crashed them in the Gulf War, crashed them in Somalia, so we’d gotten used to sending recovery teams and SAR birds. It wasn’t something that was new to us because unfortunately we’re famous for crashing helos!

  The inevitable Clausewitzian friction or fog of war that features in some way or another in every battle now made its first untimely appearance. After Tom DiTomasso moved off with half of his chalk toward the crash site he expected the closest blocking position, Chalk 4 under Sergeant Matt Eversmann to their immediate north, to move parallel toward Super 61 with Chalk 2.

  DiTomasso explained the procedure:

  The intent is that we would all move together, providing mutual support for each position. Think of a box with north being up. At the lower right hand corner you have Chalk 1, with Lieutenant Perino and Captain Steele. At the top right hand corner you have Chalk 2 where I was. At the top left hand corner you have Chalk 4, with Eversmann. And the lower left hand corner is Chalk 3 with Sergeant First Class Sean T Watson.

  If you imagine that entire box moving to the right, or east, that’s how we rehearsed it and that’s what I expected to happen. Chalk 2 went to the crash site, we went to the east, to the crash site, racing the crowd. I expected Chalk 4 to follow because before I left I got on the radio with Sergeant Eversmann and said, “Do you see me? I’m running down this road” and he said, “Roger.” We were all under a lot of enemy fire. I know Colonel McKnight and Staff Sergeant Eversmann did everything they could to get to the crash site, it just didn’t work.

  Sergeant Eversmann’s Chalk 4 were with little doubt receiving the lion’s share of the enemy fire and by this stage had multiple wounded. Enemy from three separate directions were trying to suppress them, particularly from the north, which was as noted the major enemy reinforcement route. Eversmann recalled how he became aware of the downing of Super 61:

  Picture two Rangers behind a vehicle facing to the east. [Specialist] Dave Diemer is my SAW gunner, he’s engaging to the east, I’m kneeling right next to him behind this vehicle and Dave turned to me and says, “A Black Hawk just crashed.” I didn’t hear anything on the radio, knew nothing about it.

  I looked down toward the east, it was too far for me to absolutely say, “That’s a helicopter” but I just remember this big pile of rubble. I remember I could see a black helmet that far away – somebody was there. I said, “Hey, there’s bad guys in between us so you’ve really got to check your fire, you know we don’t want to have fratricide [friendly fire] here.”

  The problem was first of all I’ve got enemy between my position and the target [the crash site] so running right down this alleyway is kinda suicide so [my] second thought is, “How do we bypass around there?” I remember talking to Jim Telscher and asking him how much demo, C4 [plastic explosive], he had because the thought was maybe we could punch through, maybe we could get there by going through a house and blowing through some courtyards. Unfortunately he only had very limited demo. Maybe we could go north a block and go east a couple of blocks and come that way. That whole idea of how’re we going to move without going full frontal right into the fray with bad guys, I’m trying to figure that out when [Colonel] Danny McKnight pulls up.

  DiTomasso recalled the confusion, noting that McKnight intended to move the entire GRF along with Eversmann’s Chalk to the crash site:

  Colonel McKnight, the battalion commander, happened to be with the vehicles that day because the platoon leader [Lieutenant Larry Moores] for that platoon was on a Convoy Escort Patrol when the mission came into the JOC. That’s why he was not with the vehicles on the initial insertion. When the first bird got shot down, Colonel McKnight was there with Matt Eversmann and Colonel McKnight made the decision to load Chalk 4 onto the Humvees and five-ton trucks instead of moving by foot.

  Eversmann added:

  McKnight pulls up with his convoy and Dan Schilling’s with him. They’re picking up our fast ropes that are still lying there and picking up our wounded guys too. I remember saying, “Hey sir, we’re moving to the crash site right down there, to the east down this alley,” and his words, and I can’t remember verbatim, are “Well, we’re going to the crash site too, jump on board and we’ll drive over there.” I’m like, “Okay, that’s the battalion commander, that makes sense, he’s got comms with everybody.”

  At the time, and it’s not true, but I assumed that Mogadishu, like any other city, would be on a grid. Go up a block, turn right, go two blocks then turn right and we’ll be right there. I didn’t think for even a second [that] we wouldn’t be able to do that. So we loaded everyone onto their convoy and started that movement towards the crash site. The assumption was, for me, the battalion commander’s here and I go with the boss. I didn’t think at the time, “Well, shit, driving down this alleyway with bad guys on both s
ides is probably a bad idea too,” so the idea of getting on his vehicles to head over there made perfect sense. Plus being down to six guys.

  With Chalk 4 now on board McKnight’s GRF, the remainder of the blocking positions and the assaulters moved on foot toward the crash site after first collapsing their perimeter around the objective. Their route would take them directly east from the objective. Norm Hooten’s F-Team led off. He recounted:

  C-Team, Matt Rierson’s team, had been designated to escort the prisoners back to base so we split the assault force. We sent one team [C-Team] back with the prisoners and the rest of us to the crash site. It was F-Team, E-Team, B-Team and Alpha [A] Team. G-Team were with Scottie Miller but they were moving with us. We were going down the street with F-Team on the right front and Echo Team was on the left.

  They headed four to five blocks east before reaching Marehan Road. At the intersection, they turned to the left and headed north up Marehan toward the crash. Hooten remembered the weight of enemy fire as they crossed intersections which had become ‘fatal funnels’:

  Captain Steele and a blocking position [Chalk 1] was in the center and behind us was Earl Fillmore’s team, Alpha Team, and [then] B-Team. There was a pretty heavy engagement moving up that street and we were doing fire and maneuver – shooting and moving but getting directions at the same time from the helo that was trying to guide us in to the aircraft. Every time we crossed an intersection we’d see them and shoot. They were shooting around corners, they’d run to the sound of the gunfire, get to an intersection and dump their magazine. All of them were converging on that one point [the crash site].

  Fellow F-Team member Kurt Smith detailed the foot movement:

  We moved in a column formation on both sides of the street. We took advantage of cover as best as we could while moving down the street, but we took casualties anyway. We could hear the sonic crack of bullets passing down the street but very rarely could we see the actual shooters. Many times the Somalis would simply stick their weapon around the corner and fire off a magazine in our general direction without aiming. I saw a Ranger across the street get hit and go down. It was frustrating because there appeared to be nothing to shoot at, no known enemy positions to suppress.

  At the same time, the second half of DiTomasso’s Chalk 2 under Sergeant Yurek were moving on foot following the same route as DiTomasso had used minutes earlier. They braved the shooting gallery of the big alley next to the parking lot to emerge onto Marehan Road and quickly linked up with DiTomasso who was by now crouched behind a green Fiat car with his RTO.

  In a significant departure from reality in the Black Hawk Down film, two members of Chalk 2, M60 gunner Specialist Shawn Nelson and SAW gunner Specialist Lance Twombly, were shown in an almost comedic sequence afraid that they have been unintentionally left behind and moving through the city by themselves toward the crash site. This simply did not occur. In fact, Nelson left with DiTomasso in the original group and Twombly moved with Yurek and the remainder of Chalk 2 after receiving the order from DiTomasso.

  1628 HOURS: SUPER 68 (SAR) INFILS AT CRASH – SUPER 68 HIT BY RPG – REQUIRE RTB [RETURN TO BASE] ASAP

  Above the crash site, Super 68, “Razor’s Edge,” piloted by Chief Warrant Officer Dan Jollota and Major Herb Rodriguez, was inbound to the crash site. The first the CSAR team knew of the crash was when the pilots passed a chalkboard back to the team inscribed with the simple yet chilling message “61 DOWN.” “We knew that if we were going to be on the ground at all, it was going to be a bad situation, and we knew that the mission automatically would change if a helicopter got shot down. I went in knowing things were going to be ugly and things were going to be bad,” Ranger Sergeant John Belman recalled.11 In a sad irony, Super 61 had been used as the simulated crashed aircraft in a CSAR exercise run by Task Force Ranger just a week before the October 3 mission.

  The CSAR helicopter was filled to the brim with 15 heavily laden personnel drawn from Delta, the Rangers and Air Force Special Tactics. The large number of personnel on Super 68 meant that some useful equipment had to be left behind: “There wasn’t enough room on the Black Hawk for the Quickie Saw and all of that kit. We just didn’t have room,” said Belman. A more compact version was developed after Mogadishu with a range of cutting tools that could be more easily fast roped into a location.

  One of the Pararescueman Jumpers, Master Sergeant Scott Fales, later said:

  Normally when you assess a crash site, one of our tactics is to turn hard over the top of the site and look down on top of it to see exactly what you have and then come back and set up on an approach and either land or fast rope to the crash. In this particular case, brownout was very bad, the enemy situation was very bad, enemy fire was very high, to include lots of RPGs being fired at the helicopter in the sky, so it was made clear we were only going to have one attempt. So we basically flew straight to the relative vicinity of the crash site.12

  As they flared over the crash site, Belman remembered: “A Delta guy on one side and a Ranger on the other deployed the ropes. I was one of the last people off the helicopter and so I was crammed in the middle.” The first man leapt onto the fast rope and descended to the crash site just under eight minutes after Super 61 went down.

  As the CSAR personnel fast roped to the ground, they experienced significant ground fire directed toward the hovering helicopter. Moments later, an RPG hit the helicopter. Air Force Pararescueman Jumper Technical Sergeant Tim Wilkinson was actually on the right-hand-side rope, sliding to the ground when the RPG struck. DiTomasso explained what happened from surveillance footage he later watched:

  There is video footage that was taken by an airborne platform of that infiltration and you can see Super 68 come in, you see them flare, you see the guys going out on the ropes, and you can see RPG and machine-gun fire hit the helicopter. The helicopter gets hit in the back, in the tail section, and lurches up with Rangers still on the ropes.

  You can see the helmet of the crew chief and he’s probably screaming on the microphone, “You’ve got guys on the ropes.” The helicopter lurches up like it needs to get out of there and then it settles back down really quickly, the rest of the Rangers go out and then the crew chief pulls a lever on the Black Hawk that releases the ropes.

  Super 68’s pilot Jollota remembered:

  An RPG has a very unique sound. There was no doubt in my mind I had been hit by something pretty heavy. Fear took over, so I immediately took in power and I was getting out of there. My crew chief in the back saved the Rangers’ lives. He screamed at me, “Sir, you’ve got to stop. We’ve got Rangers on the ropes.” These poor guys were hanging on to the fast ropes for dear life as I picked this thing up to a hover. The crew chief talked me back down into the hover hole. We got those Rangers off and we took off.13

  DiTomasso and his chalk were right under the CSAR Black Hawk when it arrived:

  It was (both) a horrifying and pleasant surprise. I knew that the CSAR element was up there in Super 68 but I didn’t know they were coming. At the time we were distracted by all of the enemy combatants at the crash site and I was standing on the corner right near the bird [Super 61] and all of a sudden I couldn’t breathe – literally could not take a breath. I thought I was going to pass out. It was all brownout around us and I didn’t realize at the time but the CSAR helicopter was fast roping right on top of us.

  Literally I’m on my hands and knees trying to take a breath and I see soldiers running out of the (dust) cloud toward me and they fall down. And another one falls down. Four guys out of the CSAR helicopter, as they fast roped down the ropes – they were getting shot and falling down right in front of me. So now you have these 15 plus the 15 that were there (Chalk 2) and you have the two pilots deceased, the two crew chiefs who were wounded, and four more wounded from the CSAR element.

  As the CSAR team roped in, the assault force was fighting its way block by block toward the crash site. Mike Moser of B-Team recounted:

  A-Team was just ahead of us, tak
ing the right side of the alley. I believe the teams from C-2 [Charlie Squadron’s 2 Troop] were on the left side. There was a moderate amount of shooting early on – some incoming, judging from flying brick chips and even a small piece of RPG shrapnel or a secondary wall chip which struck my left arm following a nearby impact.

  Some of the fire was suppressive, as we crossed alley junctions. The alleys formed long empty canyons, featureless walls occasionally punctuated with metal doors usually leading into courtyards and some windows [and] upper housing structures. I saw Somalis here and there, poking out of doorways up the alleys. Mostly [I] noticed the increased cadence of supersonic cracks as one of us would scoot across an exposed gap.

  I recall basically an L-shaped movement to the 61 site; a few blocks this way, then a left turn and we knew we were approaching the site. Shortly following this left turn, more Somalis became visible far up the alley – approximately 100 meters or so [away], one of whom I saw was holding an AK as he bobbled between two points of cover looking across the alley. This met my criteria for bad guy [as] up until this time I had seen few Somalis actually holding weapons, and in my mind I was still in surgical mode [firing only at clearly armed individuals with hostile intent].

  Although there were a number of our guys to my front, it was a clear shot and in fact, the only one I ever took during the whole day. [Sergeant First Class] Earl [Fillmore on A-Team], who was a few feet to my front immediately turned to admonish me, saying, “Hey, there’s Rangers up there.” I smiled back and reassured him that I wasn’t in danger of hitting our own folks. A few seconds after this, we were again on our feet and moving.

  Kurt Smith of F-Team recalled:

  At the corner of the intersection, the enemy fire began to increase. [Sergeant First Class] Greg A engaged targets with his M203 at the intersection, and the column turned north. As we moved north up the street, it was clear we were getting near the crash site. I could see Rangers and operators down the street at an intersection ahead and could clearly see Somali militiamen further beyond. I took up a kneeling firing position and engaged targets down the street. At this point, I could see women and children intermingled with the militiamen, making target acquisition difficult. We continued to move north toward the crash site when enemy fire began impacting close around us.14