Day of the Rangers: The Battle of Mogadishu 25 Years On
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I never did see the crash site but I thought they would know I was there as it was the only spot you could land near that area. I waited there to hear from somebody. I’m listening to all the radio nets – we had four radios, I had the Air to Air up, the Ground Force Commander net and the team I had been carrying, the assault force, their frequency. I could pretty much hear everything that’s going on.
I’m going to guess we were on the ground for 10 or 12 minutes and then we got another call [from Matthews]: “Get out of there – the crowds are converging.” Well, this time we did because we could see them, they were coming. So we waited a little longer until they got a little bit closer and then we pulled pitch. When I took off I tried to find Mike’s crash site but I never could get it in sight. Once I got in the air, the boss told me to head back to our base.
Maier related that, even after he returned to the airfield, he wanted to go back in and attempt another extraction:
I wanted to go back in there with two of our guns [AH-6s] as escort and get vectored in, because the guys up in the C2 could see the crash site, and land on the damned crashed helicopter and get those guys out of there. I wanted to try something. I was jumping up and down in the TOC and finally the Colonel told me to get the hell out of the TOC!
It is difficult even after interviewing multiple participants who were overhead at the time, and with access to the operations log’s contemporary timeline, to be entirely accurate regarding how long the snipers fought. Gerry Izzo in Super 65 thought that “20 minutes is about right,” but conceded “we’re all shaky on time,” certainly understandable after the intervening 25 years. Maier agreed with Izzo’s estimate but added that it could’ve been a little longer.
Shughart and Gordon had placed Durant in a tactically advantageous position. From his location next to a tree on the right side of the helicopter, with the tin wall behind him, he could cover that entire side of the Black Hawk. Any Somalis hoping to approach had to maneuver around the wall that Durant had covered some 15 feet away from him. The snipers gently extracted the grievously wounded Bill Cleveland from the wreckage and laid him down behind Durant.
Hearing voices through the thin tin wall, Durant fired off some rapid shots from his MP5, surprising both Delta snipers who hadn’t realized the pilot still had fight left in him. Durant experienced multiple stoppages with his MP5, believing he hadn’t been strict enough on his weapons maintenance regime. Frustratingly he was forced to eject a number of live rounds to clear the weapon.
The Delta snipers had moved back around the front of the aircraft on the left hand side and were engaged in a vicious firefight as the militia closed in. Durant could hear the AK47s being met with single, aimed shots as the operators engaged them. As he registered the sounds of Somalis moving behind the tin wall, he would fire single shots through it in an effort to discourage them.
He engaged another Somali who attempted to climb over the wall. The pilot killed a Somali who had been attempting to sneak up on the snipers but he was low on ammunition, already down to his last magazine. Finally, he fired his last round and the MP5 clicked empty. Durant explained that for whatever reason he didn’t even remember his 9mm Beretta M9 pistol in its drop holster. Despite this, he incredibly still managed to bat away a hand grenade that was thrown over the wall with his empty MP5.
The operators were firing both their rifles and their .45 pistols, transitioning to the sidearms as they changed rifle magazines. Both were beginning to run low on ammunition. The AK47 fire was now constant with rounds aimed from all directions at the helicopter. One of the snipers was finally hit by a Somali bullet. Whether it was Gordon or Shughart is still open to question. Durant initially recalled it as being Shughart who was hit first, remembering him crying out, “I’m hit.” The pilot didn’t see the operator get shot as both snipers were around at the front of the downed Black Hawk, out of Durant’s field of vision. He later said in a CNN interview that: “It’s like being shot down initially, because now one of the guys you thought was indestructible has just been taken down.”11
As Super 62 made another pass overhead, Goffena saw one of the operators get hit. Moments later, Goffena’s aircraft was struck by an RPG. “Super 62 had no doors fitted because it was summer time and an RPG came through that door, hit Brad H in the leg, [causing a ] traumatic amputation of the leg. It knocked the two pilots out cold,” recounted DiTomasso. The wounded Delta operator used his own belt to apply a tourniquet to his leg to manage the bleeding. He later became the first man to be fitted with a bionic prosthesis and became so adept with the device that he rejoined Delta before finally retiring from the Army as a Sergeant Major and becoming a certified prosthetist in 2002.
Super 62 was in a bad way. Goffena had been momentarily stunned by the impact. His co-pilot, Jim Yacone, was unconscious. “One of the pilots woke up, the cockpit was full of smoke but the helicopter was still flying,” DiTomasso explained. Goffena was quoted as saying: “I thought we had already hit the ground, but when I came to my senses, I realized we were still in the air. All the warning lights came on. My co-pilot was completely out and leaning on the controls.”12 The left side minigun was unmanned but the blast had damaged its firing controls and it continued to fire until it ran through its ammunition belt.
Smoke trailed from the aircraft. Goffena knew he was losing power and height. Up ahead was a set of power lines. The pilot struggled to keep altitude to pass over the wires. Moments later he crash landed at the New Port, bringing the aircraft in hard but in one piece. Had it not been for the incredible skills of Mike Goffena, Task Force Ranger would have been forced to deal with a third downed aircraft in the city.
At the Super 64 crash site, the situation was desperate. Whilst the Little Birds did what they could from the air, the lone surviving sniper was in a single-handed struggle against hundreds of Somalis. The Medal of Honor citations for both men state that Shughart was killed first. Mark Bowden interviewed Delta operator Paul H who said that he believed it was in fact Gordon who was killed first. All of the operators interviewed for this book concur. Durant to this day is unsure, having never met either man personally.
One of the operators, most likely Shughart, returned to the pilot’s location after Gordon was hit and asked him whether there were any small arms on board the helicopter as he was running low on ammunition. Durant recalled:
Then Randy [Shughart] came back up around the nose of the aircraft and he was almost out of ammunition and I was already out of ammunition and he asked about weapons in the aircraft. The crew chiefs had M-16s, so I told him where those were and he came back out and he gave me what I believe to this day was Gary’s weapon [a suppressed CAR15]. He made a quick call on the survival radio and we were told that a reaction force was en-route, but what we didn’t know was that it was going to take seven hours to get there.13
Tragically the 7.62mm M134 miniguns mounted on both sides of the aircraft were useless as they relied upon electrical power generated by the helicopter to operate. Surprisingly there was no backup power source carried for such emergencies. A similar scenario was encountered almost a decade later when a 160th SOAR MH-47 Chinook was shot down by al-Qaeda-affiliated Uzbek insurgents on a remote mountain called Takur Ghar in eastern Afghanistan. Again, the miniguns would have been a distinct advantage in the resulting firefight, but power was lost to the weapons when the Chinook was struck by an RPG.
Shughart had asked the pilot for the radio frequency for the Fire Support Net. Ecklund and McNerney in their Naval Postgraduate School report on the battle confirmed this directly with General Garrison himself:
the only AN/PRC-112 survival radio ever activated belonged to Durant. Shughart used it to contact 1LT James O. Lechner on Channel B, the Fire Support Net. Lechner forwarded the call to LTC Matthews and LTC Harrell in the C2 MH-60, who in turn ordered him to inform Shughart that “a reaction force is en-route.” The Somalis were in control of that radio shortly after that transmission.14
Lieutenant Lechner
himself recalls:
one of them took Durant’s survival radio, tuned to the fires support net, and sent out the call for help which I received. I passed on the call to the Command and Control ship. I was ordered to inform them that a relief column from the 10th Mountain Division had been requested and was on the way and to hold on. As I was in the middle of a fire mission, I had to abruptly end the conversation. I had no way of knowing it would be the last thing heard from them alive.15
It was unusual for the operators to not be to being carrying their own PRC-112 radios but as Kurt Smith recalled, both the Rangers and Delta were guilty of leaving behind mission-critical pieces of equipment based upon their requirements developed over the previous six missions. Indeed Smith specifically mentions leaving behind the survival radio: “I compromised and left behind some non-lethal munitions, my PRC-112 survival radio, and, most significantly, my NODs [night observation device].”16
The operators all carried their own Motorola Saber intra-team radios and Shughart also used this at least once to contact Norm Hooten, who carried two such radios, one set on the command frequency, the other on the intra-team frequency. He explained that using preset channels was difficult under fire but even carrying the two dedicated radios became confusing in the heat of battle.
I remember when I was going toward the first crash site, I got this phantom call from Randy Shughart and he was like, “Where you guys at?” and I said, “We’re on our way to the crash site.” [Shughart said] “How long you going to be before you get here?” I said, “Hopefully five minutes.” I didn’t know about the other crash site, we didn’t know that another bird had gone down.
Hooten is unsure but thinks fellow operator John M from 3 Troop, Shughart’s fellow snipers, may have also received a radio call from him.
After Shughart left Durant with Gordon’s CAR15, the surviving sniper returned to the far side of the helicopter. In the CNN interview, Durant said that “the volume of gunfire was unbelievable. I kind of knew there was no way he could hold them all off.”17 Durant described the amount of fire by likening it to the sound of a thunderstorm: “It was like being at the range when there’s a company or battalion of people shooting. There was a huge volume of fire and it lasted for a couple of minutes and then it went quiet except for that crazed mob that started to overrun the site.”18 At least 25 Somali corpses surrounded the crashed Black Hawk, a testament to the shooting skills of the two brave Delta defenders.
Garrison, Boykin, and the staff at the JOC watched the horrifying live feed from one of the OH-58Ds as the Somalis overran the crash site: “Garrison turned away from the monitor while shaking his head in disgust; with his ground forces immobilized, he was virtually powerless to affect the battle.”19
Durant fired off the last of the magazine in the CAR15 and, realizing that both snipers were gone, laid the carbine across his chest and crossed his hands over it.
He commented:
I mean, I’ve got no rounds left. I still had my 9mm pistol still in its holster and to be honest with you, I’ve never been able to explain why I never thought of it. I never even acknowledged that it was there. Don’t know why.
I was totally focused on the MP5 and we believe it was a CAR15 that Randy gave me, and when I was out of ammunition in my mind I was out of ammunition. Quite honestly, in looking back, and trying to speculate, I probably would have just gotten myself killed as they came around the corner if I had been pointing a pistol at them. So maybe it was a good thing. Still regardless, I still had the 9mm [pistol] and never pulled it out of the holster.20
With the two Delta snipers dead, the Somalis raced forward in a bloodlust toward Super 64, howling like injured animals. Durant awaited the inevitable as the mob surged into and around the helicopter, a screaming, teething mass of violence hammering their fists against the metal skin of the crippled Black Hawk.
CHAPTER 6
“RANGER, RANGER. YOU DIE SOMALIA”
“Every time we stopped, bad shit was happening.”
Sergeant Matt Eversmann, Chalk 4
At the Super 64 crash site, it didn’t take long for Durant to be spotted by the Somali mob. They swarmed over him, mercilessly punching and kicking him, and tearing off his equipment. A militiaman hauntingly declared, “Ranger, Ranger. You die Somalia!” as the mob attacked him. At one horrific point he was clubbed over the head with a dismembered arm, torn from one of his crew mates or from one of the fallen Delta snipers. His nose, cheekbone, and eye socket were all broken in the onslaught. Durant recounted:
It was minute to minute. I think initially, I thought it was over. I mean, we’d been briefed on what they would probably do. When I do talk about this with people, I compare it to what happened to the Blackwater guys at the bridge in Fallujah [in 2004].* I mean, that’s what they did. It’s the same thing. So, I’m thinking that’s what’s gonna happen and I can’t stop them.1
At least two of his compatriots suffered such a grisly fate, torn limb from limb in a macabre display of brutality. All of Task Force Ranger knew that this was the grim likelihood if they fell into Somali hands. Earlier that year, Nigerian peacekeepers had been mutilated and Somali civilians had been reported as playing football with their decapitated heads. Capture was a pilot’s greatest fear.
The mob tried to tear Durant’s uniform off but when they discovered he was not wearing any underwear they inexplicably left his trousers on. He was still being beaten senseless by the mob when gunshots rang out and SNA militiamen stepped forward to stop the crowds. The SNA claimed Durant as the property of Aideed and carried him roughly away to a waiting truck, surrounded by the mobs that still continued to strike him despite the presence of the militia. The women were particularly vicious, Durant noted that they were grabbing his genitals and attempting to castrate him.
“At the crash site, I could only see men, but as I was carried through the streets there were women who attacked me. I couldn’t see much, but caught glimpses of them,” Durant explained. He was later told by his captors that the Somali women were indeed the cruelest when exacting revenge. One wonders if women were involved in the desecration of the flight crew and snipers’ bodies. Nothing, not even the vaunted SERE [Survival, Evasion, Resistence, and Escape] School, had prepared Durant for the experience of being surrounded by a violent, baying crowd intent upon his death. “Even if they [SERE] tried, I don’t see how it could come anywhere close to the real experience,” he added.
“They [the Somalis] grab Durant, he’s the last one they find, they strip off all of his equipment, and an elder steps forward and says ‘Let’s keep this one alive for negotiations,’” commented Tom DiTomasso. James Lechner noted an alternative motivation for the capture of Durant: “[Durant] was only saved by the timely intervention of the son of Osman Atto, who happened to be at the scene, and wanted a live prisoner in the hopes of trading for his father.”2 This alternate scenario has never been confirmed.
Mike Durant was roughly carried to a flatbed truck, covered by a blanket or tarp and then sat upon by militiamen, further injuring his broken leg and the crushed vertebrae in his back. The femur had now broken through the skin and was bleeding profusely. As he later learned, the covering they threw over him was to disguise his presence from other Somali clans and bandits as much as from the American helicopters overhead. Durant was told after his release that the Navy P-3 had recorded the overrun of the crash site and the Somalis carrying him away but they had lost the trail once he disappeared into the teeming mobs. “And they’re reporting this over the radio, we’re all hearing it but there’s nothing we can do about it,” DiTomasso remembered, the frustration still evident in his voice decades later.
Back at the objective, McKnight’s Ground Reaction Force had been ordered to move to the first crash site minutes after Super 61 was shot down. The prisoners had been restrained and placed in one of the five-ton trucks and the convoy left the target building intending to conduct a straightforward movement north and then east to arrive at the crash.
What looked to be a relatively simple movement on paper, or from on high up in the C2 Black Hawk, proved to be anything but down on the ground.
The convoy consisted of three Humvees in the lead, including the SEAL Cutvee, followed by the two remaining five-ton trucks, and with three more Humvees in trail behind the trucks. One of the five-tons carried C-Team, the pair of Delta snipers, and the detainees along with the wounded Ranger Staff Sergeant who was now on a collapsible litter. The prisoners were probably in the safest place in the truck, down on the floor surrounded by sandbags. The other five-ton was empty save for its driver, Ranger Private Richard “Alphabet” Kowalewski.
Matt Eversmann was one of the last to climb aboard as the convoy headed off. He recalled:
We’re stuffing everyone onto vehicles wherever we can. I was the last on because I was doing the last sweep to make sure we haven’t left anybody and the vehicles start to move. Thankfully they stop. I remember climbing up one of these pick-up truck style ones with the wooden sides [cargo Humvee] and turning around and leaning backwards because I wanted to be able to face out and I toppled over with my legs hanging over the side. I couldn’t sit up and that was without a doubt one of the scariest moments for me. I remember sitting there thinking “We’re going into harm’s way and I can’t even sit up to shoot back,” I was thinking “I hope it doesn’t hurt!” It wasn’t until we made a turn someplace and stopped that I was able to position myself upright.
The Somalis were now split between those heading to the undefended southern crash site of Super 64, the northern crash site of Super 61 where CSAR and Chalk 2 were defending the perimeter, and the original target building. Reinforcements were still channelling from the northern end of Hawlwadig Road and the GRF ran into an incredible amount of fire as they attempted to head east from the objective.
Paul Leonard, in the first of the five-ton trucks, guarding the prisoners, recalled: “They were blocking the road, they were lighting fires. It was crazy trying to get out of there. We were losing guys left and right.” Eversmann added: “There was a ton of them. Someone smarter than me said there were estimates of 10,000 Somalis fighting for Aideed on October 3rd and 4th.”