Black Hawk Down

by Mark Bowden

  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 meeting regularly at the Abdi House. The plan called for helicopters to encircle it from the air, fire TOW 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. Mohamed Hassan Farah, Abdullahi Ossoble Barre, Qeybdid, and others present claimed 73 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 House 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 making 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. If 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 21 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 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, whose 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 was pushing the Malays and 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 pleased to see it now. It was a shame the task force had gotten stung, but once the bleeding stopped, maybe 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 t
he international military force. He 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 oxford blue shirts, and had about him an 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 soldiers 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 rooftops, 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 place they always went when bullets flew.

  It seemed to Abdi that there were a hundred helicopters in the sky. The shooting was continual and 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 grew 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 blocks 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, children. Abdi saw an American soldier up one alley, lying by 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 a 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 bad idea. He could not have imagined such madness. After the helicopter passed, a group of Somali men with rifles ran to the corner, trying to find a better angle to shoot 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 been 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 base—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, while the convoy 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 close coordination between forces on the ground and in 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, and 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 whitewashed 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 pools 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 the 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 Indian Ocean. Smoke rose and drifted over the rooftops around the hotel, marking the fight. Black Hawks and Little Birds moved through the dark haze like predatory insects, darting and firing down into the fray.

  Then he heard the expected radio call for Super Six Eight, the CSAR Black Hawk. He watched it swing away south.

  His own summons from Lieutenant Colonel Matthews in the command bird came moments later.

  —Super Six Four, this is Alpha Five One, over.

  —This is Super Six Four. Go ahead.

  —Roger, Six Four, come up and join Six Two in his orbit.