by Mark Moyar
On October 3, a CIA informant reported the location of a meeting that afternoon that would be attended by two of Aidid’s top men. Garrison assembled a formidable force for the raid, dubbed Operation Gothic Serpent, including a total of 19 aircraft, 12 ground vehicles, and 160 ground troops. MH-6 helicopters would carry the Delta operators responsible for securing the building and its occupants, with each helicopter holding four men on externally mounted benches. Eight Black Hawks would come next, carrying the Rangers, a small number of Delta operators, and a Combat Search and Rescue Team. A vehicle convoy would rendezvous at the objective to retrieve the raiders and their prisoners. The whole operation was expected to last about one hour.
THE FOUR RANGER chalks that landed near the Bakara Market on October 3 had been ordered to secure the intersections outside the four corners of the target compound. The Rangers formed L-shaped perimeters at the intersections, guarding against any hostile forces in the surrounding area that might entertain the idea of interfering with Delta’s raid. Looking toward the chalk to his east, Sergeant Thomas saw Rangers already firing their weapons. He could not see any Somalis yet.
A short time later, bullets whizzed toward Thomas’s squad, accompanied by the distinctive metallic bang of a Kalashnikov assault rifle.
“He’s in the tree!” yelled Private David Floyd.
“Floyd!” Sergeant Watson responded. “Do you see him?”
“Roger, S’rgnt. He’s in the tree. He’s in the tree!”
“Well, Floyd, if you see him, why don’t you shoot him!”
Many of the Rangers had wondered how Floyd, a nineteen-year-old from South Carolina, had ever made it through Ranger selection. He was far from an imposing physical specimen, weighing in at just 130 pounds. Nor did he have a natural affinity for soldiering. He was one of those Rangers who never seemed to get things right the first time and routinely required extra attention from his superiors. Rangers jokingly compared him to Barney Fife, the ham-fisted deputy sheriff on The Andy Griffith Show.
Recent operations had given Thomas and Watson reason to believe that their extra attention to Floyd had made a real fighter out of the young man. But Floyd had not faced a test as stern as this one before, and he was on the verge of flunking. Armed with a gas-operated M249 squad automatic weapon, Floyd had been entrusted with enough firepower to protect the entire squad, yet he appeared oblivious to his obligations.
Then, all of a sudden, something switched on inside Floyd’s brain. Aiming the M249 at the tree with a newfound inspiration that perhaps even he found surprising, Floyd squeezed off half a belt of ammunition. The bullets sawed the tree in half, bringing the sniper to his end.
The compound that the Rangers had surrounded was enclosed by a high stone wall. Inside was a small courtyard and a three-story stone house with a flat roof, its facade strangely unblemished in a city where most of the buildings had been riddled with holes or reduced to rubble in the preceding two years of civil war. While the Rangers had been fast-roping onto the streets, a helicopter had inserted four Delta operators into the courtyard, and three other helicopters had offloaded Delta passengers on the adjacent streets. The Somalis inside the building caught sight of the American helicopters and scrambled for the exits, but the Americans were too quick for them. Storming the building with their gun barrels sweeping every crevice, the raiding force cut off all possible avenues of escape.
The Delta operators, or D-boys, as the admiring Rangers liked to call them, handcuffed twenty-four suspects and herded them together with rifle butts. The take included one of the high-value targets whom the CIA expected to be there, and another man who was Aidid’s spokesman. Outside the compound, the D-boys began to load their catch into ground vehicles that had just pulled up to return everyone to base. Within minutes, it appeared, Task Force Ranger would be back at the hangar with a nice new feather in its cap and just a couple of wounded men.
The carefully choreographed progression was interrupted by the explosion of a rocket-propelled grenade at the tail of one of the Black Hawks. Its tail rotor destroyed, the Black Hawk spun uncontrollably, tumbling toward the earth until its belly clipped the tin roof of a stone house. The collision pushed the nose of the aircraft down, the main rotor snapping apart when it touched the ground, and then the helicopter flopped onto its side in a narrow alley.
For Staff Sergeant Eversmann, commander of chalk number four, the downing of the Black Hawk put an end to hopes of evacuating the severely injured Blackburn by air. With the chalk still pinned down one block north of its assigned position, they would need to move Blackburn on foot under fire toward the ground vehicles, putting more lives at risk. Eversmann doubted that Blackburn would still be alive by the time the stretcher bearers got through.
Eversmann, nevertheless, was willing to risk able-bodied men to give a wounded man a chance to live. He convinced the commander of the vehicle convoy to keep several vehicles at the convoy’s assembly area for the evacuation of Blackburn. At Eversmann’s command, two medics and two other Rangers put Blackburn on a stretcher and rushed him through the city streets while other Rangers shot at armed Somalis, forcing the gunmen to keep their heads down. The stretcher team made it through safely, and Blackburn was soon in a three-vehicle convoy heading back to base, where the doctors would manage to save his life.
Most of Task Force Ranger was still figuring out how to return to base when the crowds of hostile Somalis began to arrive in earnest. The spectacle of nineteen helicopters circling like yellowjackets over the Black Sea District in midafternoon drew Aidid’s militiamen to the compound from all parts of the city. Throbbing with the stimulation brought on by chewing khat, the men nearest to the site of the raid ran straight at the American perimeter, assailing it on every side. In more distant neighborhoods, militiamen and thrill seekers piled into cars and trucks and drove in the direction of the helicopters. Surveillance cameras in the US aircraft captured thousands of Somalis converging on the D-boys and Rangers.
Women and children mingled in the throngs, looking on like spectators or actively assisting the militiamen. The Somali fighters stepped forward to shoot their weapons, then merged back into the masses of women and children. In training, the Rangers had received briefings on the rules of engagement in urban Somalia, according to which Somalis who carried weapons were not necessarily hostile, and civilian casualties had to be avoided at all costs. “You will not fire at someone unless you are fired upon,” the instructors had said. But a combination of common sense and survival instinct quickly led the Rangers to toss the rules of engagement out the window. Within a few minutes, the Americans had concluded that Somalis were toting weapons for only one reason: to kill Americans. The Rangers started shooting any Somali bearing a weapon, and anyone abetting such a person.
Lieutenant Larry Perino was supervising the troops at one of the four corners of the perimeter when he saw Somali children creeping toward him. The children began pointing at the American positions, and then a Somali shooter fired his weapon at them. The Rangers threw flash-bang grenades at the child spotters, which chased them away. The next time that children came near, Perino interrupted his radio conversation to spray warning shots from his M-16. The kids scampered away again.
A woman attempted to sneak toward an M60 machine gun manned by Sergeant Chuck Elliot. “Hey, sir,” Elliot shouted to Perino, “I can see there’s a guy behind this woman with a weapon under her arm!”
Perino gave the order to open fire. The heavy machine gun peppered the man and the woman with large holes, dropping their lifeless bodies into the dirt.
General Garrison had prepared for the eventuality that one of the helicopters would go down. The combat search-and-rescue helicopter that was now over the Black Sea District could drop a fifteen-man team to treat the wounded and protect them until they could be evacuated. Garrison ordered the team to the crash site. Fifteen men, however, might not be able to hold out very long against hundreds of angry Somalis, so Garrison ordered all of the forces at
the original target building to head to the crash site as reinforcements. Once everyone had assembled at that location, they would load up the casualties and head out. Some of the Rangers and D-boys climbed aboard the nine remaining vehicles from the ground convoy, and the others moved toward the crash site on foot.
Sergeant Thomas was preparing to move with his squad toward the crash site when he saw his squad leader, Sergeant Doug Boren, running into a building with blood gushing from his neck. Sergeant Watson followed Boren inside an improvised first aid station. Watson emerged a few minutes later to tell Thomas, “Boren’s been hit. You’re in charge.”
“Is he all right, S’rgnt?” Thomas asked.
“He’s been hit. You’re in charge.”
“Yeah, but what happened? Is he gonna be OK?”
“Sergeant Thomas, you’re in charge!”
Thomas and his squad joined the procession of Rangers and Delta operators who were en route to the crashed Black Hawk. The pace had picked up once the Americans realized that they were in a race with swarms of Somalis who were moving in the same direction on parallel streets. As the special operators crossed intersections, they took turns firing into the Somali columns to the left and the right while others barreled across.
At an intersection a few blocks from the crash site, Aidid’s militiamen were gathered in especially large numbers, flooding the crossing with streams of semiautomatic rifle fire. Specialist Mike Kurth, one of Thomas’s men, saw Sergeant First Class Earl Fillmore getting in position to race across the intersection, and then saw a bullet strike him in the head. Fillmore, like the other D-boys, wore a thin helmet that looked like the headgear of a hockey player, which facilitated rapid movement but did not offer the same protection as the Rangers’ Kevlar combat helmet. Fillmore’s head snapped back from the bullet’s impact on the front of his helmet, and a puff of red mist exited the helmet’s rear.
A Delta medic went to help Fillmore, and he too was hit. Sergeant Thomas rushed over and found that the medic was still strong enough to move but Fillmore was not. Braving the hostile fire, which mounted in intensity when the Somalis saw the Americans clustered together, Thomas and the medic dragged Fillmore from the street. By a miracle, they reached cover without further injuries.
Seeing a Delta operator fall in battle was as unfathomable for the Rangers as the downing of a helicopter of the 160th Aviation Regiment. The Rangers looked up to, even idolized, the Delta operators, referring to them as “the varsity squad” and “big brother.” Some of the D-boys in Task Force Ranger had taken young Rangers under their wing and taught them tricks of the trade during their spare time. Fillmore was especially popular among the Rangers because of his willingness to help out the younger men.
The brotherly fondness of the D-boys for the Rangers did not extend to the Ranger company commander, Captain Mike Steele. A former football lineman at the University of Georgia, Steele liked to do things by the book and had little patience for the unorthodox thinking of Delta Force. Steele’s preoccupation with minutiae was so thorough that the D-boys were convinced that he was blind to the bigger picture. In the weeks preceding the raid, the D-boys had told Steele they had concerns about the readiness of his Rangers. Steele blew them off, believing that as part of an organization of uber-elite career soldiers they did not understand the need for basic, spit-and-polish discipline in shaping the youthful Rangers.
Fillmore was still alive, but his brain was bleeding and he needed to reach a hospital quickly if he were to stand any chance of survival. Sergeant Thomas stayed at Fillmore’s side until he caught a glimpse of Captain Steele down the street. Running toward the captain, Thomas shouted, “We’ve got a head wound. I need to get him medevacked now!”
With a wave of his hand, Steele indicated that he was tied up in a conversation on the radio. He and other officers were trying to untangle the movements of the ground forces, which had run into a number of unforeseen complications. The Rangers and D-boys who had gone on foot toward the crash site had become separated from the ground vehicles, and those vehicles were now lost. Officers in the helicopters were trying to provide directions to Lieutenant Colonel Danny McKnight, the convoy commander, but they could not figure out where he was.
“We don’t know where the Humvees are,” Thomas heard Steele say over the radio. “They can’t find us.”
Specialist Kurth waited for a break in the radio conversation to recommend an aerial medevac. “This guy has a serious head injury, and if we don’t get him out right now, he’s probably not going to make it,” Kurth warned Steele.
“Negative,” Steele replied. “The area is still too hot for the birds to land.”
Fillmore died a few minutes later.
The first group of Rangers to reach the crash site arrived just before the combat search-and-rescue team. The Black Hawk’s pilot and co-pilot had been killed on impact, and one of the passengers, Staff Sergeant Daniel Busch of Delta Force, had been mortally wounded fighting off the first Somali scavengers to arrive, but the other men inside the shattered helicopter were still alive. The Rangers and D-boys shooed away Somalis, established a perimeter around the survivors, and prepared to evacuate the site.
McKnight’s ground convoy, however, was still lost, its fighting strength dwindling as its vehicles and soldiers staggered under the blows of the Somali gunmen who lined every street. Ammunition supplies were running low, and the medics were saying that if they did not get the wounded back to base soon, several men would likely die. At 5 p.m., McKnight decided to head back to the hangar to deliver the casualties and replenish the vehicles with ammunition before making a run back into the city.
In the meantime, General Garrison had assembled a second emergency convoy at the Task Force Ranger headquarters by cobbling together the men who had brought Blackburn back and by soliciting volunteers among the cooks, ammunition handlers, communications technicians, intelligence analysts, and other support troops. By the time this convoy was ready to depart, though, Garrison had an even more urgent problem than retrieving the Rangers and D-boys. Just before McKnight’s decision to return to base, a rocket-propelled grenade had hit the tail of a second Black Hawk, compelling pilot Mike Durant to crash-land the helicopter in the middle of the city. With no friendly forces near this crash site, Garrison decided to send the makeshift convoy of Humvees and trucks to rescue Durant and his crew.
Sergeant Jeff Struecker, a twenty-four-year-old Ranger from Dodge City, Iowa, led the convoy from the front vehicle as it drove out of the base. Eighty yards into the journey, they ran into a Somali ambush. Lacking armored vehicles and short on combat soldiers, the convoy was likely to receive a horrendous drubbing if it tried to push through. Struecker decided to turn the convoy around and seek a different route.
The next route brought the convoy face to face with a Somali roadblock. The Humvees might have been able to roll over the rubble and furniture and trash that the Somalis had heaped together to form the roadblock, but for the convoy’s trucks it was impassable. Beyond the roadblock was a concrete wall that none of the vehicles could surmount or destroy. When Struecker radioed this information to headquarters, he was told that the only other option was to drive all the way around the city and come in from the back side. Struecker said he would go that way.
The convoy was in the process of making its third attempt to reach Durant’s helicopter when McKnight’s convoy came rumbling into Struecker’s view. In light of the time it would take Struecker to reach Durant’s helicopter and the deterioration of McKnight’s casualty-laden vehicles—they were riding on flat tires and broken differentials—Garrison decided to have Struecker help McKnight’s convoy return to base. Casualties were transferred into Struecker’s vehicles, and then they drove back together. Struecker’s convoy joined McKnight’s on the list of forces that could not help Durant and his crew.
Garrison had one more option for rescuing the men at the two crash sites. Phoning Lieutenant General Thomas Montgomery, the senior US military commander i
n Somalia, Garrison requested a relief force from the US Army’s 10th Mountain Division, the repository of America’s remaining conventional forces in the country. Montgomery obliged, sending an infantry company in the only vehicles in his inventory, Humvees and trucks. When the 10th Mountain’s convoy neared the danger zone, it came under heavy attack from AK-47s and rocket-propelled grenades on both sides of the street. The soldiers dismounted and traded fire with the Somalis for the next thirty minutes. So numerous were the grenade launchers in the enemy’s possession that the convoy commander decided that his thin-skinned Humvees and trucks would be slaughtered if they attempted to press farther. Turning the convoy around, he took the vehicles back to their base.
Several other assets that could have been used to save the isolated Americans were absent from Somalia on October 3. When the Rangers had deployed to Somalia, Secretary of Defense Aspin had chosen to withhold a platoon used during rehearsals as a reserve, a platoon that now could have been flown to Durant’s crash site. The Defense Department had also prohibited the Rangers from bringing along the AC-130 Spectre gunships with which they had been rehearsing, depriving the task force of a weapons suite that could have annihilated anyone approaching a downed helicopter for a good many hours.
Of the assets withheld by the Pentagon, the one that would draw the most attention and recrimination was armor. In September, following Somali ambushes of US combat engineers and Pakistani forces, General Montgomery had sent a request to the Pentagon for four M-1 Abrams tanks and fourteen Bradley Fighting Vehicles. Either of those vehicles could have bowled through Somali roadblocks, ridden over them, or cut them apart with blade devices. Aidid’s rocket-propelled grenades would have been as useless as Ping-Pong balls against Abrams tanks and Bradleys. The CENTCOM commander, General Hoar, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Colin Powell, had backed the request. But Secretary of Defense Aspin had turned it down, on the grounds that the United States was trying to downsize its military presence in Somalia and increase its reliance on diplomacy.
