by Mark Moyar
The only Americans to reach Durant’s helicopter would arrive by air. One of the remaining Black Hawks, piloted by Chief Warrant Officer Mike Goffena, flew to the scene in time to drive off the first Somali sallies toward the downed helicopter. A Black Hawk, however, could not hold back a concerted onslaught on a ground target for long, as an AC-130 could, and the surging of Somalis toward the crash site indicated that such an onslaught would not be long in coming. Two Delta snipers in the Black Hawk, Sergeant First Class Randy Shughart and Master Sergeant Gary Gordon, volunteered for insertion on the ground. Their first two requests for permission to insert were denied. Their third was granted, after it had become clear that none of the ground convoys were going to make it through.
Goffena’s helicopter descended into a small field surrounded by huts and shanties, fifty yards from the crash site. Most of the structures withstood the rotor wash, convincing Goffena to come to a hover five feet above the ground rather than landing. As Shughart attempted to climb down the skids, he became entangled in the tether connecting him to the helicopter and had to be cut free. Gordon slipped and fell while running for cover. Disoriented by the mishaps, Shughart and Gordon waved their arms at the departing helicopter to request guidance on the crash site’s location. Goffena brought his helicopter back down and gestured in the direction of Durant’s helicopter, while a crew chief threw a smoke grenade to mark the way. The two D-boys put their thumbs up and moved off toward the smoke.
Employing their world-class powers of evasion, Shughart and Gordon reached the crash without making contact with hostile forces. They found that all four of the helicopter crewmen were alive, but all had suffered severe injuries, which ruled out moving them back to the insertion point for extraction by helicopter. The six of them would have to hunker down and fight off the hordes until reinforcements arrived. Pulling the injured crewmen from the helicopter, the Delta operators placed them in covered positions, distributing firearms to those capable of shooting. Durant recalled, “They acted as if they were in no particular rush, and they raised me up gently, as if they were handling an ostrich egg.” Shuffling around the perimeter, Gordon and Shughart shot down attackers with single shots from their sniper rifles. When Somalis gathered in larger numbers, the machine guns in Goffena’s Black Hawk subjected them to showers of bullets.
The two D-boys had been on the ground for ten minutes when a rocket-propelled grenade struck Goffena’s helicopter. The blast blew out the windshield, knocked the copilot unconscious, riddled the number-two engine with shrapnel, and severed the leg of a gunner. The cockpit filled with flashing lights and horns that signaled equipment malfunctions and danger conditions. Recognizing that the aircraft could not stay aloft much longer, Goffena headed toward the sea and crash-landed at the airfield.
Following the departure of Goffena’s Black Hawk and its automatic weapons, the sky over the crash site was empty. Gordon and Shughart fought off the burgeoning attackers for nearly an hour. When they ran out of rifle ammunition, they fired their pistols. When they ran out of pistol ammunition, Somalis swarmed into the perimeter and killed them. The Somalis butchered the injured helicopter crewmen, too, except for Durant, whom a Somali militia commander thought would make a useful bargaining chip.
At the first crash site, the Rangers and D-boys were settling into an L-shaped perimeter, having been told that the arrival of ground forces had been delayed again. They set up fighting positions inside houses and established four casualty collection points, where medics labored to save limbs and lives. Captain Scott Miller, the commander of the ground element, sent word that they had casualties in need of urgent evacuation, one of whom was certain to die if he was not evacuated by helicopter. Colonel Jerry Boykin, who as Delta Force commander was overseeing the operation from the task force’s headquarters, decided that it was too dangerous to try landing another helicopter. “Scotty, we can’t send another helo in there and get it shot down,” Boykin told Miller. Boykin later called it “the most agonizing decision I have ever had to make.”
Night would soon arrive. Under most circumstances, the Rangers and D-boys relished night combat in the third world, because the Americans had night-vision equipment and third-world adversaries did not. But the Americans had left all of that equipment at their base, never imagining that they would still be in the middle of Mogadishu at nightfall. They were running low on ammunition, water, and medical supplies, whereas Aidid’s militias enjoyed immediate access to all manner of supplies.
Captain Miller kept receiving reports that a relief convoy was coming. One was said to be half an hour away. Then, after forty-five minutes, a voice announced that it would arrive in one hour. At approximately 8:30 p.m., the most seriously injured Ranger, Corporal Jamie Smith, bled to death.
A rescue convoy composed of 10th Mountain soldiers, Task Force Ranger volunteers, and 4 tanks and 28 armored personnel carriers borrowed from Pakistani and Malaysian forces finally arrived at around 2:30 a.m. The survivors of Task Force Ranger were taken to a soccer stadium, where they saw American dead and wounded lying on stretchers all over the grass.
Specialist Kurth was shocked to see so many American casualties. Fellow Rangers informed him that his two best friends had been killed. One man from his platoon, whose eyes showed the signs of prolonged sobbing, kept mumbling, “They’re all gone, Ruiz, Smith, Joyce, Pilla, Cavaco, Alphabet—they’re all dead.” Kurth smoked a cigarette that he had bummed off some 10th Mountain soldiers, then put his head down on a Humvee and started to cry.
US helicopters flew into the stadium in shifts to pick up the wounded. They would be flown to medical facilities at the airport and the US embassy, and the more serious cases would be moved on to the United States. As Sergeant Randy Ramaglia was loaded aboard a helicopter, a medic leaned over to him to say, “Man, I feel sorry for you all.”
The sergeant replied, “You should feel sorry for them, ’cause we whipped ass.” No precise count was ever made of Somali casualties, but most put the Somali dead at or above 1,000, with several thousand more wounded. According to US intelligence reports, the casualties devastated morale among Aidid’s allies and caused some of them to pull out of the city. A number of Somali warlords were even telling the Americans they would depose Aidid if the Americans would stop killing people.
Task Force Ranger suffered a total of 16 killed and 57 wounded. For the 10th Mountain Division, the casualty count came to 2 dead and 22 wounded. Ninety-seven casualties was a modest sum in comparison with what the American nation had suffered at Shiloh, Salerno, or Hue City, but the United States had not paid so steep a price in more than two decades. For that reason, Operation Gothic Serpent was certain to draw attention from the American public.
The battle’s impact on the public, however, would be shaped as much by press imagery as by the casualty list. At the site of Durant’s crash, Somalis dragged the naked bodies of dead Americans through the streets while onlookers cheered and snapped photographs. The images, which quickly reached every newspaper and newscast in the world, convinced Americans that the situation in Somalia had spiraled out of control, and that the Somalis were repaying American kindness with barbarity.
President Clinton might have been able to avert complete strategic failure had he resolutely explained to the American people what had happened, and had he ramped up offensive military operations in Somalia, as General Garrison and UN Special Representative Howe were now recommending. But Clinton had never possessed much of an appetite for military action, and the public disgust with the dragging of the dead Americans multiplied his unease. Clinton therefore chose to disengage, and to duck responsibility.
A few days after Operation Gothic Serpent, Clinton ordered an end to offensive operations against Aidid. All US combat forces, he announced, would leave Somalia by March 31, 1994. “We cannot leave immediately because the United Nations has not had an adequate chance to replace us, nor have the Somalis had a reasonable opportunity to end their strife,” Clinton remarked. “Moreover,
having been brutally attacked, were American forces to leave now we would send a message to terrorists and other potential adversaries around the world that they can change our policies by killing our people. It would be open season on Americans.”
But ending the hunt for Aidid and setting a withdrawal date for US forces were changes to America’s policies, ones that future terrorists like Osama bin Laden would cite as evidence of the value of killing Americans. Most of the Americans who had participated in the Battle of Mogadishu were appalled by the president’s dissembling, as well as by his new policies. According to Mark Bowden, the foremost chronicler of Operation Gothic Serpent, the prevailing sentiment among the men was, “If it had been important enough to get eighteen men killed, and seventy-three injured, not to mention all the Somalis dead or hurt, how could it just be called off the day after the fight?” When the Rangers were told they would soon be heading home, Sergeant Struecker remembered, “we exploded in a volley of anger and frustration. Guys threw equipment across the hangar, cursed, and pounded their fists.”
Even more infuriating to the veterans were statements from the Clinton administration conveying the impression that the president had known nothing of the US military’s hunt for Aidid—the hunt that he had personally deployed Task Force Ranger to carry out. In one public speech, Clinton averred that the hunt for Aidid “never should have been allowed to supplant the political process that was ongoing.” Secretary of State Warren Christopher explained that policy in Somalia had been managed by the Deputies Committee, one level below the Cabinet, and for that reason, top officials “were not sufficiently attentive.” Later, when Clinton met with families of the Americans killed in Mogadishu, he said the raid had taken place because he did not want to micromanage the military.
Members of Congress called for the firing of Aspin, and the press reported that some of the Joint Chiefs of Staff wanted Aspin fired, too. When it became public knowledge that Aspin had rejected General Montgomery’s request for armor, Aspin went on ABC’s This Week to explain that “the request was never put in terms of protecting troops; it was put in terms of the mission of delivering humanitarian aid.”
Someone promptly leaked a copy of Montgomery’s request to journalist Barton Gellman, who duly revealed its contents in the Washington Post. The heading of Montgomery’s message, Gellman reported, was “Subject: U.S. Force Protection.” Within the main body, Montgomery stated that the “primary mission” of the armor “would be to protect U.S. forces,” and asserted that the vehicles would “provide a critical roadblock clearing capability for our vulnerable thin-skinned vehicles.”
Clinton stood behind Aspin for a few months. Then, with the outcry against Aspin becoming ever louder, he accepted Aspin’s resignation.
Garrison was permitted to stay on as JSOC commander. The fallout from Operation Gothic Serpent, however, prevented him from obtaining a third star and moving on to a higher position. For veterans of the battle, the Clinton administration’s unwillingness to promote Garrison was an act of scapegoating, and yet another instance of the prioritization of political self-interest ahead of honor and dignity. “Garrison is the finest general officer I ever worked for,” asserted Dan Schilling, an Air Force combat controller, in 2003. “It wasn’t just a shame that his career was derailed after our deployment; it was a criminal act committed by political cowards.”
On October 23, 1993, a physician at Walter Reed Medical Center who was treating men wounded in Gothic Serpent telephoned the White House. Patched through to a member of the White House staff, the doctor said in an angry tone that the injured men had been at the hospital for three weeks and yet no one from the White House had paid any attention to them. Upon receiving the complaint, Clinton decided to visit the hospital the following day. No reporters were permitted into the hospital during his visit. The wounded were told ahead of time that if they had negative opinions of Clinton, they should keep those opinions to themselves.
According to hospital officials who accompanied Clinton, the president was shocked by the sight of the severely injured men. “Clinton was visibly moved,” one hospital official recounted. “He didn’t know what to say. The men could see that.” Some of the wounded were amiable during their brief conversations with the president. Others were sullen and hostile.
Afterward, the White House did not release any photographs from the president’s visit to Walter Reed. Anonymous government officials told Patrick J. Sloyan of Newsday that “withholding the pictures is part of a damage-limitation strategy devised by David Gergen.” A public relations specialist, Gergen at that time held the position of counselor to the president.
One senior Pentagon official recommended that President Clinton hold a public ceremony on the White House Lawn in which he would meet the wounded and present them with decorations. Earlier in the year, Clinton had done as much for Marines returning from Somalia. But the White House issued no invitations to the veterans of Gothic Serpent. The Pentagon official lamented that White House strategists “hope people will forget about Somalia.”
FOR JSOC AND most other American special operators, Gothic Serpent would be the last combat engagement of the 1990s. That fact proved beneficial to the survivors of the operation in certain respects. The military’s promotion system habitually favors combat veterans, so individuals with an exclusive claim to recent combat experience were destined to receive a disproportionate share of promotions. Participation in the Battle of Mogadishu also gave these veterans enhanced credibility with others in the military, most of whom regretted that they had missed out on the action.
JSOC spent a large fraction of the decade’s remaining years preparing for the “next Mogadishu,” an event that never materialized—in no small part because Mogadishu had convinced the Clinton administration to keep US troops away from similar hot spots. The organization also devoted much attention to weapons of mass destruction, laying plans to sabotage enemy production sites and interdict terrorists seeking to infiltrate nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons into the United States. JSOC’s most celebrated successes of the 1990s came in an advisory capacity, in Colombia, where it helped build elite military forces to defeat drug cartels that had overwhelmed Colombia’s police through assassination and bribery. Assistance to Colombian special operations forces culminated in the shooting of cartel impresario Pablo Escobar during his final scamper across the rooftops of Medellín.
Beginning in 1995, American special operators deployed to the former Yugoslavia to assist North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) peacekeeping forces. JSOC units helped locate and apprehend fugitives who had been indicted for war crimes. Special Forces teams established outposts in Bosnian and Kosovar towns, where they met with local leaders to obtain information on war criminals and potential breakers of the international peace agreements. For men who heretofore had been focused on hostage rescue, airfield seizure, reconnaissance, or training of partner forces, these experiences developed skills in working with local populations and ferreting out villains, skills that they could pull out of their pockets in wars still to come.
Other special operators filled out the decade training and advising the security forces of a host of nations beset by internal conflict. With the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991 having apparently rendered conventional warfare among major powers obsolete, the Special Forces and their smaller Navy and Air Force siblings increasingly staked claims to counterinsurgency and other forms of internal defense. The largest and most effective of their internal defense efforts took place in Colombia.
Following the death of Pablo Escobar, the Colombian government failed to consolidate political and military control over the country, permitting the rise of the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC) insurgency. So menacing did the FARC become that 800,000 well-to-do Colombians fled the country by the end of the decade. At the behest of the Colombian government, American special operators poured into the country in the late 1990s to train military and police officers. In contrast to the
ad hoc foraging for willing partners that had characterized American SOF efforts in other countries, this effort was designed systematically, with long-term objectives taking precedence over short-term expediencies. Targeted at leadership development, the training program possessed enough American special operators to train large numbers of Colombians long enough to effect real improvements in skills and motivation. The Colombian trainees were to assume leadership roles of escalating seniority during the Colombian government’s war against the FARC, which took a decided turn for the better during the presidency of Álvaro Uribe from 2002 to 2010.
SOF training programs, it should be noted, were not the decisive element in the defeat of the FARC. That distinction belonged to improvements in Colombia’s top political and military leadership, driven by belated recognition that the country’s sclerotic government and armed forces could not hold back the revolutionary tide much longer. The transformation of Colombia’s senior military leadership, though, was influenced by the involvement of America’s special operations forces in training and education programs dating back to the 1960s. Through decades of helping the Colombians form schools at centralized locations, develop curricula, and teach students, the American special operators inculcated positive cultural values into the junior leadership, which eventually became the senior leadership. “The most important thing that Colombia gained from US military assistance was the transfer of culture,” said General Carlos Alberto Ospina Ovalle, the head of Colombia’s armed forces from 2004 to 2007. “The Americans served as our role models. We watched their behavior, their discipline, their humility, and their commitment to their country, and tried to emulate them.”
