When the first bullet goes by your head, politics and all that other &^%$ goes right out the window.
”Irene,” crackled over the radio headset.
“&^%$* Irene,” relayed
CWO Mike Durant to the crew and passengers of his sleek Black Hawk helicopter, call sign
Super Six Four. Staff Sergeant Matt Eversman prayed a silent “Hail Mary” as they took off. It was Sunday, October 3, 1993, 3:30 p.m., Somalia time. The code word launched a mission scheduled to take 45 minutes. In events over the ensuing fifteen hours, death would claim nineteen Americans and 1,000 Somalis. There would be wounded beyond counting. It would be the longest non-stop firefight since Vietnam.
Black Hawk Down began as a serial in the Philadelphia Inquirer. It was later compiled into a book that I consider a must read for anybody interested in history, military operations, or human courage under adversity. Reporter Mark Bowden gets the reader inside the operation with the guys who lived it. For a book written as tersely and urgently as
Black Hawk Down, it is amazing and a credit to author Bowden that he was not on the scene of the infamous battle. He pieced the story together from interviews with survivors on both sides, transcripts of radio traffic, videotapes, and other official sources.
Unlike a lot of war stories,
Black Hawk Down is well written and a real page-turner. I also recently read
We Were Soldiers Once, and Young and the contrast is all too clear. I cannot tell you how disappointed I was about the disjointed, stilted account of the important battle offered by LTC Hal Moore and Joe Galloway (both participants in the Ia Drang battle).
Black Hawk Down, on the other hand, speaks from a bunch of different viewpoints but Mark Bowden has the skill to keep the story thread intact and moving forward.
The story concerns itself with the planned kidnapping of a pair of warlord
Mohammed Farah Aidid’s chief lieutenants. Now, why in the world was the US there in the first place? Well, suffice it to say it was a humanitarian mission, sponsored by the UN.
Anyway, Aidid, the strongest of several warlords vying for control of Somalia, had cut off UN food shipments and starved 300,000 of his fellow countrymen to death. When Aidid ambushed UN Peacekeepers killing 24 Pakistani soldiers, Washington tasked the combined US Army Rangers/Special Operations team, a separate command, with capturing the warlord. These young men were the elite of the US Army, full of p!ss and vinegar and ready to break things.
However, under the severely restricted rules of engagement, a half-dozen attempts to nab the warlord had been scrubbed. The Rangers had shot up
”the Mog” (Mogadishu) at least once and killed about 200 Somali militia with no Aidid. True to form, Washington demanded results while failing to relax the rules of engagement. Washington’s increasingly strident calls for results (think Madeleine Albright), motivated Task Force Ranger commander
Major General William Garrison to make his move. To his credit, after the smoke cleared he accepted all responsibility for the debacle. Defense Secretary Les Aspin resigned, probably due to negative press over the failed mission.
But was the mission a failure? In the short term, 130 soldiers engaging a force 20 times its size and killing approximately half, while sustaining 19 dead and 70 wounded speaks for itself as a remarkable testament to the fortitude and tenacity of the individuals involved. The failure, in my opinion, was the commander’s not having a plan for the contingency of “what if the Somalis resist?” The commander, General Garrison, had the US 10th Mountain Division as well as UN troops to call on if he had desired back up, but this would have required coordination with the various elements. To be fair, Garrison had requested armor and AC130 Specter gun ships but Washington had turned him down. Nevertheless, Garrison decided to act on information presented to him only an hour earlier as to the whereabouts of the meeting between Aidid’s lieutenants. It was a case where he gambled and lost. If everything had gone according to plan, the Aidid men would have been abducted (they were) and everyone would have come back home (they did not).
Once the US forces were on the ground the Somali militia soon brought down a Black Hawk helicopter with a Rocket Propelled Grenade (RPG), then another and soon two more were shot down. The ground troopers were told to secure the crash sites but the Somalis were attacking viciously and communications had to be routed through a bureaucratic maze of inefficiency only understandable to people who have served in the military. So the fighting devolved into small pockets of US troops surrounded by mobs of Somalis, who had thoughtfully barricaded the streets to impede any mechanized advantage the Americans might have. After more than 12 hours of horror, a relief column consisting of Pakistani, Malaysian, and 10th Mountain Division troops arrived with tanks and armored personnel carriers. In an odd twist, a number of the beleaguered Rangers and Special Operations Delta troops could not fit into the limited space in the vehicles. They had to run back to the safe zone. They called it the “Mogadishu Mile.”
I think everybody could benefit from reading
Black Hawk Down. The tale is well told and serves to illustrate real soldiers serving in the worst of circumstances and upholding the finest traditions of the United States of America.
For a review of the movie Black Hawk Down:
http://www.epinions.com/content_53396999812
