Black Hawk Down

“It makes no difference what men think of war, said the judge. War endures. As well ask
men what they think of stone. War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The
ultimate trade awaiting the ultimate practitioner.”

-Cormac McCarthy

-Blood Meridian

THE ASSAULT

-1-

At liftoff, Matt Eversmann said a Hail Mary. He was curled into a seat between two
helicopter crew chiefs, the knees of his long legs up to his shoulders. Before him, jammed
on both sides of the Black Hawk helicopter, was his “chalk,” twelve young men in flak
vests over tan desert camouflage fatigues.

He knew their faces so well they were like brothers. The older guys on this crew, like
Eversmann, a staff sergeant with five years in at age twenty-six, had lived and trained
together for years. Some had come up together through basic training, jump school, and
Ranger school. They had traveled the world, to Korea, Thailand, Central America... they
knew each other better than most brothers did. They'd been drunk together, gotten into
fights, slept on forest floors, jumped out of airplanes, climbed mountains, shot down
foaming rivers with their hearts in their throats, baked and frozen and starved together,
passed countless bored hours, teased one another endlessly about girlfriends or lack of
same, driven in the middle of the night from Fort Benning to retrieve each other from some
diner or strip club on Victory Drive after getting drunk and falling asleep or pissing off
some barkeep. Through all those things, they had been training for a moment like this. It
was the first time the lanky sergeant had been put in charge, and he was nervous about it.

Pray for us sinners, now, and at the hour of our death, Amen.

It was midafternoon, October 3, 1993. Eversmann's Chalk Four was part of a force of U.S.
Army Rangers and Delta Force operators who were about to drop in uninvited on a gathering
of Habr Gidr clan leaders in the heart of Mogadishu, Somalia. This ragged clan, led by
warlord Mohamed Farrah Aidid, had picked a fight with the United States of America, and it
was, without a doubt, going down. Today's targets were two of Aidid's lieutenants. They
would be arrested and imprisoned with a growing number of the belligerent clan's bosses on
an island off the southern Somali coast city of Kismayo. Chalk Four's piece of this
snatch-and-grab was simple. Each of the four Ranger chalks had a corner of the block
around the target house. Eversmann's would rope down to the northwest corner and set up a
blocking position. With Rangers on all four corners, no one would enter the zone where
Delta was working and no one would leave.

They had done this dozens of times without difficulty, in practice and on the task
force's six previous missions. The pattern was clear in Eversmann's mind. He knew which
way to move when he hit the ground, where his soldiers would be. Those out of the left
side of the bird would assemble on the left side of the Street.

Those out of the right side would assemble right then they would peel off in both
directions, with the medics and the youngest guys in the middle. Private First Class Todd
Blackburn was the baby on Eversmann's bird, a kid fresh out of Florida high school who had
not yet even been to Ranger school. He'd need watching. Sergeant Scott Galentine was older
but also inexperienced here in Mog. He was a replacement, just in from Benning. The burden
of responsibility for these young Rangers weighed heavily on Eversmann. This time out they
were his.

As chalk leader, be was handed headphones when he took his front seat. They were bulky
and had a mouthpiece and were connected by along black cord to a plug on the ceiling. He
took his helmet off and settled the phones over his ears.

One of the crew chiefs tapped his shoulder.

“Matt, be sure you remember to take those off before you leave,” he said, pointing to the
cord.

Then they had stewed on the hot tarmac for what seemed an hour, breathing the pungent
diesel fumes and oozing sweat under their body armor and gear, fingering their weapons
anxiously, every man figuring this mission would probably be scratched before they got off
the ground. That's how it usually went. There were twenty false alarms for every real
mission. Back when they'd arrived in Mog five weeks earlier, they were so flush with
excitement that cheers went up from Black Hawk to Black Hawk every time they boarded the
birds. Now spin-ups like this were routine and usually amounted to nothing.

Waiting for the code word for launch, which today was “Irene,” they were a formidable sum
of men and machines. There were four of the amazing AH-6 Little Birds, two-seat
bubble-front attack helicopters that could fly just about anywhere. The Little Birds were
loaded with rockets this time, a first. Two would make the initial sweep over the target
and two more would help with rear security. There were four MH-6 Little Birds with benches
mounted on both sides for delivering the spearhead of the assault force, Delta's C
Squadron, one of the three operational elements in the army's top secret commando unit.
Following this strike force were eight of the elongated troop-carrying Black Hawks: two
carrying Delta assaulters and their ground command, four for delivering the Rangers
(Company B, 3rd Battalion of the army's 75th Infantry, the Ranger Regiment out of Fort
Benning, Georgia), one carrying a crack CSAR (Combat Search and Rescue) team, and one to
fly the two mission commanders-Lieutenant Colonel Tom Matthews, who was coordinating the
pilots of the 160th SOAR (Special Operations Aviation Regiment out of Fort Campbell,
Kentucky); and Delta Lieutenant Colonel Gary Harrell, who had responsibility for the men
on the ground. The ground convoy, which was lined up and idling out by the front gate,
consisted of nine wide-body Humvees and three five-ton trucks. The trucks would be used to
haul the prisoners and assault forces out. The Humvees were filled with Rangers, Delta
operators, and four members of SEAL (Sea, Air, Land) Team Six, part of the navy's special
forces branch. Counting the three surveillance birds and the spy plane high overhead,
there were nineteen aircraft, twelve vehicles, and about 160 men. It was an eager armada
on a taut rope.

There were signs this one would go. The commander of Task Force Ranger, Major General
William F. Garrison, had come out to see them off. He had never done that before. A tail,
slender, gray-haired man in desert fatigues with half an unlit cigar jutting from the
corner of his mouth, Garrison had walked from chopper to chopper and then stooped dawn by
each Humvee.

"Be careful' he said in his Texas drawl. Then he'd move on to the next man.

“Good luck.”

Then the next.

“Be careful.”

The swell of all those revving engines made the earth tremble and their pulses race. It
was stirring to be part of it, the cocked fist of America's military might. Woe to
whatever stood in their way. Bristling with grenades and ammo, gripping the steel of their
automatic weapons, their hearts pounding under their flak vests, they waited with a heady
mix of hope and dread. They ran through last-minute mental checklists, saying prayers,
triple-checking weapons, rehearsing their precise tactical choreography, performing little
rituals. . . whatever it was that prepared them for battle. They all knew this mission
might get hairy. It was an audacious daylight thrust into the “Black Sea,” the very heart
of Habr Gidr territory in central Mogadishu and warlord Aidid's stronghold. Their target
was a three-story house of whitewashed stone with a flat roof, a modern modular home in
one of the city's few remaining clusters of intact large buildings, surrounded by blocks
and blocks of tin-roofed dwellings of muddy stone. Hundreds of thousands of clan members
lived in this labyrinth of irregular dirt streets and cactus-lined paths. There were no
decent maps. Pure Indian country.

The men had watched the rockets being loaded on the AH-6s. Garrison hadn't done that on
any of their earlier missions. It meant they were expecting trouble. The men had girded
themselves with extra ammo, stuffing magazines and grenades into every available pocket
and pouch of their load-bearing harnesses, leaving behind canteens. Bayonets, night-vision
goggles, and any other gear they felt would be deadweight on a- fast daylight raid. The
prospect of getting into a scrape didn't worry them. Not at all. They welcomed it. They
were predators, heavy metal avengers, unstoppable, invincible. The fueling was, after six
weeks of diddling around they were finally going to kick some serious Somali ass.

It was 3:32 p.m. when the chalk leader inside the lead Black Hawk, Super Sir Four, heard
over the intercom the soft voice of the pilot, Chief Warrant Officer Mike Durant, clearly
pleased. Durant announced:

“Fuckin' Irene.”

And the armada launched, lifting off from the shabby airport by the sea into an embracing
blue vista of sky and Indian Ocean. They eased out across a littered strip of white sand
and moved low and fast over running breakers that formed faint crests parallel to the
shore. In close formation they banked and flew down the coastline southwest. From each
bird the booted legs of the eager soldiers dangled from the benches and open doors.

Unrolling toward a hazy desert horizon, Mogadishu in midafternoon sun was so bright it
was as if the aperture on the world's lens was stuck one click wide. From a distance the
ancient port city had an auburn hue, with its streets of ocher sand and its rooftops of
Spanish tile and rusted tin.

The only tall structures still standing after years of civil war were the ornate white
towers of mosques-Islam being the only thing all Somalis held sacred. There were many
scrub trees, the tallest just over the low rooftops, and between them high stone walls
with pale traces of yellow and pink and gray, fading remnants of pre-civil war civility.
Set there along the coast, framed to the west by desert and the east by gleaming teal
ocean, it might have been some sleepy Mediterranean resort.

As the helicopter force swept in over it, gliding back in from the ocean and then banking
right and sprinting northeast along the city's western edge, Mogadishu spread beneath them
in its awful reality, a catastrophe, the world capital of things-gone-completely-to-hell
It was as if the city had been ravaged by some fatal urban disease. The few paved avenues
were crumbling and littered with mountains of trash, debris, and the rusted hulks of
burned-out vehicles. Those walls and buildings that had not been reduced to heaps of gray
rubble were pockmarked with bullet scars. Telephone poles leaned at ominous angles like
voodoo totems topped by stiff sprays of dreadlocks-the stubs of their severed wires (long
since stripped for sale on the thriving black market). Public spaces displayed the hulking
stone platforms that once held statuary from the heroic old days of dictator Mohamed Slid
Barre, the national memory stripped bare not out of revolutionary fervor, but to sell the
bronze and copper for scrap. The few proud old government and university buildings that
still stood were inhabited now by refugees. Everything of value had been looted, right
down to metal window frames, doorknobs, and hinges. At night, campfires glowed from third-
and fourth-story windows of the old Polytechnic Institute. Every open space was clotted
with the dense makeshift villages of the disinherited, round stick huts covered with
layers of rags and shacks made of scavenged scraps of wood and patches of rusted tin. From
above they looked like an advanced stage of some festering urban rot.

In his bird, Super Six Seven, Eversmann rehearsed the plan in his mind. By the time they
reached the street, the D-boys would already be taking down the target house, rounding up
Somali prisoners, and shooting anyone foolish enough to fight back. Word was there were
two big boys in this house, men whom the task force had identified as “Tier One
Personalities,” Aidid's top men. As the D-boys did their work and the Rangers kept the
curious at bay, the ground convoy of trucks and Humvees would roll in through the city,
right up to the target house. The prisoners would be herded into the trucks. The assault
team and blocking force would jump in behind them and they would all drive back to finish
out a nice Sunday afternoon on the beach. It would take about an hour.

To make room for the Rangers in the Black Hawks, the seats in back had been removed. The
men who were not in the doorways were squatting on ammo cans or seated on flak-proof
Kevlar panels laid out on the floor. They all wore desert camouflage fatigues, with Kevlar
vests and helmets and about fifty pounds of equipment and ammo strapped to their
load-bearing harnesses, which It on over the vests. All had goggles and thick leather
gloves. Those layers of gear made even the slightest of them look bulky, robotic, and
intimidating. Stripped down to their dirt-brown T-shirts and black shorts, which is how
they spent most of their time in the hangar, most looked like the pimply teenagers they
were (average age nineteen). They were immensely proud of their Ranger status. It spared
them most of the numbing noncombat-related routine that drove many an army enlistee nuts.
The Rangers trained for war full-time. They were fitter, faster, and first-“Ranges lead
the way!” was their motto. Each had volunteered at least three times to get where they
were, for the army, for airborne, and for the Rangers. They were the cream, the most
highly motivated young soldiers of their generation, selected to fit the army's ideal-they
were all male and, revealingly, nearly all white (there were only two blacks among the
140-man company). Some were professional soldiers, like Lieutenant Larry Perino, a 1990
West Point graduate. Some were overachievers in search of a different challenge, like
Specialist John Waddell on Chalk Two, who had enlisted after finishing high school in
Natchez, Mississippi, with a 4.0 GPA. Some were daredevils in search of a physical
challenge. Others were self-improvers, young men who had found themselves adrift after
high school, or in trouble with drugs, booze, the law, or all three. They were
harder-edged than most young men of their generation who, on this Sunday in early autumn,
were weeks into their fall college semester. Most of these Rangers had been kicked around
some, had tasted failure. But there were no goof-offs. Every man had worked to be here,
probably harder than he'd ever worked in his life. Those with troubled pasts had taken
harsh measure of themselves. Beneath their best hard-ass act, most were achingly earnest,
patriotic, and idealistic. They had literally taken the army up on its offer to “Be All
You Can Be.”