Black Hawk Down (17 page)

Goffena followed Durant for about a mile, to a point where he felt confident Super Six
Four would make it back.

He had just started to turn around when Durant's tail rotor, the whole thing, the gearbox
and two or three feet of the vertical fin assembly, just turned into a blur and evaporated.

Inside Super Six Four, Durant and copilot Ray Frank felt the airframe begin to vibrate.
They heard the accelerating high-speed whine of the dry gear shaft in its death throes.

Then came a very loud bang as it blew apart. With the top half of the tail fin gone, a
big weight was suddenly dropped off the airframe's back end. Its center of gravity pitched
violently forward, and the bird began to spin. After a decade of flying, both Durant's and
Frank's reactions were instinctive. To make the airframe swing left meant pushing gently
on the left foot pedal. Durant now noticed he had already jammed his left pedal all the
way to the floor and his craft was still spinning rapidly to the right--with no tail rotor
there was no way to stop it. The spin was faster than Durant ever imagined it could be.
Earth and sky blurred like a spinning top. Out the windshield he saw just brown earth.

Durant tried to do something with the flight controls. Frank, in the seat next to him,
had the presence of mind to do exactly the right thing. The power control levers for the
engine were on the ceiling of the cockpit. Frank had to fight the spin's strong
centrifugal force to raise his arms. In those frantic seconds he somehow managed to pull
one lever back, shutting off one engine, and to pull the other one halfway back. Durant
shouted into his radio.

--Going in hard! Going down! Raaaay!

The plummeting helicopter's spin rate suddenly slowed. Just before impact its nose pulled
up. Whether for some aerodynamic reason or something Durant or Frank did inside the
cockpit, the falling chopper leveled off. With the spin rate down to half what it had
been, and with the craft fairly level, the Black Hawk made a hard, but flat landing.

Flat was critical. It meant there was a chance the men in the helicopter were still alive.

-16-

Yousuf Dahir Mo'alim was near the man who fired the grenade. Mo'alim was behind a tree in
an alley that went behind the Bar Bakin Hotel, a smaller white stone building that was one
block south of the Olympic Hotel. He ducked behind the tree to hide from the Black Hawk
overhead. As he did one of his men, part of a group of twenty-six militia who had come
running from the neighboring village of Hawlwadigli, dropped to one knee in the middle of
the alley and pointed up his Russian antitank weapon. The tube had been fitted with a
metal funnel, which was welded on the back end at an angle to direct the back blast away
from the shooter's body.

“If you miss, I've got another round!” Mo'alim shouted. They were veteran fighters, guns
for hire, mostly, although everybody was now fighting the Americans for free.

Mo'alim's father had died in 1984 in fighting between Somalia and Ethiopia, and at age
fifteen the son was recruited to take his place. He was a skeletal young man, lost in
oversized shirt and pants, with deep hollow cheeks and a goatee that filled out his narrow
chin. He had fought for two years as one of Siad Barre's soldiers, but as the tide of that
insurrection changed, he had slipped away from his unit to join Aidid's rebel troops. He
was a veteran of many street fights, but none as fierce as this.

He had organized the men in his village, a labyrinth of twisting cactus-lined dirt paths
around rag huts and tin-roofed shanties just south of the Bakara Market area, into an
irregular militia for hire. They remained primarily allied to Aidid, because they
belonged, as he did, to the Habr Gidr clan. Mainly they defended their village from other
marauding bands of young fighters. They provided security for anybody willing to pay,
including, at times, the UN and other international organizations. Occasionally they went
looking for loot themselves. Men like Mo'alim and his crew were called mooryan, or bandits
They lived by the gun, mostly M-16s and the Russian AK-47s that could be bought at the
market for a million Somali shillings, or about two hundred dollars. They also carried
antitank weapons, everything from World War II-era bazookas to the more reliable and
accurate Russian-made RPGs. They took payment for their services in rice or khat. The drug
took its toll. Another word for the mooryan was dai-dai or “quick-quick,” for their jumpy
ways and nervous tics. They were fearless fighters, and they often died young. But these
days all the mooryan in southern Mogadishu had a common enemy. Some had begun calling
themselves, in a play on the word “Rangers,” Revengers.

They knew the best way to hurt the Americans was to shoot down a helicopter. The
helicopters were a symbol of UN power and Somali helplessness. When the Rangers arrived
they had seemed invincible. The Black Hawks and Little Birds were all but invulnerable to
the small arms that made up most of the Somali arsenal. They were designed to punish with
impunity from a distance. The Rangers, when they came, descended from helicopters quickly,
grabbed their captives, and were gone before a significant force could be formed to fight
them. When they traveled on the ground, it was in armed convoys that moved fast. But every
enemy advertises his weakness in the way he fights. To Aidid's fighters, the Rangers'
weakness was apparent. They were not willing to die.

Somali were famous for braving enemy fire, for almost suicidal, frontal assaults. They
were brought up in clans and named for their fathers and grandfathers. They entered a
fight with cunning and courage and gave themselves over to the savage emotion of it.
Retreat, even before overwhelming enemy fire, was considered unmanly. For the clan, they
were always ready to die.

To kill Rangers, you had to make them stand and fight. The answer was to bring down a
helicopter. Part of the Americans' false superiority, their unwillingness to die, meant
they would do anything to protect each other, things that were courageous but also
sometimes foolhardy. Aidid and his lieutenants knew that if they could bring down a
chopper, the Rangers would move to protect its crew. They would establish a perimeter and
wait for help. They would probably not be overrun, but they could be made to bleed and die.

Aidid's men received some expert guidance in shooting down helicopters from
fundamentalist Islamic soldiers, smuggled in from Sudan, who had experience fighting
Russian helicopters in Afghanistan. In the effort they had resolved to focus their entire
arsenal of RPGs, the most powerful weaponry left to Aidid after the summer's air attacks
on his tanks and big guns. This was problematic. The grenades burst on impact, but it was
hard to hit a moving target with one, so the detonators on many were replaced with timing
devices to make them explode in midair; That way they wouldn't need a direct hit to
cripple a chopper. Their fundamentalist advisers taught them that the helicopter's tail
rotor was its most vulnerable spot. So they learned to wait until it passed over, and to
shoot up at it from behind. It was awkward and dangerous to point the tubes at the sky,
and suicidal to aim from rooftops. The helicopters spotted an armed man on a rooftop
quickly, usually before he had a chance to aim his weapon and fire. So Aidid's fighters
devised methods to safely shoot up from the ground. They dug deep boles in the dirt
streets. The shooter would lie supine with the back of the tube pointed down into the
hole. Sometimes he would cut down a small tree and lean it into the hole, then cover
himself with a green robe so he could lie under the tree waiting for one to fly over.

They hit their first Black Hawk in the dark early morning of September. 25, but it wasn't
part of a Ranger mission. The success heartened them. The next time the Rangers came out
in force, they would be ready. They would only have to hit one.

When Mo'alim heard the helicopters come in low on October 3 he grabbed his M-16 and
rounded up his gang.

They ran north, fanning out into groups of seven or eight up past National Street and
around behind the Olympic Hotel, moving through neighborhoods they knew well. The sky was
infested with helicopters. Mo'alim's smaller groups tried to stay together in the crowds
of people moving that way. Surrounded by unarmed civilians, they knew the Americans would
be less likely to shoot at them even if they were spotted. They wore sheets and towels
thrown over their shoulders to cover their weapons and carried their automatic rifles
stiffly at their sides. They were one of many militia gangs moving quickly to the fight.

Mo'alim's group first encountered Rangers at an intersection in a Humvee just south of
the hotel on Hawlwadig Road. As they crept up and fired on the Americans, a helicopter
appeared and opened fire, killing the eldest of Mo'alim's squad, a portly middle-aged man
they called “Alcohol.” Mo'alim dragged Alcohol's limp body off the street, and his squad
regrouped a block farther south, behind the Bar Bakin Hotel.

It was there that they watched the first helicopter go down. The men cheered wildly. They
continued moving and shooting, staying about two blocks away from the Rangers. They were
still south of the target building when one of Mo'alim's group knelt in the road, took aim
at another Black Hawk, and fired. The grenade hit the rear rotor and big chunks of it flew
off in the explosion. And then, for a few instants, nothing happened.

It seemed to Mo'alim that the helicopter crashed very slowly. It flew on for a while like
it had not been damaged, and then abruptly tilted forward and started to spin. It fell in
Wadigley, a crowded neighborhood just south of his own. The crash brought cries of
exultation from the crowd. All around him Mo'alim saw people reverse direction. Moments
before, the crowd and the fighters had been moving north, toward the Olympic Hotel and to
where the first Black Hawk had crashed. Now everyone around him was racing south. He ran
with them, back through his own neighborhood of Hawlwadigli, a goateed veteran soldier
waving his weapon and shouting: “Turn back! Stop! There are still men inside who can
shoot!”

Some listened to him and fell in behind Mo'alim and his men. Others ran ahead. Ali
Hussein, who managed a pharmacy near where the helicopter crashed, saw many of his
neighbors grab guns and run toward it. He caught hold of the arm of his friend All Mohamed
Cawale, who owned the Black Sea restaurant. Cawale had

a rifle. Hussein grabbed him by both shoulders:

“It's dangerous. Don't go!” he shouted at him.

But the smell of blood was in the air. Cawale wrestled away from Hussein and joined the
running crowd.

-17-

In ordinary circumstances, as close to the first crash as they were, the convoy would have
just barreled over to it, running over and shooting through anything in its path. But with
all the help overhead, Task Force Ranger was about to demonstrate how too much information
can hurt soldiers on a battlefield.

High in the C2 Black Hawk, Harrell and Matthews could see one group of about fifteen
gunmen racing along streets that paralleled the eight-vehicle convoy. The running Somalis
could keep pace with the vehicles because the trucks and Humvees stacked up at every
intersection. Each driver waited until the vehicle in front completely cleared the cross
fire before sprinting through it himself. To get stuck in the open was suicidal. Every
time the convoy stalled, it gave the bands of shooters time to reach the next street and
set up an ambush for each vehicle as it gunned through. The convoy was getting riddled.
From above, Harrell and Matthews could see roadblocks and places where Somalis had massed
to ambush. So they steered the convoy away from those places.

There was an added complication. Flying about a thousand feet over the C2 helicopter was
the navy Orion spy plane, which had surveillance cameras that gave them a clear picture of
the convoy's predicament. But the Orion pilots were handicapped. They were not allowed to
communicate directly with the convoy. Their directions were relayed to the commander at
the JOC, who would then radio Harrell in the command bird. Only then was the plane's
advice relayed down to the convoy. This built in a maddening delay. The Orion pilots would
see a direct line to the crash site. They'd say, “Turn left!” But by the time that
instruction reached McKnight in the lead Humvee, he had passed the turn. Heeding the
belated direction, they'd then turn down the wrong street. High above the fight,
commanders watching out their windows or on screens couldn't hear the gunfire and
screaming of wounded men, or feel the impact of the explosions. From above, the convoy's
progress seemed orderly. The visual image didn't always convey how desperate the situation
really was.

Eversmann, still lying helplessly on his back toward the rear of the column, had felt the
vehicle turn right after leaving his blocking position, which he expected, He knew the
crash site was just a few blocks that way. But when the Humvee made the second right-hand
turn, it surprised him. Why were they headed south? It was easy to get lost in Mog. The
streets weren't laid out like some urban planner's neat grid. Roads you thought were
taking you one place would suddenly slant off in a different direction. There were more
turns. Soon, the crash site that had been close enough for Eversmann to see from his spot
on Hawlwadig Road was lost somewhere back in the hornets' nest.

The convoy was bearing south when Durant's helicopter crashed. Up in the lead Humvee,
McKnight got the word on the radio from Lieutenant Colonel Harrell.

--Danny, we just had another Hawk go down to RPG fire south of the Olympic Hotel. We need
you to get everybody in that first crash site. Need QRF to give us some help, over.

--This is Uniform. Understand. Aircraft down south of Olympic Hotel. Recon and see what
we can do after that.

--We are going to try to get the QRF to give us some help. Try to get everyone off that
crash site (Super Six One] and let's get out of here down to the other Hawk and secure it,
over.