Black Hawk Down (51 page)

Nobody won the Battle of the Black Sea, but like all

important battles, it changed the world. The awful price of the arrests of two obscure
clan functionaries named Omar Salad and Mohamed Hassan Awale rightly shocked President
Clinton, who reportedly felt betrayed by his military advisers and staff, much as an
equally inexperienced President Kennedy had felt in 1961 after the Bay of Pigs. It led to
the resignation of Defense Secretary Les Aspin and destroyed the promising career of
General Garrison, who commanded Task Force Ranger. It aborted a hopeful and unprecedented
UN effort to salvage a nation so lost in anarchy and civil war that millions of its people
were starving. It ended a brief heady period of post-Cold War innocence, a time when
America and its allies felt they could sweep venal dictators and vicious tribal violence
from the planet as easily and relatively bloodlessly as Saddam Hussein had been swept from
Kuwait. Mogadishu has had a profound cautionary influence on U.S. military policy ever
since.

“It was a watershed,” says one State Department official, who asked not to be named
because his insight runs so counter to our current foreign policy agenda. “The idea used
to be that terrible countries were terrible because good, decent, innocent people were
being oppressed by evil, thuggish leaders. Somalia changed that. Here you have a country
where just about everybody is caught up in hatred and fighting. You stop an old lady on
the street and ask her if she wants peace, and she'll say, yes, of course, I pray for it
daily. All the things you'd expect her to say. Then ask her if she would be willing for
her clan to share power with another in order to have that peace, and she'll say, 'With
those murderers and thieves? I'd die first' People in these countries - Bosnia is a more
recent example - don't want peace. They want victory. They want power. Men, women, old and
young. Somalia was the experience that taught us that people in these places bear much of
the responsibility for things being the way they are. The hatred and the killing continues
because they want it to. Or because they don't want peace enough to stop it.”

So, for better or worse, the USS Harlan County was turned away from the dock at
Port-au-Prince one week after the Mogadishu fight by an orchestrated “riot” of fewer than
two hundred Haitians. The U.S. government (and the UN) looked on as genocidal spasms
killed a million people in Rwanda and Zaire, and as atrocity was piled on atrocity in
Bosnia. There was some cynical posturing in the White House and Congress after the Battle
of the Black Sea about never again placing U.S. troops under UN command, when everyone
involved understood perfectly well that Task Force Ranger and even the QRF were under
direct U.S. command at all times. Even the decision to target Aidid and his clansmen was
driven by the US. State Department The single most forceful advocate for Task Force
Rangers mission in Mogadishu was US. Admiral Jonathan Howe, a former deputy on the
National Security Council during the Bush administration, who was the top UN official
on-site in Mogadishu. Task Force Ranger was wholly an American production.

Congress moved quickly to apportion blame. Hadn't Aspin turned down an initial Task Force
Ranger request for the AC-130 gunship, and again, just weeks before the fateful raid,
rejected a request for Abrams tanks and Bradley armored vehicles from General Thomas
Montgomery, QRF commander? It seems fairly obvious that a light infantry force trapped in
a hostile city would be better off with armored vehicles to pull them out, and few aerial
firing platforms are as deadly effective as the AC-130 Spectre. Many of the men who fought
in Mogadishu believe that at least some, if not all, of their friends would have survived
the mission if the Clinton administration had been more concerned about force protection
than maintaining the correct political posture. Aspin himself, before he stepped down,
acknowledged that his decision on the force request had been an error. The 1994 Senate
Armed Services Committee investigation of the battle reached the same conclusions. The
initial postmortem on the battle was summed up in a powerful statement to the committee by
Lieutenant Colonel Larry Joyce, US. Army retired, the father of Sergeant Casey Joyce, one
of the Rangers killed.

“Why were they denied armor, these forces? Had there been armor, had there been Bradleys
there, I contend that my son would probably be alive today, because he, like the other
casualties that were sustained in the early phases of the battle, were killed en route
from the target to the downed helicopter site, the first crash site. I believe there was
an inadequate force structure from the very beginning.”

This is the line picked up by David Hackworth, the retired U.S. Army colonel who has made
a second career writing about the military. Hackworth devotes a chapter of his 1996 book,
Hazardous Duty, to the battle. Pausing to vent his disappointment with not having been
invited to observe the action with the Rangers, he calls Garrison “inept” and accuses the
White House and military brass of “striking heroic poses” by not putting “their weapons
systems where their mouths were.” Hackworth calculated that tanks would have spared six
killed and thirty wounded.

There are telling inaccuracies in Hackworth's account, and it lacks even the pretense of
fairness, but the colonel's critique nevertheless shaped understanding of the fight both
in and out of the military. Garrison is the butt of his assault. He incorrectly suggests
that the general was directing the battle from a helicopter overhead, and even quotes one
of the platoon sergeants on the ground wishing that he'd had a “Stinger,” to shoot the
general down (anyone who fought in Mogadishu that day would have known Garrison was not in
the command helicopter). Hackworth concludes that Garrison should have refused to conduct
the operation when the initial force package was trimmed. He quotes Joyce as follows:
“Initially, I gave Garrison the benefit of the doubt, but the more Rangers I've talked to,
the clearer it became that he had no good reason to launch the raid the way he did. The
tactics were completely flawed. Garrison was a cowboy going for his third star at the
expense of his guys.”

From a man who lost his son in the fight, this is a terrible accusation.

I lack the standing to critique the military decisions made by Garrison and his men that
day, but the work I have done on Black Hawk Down does qualify me to report authoritatively
on the memories, feelings, and opinions of the men who fought. I have interviewed more
Rangers, Delta soldiers, and helicopter pilots who were involved in the battle than
anyone, and I have yet to meet one who expressed the opinions of the mission or of
Garrison reported by Hackworth. The men who undertook the raid an October 3 were confident
of their tactics and training and committed to their goals. While many offered incisive
criticism of decisions large and small made before and during the fight, and differed
substantially with their commanders on some points, they remain proud of successfully
completing their mission. I was struck by how little bitterness there is among the men who
underwent this ordeal. What anger exists relates more to the decision to call off the
mission the day after the battle than anything that happened during it. The record shows
that in the weeks prior to this raid, Garrison took more heat for being too careful about
launching missions than doing so recklessly. The general, who retired in 1996 after a
stint heading the JFK School of Special Warfare at Fort Bragg. is held in universally high
regard by the men who served under him.

Garrison took full responsibility for the outcome of the battle in a handwritten letter
to President Clinton the day after the fight. This letter has been called a ploy by the
general's critics, although one strains to see what advantage he gained by writing it. it
is a document that speaks plainly for itself, the honorable act of an honorable man-and
one who clearly feels no shame for the way he or his men conducted themselves in the fight

I. The authority, responsibility and accountability for the Op rests here in MOO with the
TF Ranger commander, not in Washington.

II. Excellent intelligence was available on the target.

III. Forces were experienced in areas as a result of six previous operations.

IV. Enemy situation was well known: Proximity to Bakara Market (SNA strongpoint);
previous reaction times of bad guys.

V. Planning for the Op was bottom up not top down.

Assaulters were confident it was a double operation Approval of plan was retained by TF
Ranger commander.

VI. Techniques, tactics and procedures were approved for mission/target.

VII. Reaction forces were planned for contingencies. A.) CSAR on immediate standby (UH6O
with medics and security).

VIIL Loss of 1st Halo was supportable. Pilot pinned in wreckage presented problem.

2nd Helo crash required response from the 10th Mtn. QRF. The area of the crash was such
that SNA wore there nearly immediately so we were unsuccessful in reaching the crash site
in time.

Rangers on 1st crash site were not pinned down. They could have fought their way out.
Our creed would not allow us to leave the body of the pilot pinned in the wreckage.

XL Armor reaction force would have helped but casualty figures may or may not have been
different. The type of men in the task force simply would not be denied in their mission
of getting to their fallen comrades.

XII. The mission was a success. Targeted individuals were captured and extracted from the
target.

XIII. For this particular target, President Clinton and Sec. Aspin need to be taken off
the blame line.

William F. Garrison

MG

Commanding

While the facts support Garrison's accounting overall, I believe he is wrong in this
letter on several counts. Only part of points IV and VII are supported by the evidence.
Aidid's tactics were well known, and the task force's planning was effective, but only to
a point. The Black Hawk helicopter proved more vulnerable to RPG fire than anticipated.
Once two of them crashed (three others were crippled but made it back to friendly ground),
the task force's “techniques, tactics and procedures” were stretched beyond their limits.
There was clearly insufficient reaction force standing by to rescue the pilots and crew of
Super Six Two, Michael Durant's helicopter. The CSAR bird was the primary contingency for
a helicopter crash. It was a well-stocked, superbly trained chopper full of expert
rescuers and ground fighters. They were deployed minutes after the crash of Cliff
Wolcott's Super Six One, and were instrumental in rescuing a portion of the crew and
recovering the bodies of Wolcott and copilot Donovan Briley. But when Durant's Black Hawk
crashed twenty minutes later, there was no such rescue force at hand. Durant and his crew
had to await (tragically, as it turned out) the arrival of a ground rescue force.

Prior to launching the mission, Garrison had alerted the 10th Mountain Division, the QRF,
but had decided to let them stay at the UN compound north of the city instead of moving
them down to the task force's airport base. They were promptly summoned after Wolcott's
Black Hawk crashed, but moved to the Ranger base by such a roundabout route (avoiding
crossing through the city) that they didn't arrive until fifty minutes after the first
helicopter crash (almost a half hour after Durant's helicopter went down). So for the
first thirty minutes Durant and his crew were on the ground, the only rescue force
Garrison could muster was a hastily assembled convoy comprised mostly of support
personnel, well-trained soldiers all, but men whom no one anticipated throwing into the
fight. Ultimately neither this convoy nor the QRF could fight their way in. They were
barred by blockades and ambushes that Aidid's militias had plenty of time to prepare. The
task force knew that it would encounter trouble if it took longer than thirty minutes to
get in and out of the target, but few anticipated how many RPGs Aidid's fighters would
bring to the fight. The price was paid in downed Black Hawks.

Garrison's point X is also debatable. The men I interviewed who spent the night around
the first crashed Black Hawk say they were pinned down. In strictly military terms, being
pinned down means a force can do nothing. Arguably, if Task Force Ranger's commanders had
wanted to move the force out of the city they could have. More intensive air support was
available in the form of Cobra attack helicopters attached to the QRF. But no such
decision was made, and from the perspective of the men on the ground, they were pinned
down. This is the opinion of everyone I interviewed, from the ranking officers to the
lowliest privates. While it may have been possible to fight their way back to the base on
foot, the men believe they would have sustained terrible losses. The men on the lost
convoy took better than 50 percent casualties moving through the streets in vehicles. The
force at crash site one would have had to carry their dead and wounded. The men holed up
with Captain Steele at the southern end of the perimeter on Marehan Road balked at having
to move one block on foot at the height of the battle. There is no doubt Garrison's men,
if so ordered, would have tried to fight their way out, but they stayed put for reasons
that went beyond loyalty to the pinned body of Chief Warrant Officer Cliff Wolcott.
Arguing otherwise puts a noble cast to the predicament, but falls short of the facts.

The rest of Garrison's statement squares well with the facts. The president and Secretary
of Defense, of course, bear ultimate responsibility for any actions of the

U.S. military, but without the advantage of hindsight, their decisions regarding the
deployment of Task Force Ranger are defensible. Trimming the AC-130 gunship from the
initial force

request, in light of growing congressional pressure to bring the troops home from
Somalia, seems particularly so. Garrison himself felt the gunship was not only
unnecessary, but likely to be a less effective firing platform over a densely populated
urban neighborhood than the AH-6 Little Birds. If both the Little Birds and the gunship
had been in the air, one or the other would have been severely restricted. The small
helicopters, flying below the gunship, would have had to clear out to avoid crossing the
gunship's fire. As it was, the Little Birds provided extremely effective air support
throughout the battle. To a man, the soldiers pinned down around the first crash site
credit brave and skillful Little Birds' pilots with keeping the Somali crowds at bay. The
Somali fighters we interviewed in Mogadishu agreed. They believe the helicopters were the
only thing that prevented a total rout of the pinned-down force. Soldiers trapped around
the wrecked chopper understandably found themselves longing for the devastating firepower
of the AC-130, which could have carved out a corridor of fire for their escape. But
command concerns about limiting collateral damage were legitimate. The corridor of fire,
envisioned by the men on the ground would have pulverized a wide swath of Mogadishu,
likely killing many more noncombatants than Aidid's fighters. Support for the gunship was
lukewarm on up the ranks, all the way to General Colin Powell, who in his final weeks as
chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff acquiesced without complaint to the decision.
Interviewed for this book, Powell said that while he formally endorsed the entire force
request, even in retrospect be could not fault Aspin's decision to trim the gunship.
Garrison's task force never requested or envisioned armor as part of its force package.
Its tactics were to strike with surprise and speed, and up until October 3, those tactics
worked. It is fair for military experts to criticize Garrison's judgment in this, but
hardly fair to accuse Aspin of turning down a request the task force never made. General
Montgomery asked for Abrams tanks and Bradley vehicles in late September for his QRFs, and
these were turned down, again because of pressure in Washington to lower, not raise, the
American military presence in Mogadishu. It is easy to dismiss these pressures as effete
concerns, but strong congressional support is vital to sustain any military venture. In
our system of government, everything requires a balancing act. At that point, any move
that appeared to be deepening America's commitment to the military option in Mogadishu
weakened support for it. Even if Montgomery had gotten his Bradleys, it's questionable
what impact they would have had in the battle. It is doubtful they would have been in
place by October 3. Since they would have been assigned to the 10th Mountain Division,
they would not have been part of the Ranger pound reaction force. Lieutenant Colonel Joyce
had argued that Bradleys might have saved his son's life, but since the armor would have
been assigned to a unit across the city that was not thrown into the fight until after
Sergeant Joyce was killed, it's hard to see how. The rescue force that finally did
extricate the men pinned down at crash site one came in with armor, Pakistani tanks, and
Malaysian APCs. It may have arrived faster if the QRF had been equipped with the superior
Bradleys, but the one soldier who died awaiting rescue, Corporal Jimmie Smith, bled to
death early in the evening.