Black Hawk Down

Black Hawk Down A Story of Modern War by Mark Bowden, 1951- Published: 1999 J J J J J I I I I I Table of Contents Dedication & The Assault Black Hawk Down Overrun The Alamo N.S.D.Q. Epilogue Sources Acknowledgements J J J J J I I I I I For my mother, Rita Lois Bowden, and in memory of my father, Richard H. Bowden 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 out in the middle of the night from Fort Benning to retrieve each other from some diner or strip club out 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, he was handed headphones when he took his front seat. They were bulky and had a mouthpiece and were connected by a long 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 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 tall, 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 down 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 feeling was, after six weeks of diddling around they were finally going in to kick some serious Somali ass. It was 3.32 P.M. when the chalk leader inside the lead Black Hawk, Super Six Four , heard over the intercom the soft voice of the pilot, Chief Warrant Officer Mike Durant, clearly pleased.

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