Black Hawk Down (14 page)

Durant had been with the Night Stalkers long enough to be a veteran of dangerous
low-flying night missions in the Persian Gulf War and the invasion of Panama. He had grown
up In Berlin, New Hampshire, with a reputation for being a cutup and an athlete, a
football and hockey player. Age and experience had changed him. Many of the people in his
neighborhood in Tennessee, just over the state line from the Night Stalkers' base at Fort
Campbell, Kentucky, didn't even know what he did for a living. His own family often didn't
know where his was.

It was hard to keep track. If Durant wasn't on a real mission like this one, he was off
somewhere in the world practicing for one. Practice defined the lives of the Night
Stalkers. They practiced everything, even crashing. When they were done they flew off
someplace new and practiced it again, again, and again. Their moves in the electronic maze
of their cockpits were so well rehearsed they had become instinctive.

On the day Durant's unit was dispatched to Somalia they had gotten only two hours'
notice-- Enough time to drive home and spend fifteen minutes with his wife, Lorrie, and
year-old son, Joey. Never mind that his parents were due in town the next day for a
long-planned, weeklong visit, that Joey's first birthday was in three days, and Lorrie was
due to resume school-teaching in a week, or that the house they were building was only
half finished (with Durant playing subcontractor). Lorrie knew better than to protest.

She had just pitched in to help him pack. It wasn't immediately apparent, but Durant was
also an emotional man. He fit in with his daring aviation unit, men whose allegiance was
as much to action as to flag, but the sentiment he felt for his wife and baby son, who had
just started to crawl, was closer to the surface than with some of these guys. There were
men in his unit who made a show of how hard it was to leave but who secretly lived for
missions and weren't happy unless in danger. Durant wasn't that way. It was hard to leave
Lorrie and his baby boy, to miss his parents and the birthday party. He had been looking
forward to it. He phoned his folks to tell them, and to say how sorry he was. He was not
allowed to say where he was going. There was no time even to write out a list of the
things that needed doing on the new house (he would send that via E-mail from Mogadishu.
way overusing his allotted number of bytes in the mailing). Durant stood with his travel
bag in the doorway of their home with that stiff posture of his, kissed Lorrie good-by,
and went off to war. Even his leavings were well practiced.

After Elvis crashed, Durant knew three things would happen quickly. The ground forces
would begin moving to the crash site. Super Six Eight, the CSAR bird, one of the Black
Hawks in the holding pattern with Durant, would be summoned to deliver a team of medics
and snipers. His bird, Super Six Four, would be asked to fill Elvis's vacant slot flying a
low orbit over the action providing covering fire.

For now, they waited and circled. On a mission like this one with so many birds in the
air, breaking discipline meant becoming a greater hazard than the enemy. For Durant, the
most harrowing part of his mission was done. Inserting Chalk One, his fifteen-man portion
of the ground force, had meant descending into an opaque cloud of dust to rooftop level
over the target building, avoiding poles and wires, and squinting down through the Black
Hawk's chin bubble into the brown swirl to stay lined up while the men slid down ropes to
the ground. All Durant could do was hold blind and steady, and pray that none of the other
birds flitting around him in the cloud got thrown off schedule or bumped off course. A
complex mission like this one was choreographed as carefully as a ballet, only dangerous
as hell. Guys got killed all the time just training for exercises like this, much less
ducking RPGs and small-arms fire. Durant had inserted Chalk One without incident. The rest
was supposed to be easy.

Now nothing was going to be easy.

-10-

Admiral Jonathan Howe's first inkling that something was amiss in Mogadishu came when air
traffic controllers at the UN compound forced his plane to circle out over the ocean far a
time before landing.

Howe was returning from meetings in Djibouti and Addis Ababa, exploring a plan for
bringing Aidid peacefully to heel. When they were cleared to land attack helicopters
refueling and uploading ammo on the tarmac by the Task Force Ranger hangar. When he
landed, Howe telephoned his chief of staff. He was told about the Ranger raid and the
downed helicopter. The aide told him there was a big fight going on in the city and he
would probably be stuck for a while at the airport.

Howe was a slender, white-haired man whose pale complexion hadn't even pinked after seven
months in Mogadishu. His staff joked that it was from all those years aboard submarines,
although in Howe's distinguished naval career he had had his share of surface vessels,
everything from battleship, to aircraft carriers. Whatever the cause, he seemed immune to
sunlight, even Somalia's. Aidid's propaganda sheets had dubbed him “Admiral Howe,” but the
envoy's calm, polite manner belied the nickname. He had served as deputy national security
adviser for President Bush and had helped with the transition in the White House to the
Clinton administration, so impressing the new team that he had been talked out of a
comfortable Florida retirement to assume the unenviable task of supervising an even
trickier transition in Somalia. He was Boutros-Ghali's top man in Mog, effectively running
the mission on the ground. It was not an easy assignment. Howe had slept for months on a
cot in his office on the first floor of the old U.S. embassy building, which was falling
apart. For some of the time he had a tin-roofed cabin, but regular shellings generally
drove him and the other civilians at the compound inside the stone walls of the main
building. There were no toilets in the embassy, and so few portable ones outside, that the
men toted plastic bottles to relieve themselves. They ate three meals a day out of a
cafeteria on the grounds. A story in The Washington Post that suggested the UN staff
enjoyed luxurious accommodations had provoked bitter laughter.

More than anyone, Howe had been responsible for bringing the Rangers to Mogadishu. He had
pushed his friends in the White House and Pentagon so hard that summer for a force to snag
Aidid that in Washington they were calling him “Jonathan Ahab.” He was convinced that
getting rid of the warlord--not killing him, but arresting him and trying him as a war
criminal would cut through the tangle of tribal hatred that sustained war, anarchy, and
famine.

The state of the city had shocked him when he arrived eight months earlier. It was a
savage place. Everything had been shot up, nothing worked, everything of value had been
looted, and nobody was in charge. Here was a country not just at ground zero, but below
zero. The very means of recovery had been destroyed. The hobbled predicament of the place
was reflected in the number of land-mine victims, men, women, and children pulling
themselves around on crutches. The UN intervention had ended the famine, but where would
Somalia go from there? Efforts to build a coalition government out of the nation's feuding
clans were still far from successful. Nine out of ten were unemployed, and most of those
who did work were employed by the UN and the United States. The factional fighting had
gone beyond anything rational or even understandable from the admiral's perspective, He
felt contempt for the men responsible, for men like Aidid, Ali Mahdi, and the other
warlords, the very leaders needed to set Somalia back on its feet.

It soon became clear to Howe that power sharing was not in the plans of Aidid and his
Somalia National Alliance (SNA), the political/military arm of the Habr Gidr. Having been
the principal engine of Barre's defeat two years earlier, Aidid and his clan felt it was
their turn to rule. They had purchased that right with blood, the ancient currency of
power. Ali Mahdi and all the other lesser faction leaders were enthusiastic about
nation-building plans. Why wouldn't they be? The UN was offering them a share of power
they could never wrest from Aidid on their own.

With the 38,000-strong military force of UNITAF (United Task Force) in the country, the
backbone being U.S. Marines and the army's 10th Mountain Division, the warlords had
stopped fighting. But when the last of the Marines pulled out on May 4 and the 10th was
relegated to backup duties as the QRF, the situation predictably deteriorated. The worst
Incident had been the Jun 5 slaughter of twenty-four Pakistanis. The next day the UN had
pronounced the SNA an outlaw faction. Aidid was officially dealt out of the
nation-building process. Over the next few weeks, Howe had authorized a $25,000 bounty for
the warlord as gunships flattened Aidid's Radio Mogadishu and UN troops invaded the
warlord's residential compound. To no avail. The Habr Gidr was insulted by the paltry sum
being offered for its leader. They countered with a defiant $1 million reward for the
capture of “Animal” Howe. Radio Mogadishu continued broadcasting its propaganda with
mobile antennae, and the wily old general just melted into his city.

Aidid had kept up the pressure. From his southern stronghold, mortar rounds were lobbed
daily into UN compounds. Somali employees of the UN mission wore terrorized and executed.
The warlord proved to be a formidable adversary. His name, Aidid, meant “one who tolerates
no insult” He had been schooled in Italy and the old Soviet Union and had served as army
chief of staff and then as ambassador to India for Siad Barre before turning on the
dictator and routing him. Aidid was a slender, fragile-looking man with Semitic features,
a bald head, and small black eyes. He could be charming, but was also ruthless. Howe
believed Aidid had two distinct personalities. One day he was all smiles, a warm,
engaging, modern, educated man fluent in several languages with an open mind and a sense
of humor. Aidid had fourteen children who lived in America. (One, a son named Hussein, was
a Marine reservist who had come to Somalia with UN1TAF forces in the December
intervention.) It was this cosmopolitan side of Aidid that had encouraged earlier hopes
for success. But the next day, without apparent reason, Aidid's black eyes would show
nothing but hatred. There were times when even his closest aides avoided him. This was
Aidid the son of a Somali camel herder who had risen to success as a clever and ruthless
killer. He thought nothing of ordering people killed even his own people. Howe had
evidence that Aidid's henchmen were inciting demonstrations, then gunning down their own
supporters in order to accuse the UN of genocide. Aidid had certainly used starvation as a
weapon against rival clans, hijacking and withholding world food shipments. The warlord
also knew the value of terror--some of the dead Pakistani soldiers had been disemboweled
and skinned.

Howe was outraged, and adamant that Aidid be stopped. The admiral was accustomed to
having his way. He wasn't a screamer, but once he bit into something he held on. Many old
Africa hands regarded this trait as ill suited to this part of the world. In Somalia,
warlords who feuded one day could be warm old friends the next. Howe was unyielding. If he
lacked the means to remove Aidid, he would get the means. He still had friends, friends in
very high places, friends who owed him, who had talked him into this job. One of them was
Anthony Lake, President Clinton's national security adviser. Another was Madeleine
Albright, America's emissary to the UN, who was an un-abashed enthusiast of New World
Ordering. Flush with success against Saddam Hussein and the collapse of the Soviet Union,
there were plenty of politicians, diplomats, and journalists with bright hopes for a new
millennium of world wide capitalist free markets.

America's unrivaled big stick could right the world's wrongs, feed the hungry, and
democratize the planet. But the generals, most notably outgoing Chairman of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell, demanded more solid reasons for getting their soldiers
killed. Howe found some allies in the administration, but strict opposition from the
Pentagon brass.

When Washington denied Howe's request for Delta in June, he began a fruitless effort to
catch Aidid with the forces already in place. At first, to avoid harming innocent people,
helicopters with loudspeakers broadcast warnings of impending UN action, a gesture thought
ridiculous by most Somalis. After administering such a warning, a multinational force
descended on Aidid's compound on June 17. A house-to-house search was conducted by
Italian, French, Moroccan, and Pakistani troops, and an armored cordon was thrown around
the site by the French and Moroccans. Aidid easily slipped away. Legend on the streets had
the general rolling out under the noses of UN troops on a donkey cart, wrapped up in a
sheet like a dead body. The UN was not only incapable of capturing Aidid, they were
turning him into a folk hero.

The decision to attack the Abdi House on July 12 reflected mounting UN frustration. After
the Pakistani ambush, the clan escalated its sniping and mortar attacks. The Turkish
commander of UN troops, General Cevik Bir, and his second,

U.S Army Major General Thomas Montgomery, wanted to take the kid gloves off. This would be
an attack without warning, a chance to chop off the SNA's head. The clan leadership had
taken to meting regularly at the Abdi House. The plan called for helicopters to encircle
it from the air, fire missiles and cannons into it, then raid the house to arrest
survivors.

Howe opposed it. Why, he asked, couldn't troops simply surround the place and order those
inside to come out, or why not just storm the house and arrest everybody? Such approaches
would subject the UN forces to too much risk, he was told. None of the units in-country
were capable of policing a “sanitized” cordon, so issuing a warning would be
self-defeating. The officials would just flee--as Aidid had earlier. And the force lacked
the capability to perform the kind of lightning snatch-and-grab tactics used by Delta.
When the Pentagon and White House signed off on the attack, Howe. Relented.