Black Hawk Down (50 page)

“You'll see for yourself over time that it's true,” Oakley said. Then he told them that
President Clinton wanted Durant released immediately, without conditions. The Somalis were
incredulous. The Rangers had rounded up sixty or seventy men from their leadership. The
top men, including the two most important men taken on October 3, Omar Salad and Mohamed
Hassan Awale, were being held in a makeshift prison camp on an island off the coast of
Kismayo. Any release of Durant would at least involve a trade. That was the Somali way.

“I'll do my best to see that these people are released, but I can't promise anything,”
Oakley said, pointing out that the Somalis were, technically, in the custody of the UN.
“I'll talk to the president about it, but only after you've released Durant.”

Then the former ambassador delivered a chilling message. He was careful to say, “This is
not a threat,” but the meaning was plain.

“I have no plan for this, and I'll do everything I can to prevent it, but what will
happen if a few weeks go by and Mr. Durant is not released? Not only will you lose any
credit you may get now, but we will decide that we have to rescue him. I guarantee you we
are not going to pay or trade for him in any way, shape, or form.... So what we'll decide
is we have to rescue him, and whether we have the right place or the wrong place, there's
going to be a fight with your people. The minute the guns start again, all restraint on
the U.S. side goes. Just look at the stuff coming in here now. An aircraft carrier, tanks,
... the works. Once the fighting starts, all this pent-up anger is going to be released.
This whole part of the city will be destroyed, men, women, children, camels, cats, dogs,
goats, donkeys, everything. . . . That would really be tragic for all of us, but that's
what will happen.”

The Somalis delivered this message to Aidid in hiding, and the warlord saw the wisdom of
Oakley's advice. He offered to hand the pilot over immediately.

Mindful of not upstaging his old friend Admiral Howe, Oakley asked them to delay for a
few hours to give him time to leave the country. He asked them to turn Durant over to
Howe, and he flew back to Washington.

-27-

Firimbi told Durant he was going to be released the next day. The propaganda minister was
very happy to deliver this news, but also very nervous. He was happy for his friend and
for himself. He joked that both of them were going to be released. Firimbi would be free
to go back to his normal life. He thought releasing Durant without any conditions was a
stunning demonstration of Aidid and Habr Gidr munificence. He got choked up just talking
about it. This gesture, he said, would undo at a stroke the awful images of the mob
mutilating dead American soldiers, a scene that embarrassed Firimbi and other educated men
of his clan. He repeatedly urged Durant to reassure him that he would tell the world how
well he had been treated in captivity.

The decision was such a good one, Firimbi grew afraid something would spoil it. What if
an angry faction of Somalis got wind of the deal and came looking for Durant to kill him?
What if the Americans were setting them up? The Americans could send someone to kill
Durant, and the world would believe Aidid and the Habr Gidr had done it. Firimbi requested
more protection, and the clan ringed the residence where Durant was held with armed men.

That morning, Firimbi helped Durant wash. This time, instead of being thrown in the back
of a car and sat on, men arrived with a litter to carry him out gently and placed him in
the back of a flatbed truck. Durant knew this was it. He would be nervous until he was
back in American hands, but Firimbi was so happy and excited be knew that it was true.

They drove him to a walled compound and waited. When Red Cross officials arrived, an army
doctor came in with the team and examined him. He wanted to give the pilot a shot for the
pain, but Firimbi said no. He was afraid the doctor would poison Durant.

The pilot was handed over without ceremony. Red Cross officials gave him a letter from
Lorrie and from his parents that they had been unable to deliver. The doctor who examined
him emerged from the compound to tell reporters that the pilot had a broken leg, a
shattered cheekbone, a fractured back, and relatively minor bullet wounds to his leg and
shoulder, but had been treated well by his captors.

“The leg was in a splint, but it hasn't been set and is quite painful,” the doctor said.

Then he was carried out by Red Cross officials. Durant clutched the letter and tears
rolled from his eyes as he was carried past reporters He was flown back to the airport
Ranger base the following morning, October 15.

Every American who survived the Battle of Mogadishu would be home within the month. Most
would stay bitter about the decision to call off their mission. If it had been important
enough to get eighteen men killed, and seventy-three injured, not to mention all the
Somalis dead or hurt, how could it just be called off the day after the fight? Within
weeks of Durant's release, American Marines (at Oakley's direction) would escort Aidid to
renewed peace negotiations. President Clinton would accept Oakley's plea on behalf of the
Somali leaders. Several months later Omar Salad, Mohamed Hassan Awale, and every man
captured by Task Force Ranger was released.

The reinforced task force was waiting for Durant when the Red Cross convoy arrived at the
airport. They had turned out, a force now of more than a thousand, dressed in khaki
fatigues and floppy desert hats, glad to at last have something to celebrate. They formed
a corridor leading from the base driveway to the platform of the transport plane that
would carry Durant to Germany, where Lorrie had flown and was waiting for him. The men all
had paper cups with a swallow of bourbon, ostensibly from the fifth of Jack Daniel's the
pilot had stashed in his rucksack and warned his buddies, in his note from captivity, to
keep their hands off.

It was a day of joy and enormous relief, but also a day of sadness. Durant had just
learned that he would be the only man from the crew of Super Six Four and its two brave
Delta defenders to come back alive. He smiled and fought back tears as he was carried
through the corridor on a litter, an IV in his arm, clutching his unit's maroon beret.

The men around him cheered and then, as the stretcher approached the ramp to the plane,
they began to sing. The song started in one or two places at first, then spread to every
voice.

They sang “God Bless America.”

EPILOGUE

The Battle of the Black Sea, or as the Somalis call it, Maalinti Rangers (The Day of the
Rangers). Is one that America has preferred to forget. The images it produced of dead
soldiers dragged by jeering mobs through the streets of Mogadishu are among the most
horrible and disturbing in our history, made all the worse by the good intentions that
prompted our intervention. There were no American reporters in Mogadishu on October 3-4,
1993, and after a week or so of frenzied attention, world events quickly summoned
journalists elsewhere. President Clinton's decision just days after the fight to end Task
Force Ranger's mission to Somalia accomplished what he intended; it slammed the door on
the episode. In Washington a whiff of failure is enough to induce widespread amnesia.
There was a Senate investigation and two days of congressional hearings that produced a
partisan report blaming the president and Secretary of Defense Les Aspin, who resigned two
months later, but that was it.

Even inside the military, where one might expect to find strong professional interest in
the biggest firefight involving American soldiers since Vietnam, there appears to have
been little in the way of a detailed postmortem. Proper respects were paid to the dead,
and the heroism of many soldiers formally honored, but beyond that, if the battle's
decorated veterans are to be believed, the battle is a lost chapter.

When I began working on this project in 1996, my goal was simply to write a dramatic
account of the battle. I had been struck by the intensity of the fight, and by the notion
of ninety-nine American soldiers surrounded and trapped in an ancient African city
fighting for their lives. My contribution would be to capture in words the experience of
combat through the eyes and emotions of the soldiers involved, blending their urgent,
human perspective with a military and political overview of their predicament. With the
exception of great fiction and several extremely well-written memoirs, the nonfiction
accounts of modern war I'd read were primarily written by historians. I wanted to combine
the authority of a historical narrative with the emotion of the memoir, and write a story
that read like fiction but was true. Since I was starting my work three years after the
battle, I expected the historical portion of the work had already been done. Surely
somewhere in the Pentagon or White House there was a thick volume of after-action reports
and exhibits detailing the fight and critiquing our military performance. The challenge, I
thought, would be fighting to get as much of it as possible declassified. I was wrong.

No such thick volume exists. While the Battle of the Black Sea may well be the most
thoroughly documented incident in American military history, to my surprise no one had
even begun to collect all that raw information into a definitive account.

So instead of just writing a more vivid version of the story, I found myself in the lucky
and exciting position of breaking new ground.

In the months since portions of this book premiered as a newspaper series in the
Philadelphia Inquirer, I have spoken to hundreds of active U.S. military officers whom I
met at conferences or seminars, or who contacted me seeking copies of the newspaper series
or more detailed information about certain aspects of the fight. Among that number have
been teachers at the military academies and the Army War College in Carlisle,
Pennsylvania, the National Defense Analysis Institute, the Military Operations Research
Society, officers at the U.S. Marine Corps' training base at Parris Island, the Security
Studies Program at MIT, and even the U.S. Central Command, where the commander, General
Anthony Zinni, invited me to take part in a seminar before his staff at MacDill Air Force
Base in Tampa, Florida. I was flattered in every instance, but uneasy with the idea that
our armed forces would rely on a journalist with no military background to inform them
about a battle fought by many men who are still on active duty. As one of the former Delta
team leaders remarked after hearing of yet another invitation I'd received, “Why aren't
they talking to us?”

One reason why the battle had not been seriously studied is that the units involved,
primarily Delta Force and the Rangers, operate in secrecy, and so much official
information about the battle remains classified. It seems the military is best at keeping
secrets from itself. But the bigger reason, I suspect, is the same one that sent
politicians diving for cover. The Battle of the Black Sea was perceived outside the
special operations community as a failure.

It was not, at least in strictly military terms. Task Force Ranger dropped into a teeming
market in the heart of Mogadishu in the middle of a busy Sunday afternoon to surprise and
arrest two lieutenants of warlord Mohamed Farrah Aidid. It was a complex, difficult, and
dangerous assignment, and despite terrible setbacks and losses, and against overwhelming
odds, the mission was accomplished.

It was, of course, a Pyrrhic victory. The mission was supposed to take about an hour.
Instead, a large portion of the assault force was stranded through a long night in a
hostile city, surrounded and fighting for their lives. Two of their high-tech MH-60 Black
Hawk helicopters went down in the city, and two more crash-landed back at the base. When
the force was extricated the following morning by a huge multinational rescue convoy,
eighteen Americans were dead and dozens more were badly injured. One, Black Hawk pilot
Michael Durant, had been carried off by an angry Somali mob and would be held captive for
eleven days. News of the casualties and images of gleeful Somalis abusing American corpses
prompted revulsion and outrage at home, embarrassment at the White House, and such
vehement objections in Congress that the mission against Aidid was immediately called off.
Major General William F. Garrison's men may have won the battle, but, as he'd predicted,
they lost the war.

The victory was even more hollow for Somalia, although it's not clear even five years
later how many people there understand that. The fight itself was a terrible mismatch. The
Somali death toll was catastrophic. Conservative counts numbered five hundred dead among
more than a thousand casualties. Aidid could and did claim that his clan had driven off
the world's mightiest military machine. The Habr Gidr had successfully resisted UN efforts
to force him to share power. The clan now celebrates October 3 as a national holiday-if
such a thing is possible where there is no nation. The pullout of American forces, months
after the battle, aborted the UN's effort to establish a stable coalition government
there. Aidid died in 1996 without uniting Somalia under his rule, a victim of the
factional fighting the UN had tried to resolve. His clan still struggles with rivals in
Mogadishu, trapped in the same bloody, anarchic standoff. Clan leaders I spoke with in
that destroyed city in the summer of 1997 seemed to think that the world was still
watching their progress anxiously. Photographer Peter Tobia and I were the only guests at
the Hotel Sahafi during most of our stay there. We were the first and only Americans who
have returned to Mogadishu trying to piece together exactly what happened. I told the Habr
Gidr leaders who were hostile to our project that this would likely be their only chance
to tell their side of the story, because there weren't journalists and scholars lined up
at the border. The larger world has forgotten Somalia. The great ship of international
goodwill has sailed. The bloody twists and turns of Somali clan politics no longer concern
us. Without natural resources, strategic advantage, or even potentially lucrative markets
for world goods, Somalia is unlikely soon to recapture the opportunity for peace and
rebuilding afforded by UNOSOM. Rightly or wrongly, they stand as an enduring symbol of
Third World ingratitude and intractability, of the futility of trying to resolve local
animosity with international muscle. They've effectively written themselves off the map.