Mark Bowden - Black Hawk Down

“Indigenous?”

“That’s affirmative, over.”

The radio fell silent.

Terror washed over Durant like nothing he had ever felt. He could hear sounds of an angry mob. The crash had left the clearing littered with debris, and he heard a great shuffling sound as the Somalis pushed it away. There was no more shooting. The others must be dead. Durant knew what had happened to soldiers who had fallen into the hands of angry Somalis. They did gruesome, horrible things. The rumor around the hangar was that they’d played soccer with the heads of a couple of downed pilots earlier that summer. That was in store for him now. His second weapon was out of rounds. He still had a pistol strapped to his side, but he never even thought to reach for it.

It was over. He was done.

A Somali stepped around the nose of the helicopter. He seemed startled to find Durant lying there. The man shouted, and more Somalis came running. It was time to die. Durant placed the empty weapon across his chest, folded his hands over it, and turned his eyes to the sky.

November 24, 1997

ON THE CROWDED STREETS people surged with anger around Mike Durant’s crashed Blackhawk. They wanted to kill these Americans who had fallen from the sky and opened fire on their friends and neighbors. And despite furious gunfire from the soldiers around the downed helicopter, people continued to move in that direction.

In the months since the Rangers came, they had been swooping over the city at all hours of the night and day, blowing the tin roofs off houses and roping in to shoot and arrest Habr Gidr clan leaders. It was an insult to Somalia. On this day all the hatred had come to a boil, and many were already dead.

At the wreck site, Sgt. First Class Randy Shughart and Master Sgt. Gary Gordon were fending off the crowd, waiting for the promised rescue convoy of ground troops. Yousuf Dahir Mo’Alim, the neighborhood militia leader, had been trying to keep the angry crowd back. Now he didn’t have to work as hard. The Somalian bodies strewn around the clearing and the deadly accurate fire from the Americans did that.

Mo’Alim stayed back himself. There was time. The Americans were surrounded. He waited until about a dozen of his men joined him, and then they fanned out to find good positions for a coordinated assault.

On the side of the helicopter he could see, there were two soldiers and a pilot who were firing. Another American lay dead or badly wounded. At Mo’Alim’s signal, his men opened fire all at once on the Americans. After a furious exchange of fire that lasted at least two minutes, the Americans stopped firing. The crowd followed Mo’Alim and his men into the clearing.

The mob descended on the Americans. Only one was still alive. He shouted and waved his arms as the mob grabbed him by the legs and pulled him away, tearing at his clothes. People with knives hacked at the bodies of the dead Americans. Others in the crowd pulled and tore at the dead men’s limbs. Soon people were running, shouting and cackling, parading with parts of the Americans’ bodies.

When Mo’Alim ran around the tail of the helicopter, he was startled to find two other Americans. One, stretched on the ground, looked badly wounded or dead. The other, a pilot, was still alive. The man did not shoot. He set his weapon on his chest and folded his hands over it.

The crowd surged past Mo’Alim and fell on both men. Those who went for the pilot began kicking and beating him, but the bearded militia leader felt suddenly protective of the man. He grabbed the pilot’s arm, fired his weapon in the air and shouted for the crowd to stay back.

One of his men struck the pilot hard in the face with his rifle butt, and Mo’Alim pushed him back. The pilot was at their mercy. It occurred to Mo’Alim that this American was more valuable alive than dead. The Rangers had spent months capturing Somalis and holding them prisoner. They would be willing to trade them, perhaps all of them, for one of their own.

Mo’Alim and some of his men formed a ring around the pilot to protect him from the mob, which sought only revenge. Several of Mo’Alim’s fighters tore off Durant’s clothing. The pilot had a pistol strapped to his side, and a knife, and the Somalis were afraid he had other hidden weapons. They knew the American pilots also wore beacons in their clothing so that the helicopters could track them, so they stripped him.

Durant kept his eyes on the sky. The Somalis were screaming things he couldn’t understand. His nose was broken, and the bone around his eyes was shattered from the blow to his face.

When they started pulling off his clothes, they were unfamiliar with the plastic snaps on his gear, so Durant reached down and squeezed them open. His boots were yanked off, then his survival vest and his shirt. A man started unzipping his pants, but when he saw that the pilot wore no underwear (for comfort in the equatorial heat) he zipped the trousers back up. They also left on his brown T-shirt. All the while he was being kicked and hit.

A young man leaned down and grabbed at the green ID card Durant wore around his neck. He stuck it in Durant’s face and shouted in English, “Ranger, Ranger, you die Somalia!”

Then someone threw a handful of dirt in his face, and it filled his mouth. They tied a rag or a towel over the top of his head and eyes, and the mob hoisted him up, partly carrying and partly dragging him. He felt the broken end of his femur pierce the skin in the back of his right leg and poke through.

He was buffeted from all sides, kicked, hit with fists, rifle butts. He could not see where they were taking him. He was engulfed in a great chorus of hate and anger. Someone, he thought a woman, grabbed his penis and testicles and yanked at them.

And in this agony of fright, Durant suddenly left his body. He was no longer at the center of the crowd. He was in it, or above it, perhaps. He was observing the crowd attacking him, apart somehow. He felt no pain. The fear lessened, and he passed out.

November 25, 1997

FOR THE RANGERS left behind at the American airport base on the beach in Mogadishu, the battle seemed immediate and distant at the same time. Unlike the commanders at the Joint Operations Center nearby, they couldn’t watch the fight unfold on video screens.

All they had was the radio, and that was enough. They could tell the mission had gone to hell. The snatch-and-grab mission had clearly become a pitched battle. They heard the voices of men who never got rattled shouting with fear and cracking with emotion. Their best friends, their brothers, were trapped and dying.

They heard the radio describe Cliff Wolcott’s Blackhawk going down, and then Mike Durant’s. The fight really hit home when Sgt. Dominick Pilla’s humvee rolled in, all shot up and mangled. Pilla had been shot in the head and killed. His vehicle had been part of a convoy carrying Pfc. Todd Blackburn, who fell from a helicopter at the start of the mission. Blackburn looked awful. His eyes were closed, his mouth was bloody, and he wasn’t moving.

No one was more fired up than Spec. Dale Sizemore, a husky blond kid from Illinois. The Rangers called him “Adonis.” He had the word Ranger tattooed twice on his bulging left deltoid.

Earlier that day, Sizemore had felt miserable when his buddies had suited up for the mission. He couldn’t go because he had a cast on his arm. He had banged up his elbow a few days earlier wrestling with a Commando colonel who had flung him down.

Now word came that the remnants of Pilla’s convoy were to be joined by fresh Rangers and vehicles from the base. They were going to fight their way to the Durant site and rescue the crew.