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- [00:04]
David McCloskey
For exclusive interviews, bonus episodes, ad free listening, early access to series first look at live show tickets, a weekly newsletter and discounted books. Join the declassified club@therealisclassified.com
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David McCloskey
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Gordon Carrera
Tax tips and fees extra.
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David McCloskey
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David McCloskey
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- [01:57]
Gordon Carrera
Mission creep has turned a US Force sent to Somalia to help with famine into one hunting a warlord. And now the task force is going after his top men in a mission which will go disastrously wrong. Well, welcome to the Rest is classified. I'm Gordon Carrera.
- [02:13]
David McCloskey
And I'm David McCloskey.
- [02:14]
Gordon Carrera
And David, last time we set the scene Somalia 1993, a country where the states collapsed, famines killed hundreds of thousands, clan politics and mission creep with these US forces starting from feeding starving people inter hunting the warlord Mohammed Farah Aidid who's in command of the Somali national alliance. Now. We left it on October 3rd as task force Ranger TRF was departing from its base after this tip off that some of eid's top lieutenants were going to be meeting in the middle of Mogadishu, but then everything starts to go wrong straight away. This episode is brought to you by hp.
- [03:01]
David McCloskey
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Gordon Carrera
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David McCloskey
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Gordon Carrera
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- [03:49]
David McCloskey
To see how HP helps businesses work securely and productively, visit hp.com forward/classified. The rest is classified. Listeners also benefit from 10% off HP business technology with code TRIC10. Like it's useful to have a reminder on this force that the Americans have sent out. There are four teams of Delta operators that are going to be inserted on these little bird helicopters. They are the ones who are going to hit the compound and snatch up the two lieutenants. We then have the Rangers on Blackhawks who are coming in and are going to take the corners around the target, essentially set up a perimeter cordon to prevent anyone from entering or leaving. They're doing that while Delta does its work inside the compound. Then once the snatch and grab is complete, everyone will be extracted via a ground convoy which is headed for the same position. So everyone, the Delta operators, the Rangers, all the prisoners will get loaded up on trucks and into humvees and they'll head back to the base. Also along is a combat search and rescue Blackhawk that is loaded up with these guys called pjs, which are, it stands for para jumpers. They're essentially daredevil medics, I guess you could, you could call them who are there to provide first aid. They also have tools with them like saws and things they can use to cut people out of wrecks. There's the command and control Black Hawk that's carrying the commanders of Delta Squadron and the Night Stalkers. The Night Stalkers are the group of pilots that'll be flying everyone in to the target site and then kind of orbiting to provide air cover as this mission unfolds.
- [05:34]
Gordon Carrera
So it's 3:32 in the afternoon and it's only a few minutes flight time to the target, isn't it?
- [05:39]
David McCloskey
It is. It's not a long flight. At 3:43pm operators insert at the target building. They breach the door. And this is the amazing thing, Gordon. I mean, within 90 seconds they have their prisoners, job done. They have the two lieutenants, two of IDs, lieutenants, 22 other Somalis as well. They flexed, cuffed them, they photographed them by 3:50pm so they've been out of base for just 18 minutes. It's done, the mission's complete, the snatch and grab went perfectly, and they've got the guys that they wanted to get. And it's worth pausing here, I think, just to say that the intelligence that came from the agency was, was accurate. ID lieutenants were there. The Delta guys went in as they have, as they are trained to do. I mean, this is why Delta exists. You see, in the Maduro raid most recently, which was conducted, the key ground element was Delta Force. This is the kind of thing they do is bust in to a place and quickly capture the people who were inside who were high value targets. And that, that is done perfectly.
- [06:42]
Gordon Carrera
But there's going to be a series of disasters. And I guess that's what makes this so fateful is that it's not just one thing, but multiple things are going to go wrong. And the first one is a Ranger who, I mean, it's an astonishing story, but he is going to fall from the helicopter.
- [06:59]
David McCloskey
That's right. So the Rangers, as we said, this is a, an air infiltration. And the way the Ranger teams, they call them chalks, by the way. So there's four chalks of rangers, about 12 to 15 people apiece to come in to secure the perimeter. And this is the part the pilots, the night stalkers in the memoirs seem. This is a stressful part because what happens is those helicopters are hovering 60, 70ft above the street and the rangers fast rope down. I mean, quite literally. There's a thick braid of kind of nylon rope.
- [07:33]
Gordon Carrera
And they're not attached to the rope or the helicopter, are they? They are literally just using the rope to go down. It's not a kind of safety harness or anything else, is there?
- [07:42]
David McCloskey
Yeah, there's no harness. So you can imagine they're wearing thick gloves because basically your hands feel like they're on fire by the time you get to the bottom, but you're just roping down. And one of the Rangers falls. It falls 70ft.
- [07:56]
Gordon Carrera
Is it clear why he falls? Because in the film, I think it's it's implied that there's a kind of RPG coming nearby. The. The helicopter kind of, you know, moves and then he falls. But whatever the reason, I mean, he goes head first, 70ft to the ground. I mean, you just can't imagine what that is like to fall that fast in, I guess, you know, equipment as well. So he's going to be heavy.
- [08:20]
David McCloskey
Yeah. And each of these guys are carrying, you know, probably 50 plus pounds of gear as well, on top of their. On top of their bodies. So he's alive, though, which is. Which is amazing. I mean, he's alive, but he's bleeding from the ears, the mouth, the nose. He has catastrophic brain trauma and he needs to be evacuated immediately or he'll die. That happens as the Delta guys are conducting the snatch and grab. Right. That happens on the fast rope in this Ranger falls. Now, simultaneously, the ground convoy led by a guy named Lt. Col. Danny McKnight, who was played in the film by Tom Sizemore, who I think at this period, Gordon in Hollywood, in kind of the late 90s or early aughts, I don't think you could have a war movie in Hollywood that did not include Tom Sizemore in it. I think that was sort of contractually required. But Sizemore plays McKnight in the film. These are the 12 vehicles that are tasked with extracting everyone. The convoy is immediately in trouble when they leave the base. Immediately in trouble. And you see this in the film. I mean, they start taking fire pretty much once they get right out onto the street. And this is going to be an interesting part of this story and a really, really impactful one, which is navigating in Mogadishu is really, really difficult. There are no street signs. The photo maps that they've studied at the base that are drawn from aerial reconnaissance are really tough to use. Once you're out in the city, things kind of look the same everywhere. There's almost like this urban blight that has afflicted the entire city as a result of the civil war. And so as a result, just driving short distances in Mogadishu, to say nothing of the roadblocks and the fire from the militia. Driving and navigating in Mogadishu is really hard.
- [10:04]
Gordon Carrera
And the Mogadishu is almost a character in this story, the city as well, isn't it in its own right? Because I think it's so intense and so jumbled up and so chaotic and. And so, you know, it's a pretty intense city as it was. But then the Civil War and the kind of roadblocks. And the chaos has made it even harder, hasn't it, to navigate and to try and move around that city in the way you would around a normal city.
- [10:30]
David McCloskey
I was struck in doing the research and looking at some of the pictures of Mogadishu before the Civil War. I mean, the Italians who had, who had colonized it, you know, or administered it in kind of the early 20th century, I mean, they called Mogadishu the pearl of the Indian Ocean. So they had these kind of whitewashed buildings, these kind of elegant colonnaded streets. It had, I don't know, a kind of a sophisticated air to it in the way that it, the way that it looked. Two years of civil war had destroyed pretty much everything. So buildings that were upright were pockmarked with thousands of bullet holes. Other structures are kind of shells where you just have like, there's a couple walls standing, the roofs would be gone. Everything of value in the city had been gutted by looters. So you had like cables stripped off of telephone poles because the metal was valuable and there really wasn't any security force capable of stopping you from taking it. The roads obviously hadn't been maintained in years. So even paved roads, you know, they would sort of crumble under the weight of the vehicles. There's garbage and debris everywhere. There's hulks of kind of rusting or burned out cars. One of the Rangers, Matt Eversman, who's played by Josh Hartnett in the film, he had actually compiled a series of firsthand accounts of many of the members of Task Force Ranger. And there's a book you can buy called the Battle of Mogadishu. Firsthand accounts from the men of Task Force Ranger Eversman describes the smell of Mogadishu. He says, most of all, I remember the smell, that God awful, nasty smell, kind of like sulfur and something pretty rotten mixed on top. The smell, that lingering scent of burning garbage and who knows what, combined with the African heat. It's very redolent to all of the Americans who are there.
- [12:16]
Gordon Carrera
And the civil war is driven in. Refugees. You've got some buildings collapsed because of the war, but then new buildings and new huts being put up to deal with the refugees who've been coming in this kind of extra population. And I guess the result for this convoy is that what had been a normal road network is now, I mean, something almost literally like a maze with new streets and new alleyways having appeared and disappeared. And the target where they're heading, the Bachara Market is the densest neighbourhood. Of all, isn't it? It's the stronghold of the militia for idid, and it's a. Particularly. A really, really kind of difficult environment in which to operate.
- [12:59]
David McCloskey
I think it has sort of a Star wars cantina vibes to me. It's densely populated and it has this weird mix, I think, of a lot of people, total lawlessness, but also incredibly intense commercial activity. So this market is kind of the hub of so much of South Mogadishu's commerce, including a lot of the weapons trafficking. So there's just weapons. I mean, you see this in the film and it does, I think, a good job depicting this of just out next to, you know, any kind of normal consumer good. You're also going to have a bunch of weapons and ammunition that are available for purchase. There's khat stalls at every intersection, khat being that kind of a mild stimulant
- [13:38]
Gordon Carrera
leaf that people chew.
- [13:39]
David McCloskey
Yeah, that people chew. And that comprises a lot of kind of the social glue and daily ritual of Somali life. So that's out and available for purchase. You got money changers, food traders, teenage militiamen. So this place is just. It's bumping, teeming. Yeah, it is just teeming with people. This is the place that Task Force Ranger is kind of embed itself into for what they hope will be just a few minutes to extract these prisoners.
- [14:05]
Gordon Carrera
Yeah, I noticed one of the Washington Post correspondent, Keith Rickberg, one of the journalists covering Somalia in those years, says that locals had taken to describing their neighbourhoods by the names of other war zones. One dangerous intersection in this Bacara market near the target, near the hotel, had been renamed Bosnia by residents because I guess the Bosnian civil war is. Is just erupting that. So they know that they're in a really dangerous place. So it's a incredibly chaotic, difficult environment. And of course, it's one the locals know well and have an understanding, and the Rangers, the task force do not. And that is the problem they've got, because they've got. Sure, they've got the aerial reconnaissance and the maps from the air, but it's only when you're down there on the streets that you can really understand what it looks and feels like. And that is the challenge, isn't it, for both the. The operators are on the ground at the target building and for the convoy who are trying to get in to reach them.
- [15:01]
David McCloskey
Things that seemed clear from the air are not what they seem. Open areas on maps would actually be surrounded by walls and buildings. A lot of the construction. This will be important for the way the battle goes down, a lot of the construction is kind of mud and adobe and cloth and corrugated metal. And so there's not a lot of COVID from small arms fire. But it can really clog up vehicle traffic. Right. You can have tight, kind of narrow alleyways that are very hard for these vehicles to kind of move down and through.
- [15:30]
Gordon Carrera
And that is going to make it incredibly difficult for that ground convoy, because it's getting guided, isn't it, from the air. And the helicopter pilots above and the, you know, the commanders are giving it directions, but actually, that sometimes doesn't help. I mean, they are taking wrong turns. They're kind of getting into narrow alleyways that they can't navigate through, backing up, trying different routes, asking for more clarification. I mean, you get this sense that often the commands of where to go are coming after they've already missed a turning. It's really difficult. And at the same time, you've now got the demand for or a request for medevac for Blackburn, the person who'd fallen from the Blackhawk while fast roping. The chaos is building, isn't it?
- [16:11]
David McCloskey
It is, yeah. And the radios that the Americans are using, you know, to communicate on the different frequencies are increasingly chaotic because you have the, you know, helicopter pilots giving directions. The ground convoy is trying to navigate. They're asking that command and control Blackhawk helicopter above to help them navigate in real time. And the Rangers are asking for that, that medevac. And what all of that leads up to is that some of the lead vehicles on this ground convoy, as they're heading to the site, you know, they lose the trailing vehicles, and McKnight orders a halt to regroup. And this will also be a theme of this battle, is that those vehicles are like magnets for small arms and RPG fire, because the moment the convoy stops, it becomes a sitting duck for the. The SNA militia. So you have militia men firing AK47s from windows and rooftops, RPGs from alleyways. The response to the helicopter insertion has really spread throughout the city, throughout South Mogadisha with remarkable speed. The Americans have shut down the phone networks as such as they existed. I mean, you could use. There were mobile phones that some of the militia had, but there was actually no landline network in Somalia at this time. It had been destroyed by the civil war.
- [17:26]
Gordon Carrera
And it feels like they don't need it. I mean, it can spread it through word of mouth, through people moving, through people running. And as we said, the crucial thing is they were prepared for this because they'd seen those previous operations. So they've actually got people positioned in this Bakhara Market area already, and they pre position weapons caches in mosques and schools and private homes ready exactly for this, you know, moment. So the city, effectively this area of the city at least, is mobilizing against them to some extent in a kind of preformed plan as the convoy is trying to move through it.
- [18:01]
David McCloskey
By 350 again, you know, 18 minutes into this, the mission is essentially over. Delta has the targets. The prisoners are tied up, ready for extraction. Blackburn is injured, but it's from that fall. Three vehicles from the convoy are going to be eventually detached to medevac Blackburn back to base. But you get the sense that at this point in the, in the story, things are okay. Things are okay. The convoy has taken more fire getting to the target location, but they've. They've made it there. And at the end of the day, if they can just get back out. We're definitely not having this conversation on this podcast.
- [18:35]
Gordon Carrera
Yeah, exactly. I mean, because thousands of Somalis are converging now as per the plan to converge on this and to kind of take out these foreign soldiers. But actually, you know, we talked about the speed of getting hold of the prisoners. If everything had continued to go to plan, even with that guy falling from the helicopter, with Blackburn falling, they basically could have got out at this point, couldn't they? And the mission could have been relatively successful.
- [18:59]
David McCloskey
But the theme of this story is going to be it's just one kind of disaster after another, because what happens is there are three vehicles from this convoy. As the prisoners are being loaded up and as the Rangers are getting ready to load up on these vehicles along with the Delta guys, the decision is made that Blackburn, who fell, he can't sit there while they, well, they load everyone up. So they decide to take three of the vehicles and load Blackburn onto one of them to medevac him quickly back to the, to the base. One of the Rangers who is on those vehicles, as they go back to the basement, they're taking heavy fire from all directions. One of the Rangers is shot through the head on the return, and he's. He's killed instantly. And at the same time, you have a couple bad things that have happened here, and you've lost. You've got your first kia, killed an action Ranger on the way back. You've also got the strength of that ground convoy reduced by three vehicles that have, you know, either the.50 caliber machine gun on it or in some cases a kind of grenade launcher. I'll also say that as the Somali militias are starting to close in on this target location with the rangers providing the cordon. It's interesting when you go back and you, you know, read Mark Bowden's book, you read the accounts of the rangers who were there or even when you listen to and I think this is one of the really interesting things about the Netflix documentary that's come out on this is that you get more of the Somali perspective on how the Somalis viewed the Americans. It kind of makes me feel like both sides felt like they were fighting aliens, the Americans. And you see this is referenced throughout the Bowden book. It's in the film. The Americans call the Somalis skinnies or sammies.
- [20:39]
Gordon Carrera
Yeah, they dehumanize them to some extent, don't they? They say they all look the same, they're all skinn. And it equally. It's so interesting, isn't it? Because the Somalis see the Americans as these kind of almost sci fi like warriors in their big combat uniforms and you know, with their headgear and everything else. And again they kind of dehumanize them as well. So it becomes, you know, both sides and once the violence starts, you get that sense that both sides just want to kill each other, don't you? Once it kicks off and you hear that I think from the American soldiers on the convoy, particularly once Pillar who we heard is shot, others on the convoy are like they just start shooting up everything. They're just like we're going to just shoot at everything that moves in the city now. So it becomes a real free fire zone.
- [21:22]
David McCloskey
It does. And back at the target, the team is is assembling in the remaining nine vehicles for the ground extraction because remember they lost those three to the medevac. One of the rangers who's manning the 50 caliber machine gun atop a Humvee, he's injured by small arms fire. Another steps up and is shot under the right arm. Kind of no exit wound. It's kind of the sucking chest wound that he's got.
- [21:43]
Gordon Carrera
I remember learning about those when I did my medical training, my hostile environment. Tony. We got taught how to deal with the sucking chest wound with these various dummies using a crisp packet, amongst other things, making a three way seal. I can still remember all this to deal with the sucking chest wound. It's a particular type of thing which I'm glad I've never had to do. But that's one of the kind of nasty injuries you can get. So suddenly they're Taking more casualties. It's growing, isn't it? And they need to get people out
- [22:10]
David McCloskey
then at 4:20pm so we're less than an hour into the mission. They've been loading up, prisoners are on the trucks. A rocket propelled grenade is soaring toward the tail rotor of one of the Blackhawks Super 6 1.
- [22:27]
Gordon Carrera
So this is the moment, I guess. I mean, this is the crucial moment that the Somalis have been planning for, I think, which is to take down one of these Black Hawk helicopters. Who should just maybe briefly just explain what a Black Hawk is.
- [22:41]
David McCloskey
Well, all US army helicopters, Gordon. I went deep into some helicopter helicopter history. Helicopter history here. So U.S. army helicopters since the late 40s have mostly been named after Native American tribes. You know, you have Apache, Sioux, Chinook, Lakota, Cheyenne, Comanche, Black Hawk. The army general who was really critical for developing army aviation doctrine believed that helicopters were fast and agile. They can attack the enemy's flanks and kind of fade away. Very similar to the way the tribes on the Great Plains had fought during the American Indian wars in the late 19th century.
- [23:22]
Gordon Carrera
Yeah, it's interesting. I went around the Museum of Native American history in Washington D.C. a couple of years ago and it's fascinating. There's a whole section there about how Native American names get appropriated for military hardware. Because of course, Tomahawk missiles, we've been hearing about those in Iran recently. And again, it's another example of this, this use of Native American names, which I guess goes back to this point. I mean, stop now, I think, hasn't it? Is that right that they use it so much or is it seen as less appropriate?
- [23:50]
David McCloskey
Anyway, I think for a while there was actually an army regulation that specified that army helicopters required Indian terms and names of American Indian tribes and chiefs. It's no longer enforced, but I think it's just more or less a tradition at this point. Anyhow, the, uh, 60 Blackhawk is the Army's primary tactical transport. It entered into service in 1978. The variant that the Night Stalker pilots are flying and Mokadishu is. Gordon, the MH60L, this is a standard Blackhawk that's been modified extensively for special operations. So for example, and this is a tradition that continues to today, like the Chinook helicopters that were flown for the Bin Laden raid are not the kind of standard Chinook that's been heavily modified. A couple of key kind of points on the, on the tech here, there are miniguns on either side that are capable of firing 4,000 rounds per minute. So you can imagine how that would Be extremely helpful if you're one of the Rangers or Delta operators on the ground in Mogadishu.
- [24:54]
Gordon Carrera
Not if you're on the ground, but
- [24:55]
David McCloskey
yeah, on October 3rd of 1993, they're flying these Blackhawks with the pilot doors removed. The internal fuel tanks are out, the rear seats are out so they can fit more passengers. They're running black with no markings, and they can put about 12 to 15 Rangers or Delta operators on each bird. Now, the pilots, the Night Stalker pilots who were flying these things, they are the product of a selection and trading pipeline that began after the disastrous Operation Eagle Claw, the failed rescue attempt of the Iranian hostages in 1980. The army had concluded out of that that it needed a dedicated special operations aviation unit that could operate in the dark, at low altitude, essentially, in any weather. And these pilots, these Night Stalker pilots who are there are masters of what they call nap of the earth flight, which is basically flying at treetop height, at speed, in conditions that I guess, quote, unquote, normal aviators would probably consider to be impossible.
- [25:56]
Gordon Carrera
And it's interesting, when you look at the accounts from the Somali side, they become, I mean, terrified and come to hate these helicopters because they're flying in low. I mean, they are to some extent terrorizing the population. Population because they're knocking down market stalls and blowing people over, both when they're flying low and when they come into land. They almost saw them as an evil presence, I think, in, in the city, didn't they? They came to really hate these helicopters and these Blackhawks, and as a result, they've been studying the way they fly. They'd looked at the patterns. I mean, it's again, an example, I think, of the Americans underestimating the extent to which they're actually fighting something more organized than just a kind of ragtag group on the ground. But it's a group who've actually studied how the Black Hawks circle, and they thought they've identified a vulnerability, which is that tail rotor of the Black Hawks and that they might be able to target that specifically with rocket propelled grenades to try and take them down.
- [26:51]
David McCloskey
That's right. So the tail rotor basically counteracts the torque of the main rotor above, and it controls directional flight. It's smaller, it's lighter than the main rotor, obviously, and it's spinning at a very, very high speed. And the militia, the sna, have positioned RPG teams on rooftops and in the streets specifically to engage the helicopters. And they've trained their fighters to basically lead their shot and fire ahead of the. Of the aircraft, the Blackhawk, so that the rocket will intercept the tail rotor. An rpg, a rocket propelled grenade, is not intended for this kind of like surface to air use. These are not like Stinger missiles that were, you know, sold or given to the Afghan Mujahideen in the 1980s.
- [27:43]
Gordon Carrera
Shoulder fired. Yeah. Specifically to take out Soviet aircraft. Yeah, it's different. Which again, maybe makes the Americans think that it's unlikely that they're going to be effective against their helicopters because that's not what they're designed for.
- [27:56]
David McCloskey
An RPG is meant to be fired at vehicles or clusters of personnel on the ground. It's also near suicidal to fire one of them on a helicopter because the back blast, unless you modify the rpg, which the SNA militia had done, but unless you modify it like the back blast can actually kill the shooter. Again, you're pointing it up, you're supposed to point it like this, horizontally, and it arcs out with this kind of telltale trail of smoke that rises through the air and essentially paints a target on whoever fired it because you can immediately see where it came from. And then these little bird helicopters, smaller, you know, they're not actually for troop transport, but they're essentially for, you know, air cover, can just go over and gun down whoever fired the rpg. But the sna, the militia, has made some adjustments, in part thanks to trading from Islamist militants who came from the Sudan and who had seen action against the Russians in Afghanistan. So what the SNA has done is they've welded metal funnels on the back of some of the RPGs to protect against that backblast. They've also developed a method to shoot from inside holes dug inside the ground. So the shooter actually, actually lies supine with the weapon pointed at the sky under kind of COVID So the idea here is that you'll mask the actual origin of, of the shot, because going up on a roof is basically a death sentence. Another thing to mention, the sna, the militia, they've already succeeded in bringing down a Black Hawk, but it wasn't one that belonged to Task Force Ranger. So you remember there's that contingent of about a thousand American troops belonging to the 10th Mountain Division that are attached to the UN force. And on the 25th of September, a week before, the SNA had shot down a Blackhawk using this exact method. Three crew members died, their bodies mutilated. Trigger warning alert here. Mutilation of corpses and the dead is a running theme in this series, and it's one that, as you read, accounts on the American side of the Operators who were there obviously ramps up the kind of rage and bloodlust when helicopters go down. If people get lost, their bodies end up getting mutilated, it makes people very, very angry and willing to. Willing to kill a lot of people on the other side. Now, the pilot and the co pilot in that instance escaped, but this all frames this idea that by the time we get to the 3rd of October, the militia knows that this attack via an RPG on the tail rotor of a Black Hawk could be really effective.
- [30:29]
Gordon Carrera
And surely the Night Stalkers know this as well, because they know it's happened and so they are worried about it. And I think they've been asking for more flexibility in how they fly and how they do these orbits around so that it's less predictable, if you like, so they're less vulnerable to it. But that hasn't happened yet. So if we go back to October 3, 4:20pm Crucially this time, the Somali tactic is going to work to hit that Blackhawk with the rpg.
- [30:57]
David McCloskey
That's right. And this Night Stalker pilot, his name is Cliff Walcott, he's actually played. I looked this up because I like that guy. Looks familiar. He's played by Jeremy Piven, Gordon in the film Black Hawk Down.
- [31:07]
Gordon Carrera
Don't know.
- [31:09]
David McCloskey
You don't know Jeremy Piven? No, I don't know. I don't know.
- [31:11]
Gordon Carrera
Sorry.
- [31:12]
David McCloskey
So Cliff Wolcott is piloting Super 61. That RPG glides on a smoke trail toward the tail rotor. Super 61 at that point is operating as a kind of fire support platform. So you have a pilot, a co pilot, and two crew chiefs inside that, that helicopter. You also have four Delta 4 snipers. They're providing air cover for the team on the ground. Wolcott has been flying Blackhawks for over 12 years. His call sign is Elvis. He's actually the pilot who had organized the unauthorized boar hunts for the Delta guys that we had mentioned in the first episode. Wolcott knows everything there is to know about Blackhawk helicopters. And when the RPG penetrates the tail rotor assembly, he knows immediately what's going on. So that tail rotor, as we said, it provides directional control. Without it, the helicopter spins. And so the helicopter just starts, starts to spin. And Wolcott is kind of fighting the controls. He's looking for a place he can try to coast the thing in for a really hard landing. But as we talked about with Mogadishu, like, there aren't big green spaces where you can put this thing down with some measure of safety for a survivable landing. And the thing is spinning. It's going two full rotations. As it descends, that centrifugal force is pinning the crew to their seats. I think this is interesting. Bowden in his book, was actually able to listen to the, the radio tape and you can hear Wolcott, he just says, very matter of factly, as this is happening, six one going down, just very businesslike as this thing is going down, they hit the street at high speed. The cockpit crumples on impact. So Black Hawk helicopters are designed essentially to not explode as a result. The way these things, if they crash, they crumple. And what happens is the aircraft essentially crumples around Wolcott and his co pilot and they're killed instantly. Now the crew chiefs who are manning the guns, they have these impact absorbing seats which give them some protection. The Delta snipers scramble. They've been sitting on ammo cans and they spread eagle themselves on the floor to kind of spread the impact across their bodies rather than take the impact in their spines. That is going to save them. And the Air Force kind of para jumper guys, these combat medics are the first ones to the site and they say that, you know, it looked the, the bird looked enormous, like this kind of beached whale. It's off on its left side, its rotors are gone, the tail boom's cracked and it's kind of sitting up against this 10 foot north wall. And this site, this crash site is going to become one of the main kind of locus points in this battle of Mogadishu.
- [33:53]
Gordon Carrera
So there with the Black Hawk down, let's take a break and when we come back, we'll see how the battle commences around this site, but also more as well. So welcome back. We left with that Black Hawk going down now. Major General Garrison, who's overseeing this operation is watching it on a screen from the Joint Operations Center. I mean, actually sees it happening. And of course he knows, doesn't he, that Somali fighters are going to rush to that scene within minutes and kill anyone who might have survived the crash or perhaps capture them, which could be worse. I mean, we've talked already about this issue of mutilations. So he's faced with a decision, isn't he? And he makes the decision, which, I mean, it's hard to second guess it at all, but it's going to shape what happens next because he decides we've got to get to that site first. Everything else is now secondary to reaching Super 6 1, the downed Black Hawk and you know, getting the lieutenants of Adid out You know, worrying about the prisoners. Everything is now about getting to that crash site and not letting anyone who survived fall into enemy hands, which is going to just change everything.
- [35:13]
David McCloskey
Yeah, this is called a frag o in the lingo, a fragmentation order. So the initial objective's been completed, but now this is something that, you know, again, wasn't part of the plan. The sort of. The plan is fragmented and now the new objective is going to be securing that crash site. You know, you mentioned the mutilations. I mean, the idea here also that not leaving anyone behind would include bodies, as we'll see. I mean, there's people alive at that crash site. The crew chiefs, the Delta snipers that are on that downed Blackhawk are there and alive. But the recovery of bodies is going to be a driver of a lot of the way this, this battle unfolds. So the super six one crash site is maybe six blocks east of the Pokhara market. How many kilometers is that, Gordon?
- [35:59]
Gordon Carrera
Well, I mean, it feels like half a kilometer maybe. It's not very far, isn't it? Maybe a bit more than that. But it's, it's, it's really not far from the target building where the ground convoy is and where the others are. So it feels close, doesn't it? Two blocks, three blocks east. Yeah, which, which you'd think would be, I mean, I guess is good on the one hand. But of course, the city's coming alive with Somali militants who are racing, who've already been converging on the battle at the target site where the convoy is heading and now have realized that there's a crash.
- [36:31]
David McCloskey
It's so close that some of the people who were there that day, I mean, they saw, they saw the Black Hawk go down because they're at the target site, the prisoners are being loaded. They're well within visual range to see the thing spinning and eventually crashing. So the convoy, remember that three vehicles had already left to take that injured Ranger back to base. So we have nine vehicles left. And by the way, the vehicles, there's two types of vehicles that are here. There are Humvees and there are these big kind of flatbed trucks. We have six Humvees left and one of the trucks had been destroyed by an rpg. So we've got two of the five ton flatbed trucks remaining. So there's eight vehicles. These five ton trucks have these kind of big fluorescent orange panels on top. So the Blackhawks, the little birds, all the helicopters and the spy planes can track them. The Humvees have a 50 caliber machine gun or a Mark 19 grenade launcher mounted on the roof turret. And the trucks are these unarmored, flatbed trucks that are designed to carry people, carry the prisoners, carry Delta and Rangers back. They are unarmored, they're slow. In the context of militia just coming out of the woodwork and many other people in the city who are either curious or interested in taking a shot at Americans and who have weapons coming out, this convoy is starting to seem increasingly vulnerable. The humvees take point and rear. The trucks are in the middle of the convoy in kind of a sandwich. And we talked earlier, Gordon, about.
- [38:02]
Gordon Carrera
Yeah. How hard it is to navigate.
- [38:04]
David McCloskey
Yeah, right. No street signs, no reliable maps. The radio traffic now with the Blackhawk down is increasingly chaotic. The Somali and these vehicles are kind of just magnets for small arms fire. And the ambush pattern that the Somalis use is pretty effective. So people, you know, sometimes women or children will step into the street in front of the lead vehicle, force it to break the Americans. Obviously, they don't want to run over civilians. So the convoy will stop. Fighters will appear in elevated positions and open fire. You'll have RPG teams in alleyways that engage the stationary vehicles. So if the Americans, you know, if they return fire in advance, the ambushers will kind of fade back into the buildings. But they generally know the route that the Americans are taking. And roadblocks are being constructed to kind of fence the Americans in so weapons and people can be positioned along the route to intercept them as they go.
- [38:58]
Gordon Carrera
And that is the advantage the Somalis have, isn't it? It's. It's their terrain. I mean, this is the classic problem, isn't it, of this kind of operation, is that you are operating on the terrain of your adversary who understands it incredibly well and know which roads they can close off, what are the shortcuts, where the Americans are likely to go. And then you've got this kind of throng of people heading towards them. And the Americans is to some extent restricted, aren't they, in terms of being able to use some of their heavy firepower because they're in this dense urban environment with lots of civilians around, lots of very hard to work out who's a combatant and who's a non combatant. So already the kind of. You can see the kind of pressures on that American convoy?
- [39:38]
David McCloskey
Well, I do think. I mean, if you're in the open, American firepower from the air could be decisive and from the ground. But, you know, in dense urban terrain, those advantages are more limited. You can't maneuver off road, you can't call in artillery because civilians are everywhere. The film does a good job with this of just elderly people, women, children
- [39:59]
Gordon Carrera
mixed in, crossing the road. Yeah. Moving around you. Yeah.
- [40:02]
David McCloskey
And also, you have. People are living here. You're driving through a neighborhood. So you have this mixture of people that make it extremely hard for the Americans to discern, you know, who was just attempting to get to safety and who might be, you know, actually trying to fight them. And there are a number of problems, though, that the convoy encounters. One of them is that the order from General Garrison back at the Joint Operations center to McKnight, who's leading this convoy. He directs McKnight to go and actually fight their way to the Super 61 crash site. Nobody else in the convoy, in the rear vehicles, knows where they're going. Some of them don't even know that a Blackhawk was shot down. So they. A bunch of people in the back think they're going back to the base as per the plan. But McKnight up front knows that they're heading or trying to head to the crash site intersections as they're traveling. I mean, again, we're talking about a couple blocks. The intersections become death traps because the vehicles, you know, they'll have to wait while the front one goes through because there's crossfire, you know, going all the way through the intersection. And so the vehicles will try to speed through while the one in front is going through. The convoy is sitting behind them. So everything is backing up as they go through intersection by intersection.
- [41:10]
Gordon Carrera
And they can actually see groups of armed Somalis running parallel to them, I guess, in parallel streets. And they are able to keep pace with a convoy of trucks because the trucks are having to stop constantly and moving at such a slow pace. So they can see that this group, I mean, of Somalis are racing to the same place. They are in parallel. The kind of race is on to try and get there. And then from the sky, I guess, you've got these US Spy planes orbiting a thousand feet above. They've got the surveillance cameras. And so they can also see that the convoy is moving slowly and. And that you've got all these people heading towards it. I think one of the problems is that all the different groups aren't necessarily able to talk to each other and give them clear instructions. So there's this bit where the directions are relayed. You know, they're watching the scene from the spy plane. Then you've got the Joint Operations center, and the messages are getting passed to the trucks to Say which way to go, like turn left. But by then McKnight's already passed the turn. You know, they've already passed the street because the delay is too big. So you can see it's just going disastrously wrong. Even they've got the advantage of being in these trucks. They're actually looping round. I mean, they're not going the fastest way to get to their destination.
- [42:21]
David McCloskey
And also again, I think the film does a pretty good job on this point. Everything kind of looks the same. There's orange sand, mounds of debris, low crumbling stone walls, lean tos shacks. It's very hard to get your bearings. And then on top of it all, every vehicle is just under fire constantly, they're constantly being shot at. And so there is this loop. And again, if you look at the maps of the way this convoy goes, it's actually really hard to understand initially because it's just essentially like looping around in a square. Yeah, in a square, Exactly. From about 4:30 to 5:00pm and going essentially nowhere. And again, it's like they're not, they're actually not far from the crash site, but they can't navigate there.
- [43:00]
Gordon Carrera
That's terrible, isn't it? Yeah.
- [43:02]
David McCloskey
At one point, an RPG scores a direct hit on the third Humvee. So the grenade punches through the steel skin, blows three men out the back, tears off the lower half of one of the Delta officers. One of the master sergeants, a private, has the back of one of his thighs blown off and then he gets sent flying 10 yards into the road where he's run over by the 5 ton truck behind him. The convoy stops to collect the wounded. There's another arranger who's outside, gets outside one of the vehicles trying to return fire is shot from a window above and behind him. The round pierces through the upper back. Now the Rangers have these new Kevlar Vestas body armor, but many of them had taken the plates off of the back. They're heavy. And he's, he's hit, he's dragged back to the vehicles. Another Ranger is shot in the back of the head while manning one of the machine gun turrets. He's killed instantly. This is all as this convoy is driving around. Another is killed when an RPG strikes. It actually embeds in his chest and severs his arm, which one of the Rangers stuffs back into his pocket so that he wouldn't be separated from it, you know, should. He survives at the convoys, just stopping and starting, stopping and starting. And to make it all worse, in some cases, you don't just have this delay in directions from the command and control Blackhawk above. There's actually a misunderstanding over where the convoy is at one point when it's requesting directions, and so they actually make an entirely wrong turn. Almost everybody in this convoy is injured in some way, shape or form because again, the gunfire is just constant. And the Humvee doors are supposed to be able to stop the AK47 rounds, but in some cases those rounds are just punching right through. So the back of the trucks are slick with blood and viscera. It's really.
- [44:45]
Gordon Carrera
It's awful, isn't it?
- [44:46]
David McCloskey
It's an awful experience.
- [44:48]
Gordon Carrera
And the bit I find is astonishing is that they actually pass so close to the crash site that some of the men in the rear trucks see the downed Black Hawk helicopter, but they're not even sure what they're heading for. They think they're going back to base. Message hasn't received them that that's what they're looking for. And I mean, they do what, 45 minutes of moving around, 45 minutes of trying to get to that crash site and taking casualties all this time. I mean, it is just kind of. This is a disaster.
- [45:16]
David McCloskey
Well, you can see this in the film when, again, the McKnight, played by Tom Sizemore, they get to a point after this wandering where, again, Garrison and the Joint Operations center is trying to get them to go to the first crash site. And after 45 minutes of wandering, the convoy actually has more casualties than the first crash site does. And so many people inside these trucks are injured, some critically. The McKnight character in the film essentially says, we're going to do more harm than good by showing up to the site. We've got to get back to base. And what also adds to the confusion and the chaos is that the radio net begins to fill up with news of yet yet another disaster. So 20 minutes after Super 61 has gone down, Super 61 went down at 4:20pm now, keep in mind, at this point, these guys have been out for less than an hour. This has all happened in the span of an hour. There's a second RPG now flying toward a second Blackhawk. And this Black Hawk Super 64 is piloted by Chief Warrant Officer Michael Durant, and it is in a low orbit, providing covering fire over the target area. He's kind of rotating counterclockwise in what's called a low cap, which is basically a sweeping circle over the battlefield to provide overwatch and air cover for the crew on the ground. On his fourth or fifth Circle. This is kind of the. And he's. They're trying to make, by the way, the Super 64 crew is trying to make sense of what's going on in the ground, just like anyone else on their fourth or fifth circle. Just as this chaos below is starting to make some sense, Michael Durant gets the sensation of his chopper hitting almost an invisible speed bump. And what's happened is that the RPG has blown a chunk off the tail rotor. There's kind of a mist of oil coming out, but the rotor mechanism is still intact, and the Blackhawk is actually built to run without oil for a while. So Durant runs checks on the system, and he basically sees that the bird seems to be running fine.
- [47:12]
Gordon Carrera
He thinks it's okay.
- [47:13]
David McCloskey
Yeah. And Matthews, who is the air mission commander, essentially, so he's the. He's in charge of all the Night Stalker pilots, and he's sitting in that command and control helicopter.
- [47:24]
Gordon Carrera
So he can see it, and he can see that they've been hit.
- [47:27]
David McCloskey
Yeah, he sees it, and he says, okay, you got to put that. Put that bird down. And so Durant turns to go back to base, and as he does that, the tail rotor, the gearbox, and a few feet of that vertical, the kind of the fin assembly in the back. I mean, essentially, they just poof. Like, they. They evaporate. So what happens is that that main gear shaft is in its death throws. It blows apart. There's a loud bang. Top half of the tail fin goes away. The bird kind of lurches forward. It begins to spin. And so what Durant does is he shuts off the engines, which slow the spin rate. He pulls the nose up, so it crashes flat because you obviously don't want to go in head first. But it hits hard. The co pilot is killed on impact. The two crew chiefs who were manning the guns were also killed. Durant survives, but he's catastrophically injured. His broken back. Yeah, broken back. A couple of vertebrae are broken. His right leg is shattered. And Somalis, you know, the militia, and frankly, just people who are interested in what's happening are approaching from the air. The people in the command and control helicopter, they're looking. They're seeing this happen. A second convoy is dispatched from the base to go find that crash site. So this is a point where you get some feel of this, I think, when you watch the film, where it's like, what in the world is going on? Yeah, it's chaos now because we've got two convoys now. We got two crash sites. There's overlapping radio Traffic. The directions are soon being given to the wrong unit because who's where, when and how. How do you know which convoy is even asking for directions in some cases? Everyone's trying to straighten this out. The McKnight convoy is trying to figure out how do we get back to base.
- [49:01]
Gordon Carrera
Yeah, that's the one that's got a bit lost.
- [49:02]
David McCloskey
Yeah. Known as the Bowden calls it the lost convoy. What they end up doing is they bypass the command and control helicopter entirely and they contact the observation helicopters on a new frequency. And those helicopters have been watching the Durant crash site, not the first one. And so they give different directions, wrong directions.
- [49:23]
Gordon Carrera
Oof.
- [49:24]
David McCloskey
And so what happens is they come back full circle, like past the target house.
- [49:29]
Gordon Carrera
They've gone back to where they started.
- [49:31]
David McCloskey
They've gone back to where they started. And at this point, McKnight radios the command and control helicopter and says kind of like Sizemore does in the film, like, we can't get to the crash site. And there's some pushback in the command and control helicopter. Essentially, though, they decide, okay, we're going to send this entire convoy back to base. So by 5:40pm they find this big four lane road that'll take them up to this major traffic circle and back to the base. Of the roughly 75 men in the convoy, nearly half have been hit by bullets or shrapnel. Eight are dead or near death. They'll crash through a burning roadblock. There's gasoline tanks that have been stretched all over the road and set alight. One of the humvees has three flat tires, eight wounded inside. You know, one of the soldiers legs are draped out over the hood. The vehicle almost flips over, but then it writes itself. The rest of the column follows through the flames. One of the humvees is dragging an axle and so it's being pushed by the 5 ton truck behind it. And as this convoy gets back to basically they never, they never reach the first crash site. The surviving crew of Super 61, the first downed Blackhawk and we should say the assault force, the team is actually a team that's been sent group of Delta and Rangers who have been sent on foot to the first crash site are on their own.
- [50:51]
Gordon Carrera
So there with the disaster really unfolding now and getting significantly worse, let's leave it and next time we'll see how it unfolds. And the real battle intensifying in Mogadishu. Don't forget though, you can hear the next two episodes right away. If you're a declassified club member. If you're not a member, do sign up at the Rest is Classified. And don't forget as well, we've got a live show coming up on Friday 4th September, 7pm at the South Bank. You can get the link for tickets in the Episode description box and at the South bank center website by searching for the Rest is Classified. And also do sign up for our free newsletter, also available@therestisclassified.com but with that, we will see you next time.
- [51:35]
David McCloskey
We'll see you next time.
- [51:37]
Gordon Carrera
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David McCloskey
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