143. Black Hawk Down: Chaos in Mogadishu (Ep 2)

13:39Gordon: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've 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 going to embed itself into for what they hope will be just a few minutes to extract these prisoners.

14:05David: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 just erupting there. So they know that they're in a really dangerous place. So it's an 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.

14:40David: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 operators who are on the ground at the target building and for the convoy who are trying to get in to reach them.

15:00Gordon: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 mudded adobe and cloth and corrugated metal. And so there's not a lot of cover 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.

15:30David: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 it 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 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 Medivac, for Blackburn, the person who'd fallen from the Blackhawk while fast roping.

16:09David:The chaos is building, isn't it?

16:11Gordon:It is, yeah. And the radios that the Americans are using to communicate on the different frequencies are increasingly chaotic, because you have the 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 medivac. 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, 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 SNA militia.

16:58Gordon:So you have militia men firing AK-47s from windows and rooftops, RPGs from alleyways. The response to the helicopter insertion has really spread throughout the city, throughout South Mogadishu with remarkable speed. The Americans have shut down the phone networks 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.

17:26David: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 Bukhara market area already, and they pre-positioned weapons caches in mosques and schools and private homes, ready exactly for this 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.

18:00Gordon:By 3.50, again, 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 Medivac Blackburn back to base, but you get the sense that at this point in the story -

18:20David:Things are okay.

18:21Gordon:Things are okay. The convoy has taken more fire getting to the target location, but 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.

18:34David: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, 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. successful.

18:59Gordon: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 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 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.

19:35Gordon:One of the rangers is shot through the head on the return and he's killed instantly. And at the same time, you have a couple bad things that have happened here. You've lost, you've got your first KIA killed in action ranger on the way back. You've also got the strength of that ground convoy reduced by three vehicles that have 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 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.

20:27Gordon:It kind of makes me feel like both sides felt like they were fighting aliens. The Americans, and you see this, this is referenced throughout the Boutin book, it's in the film, the Americans call the Somalis skinnies or Sammies.

20:39David:Yeah, they dehumanize them to some extent, don't they? They say they all look the same, they're all skinnies. And 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.

21:15David: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.

21:21Gordon:It does. And back at the target, the team 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.

21:43David:I remember learning about those. When I did my medical training, my hostile environment training, we got taught how to deal with a 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 a 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.

22:09Gordon: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.

22:26David: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? So we should just maybe briefly just explain what a Black Hawk is.

22:40Gordon:Well, all US Army helicopters, Gordon, I went deep into some helicopter - Helicopter history. Helicopter history here. So US Army helicopters since the late 40s have mostly been named after Native American tribes. 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. They got to 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.

23:21David: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 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?

23:49Gordon: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 not 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 in Mogadishu is Gordon, the MH-60L. This is a standard Black Hawk 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.

24:38Gordon:A couple key kind of points on the tech here. There are mini guns 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.

24:53David:Not if you're on the ground, but yeah.

24:55Gordon:On October the 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.

25:39Gordon: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.

25:55David:And it's interesting when you look at the accounts from the Somali side, they'd 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 because they're knocking down markets 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've 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 come down.

26:51Gordon: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 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 aircraft, the Black Hawk, 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.

27:35Gordon:These are not like stinger missiles that were sold or given to the Afghan Mujahideen in the 1980s.

27:42David: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.

27:55Gordon: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 backblast, unless you modify the RPG, which the SNA militia had done, but unless you modify it, like the backblast 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.

28:42Gordon:but the SNA the militia has made some adjustments in part thanks to trading from uh 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 back blast they've also developed a method to shoot from inside holes dug inside the ground. So the shooter actually lies supine with the weapon pointed at the sky under kind of cover. So the idea here is that you'll mask the actual origin of the shot, because going up on a roof is basically a death sentence.

29:19Gordon: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 Black Hawk 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.

30:03Gordon:When helicopters go down, if people get lost, their bodies end up getting mutilated. It makes people very, very angry and 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 and surely the night stalkers

30:30David: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 the 3rd 4 20 p.m crucially this time the somali tactic is going to work to hit that Black Hawk with the RPG.

30:57Gordon:That's right. And this Night Stalker pilot, his name's Cliff Wolcott. He's actually played, I looked this up because I was like, that guy looks familiar. He's played by Jeremy Piven, Gordon, in the film Black Hawk Down. Don't know.

31:08David:You don't know Jeremy Piven? No, I don't know. I don't know, sorry.

31:11Gordon:So Cliff Wolcott is piloting Super 6-1. That RPG glides on a smoke trail toward the tail rotor. Super 6-1 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 helicopter. You also have four Delta IV 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.

31:48Gordon: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 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, 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, doing two full rotations as it descends, that centrifugal force is pitting the crew to their seats.

32:26Gordon:I think this is interesting. Bowden, in his book, was actually able to listen to the radio tape. And you can hear Wolcott, he just says, very matter-of-factly as this is happening, 6-1 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.

33:10Gordon: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 on 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 bird looked enormous like this kind of beached whale it's off on its left side its rotors are gone the tail booms 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.

33:52David: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.

34:10David: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 Centre and he 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 gonna 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 down blackhawk and you know getting the lieutenant surveyed 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.

35:12Gordon:Yeah, this is called a frag-o in the lingo, a fragmentation order. So the initial objective has been completed, but now this is something that, again, wasn't part of the plan. The plan is fragmented, and now the new objective is going to be securing that crash site. 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 battle unfolds.

35:50Gordon:So the Super 6-1 crash site is maybe six blocks east of the Bakara market. How many kilometers is that, Gordon?

35:58David:Well, I mean, it feels like half a kilometre, maybe. It's not very far, isn't it? Maybe a bit more than that. But 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 or three blocks east. Yeah, 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.

36:31Gordon:It's so close that some of the people who were there that day, I mean, 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.

37:08Gordon: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.

37:55Gordon: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 -

38:02David:Yeah, how hard it is to navigate. Yeah.

38:04Gordon:Right. No street signs, no reliable maps. The radio traffic now with the Black Hawk down is increasingly chaotic. 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, 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, if they return fire in advance, the ambushers will kind of fade back into the buildings.

38:45Gordon: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.

38:58David:And that is the advantage the Somalis have, isn't it? 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 are 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 who's a non-combatant So already you can see the kind of pressures on that American convoy.

39:38Gordon:Well, I do think if you're in the open, American firepower from the air could be decisive and from the ground. But 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 mixed in.

39:59David:Crossing the road, yeah, moving around you, yeah.

40:02Gordon: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 who was just attempting to get to safety and who might be 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 6-1 crash site. Nobody else in the convoy in the rear vehicles knows where they're going.

40:33Gordon:Some of them don't even know that a Blackhawk was shot down. So 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, they'll have to wait while the front one goes through because there's crossfire 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.

41:06Gordon:So everything is backing up as they go through intersection by intersection.

41:09David: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 1 ,000 feet above. They've got the surveillance cameras, and so they can also see that the convoy is moving slowly and that you've got all these people heading towards it.

41:45David: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 centre 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's too big. So you can see it's just going disastrously wrong, even though they've got the advantage of being in these trucks.

42:15David:They're actually looping round. I mean, they're not going the fastest way to get to their destination.

42:21Gordon: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.

42:48David:In a square.

42:49Gordon:Yeah, in a square, exactly. From about 4.30 to 5 p.m. and going essentially nowhere. And again, it's like they're actually not far from the crash site, but they can't navigate there.

42:59David:That's terrible, isn't it? Yeah.

43:01Gordon: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 five-ton truck behind him. The convoy stops to collect the wounded. There's another ranger who gets outside one of the vehicles trying to return fire. He's shot from a window above and behind him. The round pierces through the upper back. Now, the rangers have these new Kevlar vests, body armor, but many of them had taken the plates off of the back.

43:38Gordon:They're heavy, and 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 should he survive. The convoy is 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.

44:11Gordon: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 AK-47 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...

44:44David:It's awful, isn't it?

44:45Gordon:It's an awful experience.

44:47David: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 Blackhawk 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 the time. I mean, it is just kind of this is a disaster.

45:15Gordon: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 another disaster.

45:56Gordon:So 20 minutes after Super 6-1 has gone down, Super 6-1 went down at 4.20 PM. 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 Blackhawk, 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.

46:34Gordon:On his fourth or fifth circle, this is kind of the... And 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 Black Hawk 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.

47:12David:He thinks it's okay.

47:13Gordon:Yeah. And Matthews, who is the air mission commander, essentially. So he's in charge of all the Night Stalker pilots and he's sitting in that command and control helicopter.

47:24David:So he can see it and he can see that they've been hit. Yeah.

47:27Gordon:He sees it and he says, okay, you got to 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 evaporate so what happens is that that main gear shaft is in its death throes 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 uh so it crashes is flat because you obviously don't want to go in headfirst, but it hits hard.

48:04Gordon:The co-pilot is killed on impact. The two crew chiefs who are manning the guns are also killed. Durant survives, but he's catastrophically injured.

48:13David:Broken back.

48:14Gordon:Broken back, a couple of vertebrae are broken, his right leg is shattered. And Somalis, 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?

48:40David:Yeah, it's chaos now.

48:41Gordon:Because we've got two convoys now, we've 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 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.

49:00David:Yeah, that's one that's got a bit lost.

49:02Gordon:Yeah, known as the Bowdoin 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. And so what happens is they come back full circle, like past the target house.

49:29David:They've gone back to where they started.

49:30Gordon: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 5.40 p.m., 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.

50:07Gordon:There's gasoline tanks that have been stretched all over the road and satellite. One of the Humvees has three flat tires, eight wounded inside. You know, one of the soldier's 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 five-ton truck behind it. And as this convoy gets back to base, I mean, they never reach the first crash site. The surviving crew of Super 6-1, the first down 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

50:48David:the first crash site are on their own so there with the disaster really unfolding now and getting significantly worse let's leave it next time we'll see how it unfolds and the real battle intensifying in moggad issue 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 classified.com and don't forget as well we've got a live show coming off on friday the 4th of september 7 p.m 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 at the rest is classified.com but with that we will see you next time we'll see you next time

51:40Thank you.