Oct 3, 1993: Task Force Ranger flew into Mogadishu on a mission that was supposed to take about an hour. It lasted all night, and it changed American foreign policy for a decade.
Somalia had collapsed into civil war in 1991. Warlords fought over the capital and used food as a weapon, and a famine killed hundreds of thousands of people. In December 1992 President George H.W. Bush sent about 25,000 American troops to protect food shipments. It worked. The starvation eased.
In 1993 the mission was handed to the United Nations, and it grew into something bigger: disarming the militias and rebuilding the country. The most powerful warlord in Mogadishu, Mohamed Farrah Aidid, saw the UN as an enemy. In June his militia ambushed and killed 24 Pakistani peacekeepers. The UN put a bounty on him.
In August the US sent Task Force Ranger: Army Rangers, Delta Force operators, and the helicopter pilots of the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, the Night Stalkers. Their job was to capture Aidid and his top people. They ran six raids. None of them got Aidid.
On the afternoon of Oct 3, word came that two of his top lieutenants were meeting near the Olympic Hotel, in the heart of Aidid's territory near the Bakara Market. About 160 men went in. Delta assaulted the building while Rangers fast-roped from Black Hawks to seal off the block. A ground convoy of Humvees and trucks came to haul everyone out.
The raid itself went fine. They captured around two dozen Somalis, including both targets. But one young Ranger missed the rope and fell about 70 feet to the street, and the whole neighborhood was already coming out with rifles and RPGs.
Then an RPG hit a Black Hawk, Super 61, and it went down in a narrow alley a few blocks away. Both pilots were killed. Rangers and Delta operators on foot ran to the crash site and set up a perimeter around the wreck. The convoy tried to reach them and got lost in the maze of streets, taking fire at every turn, with wounded and dead piling up in the vehicles.
About 20 minutes later a second Black Hawk, Super 64, flown by Mike Durant, was hit and went down about a mile away. There was no one close enough to get there.
Two Delta snipers circling overhead, Master Sgt. Gary Gordon and Sgt. 1st Class Randy Shughart, asked to be dropped at the second crash site to protect the crew. They were told no. They asked again. They were told no again. They asked a third time and were finally put down. They pulled Durant out of the wreckage and fought off the crowd until they ran out of ammunition and were killed. Durant was beaten and taken prisoner.
Gordon and Shughart were awarded the Medal of Honor, the first since Vietnam.
At the first crash site, about 90 men held out through the night in a few buildings, short on water, ammunition, and night vision, with wounded men they couldn't evacuate. They wouldn't leave without the body of the pilot pinned in the wreckage. Little Bird helicopters made gun runs over their heads until morning.
A relief force from the 10th Mountain Division finally reached them around 2 a.m. They came in Pakistani tanks and Malaysian armored personnel carriers because the Americans didn't have their own armor in Somalia. A request for tanks had been turned down weeks earlier in Washington.
There wasn't enough room in the vehicles for everyone. At first light some of the Rangers and Delta operators had to run out on foot alongside the convoy under fire. That route became known as the Mogadishu Mile.
Eighteen Americans were killed and 73 wounded. A Malaysian soldier was killed. Somali deaths are estimated in the hundreds, possibly over a thousand.
Back home, Americans saw footage of the bodies of US soldiers being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu, and video of a battered Mike Durant in captivity. Durant was released after 11 days. Within days President Clinton announced American troops would be out of Somalia by March 1994. The Secretary of Defense resigned that December.
The fallout went far beyond Somalia. In 1994, when genocide broke out in Rwanda and about 800,000 people were killed in roughly 100 days, Washington refused to intervene. Mogadishu was a big reason why. Osama bin Laden later pointed to Somalia as proof that America would pull out if it took enough casualties.
Mark Bowden told the story in Black Hawk Down, and most Americans know the battle by that name now. To the men who were there, it's still just the Battle of Mogadishu.