365: Black Hawk Down with Joshua Donohue

Dan LeFebvre
Looking at Black Hawk Down from an overall perspective, what letter grade would you give it for its historical accuracy?

Joshua Donohue
>> So I’m gonna give Blackhawk down at A minus. And the minus just for, you gotta have a little bit of criticism, a little bit of critique, you have the whole Hollywood versus history. Blackhawk now does that in a lot of different areas with characters and things that were said, things that weren’t said, you have things based on actual events as you see in the film. But overall, the most impressive grade that I heard was from the actual veterans themselves who were there. They say that the film really is about 75 to 80% accurate as far as what happened. So really getting that stamp of approval from the guys who were actually there, I thought was pretty profound. So I would say definitely, in terms of military history films, it’s a top 10, maybe even the top five film for me. Ridley Scott, the director, is of course famous for such legendary films as Alien, Blade Runner, the Gladiator films. So this shoot, I restretched, it was quite complex in terms of its logistics. They wanted to give a real urban setting. Of course, Jerry Bruckheimer and his production team involved. His body of work really speaks for itself. So they were actually originally going to shoot in Jordan, but they felt that the city area had kind of long walls. They really didn’t give it that appearance that they wanted. They felt that they wanted to go to Morocco, where actually the year prior Scott had shot scenes for Gladiator there. So I think he really did a great job as far as the landscape there, giving it more authenticity from really from what a true African country, especially Somalia in 1993, what would it have looked like. So Scott was nominated for Best Director at the Academy Awards. The film won two Oscars for Best Filmmaking, Editing, and Best Sound. So the helicopter scenes were real. I mean, didn’t really see a whole lot of CGI in there. Those helicopters were real. They used them. They have all professional pilots in the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment. You’re in the Blackhawks with the Rangers, on the Little Birds with the Delta guys. So it’s a terrific mix of casting too. It’s, for me, one of the best, maybe the best in terms of casting for a war film. You have Sam Shepard, who plays General William Garrison. Tom Sizemore plays Colonel Danny McKnight. Established actors, younger guys, kind of come up, like Eric Bana, who plays Norm “Hoot” Hooten. You also have Ewan McGregor in there, Jeremy Piven, younger core of actors, like Orlando Bloom, who plays Todd Blackburn. Tom Hardy in there. Josh Harnett, who’s really one of the central characters, plays the Army Ranger Matt Eversman. So Eversman, just so people understand, his character is really the central character really throughout the film. He’s a sort of composite character. He’s actually himself and Lieutenant Larry Perrino. So he’s sort of this composite character. And another character to mention as well is the character played by Sanderson, played by William Fichtner. That’s actually based upon Delta operator Sergeant Paul Howe, who we’ll get to in a moment. He’s quite an interesting guy. So again, the film, I think, really, as far as authenticity, gets the grade A there. What’s interesting about it too is there’s an extended version that’s out there. That’s the one that you watched. And when I first saw the film originally, a lot of those scenes– I mean, I almost felt when I watched the extended version for the first time, I felt like I was watching the movie all over again. It was like, oh, I don’t remember that scene. It was all throughout the film. They had literally made a much longer film, but it tops out over two hours. And it’s difficult to sort of condense an 18-hour battle into a two-hour film. So there’s certain things that are going to get left out, things that the veterans say, oh, that should have made it in. So you’re trying to jam in a lot of people and a lot of different situations and different events to one. But overall, I really think they really scouted, and Brock Harman just did a phenomenal job on it. [AUDIO OUT] Yeah. And I think most people would agree in terms of the authenticity of it. He really pays special detail and special attention to all of those little– right from the weapons that each soldier had. Take the two snipers, Randy Chigart and Gary Gordon. Gary Gordon was carrying a specific type of– it was called an M733. It was a modified M4 rifle. It had a silencer. It had the scope on it. Randy Chigart would carry around an M14 sniper rifle, which was an old Vietnam-style gun. And the guys used to tease him all the time about it. But it had stopping power. It shot the 7.62 millimeter round. And as we’ll discuss in a little bit, in terms of the battle, the heavier round would have made a difference in terms of– especially the militiamen they were going to be fighting up against.

Dan LeFebvre
>> Before the movie jumps to October 3rd, 1993, it uses a lot of on-screen text to kind of set up the situation in Somalia in 1992 and leading into the events that we see in the movie. So I’m gonna read out this before asking my next question. This is a direct quote from the movie, kind of the text that sets everything up. Years of warfare among rival clans causes famine on a biblical scale. 300,000 civilians die of starvation. Muhammad Farah Adid, the most powerful of the warlords, rule the capital Mogadishu. He seizes international food shipments at the ports. Hunger is his weapon. The world responds. Behind a force of 20,000 US Marines, food is delivered and order is restored. April 1993, Adid waits until the Marines withdraw and then declares war on the remaining UN peacekeepers. In June, Adid’s militia ambush and slaughter 24 Pakistani soldiers and begin targeting American personnel. In late August, America’s elite soldiers, Delta Force, Army Rangers, and the 160th SOAR are sent to Mogadishu to remove Adid and restore order. The mission was to take three weeks, but six weeks later, Washington was growing impatient. And that is the end of kind of the introductory text. Since we’re setting up the historical context, is there anything that you would change or add to the way that the movie sets up this situation?

Joshua Donohue
Maybe a few things, but I think overall, again, you’re trying to give people the central themes of what’s– the main events and what’s going on. And I think it does a really good job there, really from describing the events from 1992 into 1993. And I think even before that, again, it pretty much sums up the major sequence of events leading up to the battle. There are other important events within the timeline, especially after, as you mentioned, the Pakistani peacekeepers are killed. So to sort of delve into the history of the events leading up to the Battle of Mogadishu during what’s known as Operation Gothic Serpent, and that’s really when the mission changes from a sort of a humanitarian one to one that are– we’re now going after Mohammed Farah Aidid. It’s also referred to sometimes as the Battle of the Black Sea. So there were a number of sort of geopolitical events which affected Somalia from inside out, really from the year 1991 in particular. So from January 1991 to March of 1991, you have the spectacular victory that America gets in Desert Storm, Operation Desert Storm, defeating Saddam Hussein’s forces in Iraq, driving them out of Kuwait after they invaded there in August of 1990. So that victory had really bolstered American confidence. I remember it very well. It was the first really conflict that I remember growing up as a child. I remember everyone tying the yellow ribbons around the trees. It was–you know, from what I had been told, it was a much different experience of what happened after the Vietnam War, which was really the last major war that we had fought. So in many ways, that victory helped heal a lot of those old wounds from the Vietnam War that had been left, you know, since their bloody campaign there. Ironically, the Battle of Mogadishu would be the largest firefight that the American soldiers would experience since Vietnam. And one of the commanding intel officers explains that it was worse than what he had experienced. Just that 18-hour battle was worse than all of his four combat tours in Vietnam. So that’s a pretty telling description. Another particular geopolitical event was the collapse of the Soviet Union at that time as well. That had a wide-ranging effect on other countries. They had held influence over Somalica in terms of the geopolitical sphere of influence. So the communist sphere had been lifted, no longer a threat to the international sort of order of things. So with the absence of the old Soviet order, we start to see a profound Islamic influence begin to channel its way through the streets of Mogadishu and throughout the country in that particular region. So as for Somalia itself, the country was soon embroiled in civil war when the president of what was known as the Somali Democratic Republic, Mohamed Siad Barre, was the president who had been ruling since 1969. He was overthrown and the central government effectively collapsed and Mohamed Farah Aidid was instrumental in this occurring. So when civil war begins, you have these rival clans beginning to fight it out on the streets of the city. The country is plunged into a terrible famine and the results in the deaths of estimates over 300,000 men, women, and children dying from the effects of starvation by early 1992. So there were attempts by non-governmental organizations or NGOs as they’re known to alleviate the suffering of the Somali people. They were greeted by attacks by the militiamen, especially those belonging to what was known as the Habergeer clan, the most powerful clan in Mogadishu. Mohamed Farah Aidid was the head and was instrumental in initiating the coup which overthrew Barre, as I mentioned, and he was now the leader of what was known as the Somali United Congress during the Somali civil war. So in addition to the 300,000 Somalis who perished during the famine, tens of thousands more are killed in the intense fighting that’s going on in the city between these rival clans. So another major thing to talk about is you have what’s occurring in the United States at the time. George H.W. Bush 41 lost the election that November, so this is one of his last major decisions as he’s going out. Of course, President Bill Clinton will take the White House over in January of 1993, so one of his last major decisions, President Bush will order 20,000 U.S. Marines to Somalia to really spearhead a new peacekeeping initiative known as Operation Restore Hope. So the Marines are instrumental in restoring order and making sure the food supplies are making it to the Somali people, especially to the people in the sort of the outlying areas, the remote areas outside the city of Mogadishu. So when I was researching it, there was a great documentary that ITN News did, and they followed around the progress of the UN mission and following the food deliveries to these stricken areas. One aid worker there was commenting on how the deliveries of wheat would not have been possible without the aid of the United States Marines. So as a result of the Marines being there, the attacks on the peacekeepers became less and less. Once the Marines were drawn, again, in the middle of 1993, Aidid literally launches an offensive and trying to seize power immediately right afterwards, setting up attacks once again. He launches control of the city, and on June 5, 1993, the Pakistani contingent of UNISOM inspecting one of Aidid’s Radio Mogadishu stations comes under attack by militiamen belonging to the SNA, the Somali National Alliance. A crowd gathers outside, and they absolutely slaughter these 24 Pakistani peacekeepers. Between 16 and 25, Somalis are killed. And in the aftermath of this, in the chilling foreshadowing of the events we’ll see in the aftermath of October 3, the Pakistani peacekeepers’ bodies are butchered. They are desecrated, hacked apart, dragged through the city. I saw one news clip where these two guys are just holding a piece of an arm, and it’s just flesh and clothing hanging off of it. So this is really the central turning point. Now the UN begins to scale down their presence in Somalia, and the media is now questioning whether the UN is even capable of controlling the situation there. Even the people at the food shipment ports are saying the UN is not going to be able to maintain control of it. So as a result of the Pakistani peacekeepers being killed, a squadron of AC-130 Spectre gunships will answer the June 5 attack, hitting four weapons arsenals and the radio station also owned by Aidid. So the UNISOM mission effectively changes from a humanitarian mission into one now, we’re starting to see special forces move in in August of ’93. It’s changing now to a hut for Aidid. So it becomes–the humanitarian mission is at a standstill. UNISOM is eventually replaced by widespread anger at the continued military presence there of the United States. So tensions would further be exacerbated by the raid in what was known as the Abdi house. An American Cobra gunships and OH-58 Kiowa helicopters will fire tow missiles into the house where there’s a meeting of Aidid officials taking place. Between 20 and 70 people are killed, and many people say that that meeting was actually–there were some peaceful Klan leaders and they’re trying to resolve the situation. And again, we never really knew the real story there. So you have August 10, 1993, an IED will detonate under a U.S. military police vehicle, killing four U.S. servicemen. So Somalis were particularly bothered by this constant American presence, especially of helicopters flying over the city all the time. And Aidid’s men are slowly but surely stepping up their attacks on the Americans leading up to October 3. And this comes to a height, and this is about a week shy prior to it, of September 25, 1993, Somali militiamen will shoot down a Black Hawk helicopter over Mogadishu, killing three U.S. personnel on board. So this particular attack will mark a significant psychological victory for the Somali militiamen. They had now successfully–American helicopter– and now are seeing that these pilots are going to go on these raids. There have been six of them conducted before October 3, but the pilots are now being more aware that, yeah, we could be hit by one of these, and we could fall victim to a pretty serious attack.

Dan LeFebvre
>> Well, that’s, I mean, thank you for sharing a lot of that more, more context because there were a few things that you were saying there. Just thinking of perhaps one of the biggest manhunts, you know, that the military did for Osama bin Laden, right, which will be much later. But it wasn’t, you know, sending 20,000 Marines in. And so understanding how this is different, you know, before that and then how it changed too. And I’m sure this will come up later as we start to dig in some of the more details of this particular mission. But the idea of whether or not they could actually shoot down the helicopter and their strategies for that, it sounds like the movie doesn’t really mention that other Black Hawk being shot down in September. But that had to have been top of mind for everybody there.

Joshua Donohue
Yeah, absolutely. And they had to, of course, have a contingency plan for this. They knew as soon as going into any of these raids that this was becoming more and more of a possibility. You’re seeing Aidid’s forces– they’re going to go toe-to-toe with the Americans. And again, they’re well aware of every street, every alleyway, how to bottle forces up, how to keep reinforcements from coming into the city by using roadblocks. We see that throughout the film as well. So again, a mission that’s supposed to take 30 minutes, it’s going to be a lot longer than that, unfortunately, for the Americans. But again, there was a lot of tension building up, especially once the mission changes from not so much a humanitarian one now to going after Aidid. It was Admiral Jonathan Howe, I think, was the one that put up the reward poster for Aidid, I think $25,000. His husband, Otto, the guy they capture early on in the film, mentions it when he’s having that cigar conversation. He’s like, “Miami is not Cuba.” You know, that whole thing where they’re having tea and all that stuff. And that raid actually did happen, and he was captured in a little bit different circumstances. And Otto actually himself said when he saw the film, “That’s no way who I am.” And they sort of didn’t really get that character really the way that– in real life the way it was. But you start to see that we’re going after more high-value targets, people who are directly in contact with Aidid. We’re starting to nip away at his network over time, and that comes to an end on October 3rd.

Dan LeFebvre
>> You mentioned taking 30 minutes and that leads right into my next question. Because according to the movie, the goal of the mission is to capture some of ID’s high ranking officials at this secret meeting. And they have a local guy, you know, parking his car near the building where the meeting is taking place so that they know where to drop in the helicopters. The plan is to take the officials prisoner and then signal the Humvees to come pick them all up, the soldiers as well as the prisoners, and then head back to base. And as you said, you know, the mission is supposed to take 30 minutes. Of course, as the movie title suggests, things do not go according to plan. But before we talk about how things go wrong, how well do you think the movie did kind of explaining the mission of October 3rd, 1993?

Joshua Donohue
So as I mentioned before, Task Force Ranger had conducted six missions before October 3rd, and two of Aidid’s men, Omar Salad, who was Aidid’s top political advisor, and Abdi Hassan Awali, who is Aidid’s interior minister, they are considered by the intelligence community there as what are known as Tier 1 personalities, and you hear that mentioned in the film. They were both in regular contact with Aidid, are important to the operation, the daily operation of his militias. So Salad would be observed entering a house, which was located about a block from what you see in the film is called the Olympic Hotel. You see them when they fly in, they’re right above it. A Somali spy actually confirmed that both men were present at this meeting that morning, which also meant that Aidid also could possibly be there as well. And there was no– I should say the afternoon, not the morning, but there was no confirmation. So intelligence was not really– it was kind of scattered. They’re having to rely on locals to kind of work their way around the city. So to locate the precise location of the meeting, the Somali informant– in the film, he’s known as Abdi. He drives this sort of silver sedan with red stripes. In the film, he has black tape on the roof, whatever. In the film, he’s driving a white sedan with a cross over the car so the helicopters can see him.

Dan LeFebvre
So they could see, yeah.

Joshua Donohue
Yeah, so he was then instructed to park and stop his car in front of the Olympic Hotel and lift the hood as if giving the impression that he’s having an engine problem, and if Aidid’s militiamen suspected him for any reason, they would simply dismiss him once he’s seen looking under the hood of the car. So he does show some fear that, okay, if I get too close, they’re going to shoot me. So from there, the informant would get back in his car, park directly in front of the target building. So there was a helicopter. They had multiple layers of intelligence assets flying over the city from P-3, Orions, and again, Blackhawks are circling the C-2 bird. They’re monitoring this whole sequence of events that’s going on. So there was a helicopter flying and monitoring his movements, as you see in the film. This is where things start to go a little wrong. So the helicopter that was supposed to track the informant’s car had actually lost sight of him, and he tried to perform the engine check too quickly. He got back in the car and drove away. So by the time that the helicopter tried to reacquire him, he was already gone. So he had only caught the location where he was supposed to still be, but they couldn’t lock back onto his car. So Garrison then has the informant drive around the block, do it again, open his hood once he parks in front of the target building. So Garrison is watching this all unfold at the JOC, the Joint Operations Center. This is being fed live to him. As I said, there’s intelligence assets monitoring what’s going on, indicating now that the informant will park in front of the target building, open his hood. So this is relayed back to the Ranger, Task Force Ranger. Rangers and Delta are beginning to kit up back at their hangar at the Mogadishu Airport, and they start to strategize their plan of attack. So the CHOC leaders, the Rangers, were given detailed plans of where their blocking positions were going to be. They were going to have four Blackhawks basically surround the building, have the Rangers fast rope down. The Delta were all going to be going into the building, landing on the roof, landing on the streets, going right in. So Garrison at this point then has to call it off again. And as you see in the film, Abney makes the comment, “There are too many militia. If I get any closer, they’re going to shoot me.” So the car is parked short of the target building. So the task force was literally minutes away from launching a raid against the wrong house. So a similar event had actually occurred prior when the wrong house was raided, and it turned out to be a UN personnel gathering. There’s questions whether they were corrupt or whatever the case is, but you mentioned Washington in the beginning. This is one of the events that Washington sees, “Okay, we’re losing our patience with this whole thing now. We want to start seeing results. We want ID captured. We’re wasting time. The American public is starting to– We’re going to lose some support over this.” So Garrison then convinces the informant to park his car in front of the building on Hawatig Road. He then drives past the Olympic Hotel one block north, and that turns out to be the same building that Salon was seen entering by American observers from the air. So UN Second-in-Command General Thomas Montgomery, who’s also in charge of the 10th Mountain Division, Quick Reaction Force, or QRF as it’s known, says that the mission is a go to be sure that all UN personnel were cleared from the area. Garrison also gives the order to arm the MH-6 Little Bird helicopters with rockets, which will turn out to be a smart decision in light of what happens next. So when Garrison gives the mission briefing, a combined group of Rangers and Delta, this meeting more than likely didn’t take place, and may have in some levels, but you really had just all the main film characters that you had. Eric Band is there, Josh Hartnett’s there, Jeremy Piven’s there, all the stars are assembled into one place, of course, Tom Sizemore. So you get this sense that the mission is routine, but then you start to get the impression that it’s not going to be an ordinary mission. They go into further specifics about where they’re going to be going in the middle of the day, to Bacara Market, and as McKnight’s character says, it’s the Wild West. So you see the character Hoot, played by Eric Band, he sort of rolls his eyes at Garrison when he asks him, which exactly, which building is it? He says, well, somewhere in the Bacara Market, and he goes, well, it’s not my decision to make these targets, basically. It’s not my fault. So you sense there’s a little bit of a disconnect before the mission even begins. He then brings up another important aspect of the mission, which really did happen. Garrison says he requests light armor and an AC-130 Spectre gunship. I mentioned that earlier. And it says Washington and all of his wisdom decided against this too high profile. So Secretary of Defense Les Aspin actually used the one that is, you know, the Clinton administration, saying, no, we’re not going to give that kind of support. We don’t want this to get out of control. We don’t want these things going, shooting people up in the streets. It’s going to– the optics on it aren’t good. So that was really the impetus beside– you know, on that decision there. So the AC-130 had been in active service since leading up to the Vietnam War and during the Vietnam War. It carried two 20-millimeter cannons, a 40-millimeter cannon, and a 105-millimeter howitzer. So it’s an impressive and lethal weapons platform, and the option that might have changed the course of Operation Gothic Serpent and really the Battle of Mogadishu in total. Another moment is when we see that when McKnight walks out of the tent and he talks to Colonels Harrell and Matthews, and they say, what’s the matter, Danny? Something you don’t like? And then he goes into his whole spiel about middle of the day. Indeed, come out a serious counterattack on a moment’s notice, and I’ll talk about in a moment the plant cot, as it is mentioned a little bit in the film, but there’s more to that story.

Dan LeFebvre
>> Going back to the movie, as we see the mission start, almost right away, you’re talking about how things were, you know, even in the meeting, they were like, okay, things might not be rigid, but we start to see hints, too, as the mission’s starting, that things are probably not going to go right. There’s a line of dialogue I’ll point out from Ewan McGregor’s character, Grimes. He asks if the amount of fire that they’re getting is normal, and somebody with a soldier next to him says, “No, this is about 10 times worse than anything I’ve seen before.” Were there indications that early on that things might be worse than usual?

Joshua Donohue
Yeah, so as I mentioned, the scene with McKnight voicing his concerns to Colonels Harrell and Matthews, who are going to be in the C-2 bird, saying, you know, life’s imperfect for you to up in a bird a couple hundred feet up in the sky, but out on the street, it’s unforgiving, and you see that happen. So there’s that moment of almost foreshadowing of what he tells them. No Spectre gunship, middle of the day, and as I mentioned, cot. It’s a widely dispersed drug that is given out to the militiamen. It’s almost like it has a cocaine effect. Basically, it heightens your senses. You’re high on this drug. You’re chewing on it in the middle of the day. About an hour or so later, you’re twitching.

Dan LeFebvre
>> Just what you want with a gun.

Joshua Donohue
You’re ready to go, and yeah, exactly, and you’re not– your fear factor is brought down significantly. So many of the young men that were patrolling the streets of Mogadishu on what were called technicals– you see them in the film, these pickup trucks with a large caliber– whether it be a .50 caliber machine gun, whether it be an American or a Russian gun, or what’s called a recoilless rifle. So the drug, as I mentioned, many of the men were addicted to it. It’s really a mild amphetamine, so they would start again chewing on it, and it basically increases your aggressiveness, lowering your fear factor. So as the Americans will see once they hit the streets of Mogadishu, these men will sometimes take multiple hits and still keep coming at you, almost like zombies in a way. Those documentaries you watch, even young children, young boys– I vividly remember just seeing these young children. The rifle is practically bigger than they are. They’re in an AK-47. They’re practically dragging it. And they’re fighting literally every able-bodied person in the city. So as we go to the scene where Irene, the call to launch the mission, is given, garrisons going from one helicopter to another, telling the men good luck, no one gets left behind. This actually did happen. So there’s a little bit of a saying, “Okay, he doesn’t really do that,” and kind of giving a sense that, okay, he might have an inkling that this mission might be a little bit more risky. So when we see the Delta Force operators hit the ground at 3.42 p.m. and make their way into the target building, the meeting is taking place, the Rangers begin to fast rope down, and there’s that unforgettable scene where Army Ranger Private First Class Todd Blackburn misses the rope and falls almost 70 feet to the street. This indeed does happen, not because the pilot– in the show, an RPG is fired and Eversman yells to Walcott, “Jeremy Fibbon,” he kind of jerks the helicopter, it flies past. Yeah, it doesn’t really happen that way. Blackburn just–whether he missed the rope and he falls. Again, Eversman–I read his description of it– he doesn’t really see him fall, but as he’s roping down, he sees Blackburn motionless in the street, and that heavy rotor wash, the dust that’s whipped up and the dirt that’s flying around from the Blackhawks rotor wash is already being worked on there by two medics, Private Good and there’s another. They’ve already stabilized Blackburn, opened his airway. Eversman sees first-hand how bad Blackburn’s injuries are. He’s unconscious, he’s bleeding from the ears, nose, mouth, and Sergeant Jeff Strucker and the rest of the ground convoy have already reached their objective and are tasked with loading the prisoners, blocking the assault forces, and taking them really out of the city. So they’re really a mix, the convoy of Humvees, these M939 flatbed, these 5-ton trucks that would be moving in and out of the city. One of the Humvees was a cargo Humvee. They were also carrying a mix of Delta and Navy SEALs as well, so the SEALs were actually involved in this operation too for extra security on the convoy. So McKnight was leading the convoy, Strucker was then ordered to evacuate Todd Blackburn, and one difference that we see is Blackburn is evacuated– he’s actually evacuated in the SEAL Humvee, driven by Master Sergeant Chuck Eswine. So at this point, they have actually seized the objective. They’ve gotten a number of prisoners. They were hoping Idene was going to be among them, but unfortunately he’s not. But again, these two top Tier 1 personalities were the objective at the time. They got them. Obviously, besides the fact that Todd Blackburn’s severe injury, everything is going to plan, but things will, as we’ll see, fall apart pretty quickly.

Dan LeFebvre
>> In the movie it seems like things have just started there when we see the first American soldier getting killed. It’s Sergeant Pilla. He’s operating one of the machine guns on one of the Humvees going — as they’re going to pick up the prisoners. And then he’s shot in the neck and killed almost immediately. Was he the first KIA on the mission?

Joshua Donohue
Yeah, he was. He is– and I– Jeff Strucker tells the story of it, and he is– when they make the turn of the Humvees onto National Street, Jeff Strucker tells this with just such clarity. He says, “They– every side, all sides above them and on either side is just absolutely lit up with machine gun fire. They were just driving through a gauntlet as they were trying to get out of the city.” So Dominic Pilla was indeed the first KIA of the mission. He is shot and killed as the movie depicts. It’s a little bit different than I think you see, somewhat similar. Strucker describes it as they were driving through, and there was a Somali militiaman that stepped out with his gun. He was actually pointing it at a Paulson who was on the .50 caliber, and that Pilla had seen him, and they literally pointed their guns at each other. Pilla fired, killed the militiaman. The Somali fired, killed Pilla. So they literally shot each other dead at that moment. And again, that’s what Jeff Strucker describes. So when Pilla’s death, as you say, Pilla was a guy who was just a jokester in the hangar as he’s depicted in the movie, poking fun at Captain Mike Steele and Lieutenant Larry Perino. So when Strucker confirms Pilla’s death, and you see when McKnight keeps asking, “What’s the status? What’s the status?” and he says, “He’s dead,” all the veterans say the same thing, “What happens next?” The radio went absolutely silent for a couple of seconds, and then radio traffic picks up again. And that’s another thing that we’ll talk about. Just the communications that day were pretty chaotic and nonexistent in a lot of areas, which were the complicated things. So Pilla’s death comes as a bit of a shock for the task force, task force ranger. Strucker, when they pull in back to the base, talks about having to clean out the back of this Humvee, the scene where Eric Banner’s character looks into the back, sees all the blood, all the empty shell casings, the damage to the vehicle, the bullet holes in the glass of the vehicle. So when these Humvees arrive back with Pilla and Todd Blackburn, the activity at the ranger hangar is beginning to step up significantly. So they have to go back in the city because, obviously, what occurs next?

Dan LeFebvre
>> You mentioned — not to go back to Blackburn, I mean him being injured, but you mentioned the SEALs. And maybe one of the reasons why they didn’t really show that — I don’t — did they mention the Navy SEALs in the movie at all? I know they mentioned like the Delta Force and the Rangers, but I don’t remember the SEALs. So maybe it was just simple.

Joshua Donohue
They were there, but they don’t really– there’s no mention of them in the film at all. But during research, they definitely had a bit of a presence there, not nearly as pronounced as Delta Force and the rangers, obviously. But they were there, as I said, as really a backing force, extra security on those convoys. If you’re operating on the streets and you’re in the middle of a firefight and there are a couple of Navy SEALs around, you’re going to feel a little bit better about things. Absolutely, no discredit there either. So it was quite a bit of a mix of special operations groups all sort of intermingled at once. What’s interesting about the rocket-propelled grenade is that it’s actually not meant to be used in an anti-aircraft capacity whatsoever. It’s extremely dangerous and almost suicidal to point an RPG skyward because the violet backblast that’s emitted once the round is fired, if you’re facing a wall, the back of that concussion, that energy can just kill you. There’s been plenty of instances, I’m sure, where some unsuspecting RPG operator may not realize someone’s behind them and that thing goes off and that’ll kill you outright. So the pressure wave that’s created behind the RPG tube itself would basically hit a solid wall in a split second and then the wave comes back at the shooter. So Durant and the other Black Hawk pilots were becoming more mindful of the RPGs as they began to see more and more of them being shot at them in the missions leading up to October 3rd, as I mentioned, the one that happened in September of ’93. So another danger which faced the militiamen firing an RPG in the street was that if they, indeed, lived to tell the tale, they got really well adept at sort of firing quickly in an open area without worrying about killing the operator and quickly ducking away in the best sort of manner because they could be easily seen by an MH-6 Little Bird pilot or a minigunner or one of the crew chiefs on the Black Hawks and they’re immediately going to shoot right at them. So when Cliff Walcott’s Black Hawk Super 6-1 is hit by an RPG, the shooter is actually seen, and this is in real life, by Staff Sergeant Charlie Warren, who was one of the crew chiefs with Staff Sergeant Ray Dowdy in the back of their helicopter. So Super 6-1 will lose sight of the shooter for a few moments as it’s going into its turning orbit. Seconds later, the RPG is fired and strikes Super 6-1’s tail rotor. The film does a good job showing what happens in this particular instance. Walcott’s Super 6-1 will crash into a narrow alleyway on its side leaning up against a brick wall. And to fast forward a little bit, in 2013, CBS News 60 Minutes did a report on– they dug up a lot of the wreckage of Super 6-1. We’ll go to that later on. They show actual footage of Super 6-1’s crash. It’s out there. And you see it immediately starts to spin, and the violence, the horrific impact you see, it takes your breath away. And the film does a good job of depicting this. And when it happens, there are Delta operators also in the back of Super 6-1. Jim Smith, Jim McMahon, and Dan Bush all survive the impact along with the two crew chiefs, Dowdy and Warren. Unfortunately for the two pilots, Cliff– Elvis Walcott and Donovan Bull-Briley, his co-pilot, both are killed in the impact instantly. Delta Staff Sergeant Dan Bush would lose his life defending the crash chopper. You see this depicted in the film. You also see it once in the actual footage of Super 6-1’s crash. They show the camera as it kind of comes around, and you can see right down the narrow alleyway. You can just make out Dan Bush standing at the end of the alleyway firing his machine gun down at the Somalis. As you see in the film, Richard Tyson plays him in the film. He’s all bloody. He’s standing outside defending the chopper. That’s a true story. Dan Bush died defending Super 6-1. He shot multiple times. So as I mentioned earlier, I.D.’s militiamen were getting much more aggressive, but there were attacks on the American helicopters. And again, as I mentioned, the one on September 25th and then the week prior. So there was indeed a plan to go get these guys. And as you see, Star 4-1, the MH-6 Little Birds, ordered to go down, land right at the crash site, and evacuate wounded. This is a true story. Chief Warrant Officer 3, Carl Meyer, and Chief Warrant Officer 4, Keith Jones, both fly in in the middle of this firefight. Literally, I believe it’s–I think it’s Meyer might be the one– is literally his arm is out–you see in the film, his arm is out the window shooting an MP5 with once the stick of the helicopter and his gun out the window shooting back. They would be awarded the Silver Star for their efforts there. So the Dan Bush defense of the helicopter, it did indeed happen. And again, the footage of Super 6-1, as you can see, but when it was released in 2013, is about as close to the actual– what you see in the film–happen.

Dan LeFebvre
>> Wow, wow. Well, obviously, once Super 6-1 goes down in the movie, Yeah, they really had to, because what had happened, it’s going to be obvious to everybody. This is no longer the 30-minute mission that we had talked about earlier. And maybe you already answered this somewhat, but what — did they have a contingency plan in place for, like, when this helicopter goes down?

Joshua Donohue
obviously, as I mentioned the week prior, they immediately send out a quick reaction force to get forces to the site as quickly as possible, because they’re, in effect, in a race against time. And that’s why you see when the helicopter goes down, there’s that immediate–Garrison’s looking at this whole thing happening, and he makes that great quote, “We just lost the initiative.” And that changes the entire landscape of the battle. You now are going from this mission where we’ve just captured a big group of IDID’s top officials, and we are just close to getting everything squared away and out of the city, and then the mission changes once Super 6-1 is shot down. So from that point on, and then obviously later on when Super 6-4 is shot down, the mission will just go right from getting survivors out, seeing what we can do as far as if anyone’s trapped inside, we don’t even know who’s alive. And obviously with Super 6-4, we’ll see a different set of circumstances happen there. It’s a little bit further south of Walcott’s crash site. So they definitely had a plan to go in, get these guys out, and what they do is the survivors, the U.S. Air Force pararescue men come in, Wilkinson and others, as you’ll see in the film, are inside the Black Hawk trying to get the crew chiefs out, both the Dowdy and the other, and literally the helicopter’s on its side. Everything’s just been thrown out of the helicopter. It’s laying in a really tight alleyway. So they literally will use Super 6-1 as a casualty collection point. They’ll put up armor plating and anything they can dig out of the helicopter to defend it. There’s machine guns already in the helicopter. There’s M16s and other rifles in there in case this happens. So they definitely were planning for in case this does happen, we have to consolidate our forces, move them into the crash site, and defend it the best way we can until we can get a ground convoy in there to get everybody out. But as we see in the film, and this does happen in real life, they are able to get Donovan “Bull” Briley’s body out of the helicopter. He’s kind of up, leaning up on its side, so they’re able to kind of pull him down. But for Cliff Wolcott, the crash, the violence of the crash is when he’s driven the helicopter into the ground. He is trapped by the frame, really the front panel, instrument panel of the helicopter. So getting his body out of the helicopter will take some time. But as the military of the United States of America, we strongly adhere to no soldier left behind.

Dan LeFebvre
>> Yeah, and we’ll talk more about that as we get further into the movie. But I’m curious cuz the movie really focuses obviously on the United States side of things. But there are hints that we’ve talked about already about more gunfire than they expected. And so from the Somalian side, again, just being movies being movies, they often tend to exaggerate things. But it just seems like there’s constant waves of the Somalian militia. Can you clarify what the Somalian resistance was like?

Joshua Donohue
Well, as you can see, Aidid’s militia were well-armed and prepared to go toe-to-toe with the Americans on the streets of Mogadishu. One of the key strategies was what we see happens when crowds are gathering. Roadblocks are being quickly put into place. They’re using the burned-out hulks of cars. They’re using anything they could possibly use as a deterrent and preventing American reinforcements from getting in and out of the city. So these tire fires start burning up and going up in the sky. That’s also a signal saying that whoever’s in the immediate area that come to where this tire fire is, and there’s going to be activity where this is going to be. So while it might seem sort of in many ways primitive and shaking their head, “How can we let this possibly happen this way?” They’re not a technically advanced force. But if you’re using simple tactics, they will bring…

Dan LeFebvre
>> It’s their home ground too, so they know, yeah, the ins and outs too, yeah.

Joshua Donohue
Yeah, the simplest things can make a biggest difference on the battlefield.

Dan LeFebvre
>> Yeah.

Joshua Donohue
So another thing is, if you’ll notice throughout the film, the Somalis are using both Soviet and American-made weaponry for the most part. The predominant is the Kalashnikov, the AK-47, with its signature banana clip. You definitely see American Browning .50 caliber machine guns mounted on the back of Somali technicals. You also see Russian Dushka heavy machine guns as well. So during the Cold War, there were huge stockpiles of both American and Soviet-made weapons at their disposal. Both countries were major arms suppliers at different points during the Cold War. So there were also numerous amounts of weapons, ammunition going in and out of the city, acquired before and after the regime of the former president, Mohammed Sayyad Barre. So weapons begin to filter through the Somalia from Egypt, from Libya, Kenya, from countries near the Persian Gulf, through the black market. So these heavily armed militias were known as the Moriyan. They’re basically these young Somali gunmen who are recruited from refugee camps and trained as militia. So they fell also into the drunk trade and with warlords controlling the flow of cot, as I mentioned as well. They would hand out the drug to these militias and giving them, obviously, as we talked about, the much more aggressive potency of the drug. You’re basically creating these soldiers who are not going to run away from the fight. As you see, they are standing firm, going out of windows, rooftops. Every which way they can conduct an effective urban combat type of battle, they’re going to do that. So Aidid was able to really round up, organize, an effective fighting force within really minutes or maybe even a few hours. As Major General David Meade noted, he was the command of the U.S. Army’s 10th Mountain Division in August of 1993, and only really a quick reaction force of reinforcements, again, preventing the engineers and the tankers from being under attack, overwhelmed and killed, he wrote. So the attack was troublesome, as he mentioned, because of the boldness and the commitment to Aidid’s forces to the apparent planning that went into it. So General Meade estimated between 300 and 500 Somali fighters had assembled, bringing peacekeepers in particular at that point in time under fire on a regular basis. So this is before even a major combat operation is launched. They’re putting these forces against peacekeepers. So they have these really well-coordinated, well-rehearsed scenarios. Okay, when this group comes in, we’re going to hit them here, or we’re going to hit them here, we’re going to trap them here, we’ll let them out here. So when that– really what has changed is that the militiamen, as far as when they were better organized, where the United Nations had sort of took over the Somalia operation in May of ’93, they saw them far more ready to use command-detonated mines, making it more difficult for U.S. forces to attack. You worry about mines and IEDs, you’re really going to– they’ll pay attention using roadblocks, mortar attacks, and ambushes to great effect as well. So it’s also important to note that Somali fighters were also highly experienced. They’ve been fighting the civil war for the better part of the last five or six years. They handle large caliber weapons. Women and children are also fighters as well. So most of the Rangers and even a lot of the Deltas did not have that continuous, sustained combat experience. There were some who had obviously probably seen Operation Desert Storm to a limited degree, but for the most part, in the 1980s, you had these sort of limited operations. The 160th Delta and Rangers were involved in Operation Just Cause, which happened in 1989, taking Manuel Noriega and that whole situation there when George Bush had just become president. So again, most of the Rangers and Delta are fighting an experienced– the average militiaman, even a small child might have experience, and you really don’t know. So it can certainly complicate a typical battle where you’re trying to search house to house for the enemy and try to limit civilian casualties at the same time. That’s something that’s not easy to do, as we see. The scene where Eddie Uric is kind of– he gets lost down an alleyway. He ends up in a school with some young children and a teacher, and he’s telling them to be quiet, and the father and his son are hunting them outside with their AK-47s. He slips, and the son shoots his father on accident and goes to hug him, and he’s dying there as the son, whose arms are around him. That’s the kind of thing that they would experience. It wasn’t just 20-, 30-year-old men. They’re fighting men and children of all ages and all genders.

Dan LeFebvre
>> That really puts a lot more into perspective too, I mean, cuz you think of, if you’re just watching the movie and you think, okay, there’s Delta Force and they’re fighting battles against just civilians that just have been armed with weapons, but there’s more to it than that, than just they’re handing out. Not in this movie, but you see movies where they just have weapons that they just hand out to people as they’re running to the battle, right?

Joshua Donohue
Yeah, you see that in the film.

Dan LeFebvre
And you almost think that that might.

Joshua Donohue
Like right when they are launching the mission and you see where the young child is holding up the phone, and then he calls to the other young boy. He throws the phone down, and it gives it to the head Somali– one of the head Somali militiamen there, and then they go right into– Bacara Market is really what it is, but it’s a market for weapons. They’re just selling assault rifles and ammunition right on the streets, and they’re just going– at any given moment, if there’s an attack, they can gather a good amount of weaponry and use it at their disposal at pretty much a moment’s notice.

Dan LeFebvre
>> Earlier you mentioned Super Six Four, and if we go back to the movie, we see everyone is trying to secure Super Six One’s crash site. And then the unimaginable happens, another Black Hawk helicopter, Super Six Four, is hit. And at first, according to the movie, they think at first it’s gonna be okay, but then we see the tail rotor kind of sputters a little bit and then it flies off. And now there are two Black Hawk helicopters down. How well does the movie do showing the second crash?

Joshua Donohue
So a number of years ago, I read Mike Durant’s book. It came out about 10 years after the battle. It’s called In the Company of Heroes, and he details the sequence of events that occurs. So he describes the RPG hitting his Black Hawk. He definitely feels the impact, but he and his co-pilot Ray Frank are able to continue flying the MH-60 for, as he describes, and then hearing Matthews in the C-2 bird telling him, as you see in the film, that you’re hit pretty bad. You might be okay trying to sit down on the airfield and have it get checked out. He recalls that conversation, and Durant then describes how he wants to try to avoid landing anywhere in the city. He doesn’t want to land right in the middle of a firefight. He makes the decision to try and land– make the landing field, which is about 2 miles away from Mogadishu. So a few seconds later, the tail rotor assembly completely explodes and disintegrates. Again, they show a really good visual of that as it’s kind of flying through that column of smoke, and it’s kind of–you see it’s rotating, and it’s off-center, and it eventually disintegrates.

Dan LeFebvre
>> Kind of wobbles a little bit and then just, yeah.

Joshua Donohue
Yeah, so the tail rotor basically counters the torque that’s created by the main rotor. So once that balance is effectively disrupted, the helicopter is going to spin like this. So Durant and Ray Frank are wrestling the controls, trying to counter the spin, trying to pull the engine levers above them offline, but the centrifugal force created from the spin makes it nearly impossible to pull the engine levers, which the pilots were attempting to do at the time. Ray Frank, I think, gets a few of them, but not all of them. And in a chilling sort of audio, when Super 64 crashes, as happens in the film and also in real life, you hear Mike Durant yell “Ray” as soon as the helicopter goes down, and Durant and Ray Frank have managed to land the helicopter flat. It actually comes down and crushes a dwelling that they land right on the middle of it, whereas Super 61 landed with much more of an uncontrolled sort of violent impact. So whatever Durant and Ray Frank were able to do, they were able to somehow, someway, in this cluster of tin roof air in the middle of a neighborhood, just land it right down flat. So Durant then recalls waking and realizing how badly he’s injured in the crash. Two of his vertebrae are crushed together. His right leg is broken on the edge of the seat of the Blackhawk. The seats that were meant to actually absorb a hard landing do its job, but Durant crashes extremely hard, and they basically say he tested that seat well beyond its limits. So Durant then recalls a conversation that he has with Ray Frank, who has suffered similar injuries as he has. They have a brief exchange, then Ray Frank tells him, “I’m gonna step out of the helicopter.” He moves himself out the door, and that’s the last time that Durant would ever see him alive. So in the back of Super 64, our crew chiefs, Bill Cleveland and Tommy Field, are grievously injured by the crash. It’s believed that both men will die not too long afterwards. Durant quickly realizes that the Somalis are on their way to the crash site. He can hear gunfire getting closer, and he’s preparing then to fire his gun out the window at any oncoming militiamen. So there were several photographs taken of Super 64 in the days after the battle. One photo that I came across that I’d never actually seen before, it’s rare, it shows the tail section of Super 64, and you can see the shrapnel damage created by that RPG right in the back of the tail. So it’s pretty striking how much, how successful they are, getting not one, but two, and as we’ll talk about a little bit, there are other Black Hawks that will sustain hits from RPGs as well, not just those two.

Dan LeFebvre
>> Well, I guess it kind of goes to, I mean, they’re not, different crashes, they’re not gonna be the same, the way they’re hitting stuff. But for RPGs, correct me if I’m wrong, but they don’t target, it’s not like you think of a heat seeking missile or anything, it’s not anything like that. So it’s almost like, I’d say pure luck that they hit it, that sounds wrong. But how is the accuracy of that? I mean, I would assume that it’s just kind of, you shoot up and you hope that it hits.

Joshua Donohue
Yeah, it’s not a guided weapon. I think a lot of, probably some of the concerns of a lot of the commanders there at the time where there’s what’s called NANPADS, or what’s called a Stinger missile, which is a shoulder-launched, heat-seeking guided missile that once you lock on to an aircraft or a helicopter and that missile’s fired, that thing is going to go straight at its target where…

Dan LeFebvre
>> Use that one in Call of Duty, yeah.

Joshua Donohue
Yeah, exactly. Where you have an RPG, it simply, you fire it, it has a rock, sort of like a motor, a spinning propeller motor at the end of it, and it makes that very distinct whirring sound as it goes by you. But once it loses its momentum, it just basically, it just arcs over and just kind of drops down and then it explodes. So you kind of have to be in a spot where the momentum is going to, that projectile is going to go straight up into its target and you’re not really going to have to be sort of lobbing it or arcing, you have to make a really direct shot at the helicopter. And if you see in the film, a couple of RPGs are shot at Durant’s helicopter, one hits and another kind of shoots over it, and it kind of, the physics of it gives you an idea of what the flight of the rocket around itself would do in flight. So I think that, you know, that really Scott just does a phenomenal job there. And again, it’s not a, it’s a dangerous thing to fire one of these things. You’re supposed to shoot it straight ahead, not up. But they’ve again, rehearsed and practiced this and it is again, successful and it turns out to be successful again, as I mentioned, multiple times, not just against Super 6-1 and Super 6-4.

Dan LeFebvre
>> Yeah, I’m glad you mentioned the other one that the movie shows missing. And we talked about it before with Blackburn, the movie shows another one that gets shot and missing. So you get to see this sense of, it’s not just like they shot twice and happened to hit two helicopters. It was, you’re shooting and just you happen to hit some of them, but you’re shooting a lot in the air.

Joshua Donohue
Because these Blackhawks would fly in such a low orbit that if there’s somebody, if someone’s on a roof or has direct line of sight and you’re out in the open and you’re brave enough to go out there and not get caught off guard by a Little Bird or another Blackhawk or the Blackhawk you’re shooting at, you have a pretty good clear line of sight and you can certainly, as the Somali militiamen prove, make that shot and again, to great effectiveness that they know just by the lessons that they’d learned. And this is all playing right into Adid’s strategy because he knows that they’re not going to run away. They’re going to go right to those crash sites and he now has the ability to effectively trap the Americans inside the city itself.

Dan LeFebvre
>> Well, at this point in the movie’s timeline, there’s two crash sites. And according to the movie, there’s a scene in the Joint Operations Center where they kind of lay out the situation once the second Blackhawk goes down. It’s laid out to General Garrison there. And according to the movie, there’s ground forces in several buildings. They’re all kind of spread out. Eversman’s Chalk 4 has a perimeter set up around Super 6-1’s crash site. They were the first helicopter to go down. And then Captain Steele has about 40 men a couple blocks away, but they’ve suffered a lot of injuries, so they can’t all move. And a small Delta Force team under Sergeant Sanderson is leaving Steele’s position to go try to establish a perimeter around Super 6-4’s crash site. Is that a pretty good snapshot of what the situation was like after Super 6-4 went down?

Joshua Donohue
Yeah, it is. As conditions continue to deteriorate and the mission had effectively bogged down because as I mentioned, as the Super 6-1 crash site, Cliff Walcott’s body is crushed inside with the helicopter so they have to literally cut the helicopter apart. They tried digging him out from below. That’s not successful. So they are frantically trying to get his body out. So that is kind of complicating things. Keeping the perimeter around the crash site. There’s about 99 Rangers taking up defensive positions within the buildings in the growing shadows of now nightfall is starting to happen on the city of the northern crash site. So they treat their wounded. They work to free, again, Super 6-1 pilot, Chief Warrant Officer Cliff Walcott’s remains from the wreckage. And while all holding off these frantic Somali militias that were trying to get to them as quickly as possible. So as I mentioned, you see in the film where Star 4-1 with Meyer and Keith Jones coming in to get Dan Bush and a number of the other guys out of there, the severely wounded guys out of the crash site. There’s another part that you don’t see in the film. A combat search and rescue, or CSARBUR as it’s known, was dispatched in Blackhawk Super 6-8. So this one was led by Captain Bill Coltrop and a 15-man CSAR team, including, as I mentioned, the United States Air Force Sergeant Scott Fales and Sergeant Timothy Wilkinson. They are USAF para-rescue men. So they, Staff Sergeant Jeffrey Bray is among there, to mention him as well. They fast-roped down to Super 6-1’s crash site, and rappelling down an SNA RPG would hit Super 6-8 as well. It nearly severs the main rotor blades, and Super 6-8 is piloted by Dan Gelada, Chief Warrant Officer Dan Gelada, and Major Herb Rodriguez, and they’re able to limp the helicopter back to base. I think Rodriguez is knocked unconscious, and Gelada has to fly the helicopter pretty much single-handedly and limp this thing, fuel’s pouring out of it. That helicopter takes a major hit as well. So Wilkinson then moves quickly to the front of Super 6-1 on the ground. Delta soldier Sergeant McMahon, who was in the back of Super 6-1 when it crashed, he is already on top of the bird, trying to pull out Donovan “Bull” Briley out of the passenger seat, out of the co-pilot seat, and Briley was obviously dead. He had suffered a major injury, a head injury. His body was, again, brought out. Wilkinson then helps McMahon pull other survivors that they carry them over to, as I mentioned, the casualty collection area in around the crash site itself. So then McMahon goes to get medical attention for his own injuries. So the helicopter itself had not exploded. There was no major fire. It had just simply dropped, and it was just quiet. There was no violent fire or explosions or anything like that. Captain Steele’s primary objective at this point was to consolidate his forces and gain some semblance of order on the ground and to pinpoint exactly where his men were in relation to his position in a courtyard area, which had been set up as a casualty collection point where the dead and wounded were being assembled. Delta operator Sergeant First Class Earl Fillmore had been killed on the way to the crash site, and this also came as a shock to many of the men who knew him. Tom Satterly, one of the Delta operators there, talks about his death and Dan Bush and the Delta guys as the Rangers. We’re all really, really tight with one another, and all of these guys are getting killed out there, and they’re thinking to themselves, “These guys who I’ve been training with and have known all these years are dying, where’s that–what am I going to– where does that leave me?” So Captain Mike Steele had lost contact with Matt Eversman’s Chalk 4. As you see during the battle, Lieutenant Larry Perino’s men would occupy a small tin shed. It was only a few yards away from Super 6-1. So it was around this time when Corporal Jamie Smith was shot, as you see in the film. Medic Kurt Schmidt and Larry Perino would drag Smith into a courtyard where the horses realized the bullet had severed his femoral artery. So that pretty much stalls any kind of rescue operation that’s going–because now they have Smith, who’s bleeding out in the middle of the street of Mogadishu. He’s dying, and Perino, then, radios Captain Steele and tells him that he has many wounded, he cannot move. So in the film, it’s actually Kurt Schmidt and Eversman, as you see working on Jamie Smith’s leg wound, but in reality, it’s actually Larry Perino, not Eversman, that’s with Kurt Schmidt, as they’re trying to clamp his arteries shut, and they can’t find it, it’s retracted up into his hip. So as dust begins to settle over Mogadishu, and one of the many examples of the brave pilots of the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment risking their lives to help their fellow soldiers on the ground, a Blackhawk Super 6-6, piloted by Chief Warrant Officers Stan Wood and Gary Fuller, would hover their Blackhawk over Marahan Road for a much-needed resupply. Delta operators in the back are literally shoving kit bags out of the helicopter with water, ammunition, IV bags. The helicopter was hit several times by gunfire, even damaging the transmission. So the pilots of the bird kept that thing steady right above the city, and they were able to resupply successfully and bring the bird back out again. So if you were flying a helicopter, especially a Blackhawk in low orbit over that city that day, you were going to draw fire, an intense amount of fire, as you see, as soon as they get in that vulnerable hold, that hovering pattern, they’re just a sitting duck. Yeah, they really are. And it just kind of gives you a snapshot of exactly what the situation on the streets of Mogadishu were going into from the evening of October 3rd into the next morning of October 4th. So part of the– when I was researching it, I came across one of the Delta operators who was there. I’ll mention him a little bit later on too. His name is Paul Howe, and he’s actually the character that Sanderson is, William Fichter’s guy, I mentioned that earlier. And I mentioned Tom Satterly, who was one of the Delta operators there. And this particular document– it’s almost a documentary, but it’s just Paul Howe talking for three hours about how the Deltas basically conducted the operation, how the Rangers’ leadership was, in many words, inept. He really goes after Captain Steele. So there’s a bit of a disconnect there between the guys on the ground, between the Deltas and the Rangers, a little bit of, okay, Paul Howe talks about he was along that same roadway hunkering down that night, and Satterly says, “I just remember how angry Paul Howe was that night. He was fuming that the mission had gone so badly, and he was literally taking his anger out on every possible person. He sees a Ranger in a wrong spot. “What are you doing? You’re not fighting. Dude, go over there and do it this way.” So he was literally lecturing the Rangers that night that he was just so– had all this pent-up energy, and things had just gone so badly that that description of it– and as I mentioned, that documentary is quite telling, Speaking of the different helicopters, if we go back to the movie, but we’ll get to that later on.

Dan LeFebvre
we see Sanderson’s team can’t get to the Super 64 crash site before another Black Hawk in the area notices that there’s hundreds of Somalian militia just heading to the crash site. So in the movie, we see two Delta snipers, Sugar and Gordon, requesting permission to cover the crash site until ground troops can get there. But they’re denied that request because command doesn’t want to risk another helicopter. Of course, in the movie, we see two of them crash, but as you’re talking about, there’s even more that got hit as well, so it makes sense. But then in the movie, they volunteer to go on the ground after they acknowledge that this means they’re probably going to be on their own. But we see the two Delta snipers, Sugar and Gordon, go on the ground, and they manage to pull out one of the surviving pilots, Durant, away from Super 64’s crash site. But then despite some heroic fighting on their part, the two snipers are overrun by militia. Durant is almost killed, but he’s taken captive instead. And at the end of the movie, we don’t have to go too far ahead, but we find out that Durant was released after 11 days of captivity, while Sugar and Gordon were the first soldiers to receive the Medal of Honor posthumously since the Vietnam War. How well does the movie do telling this part of the story?

Joshua Donohue
It’s about as close to the actual story as you could possibly get. The Black Hawk, which carried Randy Chigart and Gary Gordon, which was Super 6-2, followed by Mike Grafina, who was a good friend of Mike Durant’s, and Jim Racone. When Super 6-2 drops the two Delta snipers on the ground, the helicopter is also hit by an RPG. So this makes four Black Hawks hit by RPGs, and Super 6-2 is hit, and CSAR Bird Super 6-8 is hit. And then this RPG severely damages the Black Hawk and also severely wounds the Delta operator who’s in the back, Delta operator Brad Hauling. He loses his left leg as a result of this RPG hit. So Mike Grafina is able to limp his stricken Black Hawk back to the airfield. Again, it is severely damaged by this RPG. And Durant recalls when he’s at the helicopter and he’s trying to reorient himself, and he sees the Somali militia coming at him, as you see in the film. He sees Chigart and Gordon come around the aircraft and say, as you see in the film, he knocks on the helicopter, says, “Friendlies,” and they start firing. So he actually refers to them as Batman and Robin. They just had that, almost that superhero-like aura about them. They had just come out of nowhere and had this, again, this heroic presence about them. It lifted him out of the Black Hawk, placed him down just a short distance away, propped him up against the wall, and gave him a loaded MP5. So Durant says that they didn’t really say much to him other than ask him about his injuries. They went back around the front of the helicopter and started firing at the gathering crowd that was converging on the helicopter. So Durant actually recalls that Chigart and Gordon took Bill Cleveland, who was one of the Super 64 crew chiefs, placed him near Durant. Durant said that he was kind of incoherent. He can hear him talking but couldn’t really make out what he was saying. Obviously, he was severely injured from the crash, and that he knew he was in great pain, and he was soaked in blood. So Durant, as badly injured as he was, kept his head and really thought to himself that he was going to be rescued at any moment, and that he recounts the volume of AK-47 fire increasing as Chigart and Gordon kept up their fire against the large crowd. So as we see, Gary Gordon is killed, and then eventually Randy Chigart is killed as well. And I think the sequence of events that occurs is pretty accurate. Durant tells the story in such vivid detail. He says he was out of ammunition. He took the weapon, he put it on his chest, crossed his arms over his chest, and just looked up to the sky as the mob ascended upon him. And they just were beating him and just were yanking his gear off. He has a compound fracture of his leg.

Dan LeFebvre
I was going to say, he’s already injured, and then, yeah.

Joshua Donohue
His back is severely injured. I mean, he’s now in this predicament where you also see somebody come over and just absolutely hit him square across the face. It breaks his nose, his eye socket, his orbital, his cheekbone, and this actually does occur. He thinks to himself, “This is it. I’m done. I’m never going to be able to–this is going to be my last couple of breaths on Earth.” And as you see, the mob is quickly broken up by a couple of shots to the air. One of the Somali militiamen realizing that if we capture Durant alive, he could be of good value to us in terms of some kind of ransom. They were using food basically as currency. The more food shipments they’re receiving, that’s basically as good as money. You’re controlling the money, the food, and you’re controlling the entire power base more or less. Ideed’s men did have this sort of awareness of, “You know what? How could this benefit the militia? How is this going to benefit Muhammad Farah Ideed?” So there was that sense that capturing one of the Americans alive will not only have great propaganda value, but will also sort of shift the entire midi, the mood of the public opinion to our side more or less.

Dan LeFebvre
>> I’m assuming then the other, Cleveland, I think you said, right?

Joshua Donohue
Bill Cleveland did not survive.

Dan LeFebvre
I’m assuming he didn’t survive.

Joshua Donohue
And from all accounts, from what I can tell, as we see what happens in real life– and I remember this very well when I was– I had just started high school when this happened. And I vividly remember two things. I remember Mike Durant’s face in captivity, the picture of his face in the picture of his face is bloody, you can see the fear in his eyes. And I remember, and I believe by all accounts, Bill Cleveland is one of the American servicemen that’s dragged to the streets. And that happens. CNN showed those images right after the battle. So that part of it, the soldiers being dragged to the streets, those are the men of Super Six Four. [AUDIO OUT]

Dan LeFebvre
>> Wow.

Joshua Donohue
[AUDIO OUT]

Dan LeFebvre
If we go back to the movie, we had talked earlier about kind of what the original plan was, and we talked a lot about what happened in the skies with the helicopters,

Joshua Donohue
[AUDIO OUT]

Dan LeFebvre
but according to the original plan in the movie, Sergeant McKnight’s convoy of Humvees

Joshua Donohue
[AUDIO OUT]

Dan LeFebvre
was supposed to take everybody back to base camp, including the prisoners. But then in the chaos of the battle, McKnight’s convoy takes heavy fire.

Joshua Donohue
[AUDIO OUT]

Dan LeFebvre
Many of the soldiers are killed or wounded.

Joshua Donohue
[AUDIO OUT]

Dan LeFebvre
They’re low on ammo, and so we see Garrison asking McKnight for a no-BS analysis

Joshua Donohue
[AUDIO OUT]

Dan LeFebvre
of whether or not he can actually get to the crash site. McKnight says, “We’re going to do more harm than good if we do that,”

Joshua Donohue
[AUDIO OUT]

Dan LeFebvre
so they go back to base camp to rearm and regroup. Can you give an overview of how accurately the movie portrays McKnight’s convoy?

Joshua Donohue
[AUDIO OUT] In terms of the communications that day, as I told you earlier, as the situation on the streets of the city got more and more chaotic and confused, while I was researching it, I was able to hear some audio of the transmissions that were going on. And as I mentioned, you see in the film, “McKnight’s Convoy,” there was a delay from the JSOC to the C2 bird, from JSOC, from the surveillance to the C2 bird with Colonel Matthews and Harrell, then down to the ground elements. So this proved to be costly. And I listened to some of these transmissions, and you really get a clearer picture of exactly what these communication issues were plaguing, how they were plaguing the operation. In one transmission, you hear, quote, unquote, “Continue to take the next right. Turn southbound.” Then you hear a relay, “Next right, next right.” And then all of a sudden you hear, “Alleyway, alleyway.” And then if a long period of silence occurs, “Turn right.” And then you hear a garbled transmission, then all of a sudden, “King element, they just missed their turn. Roger. Take the next available right. Uniform.” Then, “Take the next available right.” That can be blocked. It can be, you know, whatever the case is. Then they have to completely take the convoy back around and what you see happens in the film, in the points where McKnight’s saying, “We just drove through there. Where are you taking us, basically?” And as they’re driving through, still, they’re getting shot to pieces. And another piece of communique you hear is, “Be advised, they’re coming under heavy fire.” And a long delay, then you hear, “Damn it, stop. Damn it, stop.” That they had missed the turn, that they have to hit the brakes, turn back around. And then you hear the relay, “Call me when uniform links up.” We’re still trying to get them into the area. You’re going to have to mark with smoke. Hopefully, we’ll get them close enough to where you can link up. Then it’s again, “Right turn, right turn.” Then they’re always, they’re taking more and more fire. So, as I mentioned, McKnight talks about armor and Garrison mentions armor. Defense Secretary Les Aspin denies that request. And you have to sort of enhance the Humvees with this armor because Hal brings up, as I mentioned, another Delta operator who the last one to lose his life, Matt Ryerson. He appears, Hal appears frustrated with this operation. And since information wasn’t really being passed to the convoy, there was a seven to eight second delay. So, they may really go through one or two intersections not realizing that they’d really missed their turn. So, the radio transmission you hear from McKnight is, “I’ve got a lot of vehicles. It’ll almost be impossible to move with all these casualties that I have getting to the crash site. It’s going to be awful tough. We’re pinned down.” And the reply back, most likely from Colonel Harrell is, “Danny, I really need you to get to that crash site. I know you turned west on Armed Forces Road. What’s your status?” And McKnight replies back, “This is Uniform 64. I have numerous casualties. We have vehicles that are halfway running. We’ve got to get these casualties out of here ASAP, back to the base. We need to get to the K4, over.” So, the fire was just so intense. And McKnight himself is actually hit in the neck, as you see in the film. And they tried a movement from the K4 traffic circle, which they’d also mentioned in the film. But that particular area, as the 10th Mountain Division found out, it was like running a gauntlet. They would have taken even more casualties if they continued to try and push towards the crash site. So, listening to more of that radio traffic going back and forth from the JOC to the C2 burn, McKnight continues to cause– this really causes issues for his convoy getting around. They’re completely lost at this point. And it goes to the point where you hear the transmission, “K55, stop giving directions.” And for a second, you’re talking to the wrong convoy. So, that’s really how badly things are deteriorating. It’s also important to remember that I.D.’s forces were quite effective in positioning, again, as I mentioned, the roadblocks for both Super 6-1 and Super 6-4. I.D. wants to trap the Americans inside the city and not allow any rescue attempts from the outside. And again, it’s– most of the prisoners that they capture, the 20 or so prisoners, are either shot or killed on the way back from their own men. They’re only shot in the back of these trucks as they’re trying to get through the city. So, a lot of these guys they capture in the initial stages of the operation, they don’t make it. [end]

Dan LeFebvre
>> Wow. I think we do see a little bit here. At this point, we see some of those blockades that you were talking about, like, as they’re trying to navigate down the road. They’re like, “Oh, can’t go that way. Nope. Can’t go that way. We have to go almost all the way around the city.” And it just — I’m thinking of, you know, nowadays when I’m navigating, you know, with GPS, it’s like, “Turn right,” you know? But you have — if you just throw that delay and then also streets that you’re not familiar with, some of them are blocked, and then you’re being shot at the whole time. It’s just chaos, I can imagine.

Joshua Donohue
And it really makes you go back to that conversation where McKnight tells Harold and Matthews, “Life’s imperfect for you to circle it above it at 500 feet.” And it’s, again, one of those things where, you know, they just didn’t have that familiarity with the city. Again, the Somalis knew exactly where to pinpoint those roadblocks, where to go, which alleyways, which streets led to where, using those tire fires to get people to those areas as quickly as possible. So, they–credit to them, they really knew how to effectively trap the Americans because, again, this is playing right into the hands of Muhammad Farid Deed’s goal, is to trap the Americans in the city because they know they’re not going to leave their fellow soldiers behind.

Dan LeFebvre
>> Well, you mentioned the 10th Mountain, and if we return to the movie’s timeline, with things going from bad to worse, General Garrison makes the decision to call the 10th Mountain Division with the UN tanks, APCs, whatever it takes to get the stranded soldiers out of there. But the catch, according to the movie, is that the UN doesn’t know anything about this mission. It seems like the mission was kept secret from the UN troops nearby, and that’s why, at least according to the movie, when they talk about how it’ll take a couple hours at least to mobilize the 10th Mountain and 100 vehicles, since they didn’t know about this mission, so they weren’t really prepared for it, of course, General Garrison says they don’t have that long. But the movie doesn’t really talk much about the 10th Mountain’s preparation and role in the American soldiers being rescued. Does the movie do a good job of showing how and when the 10th Mountain got involved?

Joshua Donohue
Well, that’s probably the one part where I might have to push it into why I gave it the A-, because the 10th Mountain

Dan LeFebvre
[ Laughter ]

Joshua Donohue
had a really prominent role in the battle, and there’s actually quite a bit more to the story as far as the 10th Mountain’s division in the battle. They are based out of Fort Drum, New York. They are deployed alongside the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force out of Camp Pendleton, California, when George H.W. Bush authorizes the deployment of Somalia in December of 1992. So the actions of what’s known as Task Force 214 during the Battle of Mogadishu in this time period, shortly after the murders of the Pakistani peacekeepers, the 2nd Battalion, 14th Infantry, serves as– as I mentioned earlier, the quick reaction force, QRF. So the 10th Mountain had engaged with IDID’s militiamen and firefights on numerous occasions leading up to the battle. They had been really a liaison to Brigadier General Craig Nixon from Task Force Ranger. So he had helped coordinate operations between the 10th Mountain and Task Force Ranger. So QRF units are sent to respond to any needs of the UN mission, conducting raids, helping security down aircraft. So 214 was supposed to come to the aid of the Rangers and Deltas when Super 6-1 was shot down. They came–they drove from the airfield in an area, as I mentioned, known as the K4 Traffic Circle, where they see a group of Rangers in another column approaching from the opposite direction. So as the Ranger convoy and the other elements from the 10th hit the K4 Traffic Circle, they’re attacked immediately by Somali gunmen. So the convoy of the 10th Mountain gets to National Street where the right turn into there is cut off by a roadblock. They proceed north to a milk factory, which is completely blocked off and surrounded by flames. They then had to turn around and reassemble, and they didn’t have the equipment to break through these barriers. They had to turn and run back through the hail of fire the opposite way. So the 10th Mountain divisions then ordered to link up with a few of the Malaysian mechanized infantry companies and pick up a couple of Pakistani tank platoons at the new port, which is located just outside of the city. So it did, as you mentioned, take quite a bit of time to coordinate with the other tanks, the APC commanders, letting everyone know what the plan is. So they decide to take the route through the city staging area to avoid the chaos of the KFOR traffic circle. So they move into the city or turn onto National Street, which literally puts them in an area between both crash sites. So they commandeer these white armored vehicles that have giant UN on the side of them. So nothing like a giant target, especially when it’s dark out. These white vehicles stand out against the darkness. Because Ewan McGregor’s got that thing where he says these things are bullet-magnets, and that’s the truth. And so they’re going to have to fight, again, in these white vehicles standing out in the darkness. So they’re getting hit on all sides. They’re getting hit with RPGs. So Alpha Company has to dismount their vehicles during this firefight, and that’s when the 10th will lose a prior first-class James Martin, and he will be hit in the fight. They’ll also lose Sergeant Cornell Houston, who was wounded in the chest by gunfire and dies a couple of days later. So Lieutenant Colonel Lee Van Arsdale, a Delta leader who is on the ground, began to organize an exfil from the crash site. Once Wolcott’s body is pulled out of Super 6-1, he then puts the 10th in the lead. He describes this pretty well, that he felt that they, the QRF, should be the element that leads everyone out of the city. He also praises the company commander, Captain Drew Marovitch, and First Sergeant David Meena. Delta operators would be directly behind the 10th, and the Rangers would be the very last out of the city, as we’ll find out later on.

Dan LeFebvre
>> The way that the movie seems to portray it, I guess I understand you’re knocking it from A to A minus here, but it seems like there’s so much more there, but the movie is focusing more on what’s happening there in the city and not so much, you know, all of this preparation outside of it. But was the movie correct to suggest that they didn’t know anything that was going on? So, I mean, the impression I got, I guess, from the movie was you have these helicopters that crashed, but then there also just happened to be all of these troops over here that were completely oblivious to it and didn’t know anything about what was going on.

Joshua Donohue
And there is definitely truth to that, because, and they talk about it, how you get the sense in the film, when Captain Steele opens the door, and they tell people, “Kate, you’re going to have to go up on the roof.” And it’s like, “I’m not going up on the roof. Are you kidding me?” And they already have so many dead and wounded, they’re literally stacking them on top of these vehicles, that there’s no room on the inside. I mean, they had just barely enough space to get these men out. So, there’s that hesitancy that you sense from the Pakistani and Malaysian contingent of the forces there. And the other thing to note is, a lot of the, I think this was one of the, it may have been Eversman or one of the other, maybe Craig Nixon mentioned this, but there wasn’t, they kind of give you the sense that there wasn’t that fighting spirit in their Pakistani counterparts, that they say that a typical patrol mission for one of the, either the Pakistani peacekeepers or the armored crews, they would go out on a convoy, go maybe a few miles down the road to an area where they would think dangerous, turn right back around and come back, and that was the mission. So, that was about the extent of the mission from that standpoint. So, there was a bit of confusion and delay going on, saying, “Okay, we have to get these forces into the city right now. There can’t be any hesitation. Lives are at stake.” So, the film definitely does give you an accurate depiction of what goes on. They’re assembling inside of a Pakistani soccer stadium. So, that’s really where the rendezvous point is, or the staging area, I should say, where they’re going to channel all this armor, all the convoy that’s going to blast their way into the city and get everybody out.

Dan LeFebvre
Well, speaking of, at the very end of the movie, we do see the 10th Mountain extracting the American soldiers. We see Sergeant McKnight, who made the decision to go back. He was back at the camp, but then he ends up deciding to go back with them to try to get everybody out. Unfortunately, as you alluded to, the APCs and vehicles fill up fast with the wounded, so there’s not enough room for everybody. So we see some of the soldiers actually forced to run alongside the vehicles, and it doesn’t take long in the movie. It seems in the movie it’s like they’re just — like the vehicles are trying to get out of there as fast as they can, and it doesn’t take long for these guys who are running along beside — they can’t run as fast, so they have to fight their way back to the base almost. And then the movie seems to imply that everybody has returned to base, but then at the very final scene — you mentioned him earlier, the character of Hoot, Eric Bannis’ character — he mentions that he’s going back out. There’s still more men out there, so he’s going to go back out with another team, but we never really get to see that because the movie comes to an end. So how well does the movie do showing this extraction, and then were there really soldiers out there like the movie seemed to imply at the end?

Joshua Donohue
Yeah, yeah, there was. The soldiers who had to literally run out of the city, and it’s been… The one thing I was looking more into, that’s called the Mogadishu Mile. Even given the term, which was a running out of the city, it’s been sort of… I’ve heard different accounts of it. Kenny Thomas has a pretty good description of it, saying basically, “We were trying to get… All of a sudden, the vehicles just took off, and we were basically out in the open.” And that’s really what you see depicted in the film. So, the rescue convoy launched multinational forces between 12 and 1 o’clock in the morning. They come under intense fire, as I mentioned, coming down national. They get to the trapped men. The volume of the fire was preventing them from being reached, and the dead were being stacked on top of the vehicles, the wounded inside. They were still trying to get Cliff Walcott’s body out of Super 6-1 at the time. It was nearly 6 o’clock in the morning on October 4, 1993, as the last of the convoy begins to depart to the Pakistani soccer stadium. And as I mentioned, Paulson, one of the gunners in the convoy, also Jeff Strucker, they were leaving, and he’s saying to them, “Hey, I got some guys running behind us.” And Strucker’s response was, “Okay, shoot them.” And Paulson says, “No, I think there are guys.” And sure enough, they were. So, as I mentioned, the Mogadishu Mile, where the Rangers and, as you see, also Delta Force guys are having to run out of the city being fired on from all directions. So when they get to the Pakistani stadium, the scene of what you see is indescribable. The dead and the wounded are just laid out in the open. Bodies are just everywhere. And the adrenaline is effectively worn off from them getting out of the city. But yeah, there are still men trapped in the city, and there will be more men who will go in. I’ll mention Matt Ryerson again. He’s one of them. And again, as I mentioned, he’s the very last of the men who die during the battle. He dies a few days after the battle from a mortar round that strikes and wounds a number of other people. He dies not too long after that. So really from the time that the helicopters were shot down, the time they got out of the city, it is a nightmare having to get in and out of that and having to go to not one, but two crash sites. And as I mentioned, to kind of bring Super Six Four back into the picture, by the time they reach Super Six Four’s crash site, they find nothing. They find pools of blood, spent ammunition shells, no guns, no bodies. Everything is gone. And you see in the helicopter, it’s not a Hooten they show arrives. It’s not him. I think it’s a number of 10th Mountain guys get there, and I believe some of the Deltas will be there at some point as well. They will be in charge of placing thermite on the helicopter to basically destroy any sensitive equipment that might fall into enemy hands. That’s part of the mission as well of any down helicopter. Take Operation Neptune Spear, which is the mission to get Osama bin Laden. If you recall, they use these two stealth Black Hawks, as depicted in the film Zero Dark Thirty, and one of them crashes on the edge of the wall outside of the Abbottabad compound where bin Laden is inside. They have to destroy that helicopter, especially no one even knows that this thing exists, and obviously everyone finds out about it in the days after. That was part of the procedure is they have to destroy the helicopter, but they get everyone out of Super Six One, but they know and they’re well aware that the crew of Super Six One, there’s no sign of anyone. They immediately send up helicopters that night and the next morning calling on a loudspeaker, “Mike Durant, Ray Frank, Bill Cleveland, we’re not leaving you behind,” and you hear that when Durant is captured as well. Yeah, you know, I go back to a moment in the film that occurs when Jeff Strucker’s convoy first gets back with Dominic Pilla’s body and Todd Blackburn in the back of the other Humvee. And there’s a moment, and this really did happen as they show in the film, where Strucker gets out and Hooton is there. They are trying to regather themselves, get more ammunition. There’s a scene where Dale Sizemore has the cast on his arm. He goes to cut it off. He goes, “Okay, okay, okay. Go get your cape out. You can come with us.”

Dan LeFebvre
[laughter] [laughter] No hesitation whatsoever.

Joshua Donohue
That, no hesitation, and which also did happen as well. So that’s the kind of spirit that Yeah.

Dan LeFebvre
Wow.

Joshua Donohue
you’re seeing. Another part of that scene is quite poignant as well, where Strucker comes up to one of the Rangers. It’s Brad Thomas, and he says, “I can’t go back out there again.” He goes, “Listen, it’s what you do right now that makes a difference.” And again, who can blame Thomas? I mean, these guys are going, this is the first combat that these guys have ever experienced, and it’s going to affect people in different ways. I can’t imagine, I’m sure Thomas, he was probably the one that just vocalized exactly how everyone was feeling at the time. “Oh my God, I may not live through this. If I go back into that city and it is where I just came from, it’s going to be worse.” And you’re seeing these guys, Delta guys being killed, the Rangers being killed, the pilots and whatnot. I think it’s fair game. They’re not just going to, someone’s going to hesitate to see a Raider. They are there to kill you. So there’s that moment where Strucker tells Thomas what you do makes a difference. And he gets back in the Humvee, and he distinctly recalls looking in the mirror, as you see in the film, Thomas kind of hesitates, puts his K-Pod back on, grabs his rifle, and gets right back in the Humvee, and he kind of shakes his head. So again, it’s not to bring up any kind of cowardice in any way. Who could blame them? This was something that they had never experienced before. And you also get the sense that these guys know how desperate the situation is. They’re going to go in, and no matter how long it takes, they’re going to get the very, every single person is going to come out of that city one way or the other. As far as the conversation between Eversman and Hooton, a little bit of poetic license there. I think that kind of gives a little bit of a summary of, “This is why we’re doing this.” But I think it also drives home that point as well. And another good, again, this is probably creative license as well, is you have that earlier exchange with the two of them before they go. And he goes, “You don’t think we should be here?” And he goes, that whole thing, once that first bullet goes past your head, politics and all that shit goes right out the window. So there’s this bit of the sense you get from the Ranger element to the Delta element. And I think that’s probably true on some levels, that these Delta guys are just, they’re elite. We’re the cream of the crop, we’re the elite guys of the US Army. And the Rangers, obviously, they’re not an elite unit per se. They’re the cream of the crop as far as the summary for the Ranger. Rangers are the same ones that were scaling the cliffs to point to Hock on Normandy on June 6th, 1944. So Rangers have a pretty proud past and the whole Rangers lead the way all the way, that they’re all bonded together in that situation. I think you start, really Scott gives you that sense that this is why. We will risk our lives to go in, whether we know these guys are alive or dead. If there are people in that city, we are not going to quit until the very last one brought out. Exactly. Yeah, I think that it, as far as I’m concerned, I think that’s the way it’s going to be. As far as the competition element goes, it’s really there from the outset. And once you see the more elite groups emerge within the US military, like Delta Force, of course the Navy with the Navy SEALs, the Green Berets and so on. And even before that, you have competition between just the branches, between the Army versus Navy, Army versus Marines. Competition, oh yeah, it plays out on the athletic fields and on basketball courts You have that on the football field too. I mean, oh yeah. everywhere. Yeah. So there’s always that competitive element. And I think competition is what drives and defines this country in a lot of ways. And especially within the military, it’s even to a higher degree. So the young Rangers naturally looked up to the older Delta operators who exuded this sort of irreverent air of any Army norms. And you see that where with Hooton in the hangar where he’s saying, “Oh no, the Delta Safari? Well, not if General Garrison is asking basically, right? The whole, this is my safety, sir, and all that.” So Delta were strongly encouraged individual initiative. Rank was largely shunned and really with deference to only with the most experienced. This did not really sit well with the Rangers and their company commander, Mike Steele, who by all accounts, who was a really die in the wall Army traditionalist. He saw this as a negative and did the utmost that he could to keep the two units separate. And really he was fearful of any influence of the Delta operators. So the Ranger captain was by all accounts, from what I could tell, a divisive figure in a lot of ways. He actually tried to stop the training sessions that involved Deltas, which wouldn’t really would have helped the Rangers in the battle. And it got to the point where the Rangers would sneak out after dark and attend secret training missions with the Delta operators. So Ranger Kenny Thomas gave his own account of the issues between Steele and some of the members of Delta. Perhaps strikes at the heart of the issue. We quoted Steele as telling him, “It’s not Steele dislike the men of Delta. He believed them to be undisciplined cowboys as the film portrayed. He felt that their methods were quote unquote, not our methods.” In the movie they mention that once the bullet goes by, you know, politics are out the window. Yeah. And from the time the mission launched, each individual soldier knows what he or she But to some degree too, I mean, you still have chain of command and you still have all these structures that still need to be in place.

Dan LeFebvre
But also sometimes you got to do what you got to do to get out of this situation where it’s literally life or death.

Joshua Donohue
has to do, where they have to go. When Super 6-1 went down, it didn’t matter if you’re a Ranger or a Delta or a 10th Mountain, a Navy SEAL, Air Force pararescue, they were all performing their assignments under extremely difficult conditions. And everyone is on the same page when lives are at stake and the military follows again, that creed of no one gets left behind. So the word competition seemingly disappears under these circumstances. And it’s about helping the soldier next to you and bless those medics. They never get the attention that they deserve. Guys like Kurt Schmidt, who feverishly tried to save Corporal Jamie Smith’s life, who he would eventually die from his injury. Or Private Mark Good from 3rd Ranger Battalion, who was the first medic to get to Todd Blackburn when he missed the rope and fell from the Black Hawk. And then I mentioned Delta Sergeant First Class Paul Howe and that three-hour documentary he did about his experience in the military and his time in Somalia. He brings up something interesting. He talks about how training aspects or SOPs or standard operating procedures that the Deltas and the Rangers should have been sort of honing was undermined by the actions of Captain Steele. And he actually calls Steele a rogue captain and arrogant, and that he wanted to do things his own way. And he goes on to say that his chain of command should have reeled him in. And during an after action rehearsal, Steele was told by an E7 about the mission problems, but Steele felt that it should have been handled by officers. Howe then describes how his team were attempting to explain to Steele about the mission, which Steele replies, “Mind your own business, we’ll mind ours.” So in Howe’s opinion, he believes that Steele should have been handled by Howe’s chain of command, but failed to do so. So it also does explain this tension between the Steele character played by Jason Isaacs and the Sanderson character played by William Fechner. So the Sanderson character, as I mentioned, is based on Howe. And the two scenes in particular that are striking, the first is when we see Sanderson conferring with Steele and McKnight as the prisoners are being loaded once before Super 6-1 goes down. Steele asks Sanderson if he’s receiving the order, and Sanderson’s kind of like looking off, not even really paying attention. He goes, “Yeah, I heard you. We should be getting out of here soon.” So you detect that there’s some tension right off the bat. And I think there is some deafened credibility to that. So Sanderson, the other scene is where Sanderson defies Steele’s order to get men into the building and he’s yelling, “What the F are you doing out there?” And he goes, “We got to get people to that crash site.” Howe said that this did somewhat happen during the battle and saying that Steele was saying that Howe had really left him behind. So what’s interesting, because after watching Howe’s assessment of Steele as a combat leader, you can see why there’s this tension between how it plays out on the film itself. So this really did exist. So I think even back to the scene where they’re in the hangar and they’re roasting the wild boar, the whole, the Hooten says, “This is my safety, sir.” It did happen, but not in the same sort of context. It was a little bit more drawn out of a conversation that wasn’t as that whole, that they show. But it does have some truth to it. So Howe even says that Steele should have even brought up on UCMJ and thrown out of the military completely. You were from code of military justice and brought up on court martial. Pretty intense feelings there. So he then talks about McKnight, saying he wasn’t counseled properly, which led to the disconnect that you see. So in many ways, I get a lot of Howe’s points. It does seem to be a bit of a Monday morning quarterback thing where he’s kind of grand stings saying, “Well, the Rangers are here, Delta’s here. And if he did it Delta’s way, things would have been different.” So it’s a bit self-serving, but it also reveals quite a bit. And you can tell that a lot of those deeper interactions that did indeed happen play out in the film. [AUDIO OUT] Yeah. And I wanted to mention also earlier too is one of the main impetuses of getting more special forces is what happens during Operation Eagle Claw in 1980. Paul Howe’s daughter is a man named Chargent Charlie Beckwith, his daughter. He married Beckwith’s daughter. We did the We Were Soldiers thing. Beckwith actually interacts with Joe Galloway and is a part of the special forces base there. So Beckwith is part of the planning, the operational planning for Operation Eagle Claw. Eagle Claw is the mission, a special forces mission that’s organized to try and rescue the US hostages being held in Iran. So this mission fails. There are C-130s involved. One of the helicopters crashes into the planes on the ground. It gets caught in a sandstorm at one point. Five of the helicopters are not operational. So the mission is called off. And then this horrible accident happens. Eight people are killed, the eight Marines and some airmen are killed as well. So the failure of that mission, Eagle Claw in 1980s, right at the end of President Jimmy Carter’s presidency, that is a pretty big wake up call saying, you know what, let’s really refocus our energies on how the lessons from the loss, the tragedy of that mission, what are we going to learn from those lessons and how are we going to apply them to future special operations missions in the future? So that particular mission, the failure of that mission is really what drives the reconditioning, I would say, of Delta Force and the SEALs and all those types of special operations.

Dan LeFebvre
Well, thank you so much for coming on to chat about Blackhawk Down.

Joshua Donohue
Yeah, so I was just in touch with the editor and my article about Everfield is an aspect I believe the last time we talked, you were working on a new article.

Dan LeFebvre
So before I let you go, can you give us an update on what you’ve been working on recently?

Joshua Donohue
of the Pearl Harbor attack that’s a little bit less known about. That’ll be coming out probably towards the end of the year in World War II magazine. Also relaunched my YouTube page at the Freelance Historian. So I plan on doing some big things there probably coming up over the next couple of months. So I’m just kind of doing some odds and ends, some history stuff here and there on there. So I’ve got that going on. And I’ll also be doing a podcast on World War II TV with Paul Woodage, who’s a great historian. He’s based out of France and I’ll be talking about the 70th Infantry Division, March 15th, that’ll be at 2 p.m. So I’ll be doing that. And I also have a book that I contributed to that I wanted to mention. It’s called Son of Wake Island. And it’s sonofwakeisland.com. It’s the second volume of that book as I contributed to the forwarded bunch of photographs that have rare, never been seen before. And I wrote some other stuff in there as well. So that same author, that I’m also working on some other stuff with. We’re collaborating on a new book that’s probably going to come out over the next year or two.

Dan LeFebvre
Fantastic. Well, make sure to add links to those in the show notes Absolutely. Thank you so much. so people can check them out. Thanks again so much for your time.

Joshua Donohue
Thank you. [end]