US SOCOM commemorates 27th anniversary of Gothic Serpent (Battle of Mogadishu)

The anniversary was yesterday.

Video: US Special Operations Command honors the Battle of Mogadishu 27 years ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dAIQwjmtbA0

On October 3rd, 1993, U.S. Forces from Task Force Ranger set out for the Somali city of Mogadishu to capture the Somali warlord Mohammed Farah Aideed.

That day would be remembered years later for the downing of two UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters and the intense urban fighting that followed, coined “Battle of Mogadishu,” which was documented in the book “Black Hawk Down” and inspired the 2001 film of the same name. In remembrance of the battle’s 27th anniversary, the U.S. Special Operations Command (USSOCOM) shared footage from the mission and the subsequent downing of the U.S. helicopters in a Facebook post.

After the helicopters went down, Task Force Ranger worked to protect the crash sites from Somali mobs and a numerically superior force of Somali fighters.

In the resulting battle, 17 members of the task force were killed and 106 more were wounded. Somali death tolls in the battle are estimated in the hundreds.

The U.S. involvement in Somalia began initially as an effort to support U.N. peacekeeping efforts during Operation Restore Hope. Smithsonian Magazine, the U.N. started providing assistance in 1992 for Somalis suffering from famine.

The U.S. forces prepared to intervene after Aideed began attacking those U.N. peacekeepers. According to the Smithsonian, the plan was to arrest two of Aideed’s lieutenants and gathered leaders of his Somali Habar Gidir clan. Rangers planned to helicopter in and deploy from fast-ropes to surround a three-story building in Mogadishu where the militant clan leaders would be gathered.

A ground convoy was prepared to carry away those Rangers and their captives. In total, the plan called for the use of 19 aircraft, 12 vehicles, and about 160 troops; however, what was meant to be a quick “snatch-and-grab” mission became an 18-hour firefight through the urban center of Mogadishu.

In the opening minutes of the operation, Somali crowds gathered to watch the spectacle but eventually turned hostile.

Two of the Black Hawk helicopters were brought down by ground-fire and U.S. forces jumped to action in an effort to rescue those helicopter crews.

Among those rescue efforts, two Delta Force Soldiers Master Sgt. Gary Gordon and Sgt. 1st Class Randy Shughart elected to respond alone to one of the crash sites, despite growing mobs. The two fended off numerous attackers before being overwhelmed and killed as they attempted to save one of the pilots, Michael Durant.

“They were textbook special ops guys,” Durant said in a 2008 interview with Defense Media Network. He said they showed no signs of panic as they held off attacks for about 15 minutes.

Durant was eventually captured by Somali fighters and held prisoner for 11 days.

Gordon and Shughart were later awarded the Medal of Honor for their efforts to rescue durant and defend the downed helicopter.

Despite the professional efforts of U.S. forces, much of the media fallout from the battle fixated on Somali mobs dragging U.S. bodies through the streets of Mogadishu and according to the Smithsonian, then-President Bill Clinton elected to remove U.S. forces from Somalia by March 1994.

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If you're interested, this past May, author John Gresham published an interview with Chief Warrant Officer 4 Michael Durant (Ret.), pilot of Super Six-One of "Blackhawk Down" fame, with some interesting insights. The first installment (and links to the remaining two) is here.

It's amazing to look back at images from this event and realize how far our SpecWar community has come. This was before the M4 carbine was standardized so the Colt 723s/CAR15s they carried were non-standard weapons, the basic design of which had been evolving since Vietnam.

One of their key considerations was barrel length because the snake eaters can't get a barrel short enough to suit them. With the CAR15 they settled on 14.5" because that left enough barrel forward of the gas port to support better reliability (Delta Force Master Sergeant Larry Vickers (Ret) discusses the matter here).

Later they thought they'd found nirvana with the HK416 because its OpRod system can tolerate a much shorter barrel without compromising reliability. SOCOM ran 10.3" bbls for a while but switched to 11.5", not because of reliability but for better terminal ballistics. The 11.5" bbl and the new steel-core M855A1 round is a "Goldilocks" match-up that has proved a phenomenal combination for knocking people down.

The other thing that makes me giggle is the helmets the D-Boys wore. The equipment in the film "Blackhawk Down" is historically correct, they were wearing skateboarding helmets. I shit you not, the Delta Force guys were wearing Pro-Tec (brand) plastic skateboarding helmets. In fact they also wore them in Panama in '89, which was the first time I'd seen them.

https://www.hostpic.org/images/2010050307360170.png
The K-pot of the soldier at far left looks YUGE in comparison

In the 1980s the army had switched from the WWII steel pot to the Kevlar Nazi helmet but the K-pot was so bulky that the SpecWar community found it unsuitable to their requirements. And they couldn't wait for DoD to come up with something to meet their needs so they bought skateboarding helmets as a stopgap. They called them "bump" helmets because that's about all they were intended to protect against -- bumps -- but they were less restrictive to vision than a K-pot, you could stick you helmeted head into a smaller hole, and probably most crucially, it was more commodious to their Comms gear.

In his book Black Hawk Down: A Story of Modern War, Mark Bowden mentions a Delta operator who was struck in the bump helmet by a 7.62 and killed, implying that the lack of a proper ballistic-resistant helmet contributed to his death.