Channels, Fall 2016

Channels • 2016 • Volume 1 • Number 1 Page 5 apprehend General Aidid’s top two lieutenants. High priority members of Aidid’s militia, including the two lieutenants, were supposed to be meeting on October 3 rd at three o’ clock. The meeting was to be held in the Olympic Hotel, which was in the center of Bakaara Market, the most hostile district in the entire city. 1 st SFOD-D, more commonly referred to as Delta Force, operators were to be dropped both on and around the building by four AH-6 “Little Birds,” small helicopters that carried four operators apiece. They were to go into the Olympic Hotel, clear it out, and detain the approximately twenty prisoners inside. Coinciding with the Delta operators, 75 th Ranger Regiment personnel were to fast rope into the objective from Black Hawk helicopters to provide outer security on all four corners of the building. The four “chalks” were under the control of Captain Steele, who would stay on the ground with the men during the entire fight. Once the Delta Force operators had secured the hotel, Lt. Colonel Danny McKnight, in charge of the whole operation from the ground, would come in with his HMMWVs (High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicles) and flat-bed cargo trucks to load up the men and prisoners and ex-fill from the objective back to the base. The entire operation was supposed to take less than an hour. Instead of only an hour, however, the mission turned into a nightmare, taking almost fifteen hours to complete; some would call it “the bloodiest single combat episode involving U.S. casualties since Vietnam.” 11 After only “20 minutes, the Somali leaders had been captured,” 12 but the fight was nowhere near over. Two primary mishaps occurred throughout the battle that contributed to the lengthy execution. The first of which was communication, specifically with the aircraft. Aircraft played a huge part in this mission, both good and bad. One of the aircraft involved was the Orion spy plane, which flew above the battlefield throughout the duration of the mission, relaying directions through a team of forward observers to the men on the ground. Garrison’s biggest tactical error in the entire mission was deciding that the Orion spy plane should give directions to the convoy. The problem was that the plane gave directions to the pair of forward observers who then relayed the information to the drivers on the ground. Because of the delay, the information took a substantial amount of time to get to the convoy leaders, causing the convoy to pass their turn before they even got the directions. TFR sustained most of its casualties while in the HMMWVs, which could have been minimized if they had not kept making wrong turns. Howard Wasdin, remembering the mission, remarked, “The Orion spy plane could see what was happening but could [not] speak directly to McKnight. So it relayed information to the commander at the Joint Operations Center (JOC). Next, the JOC commander called the command helicopter. Finally, the command helicopter radioed McKnight. By the time McKnight received directions to turn, 11 J Stevenson, Losing Mogadishu: Testing U.S. Policy in Somalia (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1998) p.xiv 12 S Southworth and S Tanner, U.S. Special Forces (Cambridge: De Capo Press, 2002) p.49