Super 64 crash site

The Super 64 crash site was the southern focus of two rescue efforts during the battle in Mogadishu: an initial convoy was stopped more than a mile short, while a later, larger force split off a westbound company toward the already-overrun site. It was also where Somalis seized the injured pilot, Mike Durant, though the evidence places his captivity afterward in an unspecified location in Mogadishu.

Position in the Battle

Before sunset, Charlie Company made an attempt to reach the southern crash site, where Mike Durant and his crew were close to being overrun. The convoy—about 150 men traveling in nine flatbed trucks and a dozen Humvees—advanced only as far as K-4 Circle, more than a mile away, before a fierce ambush forced it back. The failed approach left the crew at the crash site exposed and showed how far a relief force might be from reaching them.

Later Convoy Operations

More than five hours into the battle, with wounded Rangers elsewhere in the city at risk of dying without rescue, Lieutenant Colonel Bill David had to assemble a much larger, multinational force. The planned force combined four Pakistani tanks, 28 Malaysian armored personnel carriers, men from the 10th Mountain Division’s Alpha Company, Ranger volunteers, and the surviving, still-mobile vehicles from the earlier convoy. The assembly at the New Port facility was hurried and difficult.

The convoy eventually divided. One company headed west toward the crash site of Mike Durant’s Super 64, which Somalis had overrun hours earlier; another pushed north toward the Super 61 crash site, where 99 Rangers and soldiers from the special operations force were pinned down. The westbound movement made the Super 64 site a destination of the relief operation, but the evidence does not establish that this company reached it.

Overrun and Its Human Consequences

By the time of the later convoy’s departure, Somalis had overrun the downed helicopter crew and the two Commando sergeants who had fought to protect them. They carried the injured Mike Durant away. On the morning of October 4, he was captive in a small room somewhere in Mogadishu, unaware that the others were dead. The crash site therefore marks both the point the rescue effort had failed to reach before sunset and the place from which Durant was taken into captivity.