Defense after the Super 64 crash and Michael Durant's capture

The defense after the Super 64 crash began with an aircraft crippled in the air and ended with Mike Durant captured amid a hostile crowd. The second Black Hawk lost that day came down far from the American troops and without an immediately available rescue force, leaving its surviving crew and the two soldiers sent to protect them exposed to attack.

The Second Helicopter Hit

Mike Goffena was moving his Black Hawk, Super 62, behind Mike Durant’s Super 64 when a rocket-propelled grenade hit Durant’s helicopter. Super 64 had not been in formation long enough to settle into its orbit over the target area: it was still taking the place of Super 61, piloted by Cliff Wolcott, which had been shot down minutes earlier. Goffena saw the strike damage the gearbox, tear away part of it, and spill oil in a fine mist. The aircraft initially remained intact and appeared to be functioning, but Goffena radioed Durant to ask if he was all right before Durant had fully understood what had happened.

Durant steered the damaged helicopter southeast, toward the Indian Ocean and the base, while Goffena followed for about a mile. Goffena had been providing cover near the target and the Super 61 crash site, where a rescue team had already fast-roped in; with the ground force preparing to leave, he chose to escort Durant and his crew as far toward safety as he could. Then Super 64’s tail-rotor assembly, including its gearbox and part of the vertical fin, broke away. Inside the aircraft, Durant and copilot Ray Frank felt the airframe vibrate, heard the dry gear shaft whine, and then a loud bang. The sudden loss of weight at the rear pitched the nose forward and sent the helicopter spinning to the right. Durant pushed the left pedal down, but without the tail rotor there was nothing to counter the spin.

The Crash and the Missing Rescue Force

As the rotation tightened, Durant saw only blue sky and brown earth blurring beyond the windshield. His flying instincts told him how to swing the aircraft left, but the left pedal was already jammed to the floor and Super 64 kept spinning to the right. He called out to his copilot, Ray Frank. From above, Goffena watched the plunge; just before impact, the spin slowed and the nose came up. The helicopter struck the ground hard but level, a landing that left open the possibility that all four men aboard had survived.

Super 64 remained upright. Its shock absorbers were built to take a severe impact provided the aircraft did not overturn, but the crash left Durant and his crew about a mile from the commandos and Rangers near the downtown target. Super 61 had gone down only a few blocks from American troops; Durant’s helicopter, by contrast, had fallen while taking its place in the orbit. The difference in distance would matter: the only airborne search-and-rescue team had already fast-roped to Wolcott’s wreck, and no second rescue force was available. The mission had not treated the possibility of two helicopters being shot down as a serious prospect.

Goffena made a low pass and glimpsed Durant pushing aside a piece of tin roof that had caved in around his legs. He was alive. Goffena also saw Frank’s frustrated expression; years earlier, Frank had suffered a broken leg and back injury in a similar tail-rotor crash during training, and had been fighting a legal battle over that accident ever since. As Goffena dropped lower, fire against his own aircraft grew heavier: bullets ticked through its thin metal walls, and rounds striking rotor blades flashed into bright arcs. Below, Somalis were already moving through alleys and footpaths toward the newly fallen helicopter.

The Ground Rescue and the Perimeter

As fire intensified around the wreck, Goffena’s helicopter drew increasing attention: bullets ticked through its thin walls, and rounds striking the rotor blades flashed as they spun. Pilots overhead kept asking for immediate help and were repeatedly told that a ground convoy was on its way. With that column taking too long to assemble, Goffena’s air commander approved a perilous interim measure: two of the three commandos aboard Goffena’s helicopter would go down to give first aid, establish a perimeter, and help Michael Durant and his crew hold off the approaching Somalis until the ground force arrived.

The two soldiers were Gary Gordon and Randy Shughart, experienced commandos. Gordon had enlisted at seventeen; his wife and children lived near Fort Bragg. Shughart, an outdoorsman from western Pennsylvania, loved his Dodge truck and hunting rifles. When the crew chief told Gordon that he and Shughart were going in, Gordon grinned and gave an eager thumbs-up. Goffena lowered his helicopter over a small clearing, using the rotor wash to knock down a fence and scatter debris, and held it in a hover about five feet above the ground as the men jumped.

Their arrival was not a clean insertion. Shughart became tangled in the safety line connecting him to the helicopter and had to be cut free; Gordon fell as he ran for cover. The two crouched in the open, visibly unsure of their position. Goffena dropped lower and pointed the way, while a crew chief tossed out a small smoke marker toward Durant’s helicopter. Shughart and Gordon ran to it. As Goffena pulled away, both men signaled that they were all right.

A Little Bird helicopter carrying pilots Keith Jones and Karl Maier had also landed nearby, about 110 yards from the wreck. Jones and Maier covered the alleys leading to the clearing, expecting the Somali crowd to arrive and hoping the commandos would bring Durant and his crew to them. From overhead, Goffena saw Shughart and Gordon lift Durant, then crewmen Cleveland and Field, out of the fuselage. The wounded men could not be carried to the Little Bird. Goffena radioed that the commandos had formed a perimeter and that they would have to hold their position until the ground force came. After about five minutes, with fuel running low and their own aircraft exposed, Jones and Maier received permission to leave and refuel. The Americans at the crash site were left to wait.

Durant initially believed the situation remained under control. Though his leg was broken, he felt little pain as he lay propped against a supply kit beside a small tree, using his weapon against Somalis who occasionally appeared at the edge of the clearing. He could hear gunfire on the far side of the helicopter and knew Ray Frank was hurt but alive. He wondered about crew chief Tommy Field and assumed the ground vehicles would soon arrive. That expectation changed when he heard Gary Gordon shout that he had been hit. The cry of anger and pain was brief; Durant heard nothing more from him.

Randy Shughart returned to Durant’s side and asked whether there were weapons aboard. Durant directed him to the crew chiefs’ M-16s. Shughart went into the wreckage, found both rifles, and handed Durant Gordon’s loaded CAR-15 without explaining what had happened to Gordon. He then asked for the support frequency on the survival radio. Only then did Durant understand that the two commandos had come in alone: they were the entire rescue team, and one of them had already been shot. Durant explained how to use the radio. Shughart called for immediate assistance and was told that a reaction force was on its way, then carried the weapons back around the helicopter.

Durant began firing toward voices behind a wall. The CAR-15 was set to burst rather than the single-shot mode he had been using; the voices stopped. Two men tried to climb over the helicopter’s nose and jumped back when he fired. Another man attempting to cross the wall, and a fourth crawling around the corner with a weapon, were also shot. Then a concentrated burst of gunfire erupted on the other side of the aircraft and lasted about two minutes. Durant heard Shughart cry out in pain. The firing stopped, while commanders watching from surveillance helicopters waited for a report from the crash site.

Silence, Capture, and the Shift from Revenge to Leverage

After the two-minute fusillade, the radio fell silent. From his position beside the wreck, Mike Durant heard an angry crowd moving through the debris, shoving it aside; with no more gunfire, he believed the others were dead. He expected the mob to kill him, remembering a rumor that Somalis had played soccer with the heads of downed pilots. His second weapon was empty. Though he still had a pistol at his side, he did not reach for it. When a Somali appeared around the helicopter’s nose and shouted for others, Durant laid the empty weapon across his chest, folded his hands over it, and looked toward the sky.

At the other side of the wreck, Yousuf Dahir Mo'Alim and roughly a dozen of his men had coordinated an attack. Mo'Alim’s fighters opened fire together; after at least two minutes of intense shooting, the Americans stopped, and the crowd surged into the clearing. The mob dragged away the one American still alive and attacked the dead, cutting at bodies and tearing at limbs. But when Mo'Alim came around the tail of the helicopter, he found Durant alive and not firing. As people began kicking and beating the pilot, Mo'Alim felt protective of him and ordered the crowd back. One of his men struck Durant in the face with a rifle butt; Mo'Alim pushed the attacker away.

Mo'Alim’s intervention was not simply an act of mercy. He recognized that Durant could be more valuable alive: American forces had spent months capturing Somalis, and he thought they might trade prisoners for one of their own. He and some of his men formed a ring around Durant to shield him from the crowd’s appetite for revenge. Other fighters stripped away Durant’s gear, fearing that he carried concealed weapons or a beacon that could let American helicopters track him. As they struggled with unfamiliar plastic fasteners, Durant helped open them; they removed his boots, survival vest, and shirt, while leaving his brown T-shirt on. A young man held Durant’s identification card before him and threatened him in English. Dirt was thrown into Durant’s face, and a rag or towel was tied over his head and eyes. The crowd carried and dragged him away, kicking and striking him; his broken femur pierced the skin at the back of his leg. Amid the assault, Durant experienced the crowd as if from outside his own body, felt his fear and pain recede, and passed out.

Civilians in the Battlespace

The defense and capture at Super 64 unfolded within a battle where identifying combatants was already difficult. The United States Army Rangers had been ordered to fire only at people pointing weapons at them, but armed Somalis were intermingled with women and children, while residents of all ages crowded toward disturbances. The account links this civilian presence to the widespread hatred stirred by the summer’s American missions, making the distinction required by the rules of engagement increasingly difficult to maintain in the streets.

The returning convoy faced that ambiguity in a stark, specific encounter. A woman in a flowing purple robe ran beside a vehicle with a baby in her arms; a soldier first shouted to prevent the driver from shooting because she had a child. Then she turned and raised a pistol with her free hand. Specialist Eric Spalding shot her, firing four additional rounds before she fell. He could not tell whether the baby had been hit, and believed it probably had. The brief reversal—from apparent civilian flight to a weapon aimed at the convoy—left the child’s fate unknown even as the immediate threat was answered.

By the time another convoy fought its way back to the base, its rules of engagement had been abandoned. Ranger Sizemore described shooting at boys, some armed and some not, and firing into crowds containing women alongside men with rifles; he was numb, angry, and intent on getting his friends home. A civilian witness, Abdikarim, encountered the battle from another angle: near the market he saw dead men, women, and children, an American soldier wounded by the roadside firing toward a woman who ran in front of him, and a Little Bird helicopter firing down an alley as armed Somali men rushed toward the American position. These separate encounters do not resolve who was a combatant in every instance. They show the widening gulf between a rule that depended on recognizing a weapon and a battle in which civilians, armed fighters, and rescuers moved through the same streets.

The Marks of Capture

The crowd’s treatment of Mike Durant exposed the unstable boundary between killing an enemy and keeping a prisoner. A young man held up Durant’s green identification card and shouted, “Ranger, Ranger, you die Somalia!”—misidentifying the downed pilot even as the card made him recognizable as an American serviceman. The words turned the crowd’s violence into a declaration of vengeance, but Mo'Alim’s calculation redirected it: Durant’s value lay in being kept alive for a possible exchange.

That survival did not spare Durant from severe injury. A rifle butt broke his nose and shattered the bone around his eyes; his pistol and knife remained strapped to him as the fighters searched his clothing for weapons and a tracking beacon. When they dragged him away with his head covered, the broken end of his femur pierced the skin behind his leg. The scene’s reversal was therefore narrow and brutal: Mo'Alim protected Durant from being killed by the mob, not from the mob’s assault, and captivity began as a struggle over whether the wounded pilot would be treated as a body to punish or a prisoner to bargain for.

Unequal Views of the Crash Site

The fight at the wreck is shaped by how little any participant can see of the whole. Commanders watch from surveillance helicopters, while Goffena circles above and can observe the commandos moving the wounded; on the ground, Durant cannot tell what has become of the men on the other side of the aircraft. Even the nearby rescue team remains outside his awareness: pilots Keith Jones and Karl Maier are waiting about 110 yards away, but Durant and the others do not know they are there. The distance is small enough to seem like rescue and large enough to be useless.

That divide turns the radio into a fragile link between isolated positions. Shughart’s call brings word that a reaction force is coming, yet the promise does not give Durant a reliable picture of the fight or of how long they must hold out. After the firing stops, the radio falls silent; from Durant’s position, silence becomes evidence that the others are dead. The account’s shifts between the view overhead and the view beside the wreck make the crash site more than a perimeter under attack: it becomes a scene in which information is unevenly distributed, help can be near without being reachable, and a survivor must act on what he cannot verify.

When Rescue Became Captivity

The operation at the second wreck turned on a reversal of purpose. The two commandos descended to protect the crew until help arrived, and their perimeter briefly gave the wounded a chance to survive; but with the ground force delayed and the nearby aircraft forced to leave, holding the site could not become evacuation. Once the defense fell silent, the question was no longer whether the crew could be extracted, but what the crowd would do with the surviving pilot. Yousuf Dahir Mo'Alim’s decision to keep Mike Durant alive changed the outcome from immediate death to captivity, without undoing the violence that had brought him there.