'That's it, I thought.

Death is on its way'

Mike Durant became the face of modern warfare after his helicopter was shot
down in Somalia. He tells Toby Harnden how he survived
THE DAILY TELEGRAPH (LONDON)
July 09, 2003
For nearly a decade, American pilot Mike Durant has kept a terrible secret. After his Special
Forces helicopter was shot down by a rocket-propelled grenade in Mogadishu, his right eye
socket and cheekbone were broken when a mob of Somalis surrounded him and a man began to
club his face with a long, heavy object.
In Mark Bowden's best-selling book Black Hawk Down, and Ridley Scott's blockbuster film of
the same name, Durant was beaten with a rifle. Now, he reveals that the object, briefly haloed by
the sun before it came smashing down on him, was the severed arm of one of his murdered
comrades.
Preparing to be beaten to death with the limb of a friend who had been dismembered moments
earlier, Durant fixed his eyes on his attacker. "This guy had grey hair and he was holding it up for
another strike," he recalls.
"I just stared at him with a mixture of disgust and shock and disbelief, and then he dropped it and
ran. I cannot imagine, as a person, being that angry, bitter, aggressive, brutal - whatever word
you want to use - to do that."
The families of the five American soldiers who were killed at the crash site, some of whose
bodies were dragged through the streets of the Somali capital, were told what had happened to
their loved ones, so Durant has decided that it is time the truth about the level of depravity
should be known publicly, and has just published a new book, In the Company of Heroes.
"Nobody ever came to the conclusion that if you're hit with a rifle butt, there's going to be a big
welt," he says, matter-of-factly, as he sits in his office in Huntsville, Alabama. "But if you look at
the picture of me, there's no welt."
What Durant refers to as "the picture" is a still from his interrogation video, after he was
captured. It instantly became one of the most dramatic images of modern warfare and was shown
all over the world.
Bloodied and bruised, the badly injured chief warrant officer gazes into the camera, knowing he
could be killed at any moment, his eyes betraying fear, but also an intense determination to
weigh up every possible option that could help him survive.
Durant, now retired from the US Army and working for a defence technology company, is 41 and
his hair is flecked with silver. The eyes, steady and unblinking, are those of a man who is secure
in the knowledge he can face anything life throws at him because he has already travelled to hell
and back. That week in October 1993, as America reeled from the loss of 18 elite servicemen in a
single day after two of its Black Hawks were downed, "the picture" ran simultaneously on the
covers of Time and Newsweek.
At first, Durant says, the horror of his ordeal, which ended when he was released by the Somali
warlord Mohammed Aideed after 11 days in captivity, left him with a feeling of senselessness. "I
thought, there's no way God could ever do this to his children. So I thought that He can't be.
"And then, a few years went by and I began to realise, well, there's some mystery to it all that I'll
never figure out."
The US military learnt tough lessons on the streets of Mogadishu. Ninety-nine elite soldiers were
trapped in a hostile city as an operation to arrest two aides to renegade warlords became the most
intense and bloody firefight America had engaged in since the Vietnam War. Their role with the
UN in Somalia is now seen as having been fatally hampered by political mistakes - the failure to
act on requests by commanders for tanks and C130 gunships and the decision to withdraw
American forces early in 1994.
"You can't send soldiers into harm's way and not give them the tools they need to do the job
because you're worried about the headlines," Durant says. "Once we did suffer losses, we turned
around and ran - to me, those things are tragic mistakes."
Ten years on, Durant can still scarcely hide his contempt for President Bill Clinton. "I went
beyond just not wanting to talk to him. I was summoned to the White House on a couple of
occasions, but I refused to go."
Clinton, he believes, "didn't like the military - he just plain didn't like us", and what happened in
Somalia sent a signal to the world that America lacked resolve. It was later cited by Osama bin
Laden as an example of American weakness, while Saddam Hussein's troops were told it showed
that America could be beaten.
"We're suffering for it today," says Durant. "You can argue that it has given the terrorists more
motivation to take us on, because people thought, 'They don't have the stomach for it', which is
not true at all."
Rather than dwell on his country's political leadership in 1993, Durant prefers to concentrate on
the valour of those who died alongside him. In "a league of their own" were the Delta Force
radio operators Gary Gordon and Randy Shughart who arrived on the scene 10 minutes after
Durant hit the ground. They insisted on being dropped by helicopter to rescue Durant and his
crew, even though they knew they would probably be killed.
"They knew that the odds were stacked against them, but they also knew that if they didn't do
anything, our chances were zero," says Durant.
"I know that everybody there that day would have done pretty much anything they could to help
their comrades, but when you are thinking, 'This truly will likely get me killed if I do this', and
you still go in to get somebody you don't really know, that is a hell of a sacrifice."
Gordon and Shughart were each awarded a posthumous Congressional Medal of Honour, the
American equivalent of the Victoria Cross. After killing dozens and holding off the Somali
hordes, they were both overwhelmed.
Certain that he was about to be shot or torn apart, Durant placed his empty rifle on his chest. "I
just kind of laid back and looked straight up at the sky," he says. "I still remember that image, the
blue sky with a white cloud going by. That's it, I thought. Death is on its way. I compared it to
being on top of the World Trade Centre when the fire's coming up. You know you're going to
die."
He thought of his son, Joey, whose first birthday he had just missed. And then, somehow, he was
spared. One of Aideed's men decided that a live American pilot was a more valuable bargaining
chip than a dead one. So Durant lived to tell his tale.
Before his ordeal, he had known Gordon and Shughart only by sight, but afterwards he came to
discover what kind of men they were. Shortly after her husband was killed, Stephanie Shughart
wrote to Durant. It made him weep, but also inspired him to recover and fly again with his Night
Stalker helicopter unit. "Your refusal to be defeated and give up was as brave an act as Randy's,"
the letter said. "Had you given up, I would never have known exactly what happened to him. I
don't want you to question why you lived and Randy and the others with you did not."
The following year, Durant visited Gordon's home town in Maine and stopped at the local library
to prepare for a talk about the men who had laid down their lives for him.
He took out a book about the Medal of Honour and found that the card showed the last person to
have done so previously had been a young teenager called Gary Gordon, nearly 20 years earlier.
He was never a superstitious man, but Durant now believes in omens. In 2001, he married his
second wife, Lisa desRoches, the widow of a Chinook pilot killed in a training accident. After
her first husband's death, Lisa had found a note inside his desk that said: "Call Mike Durant."
The two men had been discussing some training issues, but Pierre desRoches had never had the
chance to act on the message. "She was pregnant with her third child when he died," says Durant.
On reflection, he believes that the experience of Somalia did have some purpose. "Maybe this
urban combat in Somalia gave us a more healthy respect for Baghdad and Basra. We prepared for
it better and maybe thousands of lives were saved because we understood how hard it is to fight
in places like that. And we had to lose 18 people to prove it."
Mostly, however, he thinks of the comrades he lost and just tries to live his life, as Mrs Shughart
suggested, to give some sort of meaning to the 18 deaths.
One of his greatest friends was Donovan Briley, an irrepressible, barrel-chested fellow pilot, who
was killed that day in Mogadishu after the other Black Hawk was shot down.
As Durant was lying in his cell, not knowing Briley's fate and listening to the Armed Forces
Network on the radio, he heard a dedication "to Mike Durant from Donovan Briley". The song
was John Anderson's haunting Seminole Wind, about the loss of American Indian lands. It had
been Briley's favourite and the other soldiers had chosen it on his behalf.
"So blow, blow Seminole wind." The words floated into the cell. "Blow like you're never going
to blow again; I'm calling to you like a long-lost friend. But I don't know who you are."
Durant smiles. "Donovan was part Cherokee and proud of it," he says. "He never let you forget
it. We were tight, we were closer than brothers in some cases, and" - he pauses, briefly - "they're
just great guys. I think about the good times. I think about the fun we had."
In the Company of Heroes by Michael J Durant (Bantam Press) is available from Telegraph
Books Direct for pounds 10.99 plus pounds 2.25 p&p. To order, call 0870 155 7222