At the end of the movie “Black Hawk Down,” Chief Warrant Officer Mike Durant (played by actor Ron Eldard) is sitting in a dark room as a prisoner of the Somali warlord Mohamed Farah Aidid, as a helicopter flies by overhead. From the passing bird comes a voice as the sun goes down:
“Mike Durant, we won’t leave you behind.”
This makes for an agonizing scene, with Durant suffering from a broken cheekbone, eye socket, back, femur, and nose from his fight with Somalis near the crash site of Super Six-Four. He thought he was going to die (and in real life, the Somalis did try to kill him three times).
But the Army didn’t want just to remind one of its captured soldiers that he wouldn’t be left behind; his friends in the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment (SOAR) wanted him to know they were actively looking for him, and they wouldn’t stop until they found him. To make the message more personal, they played his favorite song.
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The Battle of Mogadishu took place on Oct. 3–4, 1993, when U.S. Army Rangers and Delta Force operators launched a raid in Somalia’s capital to capture Aidid’s key lieutenants. The mission was supposed to last about an hour, but after two Black Hawk helicopters were shot down by Somali militia using RPGs, it turned into an overnight urban fight for survival. American troops had to hold defensive positions around the crash sites while under intense fire in a dense, hostile city, with armored relief columns struggling to reach them. By the time the shooting stopped, 18 Americans were killed, dozens were wounded, and hundreds of Somali fighters and civilians were dead or injured.
Durant was piloting one of the downed helicopters, Super Six-Four, when a rocket-propelled grenade hit it, and it crashed into the heart of Mogadishu. Two Delta Force snipers, Master Sgt. Gary Gordon and Sgt. 1st Class Randy Shughart, volunteered twice to be inserted at the crash site. Inserted with only their personal weapons and limited ammunition, they fought their way to the wreck to protect Durant from heavily armed Somali fighters converging on the site. They set up a defensive perimeter, but the situation deteriorated and they ran low on ammo, fighting at close range until they were overrun and killed.
Their actions delayed the mob long enough to keep Durant alive to be taken prisoner rather than killed on the spot, and both men were posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor for their extraordinary courage and self-sacrifice. Mike Durant says he was incredibly lucky that someone recognized his value as a prisoner.
“When you’re in captivity,” Durant told documentarians filming AC/DC’s “Beyond the Thunder,” “if you hear an aircraft, it obviously gets your attention because the first thing you’re trying to determine is, ‘Do they know where I am?”’
Something happened in Mogadishu at that moment that isn’t depicted in “Black Hawk Down.” As the Somalis started to scramble to attack the helicopter, Durant heard a telltale “BONG” of his favorite song, and then the opening lines of AC/DC’s “Hell’s Bells.”
“It was an incredible moment,” Durant recalled. “They had loudspeakers attached to this Black Hawk, flying around the city, broadcasting this music.” That’s when the voice bellowed the words echoed in the movie:
“Mike, we won’t leave here without you.”
Mike Durant We Won't Leave You Behind
It was a moment Durant says he will never forget. He was held by militiamen loyal to Aidid, interrogated, beaten, and filmed for propaganda, but also treated for his injuries so he could be used as a bargaining chip. Behind the scenes, U.S. officials, United Nations representatives, and the International Committee of the Red Cross worked with contacts in Mogadishu’s clan network to secure his release without further escalating the conflict. Aidid agreed to release Durant on Oct. 14, 1993, after 11 days.
