Amid Disaster, Amazing Valor

The Mogadishu street where Cliff Wolcott died on Oct. 3 last year doesn't even have a name. For Wolcott, one of 15 helicopter pilots who took part in the ill-fated operation aimed at capturing warlord Mohammed Farrah Aidid, luck ran out when he spotted several armed Somalis firing rocket-propelled grenades at his Black Hawk attack helicopter. Turning the craft broadside to give his gunners a bet- ter shot, Wolcott became a perfect target. A grenade exploded into the side of the chopper. "Super six-one is going down," he yelled into his headset, "Six-one is going in." Those would be his last words. The crash of Wolcott's Black Hawk transformed what had been planned as a textbook operation to decapitate Somalia's most powerful warlord into the longest sustained fire fight American soldiers have endured since the Vietnam War. The human costs of that raid, which took the life of 18 Americans and wounded more than 75 others, altered the very nature of the U.S. peacekeeping mission in Somalia, shocking the American public and forcing from the President a promise to remove all U.S. troops by the end of March.

Many of the details of that debacle are well known: the aborted mission to rein in Aidid, the desperate efforts of several relief convoys to reach and extricate the trapped Task Force Rangers and -- above all, the capture, beating and humiliation of helicopter pilot Michael Durant. One part of the story has gone largely unreported, however: the 15-hour pitched battle that took place around the wreckage of Wolcott's chopper, an extraordinary display of valor by 99 men under calamitous circumstances. TIME has been told that two of those men who gave their life to protect Durant -- Sergeant First Class Randall Shugart and Master Sergeant Gary Gordon -- have been recommended to receive the nation's highest award for valor, the Congressional Medal of Honor. In addition, more than a dozen other Rangers and airmen will soon be given special awards. During the past six weeks, more than 19 of these soldiers agreed to be interviewed, some for the first time. This is their story.

At 3:40 p.m. on Sunday, Oct. 3, six MH-60 Black Hawk helicopters and eight MH-6 and AH-6 "Little Birds" headed for a building in southeastern Mogadishu where Aidid's henchmen were reported to be meeting. Within minutes, nearly 50 commandos from Delta Force, the premier U.S. counterterrorism unit, and several hundred Army Rangers had captured 24 of Aidid's closest colleagues. While helicopters from Task Force 160, the Army's special-operations air wing, fluttered overhead, the Rangers herded the prisoners into a nearby courtyard and awaited a ground convoy to take them away. Then came the radio report that would change everything: "One of the birds is down."

Karl Maier, 37, was at the controls of an unarmed MH-6 Little Bird helicopter when he spotted Wolcott's Black Hawk heeling over nose first. The stricken craft smashed into an alley about 500 yds. northeast of the target site the Rangers had first assaulted, its rotors chewing off the corner of a one-story building. Maier's decision was instantaneous. "I'm going in," he announced into his headset, and swung his aircraft toward the street corner. The space was so narrow that his blades barely cleared the houses on both sides as he set his bird on the ground.