Bill DeYoung.com

The real thing: Vet recounts ’ÄòBlack Hawk Down’Äô

By BILL DeYOUNG

© 2002 The New York Times Company

This past Sunday, Danny McKnight went to a suburban Georgia mall to see "Black Hawk Down," director Ridley Scott's film based on a real event - the longest sustained U.S. firefight since Vietnam. He sat alone in a corner of the theater.

McKnight, who retired this month after 28 years in the U.S. Army, watched as the streets of Mogadishu, Somalia, ran red with the blood of young American soldiers.

He watched as an angry Somali militia gunned down one soldier after another; he watched what was supposed to have been a simple, 30-minute mission turn into a 16-hour nightmare of chaos and carnage.

And he watched as actor Tom Sizemore played Lt. Col. Danny McKnight, battalion commander for the 3rd Ranger Battalion of the 75th Ranger Regiment.

"It was very tough," McKnight said of his day at the movies. "Because even though it's a movie and it's somebody else, I can put myself back in those places very easily, with those soldiers that get shot."

"Black Hawk Down" is the story of Oct. 3, 1993. A group of elite U.S. soldiers were sent into Mogadishu - Somalia is in East Africa - to abduct two key members of warlord Mohamed Farrah Aidid's staff. The country was in the grips of a bloody civil war and a crippling famine, and Aidid and his murderous cronies were stealing United Nations relief food supplies.

Participating in the mission were the Rangers, under McKnight's command, along with covert Delta Force soldiers and members of the 160th SOAR (Special Operations Aviation Regiment), who pilot the "Black Hawk" helicopters.

The final tally: Eighteen Americans and an estimated 500 Somalis dead.

Once the film ended, McKnight took a few moments to compose himself, then headed for the exit. Suddenly he recognized someone else sitting alone in the dark. "For the next three or four minutes," McKnight recalled, "all we did was embrace each other and cry."

Serendipity had played its hand.

"It was Sgt. Scott Galentine, who in the movie gets his thumb about shot off," McKnight explained. "He's out of the Army now, lives in Covington, Ga., and lo and behold we both end up in the same theater on a Sunday afternoon watching the movie. You couldn't have planned anything like that."

On that day in Mogadishu, McKnight had been standing next to Galentine when a bullet tore through the sergeant's left thumb (it's depicted in the movie). McKnight bent the shredded digit back onto Galentine's bloody hand and called for the medic.

Although McKnight lives in Atlanta, they had seen each other only once in the intervening years.

"I guess that's how the movie was supposed to end for me," McKnight said. "With somebody who was really there beside me that day."

Sizemore plays McKnight as a stoic, clear-thinking man who puts his men's safety ahead of his own.

"I like to think that I was fairly calm during it, because they look to certain people," McKnight explained. "They're going to look to the boss, per se. And his reactions mean a whole lot.

"That was a compliment that I guess I took out of it from my soldiers: 'Sir, we appreciate the way you were, because you gave us the impression everything was going to be OK. Even as bad as it was.' "

McKnight thinks Sizemore - who never met McKnight, but called twice from the film set in Morocco - captured him reasonably well.

"But I probably wasn't as calm as he was."

Indeed, the film is two unrelenting hours of whizzing bullets, exploding rockets and heart-pounding violence. The Americans never lose sight of their mission.

"During the time you're out there and you're being shot at, and you're shooting back, it's so intense that the focus is really a matter of training," McKnight said. "The Ranger battalions are the best-trained soldiers in the United States Army, along with Delta and the Special Operations people. They just are."

McKnight was shot through the arm, and his face was peppered with shrapnel. "We went in there to do what we were supposed to do, and we did do that. Ridley Scott does get that across, too. The mission that we went in to do that day, we did. And it changed when the helicopter got shot down.

"When it was shot down, we were minutes away from being Mission Complete and headed home. It was that close.

"But when that happened, everything changed."

Noles and Gators

Although he's not an Army brat, Daniel McKnight was born 50 years ago in Columbus, Ga., home of Fort Benning, where the Rangers are based. He grew up in Cocoa and earned a degree in business management from Florida State University.

He joined the ROTC program at FSU and was commissioned in 1973. Nine years later, he accepted a job as an ROTC instructor at the University of Florida, where he also pursued and got a master's in higher education.

McKnight lived in Gainesville for three years.

"It was great for me to go to the University of Florida," he said. "It's a little tough if you're a Florida State Seminole, though. Which I really am. I bleed garnet and gold."

After a stint at Maxwell AFB, McKnight was assigned to the Rangers in 1986. He returned to his hometown, and to Fort Benning.

He saw combat for the first time in 1989, as part of the group that extracted Gen. Manuel Noriega from Panama.

That, he said, was a cakewalk compared to Mogadishu.

"War is ugly, whether it's a little war or a big war. Whether it's Somalia or World War II, it's ugly because real bullets hurt people.

"And our soldiers are amazing, unique people. I think those are the things Scott was trying to get across to people, that things like this go on and we need to make sure how important it is. Especially today - these kinds of things could be happening in Afghanistan. We could be back in Somalia again."

'I know too much'

McKnight was not asked to be a technical adviser on the film. He never met Ridley Scott.

"He couldn't satisfy me if he was looking for accuracy, because I know too much," he said.

"I would say the film is probably 70 to 75 percent accurate. Which I think is very good, because we're talking about events that transpired over days - and he's trying to get it into 2 hours and 20 minutes of movie."

Some characters and events were combined, condensed or eliminated for the sake of telling a cohesive story. McKnight is OK with that - he thinks Scott made the point.

"He pays some great homage in a few places that I am thrilled with," McKnight said. "The work he did with the Medal of Honor winners, Gary Gordon and Randy Shughart, who went into that second aircraft site. God, what a tremendous piece he did with that.

"Because those guys, yes, they really knew what they were going into. They really did. That was very true. They asked to go, and they paid the ultimate price."

That price, after all, was on everybody's mind that day.

"I knew we'd get out of there," McKnight said. "We were gonna get out of there one way or the other. Those soldiers stayed out there at night, and a lot of people believe, oh, they were trapped. They were not trapped; they stayed out there because there was a helicopter pilot named Cliff Wolcott who was trapped in that helicopter, and they couldn't get his body out.

"When they got the vehicles there the next morning, they actually used the vehicles to pull the aircraft apart to get to him. So that's why they stayed. We could have fought our way out that night, because we're better than them at night anyway. And that would have been our preference to get out of there in dark. But we had to get Cliff Wolcott out of there, because as the movie says, we will never leave a fallen comrade."

McKnight, a divorced father of two, was awarded the Purple Heart and the Bronze Star. When he retired, he was the First Army's chief of training.

He's looking forward to life outside the military; he can't wait to play with his two young grandsons.

But Mogadishu, he knows, will never be far from his thoughts.

"The hardest part, for me, is that they weren't only my friends," he said. "I was the senior guy. I was 42 years old, and these are 18-, 19-year-old kids, the young ones. All of them were my family. They were my kids.

"That's what gets me. I always said, when I took command of that battalion, if we go anywhere, we will go together. And we'll all come back together.

"I got them back, but they weren't alive. And I felt like in a way I was letting the family down. And I still think about that today."