Bill Mitchell

33 years ago this weekend, two Delta Force snipers made a choice almost nobody would make. Master Sergeant Gary Gordon was 33, from Lincoln, Maine, with a wife and two young kids at home. Sergeant First Class Randy Shughart was 35, a farm kid from Newville, Pennsylvania. On October 3, 1993, they were in a Black Hawk circling over Mogadishu when another Black Hawk, Super 64, was shot down. Pilot Mike Durant was alive in the wreckage with a broken back and a crushed leg. His crew was hurt. There were no friendly ground forces anywhere near them, and hundreds of armed militia and locals were already converging on the crash site. From the air, Gordon and Shughart could see exactly what was coming. They asked to be dropped in. Command said no. They asked again. No again. They asked a third time and finally got the green light. Their helicopter set them down nearby and they fought their way to the wreck on foot. Two men, carrying only what they had on them. They pulled Durant out of the cockpit, set him up in a safer position, and started holding off the crowd. For a while, it worked. They kept the mob back with precise, steady fire while the numbers against them kept growing. Shughart was killed first. Gordon kept fighting alone. When he was nearly out of ammunition, he went back to Durant, handed him a rifle, and told him good luck. Then he went back out. He was killed minutes later. Durant was captured, beaten, and held for 11 days. He came home alive. He has said for decades that he's only here because of those two men. In 1994 Gordon and Shughart were posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor, the first since Vietnam. The Navy later named two ships after them, the USNS Gordon and the USNS Shughart. They didn't stumble into that fight. They watched it from above, understood the odds, and asked three times to go anyway. Gary Gordon and Randy Shughart. Remember their names.