Our mission was really to kill or capture Muhammad Fara ID or basically remove his infrastructure.

Well, we were independent from the UN effort too.

We had one simple mission, killer capture, one individual.

And so what you have is this dynamic where you can drive in or take a helicopter in to a neighborhood to do a job, and it's no big deal. But if you go one block over,

then you put a stick in the hornet nest. And the Hoburgator militia was about 3,000 strong.

They couldn't muster 3,000, you know, at that particular point in Mogadishu because they were in the outskirts.

But varying estimates have them up to 2,000 and losing 1,000 during that battle.

Hi and welcome to The Spear, a podcast by the Modern War Institute at West Point.

I'm John Amble, editorial director at MWI, and The Spear is our platform to explore the combat experience.

Each episode includes a single one-on-one interview with a guest who walks us through a particular event and their role in it.

A battle, a firefight, a mission, it's a first-person account of combat.

In this episode, MWI's major Jake Moraldi talks to three guests, Larry Perino,

Lee Van Arsdale, and Kyle Lamb.

Each of them was a part of a mission in Mogadishu, Somalia, 25 years ago.

And while that single mission would become famous from Mark Bowden's book, Blackhawk Down, and the movie of the same name,

this episode is an opportunity to hear directly from our guests what happened that day.

And truly, even if you've read the book and seen the movie,

hearing these three practitioners from elite units describe not only what happened, but also what was going through their minds at key moments of the Battle of Mogadishu, I guarantee you'll learn some things you have never heard.

Now, there was so much detail and so much to unpack from their stories that we split the conversation up into two episodes.

This is part one, in which you'll hear them talk about the earlier part of their deployment, some previous missions,

how this particular mission came about and really how everything happened once they launched.

This part, to put it bluntly, takes us right up until

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