Gary Gordon was from Lincoln, Maine, joined the Army at eighteen as a combat engineer, moved to the 10th Special Forces Group and was selected for Delta Force in 1986. By 1993 he was a sniper team leader, married to Carmen, with two small children, and in Mogadishu with Task Force Ranger.
On the afternoon of 3 October 1993 a raid to seize two of Mohamed Farrah Aidid's lieutenants turned into the longest firefight American troops had fought since Vietnam. Two Black Hawks were shot down. The second, Super Six-Four, came down alone in a hostile quarter of the city with its pilot, Michael Durant, alive and trapped in the wreck and no ground force able to reach it.
Gordon and his fellow sniper Randy Shughart were orbiting above it. They asked to be put on the ground to defend the crash site. The request was refused, because it was clearly a suicide mission. They asked again, and were refused again. On the third request the commander gave permission.
They were landed a hundred metres away, fought through to the helicopter, pulled Durant and the dead crew out of the wreck, put Durant behind cover with a rifle and then held the perimeter against a crowd that ran into the hundreds. Gordon was killed first. Shughart fought on until his ammunition was gone, and then he was killed too. Durant was taken prisoner and survived eleven days of captivity — alive because two men had asked three times to be dropped into a place from which no one expected them to return.
Both were awarded the Medal of Honor, the first since Vietnam. A destroyer of the US Navy carries Gordon's name, and so does a road at Fort Bragg.
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