Lamb was part of a contingent that tried twice to rescue an assault team of about 80 rangers and a dozen or more Delta Force counter-terrorist commandos. They had launched a simple but daring operation to nab key aides of Somali warlord Gen. Mohammed Farah Aidid. The mission went awry and turned into a skirmish from hell, exacting an appalling toll on U.S. troops: 17 dead, 77 wounded, 1 missing and 1 in captivity, Chief Warrant Officer Michael Durant, a pilot. Among the dead, NEWSWEEK has learned, were three Delta Force commandos. The troubled search-and-seizure mission underscored a series of larger problems: coordinating military operations with U.N. forces, miscalculating Somali guerrilla power and underestimating the needs of U.S. troops. After interviewing veterans of the battle, and defense and intelligence sources, NEWSWEEK correspondents pieced together a preliminary account of the disastrous fire fight.

It started out as a working Sunday for Lamb at the tactical operations center at the Mogadishu airport. Not long after breakfast, Somali spies on the CIA payroll reported that three of Aidid’s top lieutenants–his foreign minister, political adviser and propaganda chief–were holding a meeting that afternoon at the Olympic Hotel (map, page 40), one of the warlord’s strongholds. The supersecret National Security Agency picked up a radio transmission, corroborating the “humint,” or human intelligence. Delta Force had already captured Osman Ato, Aidid’s key financier, less than two weeks before. Here was a chance to decapitate the Somali senior command.

At about 1:30 p.m. Mogadishu time, Lt. Col. Danny McKnight, the rangers’ commanding officer, put the finishing touches on a plan to snatch the Somalis. To maintain secrecy, details were tightly held, kept even from many within U.S. headquarters, and from U.N. forces which are infiltrated with Aidid spies. That secrecy would later prove to be a fatal tactical mistake. Around 2, McKnight briefed his men and passed around aerial photos of the Olympic Hotel. A raiding party of about 60 rangers and Delta commandos, led by McKnight, piled into about eight MH-60 Black Hawk helicopters. Some would land on the hotel’s roof and grab the Somali leaders. Others would alight across the street and provide covering fire. A ground convoy of some 30 rangers would truck everyone back.

The attack force left the airport at about 2:30. There were risks, of course. Conducting the maneuver at midday instead of at night left the commandos exposed to ground fire as the choppers hovered over the rooftops of Mogadishu’s teeming slums. Still, “when somebody nibbles on the line, you have to pull the fish out of the water, even if it is daylight,” says a senior Defense Department aide involved in the plan.

The operation unfolded with few glitches. A little after 3, the rangers arrived at the hotel and rappelled down 50-foot ropes. Immediately, a torrent of AK-47 and rocket-propelled-grenade fire greeted them. Returning fire, they held off the Somali attackers. Within 45 minutes the rangers had taken 24 prisoners, including three principal Aidid aides, and gained control of both buildings. Moments later came a radio report that Humvees, light utility trucks, were speeding ground forces to the scene.

Suddenly, everything started to go terribly wrong. The Humvees ran into an ambush at the K-4 traffic circle, a mile from the airport: at least one, and possibly three, rocket-propelled grenades slammed into the lead vehicle, wounding three rangers. At 4:10 the convoy finally reached the Olympic Hotel and began rushing captives out to the trucks. But five minutes later, Somali antiaircraft fire brought down a Black Hawk near the hotel. instead of evacuating the area, as originally planned, the rangers formed a security perimeter around the aircraft to protect one of the pilots trapped inside. “One of the other choppers flew over and reported he had movement in the cockpit,” says Lamb. “We figured we could salvage it.” But then a second MH-60, hit by antiaircraft fire, crashed just south of the hotel. Lamb remembers with sickening clarity the words that came over the radio at–HQ: “I’ve got a man down! I’ve got a man dead! Heavy fire over here!”

Somali gunmen poured on the fire. From rooftops and trees they let loose a relentless barrage against McKnight and the 90 or so troops with him, mostly rangers with a handful of Delta commandos. They took shelter where they could in the surrounding warren of ruined buildings, returning fire with M-16 rifles and M-60 machine guns. lightly armed, the rangers feared running out of ammunition. They had no significant air cover, a standard procedure in such an engagement. Air Force AC-130 gunships-high-tech special-operations planes with a 105mm howitzer and heavy-caliber Gatling guns–might well have turned the course of the battle. But the Pentagon, eager to reduce its forces in Somalia, had brought those planes home in August over the protest of U.N. commanders on the ground. Somali cross-fire killed one U.S. pilot and three Somalis, wounding McKnight and an Aidid aide. A third Black Hawk, dispatched to aid the second downed chopper, was hit and made a crash landing in the New Port area.

McKnight frantically radioed for assistance–and Lamb heard the call. “We pulled all our guards off the perimeter and launched a platoon-size [contingent], about 40 guys,” he says. The team consisted of cooks and other assorted rangers, including Lamb, an electronics expert. Taking off from the airport in thin-skinned Humvees, the rescue column got as far as the Bakbara Market district–deep into Aidid territory–but fell short of the Olympic Hotel and turned back after 45 minutes. “We were taking fire almost from the time we left the gate,” Lamb explains.

The Charlie Company of the 2nd Battalion, 14th Regiment, loth Mountain Division, had an even dimmer idea of enemy strength when it received a call for help at 4:15. Part of the Quick Reaction Force based at the university, the 200 or so U.S. soldiers were on 20-minute alert–but bad little familiarity with the ranger attack plan, which delayed their rescue efforts. At 4:35, QRF commander Lt. Col. Lawrence Casper ordered his force to move out and link up with rangers at the airport. Because the main streets were so dangerous, the QRF convoy of about a dozen trucks and Humvees took a circuitous route to the airport, where they waited for instructions. Finally, at 5:50, the convoy moved out in the direction of the downed choppers. Ten minutes later, they ran into an ambush at K-4 circle. For as long as they could, QRF soldiers held off fierce fire and rocket salvos from Somalis on both sides of the street. But at 6:30, Casper ordered a retreat.

By 7, U.S. commanders were desperately trying to assemble a heavier rescue force. They hadn’t anticipated the difficulties of a joint U.S.-U.N. operation. Malaysian and Pakistani officers had the only tanks and armored personnel carriers available in all of Mogadishu for the mission. But foreign U.N. troops put up some resistance. They had been left out of the loop on the ranger assault, and balked at revving up their armored vehicles. NEWSWEEK has learned that at one point, a U.S. officer held a gun to the head of a Pakistani tank commander to force him to move out with the rescue party.

A few minutes before midnight–nearly nine hours after the assault team landed atop the Olympic Hotel–the U.N. rescue convoy of some 30 APCs and tanks, including a second QRF force, finally got underway. One of the Malaysian APCs held the eight-man squad from the 41st Engineers of the 10th Mountain Division, which included Private Xiong Ly, a native of Stockton, Calif. When they came under heavy fire, Ly’s squad dropped the hatch and piled out. Seconds later, a rocket-propelled grenade struck the APC, killing the Malaysian driver and wounding his machine gunner. Huddling by a wall for protection, Ly was hit by shrapnel in the foot. For the next five hours, he and his squad fought off a brutal Somali siege. Grenade shrapnel tore into Ly’s other ankle and wounded his sergeant in the chest and face. Ly dived for a wall and hugged the ground, taking more shrapnel in his back. just before 6 a.m. on Monday, a scout helicopter arrived, providing cover for two APCs that raced in to evacuate the squad. “At that point,” says Ly, “I didn’t care if I lived or died.”

Rick Lamb and fellow rangers had joined the U.N. rescue force when small-arms fire knocked out three of the tires in his Humvee. The driver took a hit, and Lamb, who was riding shotgun, helped pull him into the back and took over the wheel himself. “Everything went gray for a minute, but then we were on the move again,” he says. Ten minutes later a rocket-propelled grenade flew across the hood of his car, crashing into a nearby wall. “That’s when I got a piece of shrapnel,” says Lamb, who wondered if he’d been hit by a chunk of brick. “I thought I was going to die. I thought of my wife and my small son, and I saw a big squirt of blood come out.” Still, he managed to pull his helmet down low over the wound. Despite “a pretty-good-size headache,” Lamb drove out of the ambush.

He never made it to the site of the downed copters. Instead, he got only as far as the edge of the U.N. “stabilization zone,” where forces had finally quelled Aidid’s gunmen and pulled out what was left of the rangers. Lamb eventually rode out with the 10th Mountain Division–but not before witnessing a searing spectacle: “They were stacking the dead here, the wounded there, and some of the guys were mauled, missing fingers, missing limbs. Others had chunks gone.” Sometime after 7 a.m., the wounded were brought to the stadium and then medevaced to the hospital at the airport. The fire fight had lasted 16 hours.

Back at the Pentagon, Adm. David Jeremiah, acting chairman of the Joint Chiefs, agonized over the first action reports of casualties and summoned Defense Secretary Les Aspin to the national military command center. Last Tuesday, NEWSWEEK has learned, they secretly dispatched Gen. Wayne Downing, four-star chief of the U.S. Special Operations Command, to Somalia to assess what went wrong. The survivors of the fire fight still believe in the mission. “If they get some more troops in there, it’ll go a long way,” said Lamb as he prepared to go back to his wife and baby in Fort Benning. He felt there was still something worth fighting for.

Spc. James Smith; 21 years old; Long Valley, N.J.

Cpl. James Cavaco; 26 years old; Forestdale, Mass.

Pfc. Richard Kowalewski Jr.; 20 years old; Crucible, Pa.

CWO Donovan Briley; 33 years old; N. Little Rock, Ark.

Sgt. James Joyce; 24 years old; Denton, Texas

Sgt. Cornell Houston; 31 years old; Compton, Calif.

CWO Clifton Wolcott; 36 years old; Cuba, N.Y.

Sgt. Daniel Busch 25 years old; Portage, Wis.

Spc. Dominick Pilla; 21 years old; Vineland, N.J.

Sgt. Lorenzo Ruiz; 27 years old; El Paso, Texas

Sgt. 1/c Earl Fillmore Jr.; 28 years old; Blairsvill, Pa.

Pfc. James Martin Jr.; 23 years old; Collinsvill, Ill.

M/Sgt. Timothy Martin; 38 years old; Aurora, Ind.

Sgt. Thomas Field; 25 years old; Lisbon, Maine

M/Sgt. Gary Gordon; 33 years old; Lincoln, Maine

Two men were recovered but not yet identified

PHOTO: U.S. Army Sgt. James Joyce, killed in action in Mogadishu, was flown home last week and buried in Arlington National Cemetery (WILFREDO LEE–AP)