The battle did not begin on October 3. Its roots lay in a famine that killed an estimated 300,000 Somalis in 1992, a civil war that had destroyed the country's government, and a United Nations intervention that shifted from humanitarian relief to political ambition. By mid-1993, the UN mission, UNOSOM II, was actively pursuing General Aidid after fighters loyal to his Somali National Alliance attacked Pakistani peacekeepers on June 5, killing twenty-four soldiers. The UN blamed Aidid and began military operations against him. On July 12, U.S. helicopters attacked a house in south Mogadishu where Habr Gidr clan elders were meeting. The Somalis called it Bloody Monday. Human Rights Watch described the aftermath as looking "like mass murder." The Red Cross counted 215 casualties at just two hospitals. Each escalation deepened Somali hostility toward the foreign forces, swelling the ranks of fighters willing to take up arms against UNOSOM. By autumn, President Clinton authorized Operation Gothic Serpent to capture Aidid himself.

The raid began at 3:42 p.m. local time. Helicopters carrying Rangers established a perimeter around a target building near the Olympic Hotel while Delta operators entered to seize the two Aidid lieutenants. The captives were secured quickly, but events on the streets overtook the plan. Somali fighters fired RPGs at the low-flying helicopters, downing Super Six One, piloted by Chief Warrant Officer Cliff Wolcott, deep in hostile territory. A rescue team was dispatched to the crash site. Then Super Six Four, piloted by Chief Warrant Officer Michael Durant, was hit and crashed several blocks away. Two Delta snipers, Master Sergeant Gary Gordon and Sergeant First Class Randy Shughart, volunteered to defend the second crash site, knowing they were outnumbered. Both were killed; their actions earned them posthumous Medals of Honor. Durant was captured by Somali fighters and held for eleven days. Through the night, pinned-down American soldiers fought street by street while a relief convoy of Pakistani and Malaysian armored vehicles attempted to reach them, absorbing fire along the entire route.

The American narrative, shaped by Mark Bowden's book and Ridley Scott's film Black Hawk Down, centers on the valor of trapped soldiers fighting impossible odds. The Somali experience of October 3 was different. Months of UNOSOM military operations had already killed significant numbers of civilians. The Bloody Monday raid in July had been widely perceived as an attack on clan elders, not military targets. When the helicopters arrived that October afternoon, Somalis throughout south Mogadishu did not distinguish between a targeted raid on Aidid's network and another assault on their neighborhoods. Armed fighters converged on the crash sites, but so did unarmed residents caught in a battle that swept through densely populated streets for fifteen hours. Ambulances could not reach the wounded. Families sheltered in interior rooms as heavy-caliber rounds penetrated walls. The Somali dead included insurgents, bystanders, and people whose involvement will never be classified. Most estimates place the Somali toll between 133 and 700 killed, with a thousand or more wounded.

The photographs changed American foreign policy. Images of a dead American soldier being dragged through Mogadishu's streets were broadcast worldwide, producing a wave of public outrage in the United States. President Clinton ordered the withdrawal of American forces from Somalia by March 1994. All UN troops followed by early 1995. The doctrine that emerged — an aversion to deploying U.S. ground forces in African conflicts — contributed directly to American inaction during the 1994 Rwandan genocide, when the Clinton administration resisted intervention as 800,000 people were murdered in one hundred days. In Somalia itself, the departure of international forces left the country without a functioning central government for nearly two decades. The CIA later compensated by funding Mogadishu warlords as proxies against the Islamic Courts Union in the 2000s. The remains of Super Six One were eventually recovered in 2013 and are displayed at the Airborne and Special Operations Museum at Fort Bragg, North Carolina.