BETRAYED BY THE VA Thomas Alan Bowman Sr. asked his country for help. He got silence. Sign the demand →
Dear Doug Collins

The 1994 Black Hawk Shootdown: Twenty-Six Aboard, and No One Convicted

Twenty-six people went up that morning on a mission of mercy that had been running for three years, and none of them came back — not to an enemy, but to two American fighter jets flying the same mission, under the same airborne control, in clear weather. The helicopters were American, painted with American flags precisely so they would be recognized. The fighters had been told nothing about them. The radar plane overhead, which knew the helicopters were there, said nothing that stopped the shooting. What followed was an investigation that found a "chain of events" and no single culprit, a court-martial that acquitted the only man tried, reprimands and groundings handed out under congressional and family pressure, and an independent review by the Government Accountability Office that documented, item by item, what the Air Force's report had left out. And running underneath all of it was a number: $100,000, paid by the Department of Defense to the family of each foreign victim, and not paid to the families of the 15 Americans. This page is the record of the two crews and their passengers, of what the institutions did and did not do afterward, and of what their families asked for and are still owed.

The service and the promise

Operation Provide Comfort began in April 1991, after the Gulf War, under United Nations Security Council Resolution 688, which demanded that Iraq stop repressing the Kurds of northern Iraq and called on member nations to meet the region’s humanitarian needs. A coalition of the United States and twelve other countries mounted the relief effort. Coalition air forces — American, British, French, and Turkish — secured the airspace north of the 36th parallel, the “no-fly zone” from which Iraqi aircraft were barred, and a security zone inside it that Iraqi ground forces could not enter. A Military Coordination Center at Zakhu, Iraq, monitored conditions in the zone and was supported by a U.S. Army helicopter detachment.

That detachment was Eagle Flight: C Company, 6th Battalion, 159th Aviation Regiment, based at Giebelstadt, Germany, flying out of Diyarbakir, Turkey, since October 1991. Its Black Hawks flew the daily logistics run to the Coordination Center at Zakhu, provided search and rescue for coalition pilots forced down, flew medical evacuations, and carried Coordination Center teams to Kurdish villages reachable only by helicopter. By April 1994 the detachment had flown more than 6,500 hours in support of the Combined Task Force. Its six Black Hawks wore a unique paint scheme — United States flags on the nose, the sides, and the belly — chosen, the detachment’s own memorial history says, to distinguish them from similar helicopters on other missions in the region. As they flew over the Kurdish region on external fuel tanks, the memorial history records, people below would pause to wave or salute.

The two helicopters lost on April 14, 1994 carried eight Eagle Flight crew members: Specialist Cornelius A. Bass, Specialist Jeffrey C. Colbert, Specialist Mark A. Ellner, Chief Warrant Officer John W. Garrett Jr., Chief Warrant Officer Michael A. Hall, Captain Patrick M. McKenna — the detachment commander — Warrant Officer Erik S. Mounsey, and Sergeant Michael S. Robinson. Their passengers were a coalition leadership team on an orientation flight: Colonel Jerald L. Thompson, the outgoing Coordination Center commander, was introducing his replacement, Colonel Richard A. Mulhern, to the region and its leaders. With them flew Staff Sergeant Paul Barclay, Sergeant First Class Benjamin T. Hodge, Staff Sergeant Ricky L. Robinson, and First Lieutenant Laura A. Piper, an Air Force intelligence officer; Barbara L. Schell, the United States political advisor; Major Harry Shapland and Lieutenant Colonel Jonathan C. Swann of Britain; Lieutenant Colonel Guy Demetz of France; Colonel Hikmet Alp, Lieutenant Ceyhun Civas, and Lieutenant Barlas Gultepe of Turkey; and five Kurdish representatives — Abdulsatur Arab, Ghandi Hussein, Bader Mikho, Salid Said, and Ahmad Mohamad. Fifteen of the 26 were Americans: fourteen members of the armed forces and one civilian federal employee. The other eleven were the allied officers and Kurdish representatives the mission existed to serve alongside.

The promise made to them and their families was spoken within hours, on camera, by the President. “We will get the facts,” President Clinton said on April 14, 1994, “and we will make them available to the American people and to the people of Britain, France, and Turkey, our partners in Operation Provide Comfort.” Secretary of Defense William Perry, as reported at the time, said: “I take full responsibility for this tragedy and I pledge that I will take a direct role in ensuring that the investigation is conducted as thoroughly and quickly as possible.” Eleven days later, at the Fort Myer memorial service, the President put the obligation in its lasting form: “We owe it to them to honor their lives and their service, to answer the questions of their families.” The ledger at the end of this page is kept against those sentences.

What happened

On the morning of April 14, 1994, the two Black Hawks — Eagle Flight — flew from Diyarbakir to the Military Coordination Center at Zakhu, reporting their entry into the no-fly zone to the AWACS en route controller and landing at the Center. There they picked up the sixteen members of the coalition leadership team and departed Zakhu for Arbil, reporting their departure, route, and destination, which the AWACS en route controller acknowledged. The AWACS aircraft, flying over Turkey, was responsible among other things for controlling aircraft en route to and from the zone, providing threat warning and control inside it, and identifying all unknown aircraft. Its crew knew the Black Hawks were in the area.

The two F-15s were the first fighters into the zone that day, assigned to “sanitize” it — to sweep it and confirm it clear of hostile aircraft before the rest of the day’s mission package entered. Their pilots, Captain Eric A. Wickson in the lead and Lieutenant Colonel Randy W. May, his squadron commander, as wingman, had not been told the Black Hawks were there. The daily Air Tasking Order carried the Black Hawk missions only as “as required,” with no flight times. The fighters entered the zone talking to a different AWACS controller, on a different frequency, from the one the helicopters used; the helicopters could not hear the transmissions between the fighters and the AWACS at all.

The lead pilot picked up radar contacts — low, slow aircraft — and the two fighters attempted electronic identification. They twice reported their contacts and their unsuccessful identification attempts to the AWACS. The AWACS, which had access to electronic information showing friendly aircraft near those contacts, did not tell the fighters that Black Hawks were in the contact area. Under the Airspace Control Order, aircrews encountering an unusual circumstance — an unidentified aircraft in the zone was the paradigm case — were required to report it to the Airborne Command Element aboard the AWACS, the officer who acted as the eyes and ears of the air component’s director of operations and who had authority to stop fighters from engaging unknown aircraft. The F-15 pilots did not make that report. About a week earlier, after F-15 pilots had initially ignored an Airborne Command Element order to break off an intercept, the director of operations had orally re-emphasized exactly that requirement. The accident board never learned of that directive.

What the pilots did instead was a visual identification pass — one pass each, flown, the board president concluded, at speeds, altitudes, and distances at which it was unlikely they would have detected the helicopters’ markings. The Black Hawks, carrying external fuel tanks on wing mounts, were read as Iraqi Hind helicopters, whose wings carry weapons; the pilots said afterward that they did not recognize the differences. The lead pilot misidentified the helicopters as Hinds; the wingman, who had been unable to positively identify them, did not tell the lead that. The lead pilot fired a missile and destroyed the trailing Black Hawk. At his direction, the wingman fired and destroyed the lead Black Hawk. All 26 people aboard were killed.

What the institution did afterward

Later on April 14, the Secretary of Defense ordered an Aircraft Accident Investigation Board — the kind of investigation whose findings are public and whose testimony can be used in disciplinary proceedings, rather than a confidential safety investigation. The board’s report and its president’s opinion, issued May 27, 1994, found “a chain of events”: the task force’s failure to provide clear guidance; the components’ misunderstanding of their responsibilities; the failure to integrate Army helicopter and Air Force operations; AWACS crew mistakes; and, at the end of the chain, the lead pilot’s misidentification and the wingman’s failure to say he had not positively identified the helicopters. On the basis of the report, the Secretary directed the commands to determine whether violations of the Uniform Code of Military Justice had occurred. Fourteen officers were investigated, under two separate commands.

The military justice result, in full, is this. One officer — Captain Jim Wang, the AWACS senior director — was tried by court-martial, charged with dereliction of duty for failing to warn the F-15 pilots that they had misidentified friendly helicopters. At Tinker Air Force Base, Oklahoma, after a two-week trial, a ten-officer tribunal deliberated about five hours over two days and, on June 20, 1995, acquitted him on all counts. Charges against other officers, including negligent-homicide charges against one of the fighter pilots, were dismissed or never carried to trial. One officer received Article 15 nonjudicial punishment, a letter of reprimand; nine others received administrative letters of reprimand, admonition, or counseling; against three of the fourteen, no action was taken at all. No one was convicted of anything arising out of 26 deaths.

The families’ verdict on that result is on the record. “My husband and I feel that this concludes for the Air Force their massive whitewash of this tragedy that cost the life of our son, Patrick, and 25 other people,” said Maureen McKenna, mother of the Eagle Flight commander. Joan Piper, mother of Lieutenant Laura Piper, said: “So now we have 26 people, on a clear day in perfect weather, shot down by our own F-15s and no one is responsible.” Kaye Mounsey, widow of Warrant Officer Erik Mounsey, said she was “still baffled how 26 people could be brutally killed and yet not one person held accountable.” Secretary Perry answered the families directly: seven officers had received letters of reprimand or admonishment, he noted. “No one has been sent to jail, that is true,” he said. “But many officers’ careers were very adversely affected by this.”

Under pressure from the families and from Congress, the new Air Force Chief of Staff, General Ronald Fogleman, reviewed the administrative actions at the Secretary of the Air Force’s request and found that a number of the involved officers’ performance evaluations had not reflected their failure to meet Air Force standards. In August 1995 he issued letters of evaluation for seven officers — including the task force commander, Brigadier General Jeffrey S. Pilkington, and the air component commander, Brigadier General Curtis H. Emery — and took further action against five. Both F-15 pilots were disqualified from aviation service for three years. Three AWACS crew members — Captain Wang, Captain Joseph M. Halcli, and First Lieutenant Ricky L. Wilson — were disqualified for at least three years from aircraft-control duties. Lieutenant Colonel May ultimately retired at the grade of major, the last grade at which the Secretary of the Air Force determined he had performed satisfactorily. These were the heaviest consequences anyone bore, and every one was administrative.

The institutional self-examination is where the families’ questions did measurable work. Their questions led the House Committee on National Security to hold a hearing on August 3, 1995, on the shootdown, the board’s investigation, and the judicial actions. Afterward, the committee’s Military Personnel Subcommittee asked the Government Accountability Office whether the board’s investigation had met its objectives, whether the UCMJ investigations had followed established guidelines, and whether officials had improperly or unlawfully influenced either process — considering, as it worked, the families’ concerns. GAO interviewed more than 160 people and reviewed the board’s 25 volumes and thousands of classified documents. Its report, OSI-98-4, issued November 5, 1997, is the anchor document of this page.

GAO found that the board had been properly convened and had conducted an extensive investigation that met its evidence-gathering objective — and then it documented what the report had left out. First, it never discussed the F-15 pilots’ responsibility under the Airspace Control Order to report to the Airborne Command Element when they encountered an unknown aircraft in the zone — a report they did not make — though the board had reviewed that provision and the evidence the pilots knew of it. Second, it cited the air component commander’s statement that the Airborne Command Element had no authority to stop the incident; that portrayal was inaccurate, the element did have that authority, and evidence of it was available to the board. Third, the board president erroneously concluded that the Black Hawks’ use of an incorrect electronic identification code was what prevented the F-15 pilots from receiving an electronic response; a later Air Force analysis indicated that on the pilots’ own account of their settings, they should have received a response during certain sequences regardless of the code. Fourth, the report and opinion never discussed two concerns the families had raised: a perceived general lack of discipline in the F-15 pilot community, and a perceived urgency by these pilots to engage. GAO asked the operation’s officials about both directly. The officials stated that the pilots’ failure to contact the Airborne Command Element resulted from a lack of F-15 mission discipline in Operation Provide Comfort at the time; that they had seen a number of F-15 mission-discipline problems, including the break-off incident a week before the shootdown; that F-15/F-16 rivalry had become pronounced; and that there had been no reason for the urgency to engage, since the helicopters posed no threat. Including these issues, GAO concluded, could have raised questions useful in the disciplinary proceedings that followed.

On the military justice process, GAO found that the UCMJ investigations complied with the Code and the Manual for Courts-Martial, and found no evidence of improper or unlawful command influence — with a stated limit. To confirm whether the disposition of the suspected offenses had been influenced, GAO asked to interview the convening authorities and the inquiry and investigating officers. The Department of Defense refused, on the stated ground that “any Congressional intrusion” into the deliberative process would compromise the independence of the military justice system. The question the families most wanted answered — why, with 26 dead, the charges resolved into one acquittal and a set of letters — is therefore one the independent reviewer was not permitted to put to the people who made the decisions.

On prevention, the record is stronger: within twenty-four hours the rules of engagement were modified, helicopter flight times went onto the daily Air Tasking Order, and AWACS responsibilities were further defined — the first of hundreds of corrective actions GAO later counted. The system that had failed to put Eagle Flight on the fighters’ picture was, on paper and in procedure, rebuilt so the same gap could not quietly reopen.

The compensation record stands apart, because it was never part of the GAO review — the office said so expressly when it testified on the subject in 1998. On August 26, 1994, the Department of Defense announced $100,000 ex gratia humanitarian payments to the family of each non-U.S. victim, authorized by the Secretary of Defense under section 127 of title 10 as a gesture of the government’s regret. No equivalent payment was made or offered to the American families, who had only the ordinary incidentals of military death — including, for those who had bought it, Servicemen’s Group Life Insurance at a $200,000 maximum. One American victim, Lieutenant Laura Piper, had no life insurance at all. Her father, Colonel Danny Piper, a retired Air Force officer, raised the disparity with the Senate Armed Services Committee: if the foreign payments were proper, similar payments should have been made to the American families, and treating the two groups differently was discrimination. GAO answered him on February 1, 1996 (NSIAD-96-91R): the payments had been authorized, the claims statutes did not restrict the Secretary’s section 127 authority, and the civil-rights provision he cited did not reach discretionary payments of this kind. The opinion answered the legal question. It did not move the money.

Congress was then asked to close the gap itself. Private relief bills — H.R. 2986 in 1997 and H.R. 4061, introduced June 16, 1998 — would have directed the Treasury to pay $100,000 to the survivors of each of the fourteen service members and the one civilian federal employee killed. The House Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration and Claims took the matter up on June 18, 1998, at a hearing where GAO testified on its review and the families’ supporters testified to what the disparity itself had communicated: by compensating the foreign families at $100,000 more than each American survivor family received, the Department had “implicitly signaled that it views the lives of certain foreign nationals to be of greater worth than those of its own personnel.” The bills were heard. They were not enacted.

Where it stands now

The criminal account closed on June 20, 1995, and has never reopened: the complete judicial product of 26 deaths is one acquittal. The administrative account closed in August 1995 with groundings, disqualifications, letters in selection records, and one retirement at a reduced grade. The procedural account — tasking orders, rules of engagement, AWACS responsibilities, joint-integration fixes counted in the hundreds — is the one part of the ledger the institution filled in promptly and, by GAO’s review, substantially.

The compensation account remains where the families left it in 1998. The foreign families received $100,000 each as an expression of the government’s regret; the American families received no equivalent, and the two bills that would have provided one died without enactment. The disparity was lawful — GAO’s 1996 opinion settled that — and it was never cured.

The question of command influence remains formally unresolved in a specific, documented way: GAO found no evidence of it in everything it was allowed to see, and was refused access to the officials whose decisions were in question. Its 1997 report — which made no recommendations, and in whose conclusions the Department concurred — stands as both the most complete public accounting of the shootdown and a standing record of the limit the Department placed on that accounting.

What remains is the remembrance the families and the detachment built themselves. The Eagle Flight Detachment Memorial Monument — privately funded, more than $50,000 raised by a volunteer organization — was dedicated at Giebelstadt Army Airfield on April 14, 1996, the second anniversary, before some four hundred people, with a message from President Clinton. Eight stones carry the names and badges of the eight crew members; bronze replicas of the two helicopters rise above plaques naming the eighteen passengers. The families’ books stand beside it: Joan L. Piper’s A Chain of Events (2000), on her daughter Laura’s death and the investigation that followed, and Allen L. Hall’s Michael, My Son, and the Story of the Eagle Flight Detachment (2002), a father’s account of his son, Chief Warrant Officer Michael A. Hall. The scholarly account, Scott A. Snook’s Friendly Fire (Princeton University Press, 2000), frames the whole case in one observation: after almost two years of investigation with virtually unlimited resources, no culprit emerged and no smoking gun was found — the puzzle was complete, and the accountability the families were promised in April 1994 is the one piece that was never in it.

The ledger

The accounting, in three lines — what the record shows has been done, what it shows has not, and what is still being sought.

What has been done

What has not been done

What is being sought

The record, on video

This case was told on camera in its own time: in the President’s televised remarks on the day of the shootdown, at the Fort Myer memorial service eleven days later, and in news coverage of the court-martial and the hearings. Those recordings are archival. No recording of this case from its publisher could be verified to the standard this page requires for embedding, so the wall below stands empty rather than filled by guesswork.

Sources

Part of Betrayed, Not Forgotten — this site's accounting for the service members and veterans their own institutions failed. Videos are embedded from their publishers; nothing here is re-hosted.