The Night They Took Maduro

 

The sky over Caracas turned the color of a fresh bruise that night—purple-black and angry, split open by explosions that lit the clouds from beneath like some hellish stage show. The kind of sky that makes you think of the end of things.

Down below, the Black Hawks came in low and mean, their rotors chopping the air into a rhythm that sounded almost like laughter—thup-thup-thup-thup—while F-35As screamed overhead and the B-1B Lancers did their terrible work from someplace you couldn’t even see them. Infrastructure going up. Air defense systems turning into junk metal and dead operators. The whole nine yards.

And through it all, like ghosts in expensive boots, Delta Force moved.

They’d been watching Nicolás Maduro for months by then—watching him the way a cat watches a mouse hole, patient and still and absolutely certain. They knew when he ate breakfast. They knew which mistress he visited on Tuesdays. They knew about the safe room, naturally. The panic room with its reinforced steel door and independent air supply, the kind of room a man builds when he knows, deep down in the lizard part of his brain, that someday the bill’s going to come due.

Maduro tried for it that night. Of course he did. When the walls started shaking and the lights went out and you could hear the helicopters getting closer—that sound that bypasses your ears entirely and goes straight into your chest cavity—he ran for that room like a kid running for home base.

But Delta had already cut him off. They’d been there for seven minutes by the time he realized what was happening. Seven minutes. Think about that.

From Mar-a-Lago—that gaudy palace down in Florida with its gold-plated toilets and chandeliers the size of Volkswagens—Trump watched it all go down on screens that made it look like a video game. Later he’d describe it in that way he has, all hyperbole and superlatives, how the elite forces breached the compound with “virtually no meaningful resistance,” which is PR-speak for they didn’t even have time to shit their pants.

They called it Operation Absolute Resolve, which sounds like something a committee came up with after three hours and too much coffee. What it really was, if you strip away the patriotic bunting, was a snatch-and-grab. A kidnapping dressed up in fatigues and justified by calling Maduro a drug fugitive—which, to be fair, he probably was. But since when did America care about that unless it was convenient?

The United Nations howled. Mexico howled. Half the world howled about sovereignty and international law and setting dangerous precedents. But by then Maduro was already in American custody, and Delta Force had proven once again that they could reach out and touch anyone, anywhere, any time they damn well pleased.

Borders? Fortifications? Sovereign territory? All just lines on a map. Suggestions, really.

The Men Who Can’t Be Stopped

You want to understand Delta Force—and I mean really understand them—you’ve got to go back to 1977, back when Colonel Charlie Beckwith looked at what was happening in the world (hijackings, bombings, Americans getting murdered on airplanes and in airports) and said, essentially, we need something better.

Beckwith had served with the British SAS, those quiet, competent bastards who don’t talk much but get the job done, and he stole their playbook wholesale: quality over quantity. Small teams of absolute killers who could do what needed doing when the politicians had painted themselves into a corner.

The weapons are impressive, sure. The training is top-shelf. But what really separates Delta operators from every other swinging dick in the military is what’s between their ears. It’s the mental toughness—that thing that keeps you moving when your body’s screaming at you to quit, when you’ve been awake for thirty-six hours and you can’t remember your own name but you still need to distinguish a hostage from a hostile in the space of a heartbeat.

Selection happens twice a year in the mountains of West Virginia, and it has a failure rate north of ninety percent. Think about that. These aren’t civilians off the street; these are already the best of the best—Green Berets, Rangers, guys who’ve survived training that would break a normal person like a twig. And nine out of ten of them wash out.

The worst parts aren’t even the physical stuff, though God knows there’s plenty of that. It’s the Stress Phase. No talking. No buddies to commiserate with. Just you and your rucksack and eighteen to forty miles of mountains every single day, alone with your thoughts, which is where the real monsters live.

The capstone is something they call The Long Walk—forty miles with a secret time limit. The uncertainty is the weapon. You don’t know when it ends. You don’t know if you’re going fast enough. You just keep putting one foot in front of the other while your body dissolves into pure pain and your mind starts playing tricks on you, showing you things that aren’t there, telling you lies about how it’s okay to quit, how nobody would blame you.

Dale Comstock, a former operator, called it psychological warfare, and he wasn’t wrong. Plenty of tough guys—athletes, marathoners, men who can bench-press a Buick—they wash out because they can’t handle the isolation. The exhaustion. The not-knowing.

Delta wants the ones who can still think when their body’s on the verge of complete collapse. The ones who don’t quit even when quitting makes perfect sense.

If you make it through—and most don’t—you get six months of Operator Training Course. Close Quarters Battle drilled until it’s muscle memory. Espionage techniques. Tactical driving. Demolitions. You learn to move through a room like smoke, to tell friend from foe in the time it takes to blink, to be the nightmare that kicks down the door at three in the morning.

And that’s exactly what made Caracas possible.

The Betrayal (Or Was It?)

Starting in August 2025, CIA teams slipped into Venezuela the way water seeps into cracks—quietly, persistently, unstoppable. They recruited assets. They mapped Maduro’s routines. They learned everything there was to learn, and the fifty million dollar reward the U.S. government was offering—that helped loosen tongues considerably. Fifty million buys a lot of cooperation, even from people who should know better.

The operation went off so fast that people started wondering almost immediately: who helped them?

All eyes turned to Diosdado Cabello and Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino López—Maduro’s own guys, the men who were supposed to protect him. Both condemned the raid publicly, of course. Both made the right noises for the cameras. But their forces—the forces they commanded—put up almost zero resistance. Fox News noted it. The Venezuelan analysts noted it. The whole world noticed.

Jorge Jraissati, who knows Venezuelan politics the way a cardiologist knows hearts, suggested the speed of the capture pointed to something darker than good intelligence. It pointed to active cooperation from inside the regime. Pro-U.S. elements. Traitors, if you want to use the ugly word.

Or maybe just realists who saw which way the wind was blowing and decided they’d rather be on the winning side.

When Things Go Wrong: Mogadishu

Of course, not every operation ends with champagne and medals. Sometimes things go to hell, and when they do, men die in ways that make you wake up screaming twenty years later.

The shadow of Mogadishu hangs over every Delta Force operation like a ghost you can’t quite exorcise.

Somalia in the early 1990s was what happens when a country tears itself apart. Dictator Siad Barre fell, and what came after was worse—clan warfare, mass starvation, warlords hijacking international food aid while children died in the streets with their bellies swollen and their eyes empty.

The UN came in with the best intentions, because the UN always has the best intentions, and the U.S. backed them up. But good intentions in a place like Somalia are about as useful as a screen door on a submarine. The humanitarian mission turned into a shooting war with Mohamed Farrah Aidid, a warlord who saw foreign intervention as a threat to his power. Which it was.

After Aidid’s militia killed twenty-four Pakistani peacekeepers, the UN issued an arrest warrant—which in hindsight seems almost quaint, like serving a warrant on a rabid dog—and the U.S. deployed Task Force Ranger. Delta Force. Rangers. The 160th SOAR with their black helicopters. All under Major General William Garrison, whose job was to hunt Aidid and his lieutenants through the streets of Mogadishu.

On October 3, 1993, U.S. intelligence located two key targets meeting in a building near the Olympic Hotel in the Bakara Market—Aidid’s stronghold, a neighborhood where white faces and American uniforms stood out like blood on snow.

The plan was simple, the way all plans are simple before reality gets its teeth into them. Delta would assault the building. Rangers would secure the perimeter. A ground convoy would extract everyone. Nineteen aircraft, twelve vehicles, about 160 troops. Estimated duration: under an hour.

In and out. Easy peasy.

The initial phase went smooth as silk. Delta captured the targets and several others, zip-tied and hooded and ready for transport. Mission accomplished, or so it seemed.

Then a Black Hawk went down.

The Day Everything Changed

The Somali militia had been watching. Learning. They knew the helicopter patterns, knew the vulnerabilities. When they fired that RPG at Super 61’s tail rotor, they changed everything.

Mark Bowden wrote about it in Black Hawk Down—the book, not the movie—and he got it right: “The operation didn’t go as planned.” Which is perhaps the greatest understatement in military history, like saying the Titanic had some water issues.

Super 61, piloted by Cliff Wolcott, corkscrewed into the streets of Mogadishu, and what had been a surgical strike turned into a desperate rescue mission in a city that wanted every American dead.

The ground convoy fought through barricades, through ambushes, through streets that had become a shooting gallery. Then Super 64 went down somewhere else, and the nightmare doubled.

At the Super 64 crash site, two Delta snipers—Master Sergeant Gary Gordon and Sergeant First Class Randy Shughart—watched from above as the militia closed in like ants on honey. They could see what was coming. They knew the math.

They requested permission to drop in. To go down there and try to save the crew. They were told no. They asked again. They were told no again.

They kept asking until someone finally said yes.

Think about that. Think about asking permission to do something you know—you know in your bones—is going to get you killed. And then doing it anyway.

They fast-roped down, two men against hundreds, and fought their way to Michael Durant. Pulled him from the wreckage. Set up a perimeter with their bodies and their rifles and held off the militia until their ammunition ran out and there was nothing left but courage, which isn’t quite enough when the other guy has an AK-47 and friends.

Both were killed. Durant survived—captured, beaten, but alive. Gordon and Shughart received posthumous Medals of Honor, which their families can frame and put on the wall and look at when they wake up at three in the morning thinking about what was lost.

The fighting lasted eighteen hours. Eighteen hours of nonstop hell. The men trapped at the Super 61 crash site held out through the night—through waves of attacks, through ammunition running low, through wounded men screaming and dying men going quiet—until a UN relief convoy broke through at dawn on October 4. Pakistani tanks. Malaysian APCs. The cavalry, finally.

Eighteen Americans died. Over seventy were wounded. Two helicopters destroyed. Somali casualties were estimated at 300 to 1,000-plus, including God knows how many civilians who just had the bad luck to be in the wrong place when the shooting started.

CNN broadcast footage of American bodies being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu, and the American public—sitting in their living rooms with their TV dinners—got to watch it all in living color. It traumatized the nation. President Bill Clinton pulled out of Somalia, the UN mission collapsed, and everyone went home having learned a valuable lesson about what happens when you stick your nose into places you don’t understand.

The Syndrome

They call it Mogadishu Syndrome—the reluctance to commit ground troops to overseas interventions unless there’s a vital strategic interest at stake. It shifted military doctrine toward airpower, cruise missiles, drones. Keep Americans out of harm’s way. Fight from thirty thousand feet where the enemy can’t touch you.

You could see it in the massive airstrikes that preceded Delta’s landing in Caracas in 2026. Pound the hell out of them from above first. Take out the air defenses, the infrastructure, anything that could shoot back. Then send in the shooters.

Militarily, Mogadishu became a case study in what not to do. The communication failures. The denied request for armored vehicles—Defense Secretary Les Aspin vetoed it over political optics, worried about how it would look to Congress—and the vulnerability of helicopters to basic infantry weapons. All of it led to changes in how America fights its wars.

A 1994 congressional report noted that Aspin was concerned about perceptions. Perceptions. Men died because someone in Washington was worried about how things would look.

In the decades after, Delta Force refined their tactics. More nighttime operations to avoid daytime crowds. Better surveillance tech. Better intelligence. Better everything. The Caracas operation—executed in the dead of night with real-time oversight from Mar-a-Lago—came directly from the lessons written in blood on the streets of Mogadishu.

The Movie and the Myth

Ridley Scott made Black Hawk Down in 2001, based on Bowden’s book, and released it just months after 9/11 when America was hungry for heroes and righteousness and simple stories about good guys and bad guys.

Scott took a strategic defeat—a mission that went catastrophically wrong—and turned it into a tactical epic about courage under fire. He popularized the “leave no man behind” ethos that became a cornerstone of military culture. He made Delta operators look calm and professional and lethal amid absolute chaos, which they were, but he also stripped away most of the context.

The movie had a huge impact on recruitment—some studies suggest it boosted Army enlistments by up to 400 percent. Young men watched Gordon and Shughart sacrifice themselves and thought, I want to be like that. They joined the Rangers. They tried out for Delta. They wanted to be part of something bigger than themselves.

But the film also drew criticism for what it left out. The political context of why America was in Somalia in the first place. The civilian suffering from U.S. operations. The reasons behind the Somali rage that sent hundreds of militia into the streets to kill Americans.

Ann Talbot noted the stark contrast between Bowden’s book—which meticulously traces the fifteen-hour battle and explains the context—and Scott’s film, which presents the enemy as faceless hordes and U.S. motives as purely righteous. Good versus evil. Heroes versus villains. No moral complexity. No uncomfortable questions.

That simplification—that good-versus-evil binary—may have helped shape public support for aggressive actions years later. Actions like snatching Maduro from his compound in Caracas while the world watched and screamed about sovereignty.

Because once you’ve decided you’re the good guys, really and truly, it’s easy to justify anything.

And that, friends and neighbors, is the scariest part of all.

—The End—