Jerry Boykin & Lynn Vincent (30 page)
Less than a minute passed at the bottom of the 737 ladder as all these impressions flooded over me and gelled into a single thought.
This has got to be the worst place I’ve ever been
.
I had seen poorer places. In El Salvador, I had watched ragged, legless beggars scoot around on carts; in Sudan, I had been with the Dinkas, a desperately poor people who raised scrawny cattle and owned nothing. And I had seen more decrepit paces: Trash heaped in the streets of Honduras, the rubble that once was Beirut, and in Khartoum, a dead donkey burning. But I had never seen hopelessness like this. A palpable oppression hovered over the rubble, the tent cities, and the low, smoky skyline. Whatever it was, it seemed to press in on me physically, as though jealous to give up territory.
As I waited for Garrison and the others to deplane, I flashed back to a conversation he and I had earlier that summer on a training range at Eglin AFB under a sweltering Florida sun. Standing with his arms folded across his chest and the trademark unlit stogie jutting from his mouth, he watched as elements of Delta, the Rangers, and the 160th SOAR finished up an exercise in preparation for what was then a possible deployment to Mogadishu.
“My spies in the Pentagon tell me Powell’s not too shot in the ass with this thing,” Garrison said.
Translation: Joints Chiefs chairman Colin Powell was not enthusiastic about our going into Somalia to hunt Mohamed Farrah Aidid.
“Why not?” I asked.
“Thinks it’s mission creep,” Garrison said. The term meant taking on new missions that were not part of the original concept.
Powell had a point. The 10th Mountain Division had been in Mogadishu since December 1992 to deliver humanitarian aid to Somalia, a country torn by civil war and drought. An estimated half million refugees had already fled to other parts of Africa. Hundreds of thousands more remained behind. U.S. forces landed in concert with nineteen other UN countries as part of Operation Restore Hope, a mission to provide secure distribution of food and relief supplies. In addition, U.S. and UN negotiators arranged peace talks between more than a dozen warring factions, including Aidid and his Habr Gidr clan. Tensions escalated as UN nations charged that Aidid was hindering peace talks. Then in June 1993, Habr Gidr militia ambushed and killed twenty-four Pakistani peacekeepers. A week later the UN issued a warrant for Aidid’s arrest. Enter Task Force Ranger.
America was moving from a humanitarian mission to a direct combat role. So in that sense, Powell was right: Mogadishu was a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-don’t enterprise. Human rights groups love to criticize the United States for not stepping in to squash genocidal conflicts in other nations. But when we do step in, they love to complain about how we’re doing it wrong.
I respected Powell. He was an intelligent strategist, very astute. He understood Washington and the political scene better than any general officer I ever saw. And while he did serve the president, he was also his own man, someone who would provide the administration with his best military advice whether or not it was what they wanted to hear.
But standing there with Garrison, I wondered why Powell had not fought harder to make Task Force Ranger the “overwhelming force” that was a well known centerpiece of his war fighting philosophy. Instead, we would execute our operations with a force of only 450. Even at that, we’d have to peel off some combat troops for force protection—to stay back and guard our base of operations against the Sammies, as we came to call hostile Somalis. The Pentagon also denied us a Spectre gunship (saying it was too “provocative”), as well as a fleet of APCs.
Now, here we were.
I suspected our incursion into Mogadishu would not be a short-term mission. We had chased Noriega in Panama, and cornered him quickly—but in a country where we controlled the environment. In Colombia, though, a country where we didn’t control the environment, Jack Alvarez and his team had been locked in the hunt for Pablo Escobar for over a year now—even though we had the support of the government there, our presence remained largely unknown. Mogadishu would be different in all those respects: Task Force Ranger would be operating in a country where racial differences would make it impossible for our elements to move freely in the streets, collecting human intelligence. We would be fighting with a force smaller than what our commander, Garrison, thought sufficient to do the job. And we would be operating from the knife edge of a hostile territory occupied by warring factions, and where most of the population was armed.
The next day, the troops and helos began to arrive from Fort Bragg. Since the 160th brought the only chaplain, I pressed him into service. We gathered everyone in the hangar—Rangers, Delta, SEALs, aviators, some “P.J.s,” or parajumpers, Air Force medics whose specialty was parachuting into combat zones to tend the wounded.
Garrison and I addressed the troops briefly then the chaplain read Scripture and led us all in a prayer. Maintaining our tradition, we then sang
God Bless America
, and launched operations on an adrenaline high.
WE HAD BEEN IN-COUNTRY only for a few days when Aidid gave us the warlord version of the finger. After cleaning the pigeon crap out of the tumble-down terminal, we had set up our joint operations center in there. The JOC was equipped with three video screens for monitoring live battle feeds from the West-Cam Ball, a camera mounted on an OH-58 helo. The logisticians established sleeping and messing areas in the hangar next door. Garrison, meanwhile, moved into a small trailer provided by contractors, just big enough for his cot and a couple of chairs. One evening, he and I, along with Dave McKnight, gathered in there to talk about the next day’s operations.
An older officer, Dave was a Special Forces expert and Vietnam vet who had transitioned into intelligence work. During the first Gulf war, he worked with CIA, and developed a deep understanding of both fields. Lean and ruddy, Dave burned through three packs of cigarettes a day, smoking them nearly end to end. Despite the atrocities he had seen in the darkest, most violent parts of the world, or maybe because of them, he always found a way to crack the tension with some nutty war story about jungle rot in ‘Nam or farting all night in a two-man tent. Dave was always serious when it counted. When it didn’t, he was spinning a tale.
“Intel is still sketchy,” Garrison said from his seat on the cot. “First the Sammies tell us they saw Aidid in such and such a house, then they say they didn’t. Makes it hard to hit him.”
“The informants are scared,” I said. I was going to add that Aidid’s men had been known to literally cut out the tongues of traitors, when I heard a muffled thud from the direction of the airfield.
Dave and I locked eyes and said in unison: “Mortars!”
Instinctively, we hit the floor then both leapt to our feet and practically climbed over each other trying to get outside to see what was going on.
Another mortar round crashed into the tarmac, the concussion spraying concrete skyward. I couldn’t see the falling rubble, but I could hear it showering down on the Black Hawks and Little Birds.
“Go, go, go!” I shouted.
Dave darted for cover beside an empty Conex and I followed, running low, my sidearm banging against my hip. The Somali night was coal-black, empty even of starlight. We flattened ourselves against the outer wall of the container and waited. The sulfur smell of spent ordnance hit me. I could hear the pounding of running feet and Ranger squad leaders barking out commands to their troops, “Stay down! Take cover!”
Then, silence.
The insidious thing about mortars is that you can’t hear them coming. There is no whistle of incoming. There is no tracer fire or any telltale red glare as with small-arms fire or rockets. In a mortar attack, you know you’re being shot at, but you can’t tell when the next round will fall. Or whether it will fall on you.
The ground shook as another mortar slammed down. Orange light flashed at our 10 o’clock, and a hail of tile shards rained down on the pavement.
“I think that one landed right on the JOC,” I told McKnight irritably. The JOC was no palace, but it was all we had.
We huddled against the side of the Conex for another three or four minutes waiting for the attack to end. I don’t think you ever get to the point where things like that don’t scare you. I think you get to the point where they don’t scare you as much. This time though I was too pissed off to be scared. Here we were taking fire and there wasn’t a thing we could do about it. Even if we had known where the Sammies were shooting from, we couldn’t fire back. Aidid and his men were smart—or evil, I couldn’t decide which. We knew from intel they’d pick a sandlot teaming with ten thousand refugees and start shooting from right in the middle of it. And they knew enough about Americans to know we wouldn’t fire back into a defenseless crowd.
Two more explosions ripped the night, hitting the airfield out by the helicopters. Then quiet set in and, this time, spun out into an unbroken string of explosionless minutes. Finally, it appeared the Somalis were ready to turn in for the night. McKnight and I peeled ourselves off the Conex and jogged toward the JOC to inspect the damage.
The Sammies hadn’t launched more than a half-dozen rounds. The blow to our operations center seemed like a lucky strike, with the shooters managing only to knock out a radio and blow over an antenna. From the flightline, a couple of the crew chiefs ran into the JOC and told us that a chopper mechanic had taken a piece of shrapnel in the arm. Somebody else came in and said that our hangar had been hit by shrapnel, but nobody was hurt. Damage wise, that was about it.
Still I had to admire the Somalis’ guts. They used an American technique: Fire for effect. They had shown they knew who we were and why we were there, and that they weren’t afraid of us. Fired right into our base, striking fear into a good portion of our troops, a couple of hundred young Rangers sitting in a vulnerable position, men who had never seen combat. The Sammies may have been terrible marksmen, but launching the attack was the kind of macho intimidation tactic that was probably the best thing they could have done. The incident formed in me a grudging respect.
As McKnight and I stood in the JOC, Garrison walked in, chewing his stogie. “McKnight, tell me where the last place was we saw this sombitch,” he said mildly, referring to Aidid.
McKnight and Garrison walked over to a map of Mogadishu, and called over an analyst who immediately pointed to a house near the center of the city. “We haven’t had a positive sighting in awhile, but that’s the last place we know Aidid was for sure,” he said. “That was a few days ago.”
“Then that’s our target,” Garrison said. “I don’t care if Aidid’s there or not. Jerry, get the men ready. We’re gonna let ’em know we’re here.”
An hour later, Garrison ordered the Ranger and Delta team leaders to assemble their men in front of the JOC. Now he stood before the task force on the open concrete, his arms crossed, cigar jutting from his mouth at a thoughtful angle.
“Now, some of you have never been mortared before,” he said as casually as if the whole group had only fallen off a bicycle. “I just wanted to tell you that if one of them piddly-ass mortars lands in your pocket, it’s probably going to hurt. If it doesn’t land in your pocket, you don’t have to worry about piddly-ass mortars.”
I stood among the men, some as young as eighteen, and heard the intensity of their hush. Garrison let steel creep into his voice. “Now we’re gonna go in there tonight and let ’em know we’re here. And I have confidence in every one of you. So let’s get it on and go do it.”
It was as good as any Knute Rockne pre-game talk. Garrison motivated everybody, including me. When he finished, there was no loud cheer, but I could hear the low, approving rumble of young men ready to strike back. Most of the Delta operators were already battle hardened, but the Rangers had been stung, jarred into the reality that we weren’t playing G.I. Joe. This was not an exercise. There was a real enemy out there, people who really wanted to kill them.
Two hours later, an assault force of eighteen heavily armed helicopters roared into the city and sixty very pissed off elite American soldiers hit the house where informants last spotted Aidid. The raid force captured several men, plus a large cache of Somali money, which we concluded was connected with Aidid’s financial operation. The next day, we turned both the prisoners and the cash over to the UN.
In the larger picture, the raid didn’t get us any closer to capturing the warlord. But from a morale standpoint, it served a vital purpose, particularly for the uninitiated young Rangers. They had been hit and it was important they hit back, that they not feel impotent in the face of Aidid’s brazen strike.
Aidid had given us the finger. We gave him the finger right back.
THROUGHOUT SEPTEMBER, we gathered intel and launched five more strikes, all designed to capture elements of Aidid’s infrastructure. Taking out a despot is a chess game. A dictator seizes control with a wave of violence and holds it with the threat of more. But iron fists leak. Exploit those leaks, mission by mission, systematically leveraging mistakes. Learn, profile, move closer, and even the most feared and cloistered man can be knocked down like rotten fruit.
Take Colombia, for example. Under the leadership of Hugo Martinez and with American intel support, the Search Bloc was systematically tearing the Medellin cartel apart. The body count was horrific: Pablo Escobar was fighting back savagely, ordering bombings and assassinations. Through the first six months of the hunt, more than sixty-five police officers were killed. But the Colombian government was winning the war of attrition, picking off major players in Escobar’s power structure. Escobar’s men began to turn on him, offering to provide information in return for concessions from the government, and the drug lord himself had gone to ground. Teams of Delta operators rotated through Medellin, assisting the Search Bloc as forward observers and advisors while being very careful not to get into the shooting end of the operations. Doing so earned them the Search Bloc’s respect.
