SEAL Team Six: Memoirs of an Elite Navy SEAL Sniper (25 page)

That first night, Casanova and I kept watch from the roof. A horrible smell like the remains of a dead carcass filled the air. “What the hell is that?”

AUGUST 30, 1993

On Monday, I looked around the neighborhood for the source of the stench, but it had disappeared. Nothing. While I fixed tea downstairs, an asset arrived with some information. I brought him some tea.

He politely refused.

“No, it’s OK,” I said.

He only took half a cup, as though I had given him something of great value. These Somalis conducted themselves so as never to take away too much.

SIGINT told us they’d picked up a conversation between a fire controller and his firing positions. The mortarmen would fire from concealed positions while the fire controller watched where the rounds exploded in relation to the target. If the mortar round hit the target, the fire controller could assess how much damage had been done. The fire controller advised, “Don’t chew your khat until the adjustments and battle damage assessments are made.” Khat, a flowering plant native to Somalia, contains a stimulant in the leaves that causes excitement, loss of appetite, and euphoria. A user would stick a wad of leaves in his mouth and chew on it like chewing tobacco. Most of Aidid’s mortarmen were enticed to do their job for khat. They became dependent on Aidid’s people to continue feeding their addiction, similar to how a pimp strings out his prostitutes on drugs to control them. Because the drug suppressed appetite, Aidid didn’t need to feed them much. They were obviously not well disciplined. Although nothing happened this time, later SIGINT would vector in military strikes and succeed in destroying some of the mortar positions.

That evening, the smell came back. “What the hell
is
that?” I came down off the roof and covertly went next door. On the front porch, I saw a teenaged boy sleeping on a futon. At a distance of around 10 yards, it was obvious I’d found the source of the stench. Later, I found out the fourteen-year-old Somali boy had stepped on a land mine in his school playground. His right foot was blown completely off. Part of his left foot was missing. Gangrene had set in. Aidid’s people had planted explosives in the schoolyard to kill or maim children, preventing them from growing up to be effective fighters—turning them into liabilities. The infection in the boy’s leg stank so badly that his family couldn’t sleep at night with him in the house. So they made him sleep on the porch. During the day, they brought him back inside. I asked the CIA for permission to help the crippled boy next door. They denied my request, not wanting to compromise the safe house.

We noticed a lot of movement between 2200 and 0400 from the street in front of Pasha and surrounding buildings. Based on a tip that Aidid’s people hung out there, at 0300, Delta Force fast-roped down on the Lig Ligato house. They captured nine people, but they were only UN employees and their Somali guards. Delta had launched on a dry hole.

AUGUST 31, 1993

On Tuesday, an asset sighted Aidid in a vehicle. Crescent wanted the asset to deploy a mobile transmitter in the vehicle, but Condor, not wanting to sacrifice his asset, denied it as being too risky.

Aidid was slippery. Rather than stay home, he lived with relatives, staying in the same place only one or two nights. Sometimes he traveled in a motorcade. Sometimes he only used one vehicle. He would dress as a woman. Although he was popular within his own clan, people outside Aidid’s clan didn’t like him.

Casanova and I dressed up like locals and ran a vehicular route reconnaissance in a Jeep Cherokee that had been beaten more than once with an ugly stick. Secretly, our vehicle was armored. I wore a turban, a flowery Somali shirt, and BDU trousers under my
macawi
. With my beard starting to grow out and dark skin, I could pass for Arab. For weapons we each had a sound-suppressed CAR-15 down between the seats, partly concealed by our skirts. I carried a magazine of ammo in my CAR-15 and an extra in the cargo pocket of my BDU trousers. We also carried our SIG 226 9 mms in a breakaway butt pack turned around to the front under our shirts—making it look like we had pooch bellies. To get to my pistol, I could just lift my shirt, reach into the upper right corner, and pull down and away, separating the Velcro and readying my SIG. Besides the magazine of ammo in the pistol, an extra magazine sat in the top of the breakaway butt pack.

Clipped inside my pocket was a Microtech UDT tactical automatic knife, a switchblade—extremely sharp. In the cargo pocket on my right thigh, I carried a blowout kit.

By SEAL standards, we were lightly armed. It was a calculated risk. If a bear showed up in the woods, we couldn’t fight him off. However, traveling light allowed us to blend in better to collect intelligence. It was a trade-off. If we were compromised, we’d have to run and gun.

While Casanova drove, I took pictures with a 35 mm camera. We noted a location for a possible helicopter landing zone where Delta and their indigenous people could insert. Then we figured out routes where they could be inserted by truck.

We figured out something else, too. Previously, even though our people walking on foot, riding in Humvee motorcades, hovering in helos, and flying over in planes gathered information, we continued to wonder how Aidid’s people kept transporting mortar rounds to their crews. I took a picture of two women in colorful robes walking side by side, each carrying a baby in her arms. As I rotated the lens to zoom in, I could clearly see the first baby’s head, but the second woman was actually carrying two mortar rounds. The ruse had almost fooled me.

During our vehicle recon, we completed a concept of ops for inserting and extracting people from Pasha. For example, when the time came for turnover, we could drive to an abandoned camel slaughterhouse on the seashore, signal out to sea for a boat of replacement SEALs, and give them our vehicles while we took their boat out to rendezvous with a ship. The replacement SEALs could travel lighter than we had because we’d already stocked Pasha with the heavy SIGINT equipment and other supplies.

The slaughterhouse, huge as a city block, had been owned by the Russians, who abandoned it when the civil war began. They had used the camel meat and bones, but threw everything else out into the ocean. The water along one of the most beautiful beaches in the world became infested with sharks: hammerheads, great whites, and all kinds of bad-ass sharks. I’ve never been afraid to swim anywhere, but I did not want to swim in that water. Neither did the locals, which kept the location private for our needs. As a bonus, the beach was close to Pasha. The slaughterhouse could be seen easily from the water, covering and concealing a large area of the coast. Ideal for the guys to bring Zodiacs—black inflatable rubber boats with outboard motors—or RHIBs in to the shore.

We returned to Pasha, and that evening, the boy next door groaned like he was dying. I knew what it was like to be a child in pain.
Screw this.
Casanova, a SIGINT medic named Rick, and I did a hard entry on the boy’s house, blacked out with balaclavas and carrying MP-5 machine guns. We didn’t take any chances. Kicked in the door. Flexicuffed the boy’s mom, dad, and aunt. Put them on the floor next to the wall. Of course, they feared we would kill them. We brought the boy inside, so the parents could see what we were about to do. Rick broke out his supplies. We scrubbed the dead tissue out of the wounds with betadine, a cleaner and disinfectant. It hurt the kid so bad that we had to put our hands over his mouth to keep his screams from waking the neighborhood. He passed out from the pain and shock. We gave him intravenous antibiotics, bandaged his wounds, and injected each butt cheek to stop the infection. Then we vanished.

SEPTEMBER 1, 1993

Wednesday, while conducting observation from the rooftop, we saw an elderly man leading a donkey pulling a wooden cart mounted on an old vehicle axle. On top of the cart were stacks of bricks. During his return trip, he had the same load of bricks.
What?
We asked an asset to follow him. The asset found out the old man hid mortars in the stack of bricks. We reported it. Our superiors issued compromise authority—giving us permission to off the old man.

A sniper must be mentally strong, firmly anchored in a religion or philosophy that allows him to refrain from killing when unnecessary, and to kill when necessary. During the Beltway sniper attacks in 2002, John Allen Muhammad killed ten innocent people and critically injured three. Shooting can make a person feel powerful. Obviously, a good sniper must not give in to such impulses. On the other hand, if a sniper allows himself to be overcome by Stockholm syndrome, he cannot perform his job. (In 1973, robbers held bank employees hostage in Stockholm, Sweden. During their six-day ordeal, the hostages became emotionally attached to the robbers, even defending them after being released.) Through his scope, the sniper becomes intimately familiar with his target, often over a period of time, learning his lifestyle and habits. The target probably has done nothing to directly hurt the sniper. Yet, when the time comes, the sniper must be able to complete the mission.

On the roof of Pasha, a walkaround wall concealed Casanova and me. I aimed my Win Mag in the old man’s direction, 500 yards away.

Casanova viewed him in the spotter scope. “Stand by, stand by. Three, two, one, execute, execute.”

Target in my sights, I squeezed the trigger on the first “execute.” Right between the eyes—I nailed the donkey.

Expecting to see the old man die, when the donkey dropped instead, Casanova couldn’t hold back a little throat chuckle—not very sniperlike.

The old man ran away.

Casanova’s throat chuckle sounded like he was gagging.

Old men were a dime a dozen, but the donkey would be hard to replace. No one ever came to get the dead donkey, still hitched to the wooden cart. They just left it there in the middle of the road.

Later, one of our assets informed us that the old man didn’t want to carry the mortars, but Aidid’s people threatened to kill his family if he didn’t. I felt pretty good about not shooting the old fart.

*   *   *

The same day, SIGINT guys intercepted communication about a planned mortar attack on the hangar at the army compound. SIGINT knew the mortar crews’ communication frequencies. Notifying the base gave the personnel there some time to find cover before seven or eight mortar rounds landed. No friendlies were injured. Just a few minutes’ warning is huge.

SIGINT routinely jammed communication between Aidid’s fire controllers and the mortarmen. SIGINT vectored in military strikes to destroy the mortar positions. Also, we made khat readily available to the mortar addicts. “You don’t need to become Aidid’s mortar men to get your fix. Here, go chew this.” They smiled like jack-o’-lanterns, their teeth stained black and orange. I know it’s a terrible thing to give an addict drugs, but it saved others from being blown to bits by mortar attacks. It probably saved the addicts from dying in one of our military counterstrikes, too. Aidid’s people started finding it more difficult to coordinate mortar attacks.

*   *   *

That night, we spotted a man with an AK-47 on the balcony of one of the houses out back and a couple of streets over. I flicked the safety off my sound-suppressed CAR-15 and held the red dot of my sight on his head—an easy shot. Over each of our CAR-15s, we had mounted Advanced Combat Optical Gunsights (ACOGs), a 1.5-power close-range point-and-shoot scope made by Trijicon. At night, it dilated ten times more than my pupil, giving me extra light. Its red dot appears in the scope, unlike a laser that actually appears on the target itself. The ACOG worked just as well in the night as it did in the day. I waited for the man to level his AK-47 in our direction. He never did. After consulting with our guards, we found out the man with the AK-47 was one of our young guards at his own house trying to mimic the SEALs’ tactics of defending from the roof. Of course, the idiot never told us of his plans, and he probably couldn’t conceive our capability to see him with night vision. We told him, “That was good thinking, but if you’re going to be on the rooftop with a weapon at night in this neighborhood, let us know. Because that was almost your ass.”

SEPTEMBER 2, 1993

Thursday morning, we held a meeting to discuss future plans and personnel. Pasha was doing well, so we needed to keep the machine running after we completed our stay and it came time for someone to relieve us.

Later in the day, we received the break we needed. Aidid was wealthy, and his college-age daughter had friends in Europe, Libya, Kenya, and other places. Someone slipped her a cell phone, and SIGINT tapped it. Although Aidid moved around a lot, his daughter made a mistake, mentioning on the phone where he was staying. An asset helped pinpoint the house. Our navy spy plane, a P-3 Orion, picked up Aidid’s convoy, but the convoy stopped, and we lost him in the maze of buildings.

In the evening, Casanova and I lay on Pasha’s roof, protecting the perimeter. During our time at Pasha, we had been playing a game of trying to trap rats, using peanut butter from our MREs as bait. We tied string to a stick and propped a box on it. Through our night-vision goggles, we saw the rat go in. Casanova pulled the string, but the rat escaped before the box fell down on top of it. Our technique evolved into a science. I took apart some ballpoint pens and used the springs to make a one-way door into a box. Inside the box sat the peanut butter. Soon the rat sniffed around the trap. It slipped inside the door. The springs slammed the door shut behind the rodent.