The Road to Hell (6 page)

As the plane taxied away from the terminal, Cassidy should have felt relieved. But Tone's weighty silence told him that all was not right. For the first time he noticed how worn she was, how devastated. How long had she been like this? It could have been years. The look in her eyes petrified him. Below, in the northern part of Mogadishu, under a small stone in the Catholic cemetery, lay their eldest son, Bernie. There had been no time to remove the body, but Chris promised that he would do that in a few months, as soon as the fighting ended. Then Bernie could be buried in the family cemetery in New Orleans. But the flight to Nairobi would be the last thing the family would do together.

L
ater, in Yakima, Cassidy avoided talking about Somalia, and when it did come up he'd dismiss it. Where is Somalia? Never mind. Forget it. Nobody was really that curious anyway. Not in Yakima. He would tell them: “You know, it's in the Bible. The land of frankincense and myrrh. One of the wisemen was a Somali or something.” Few knew what frankincense was and fewer could even guess about myrrh. But “frankincense and myrrh” floated like a familiar song and left people feeling some sort of connection.

Then, somehow, on this raw February night in 1993, Cassidy found himself preparing to give a talk about Somalia. He put on his best suit, climbed into his Toyota pickup truck, and drove along Route 82 from Yakima toward Ellensburg, some 45 miles away. The task should have been simple; the talk would be informal, relaxed. But Cassidy was not relaxed. He
cracked open the window and cold, dry air filled the cab. And he thought one more time about what he would tell the audience.

As he sped through the early evening darkness, Cassidy knew he would not be allowed to get away with frankincense and myrrh. After the U.S. Marines landed, suddenly, people who had never heard of Somalia had opinions about it. It had been on television. Everyone knew it was a land where Americans had gone to rescue starving people from vicious warlords and drug-crazed thugs. They'd learned it all since the summer of 1992, when the picture of those beautiful black and dying people appeared on television screens across America. First they watched them starve and then they watched the marines climb over sand dunes. They watched blond-haired angels holding little black babies.

T
he crowd tonight is small, thirty or forty people in a small circular building on the campus of Central Washington State University. They are mostly students and professors and a smattering of the liberal intelligentsia who gather around rural universities, people who reserve copies of the
New York Times
at the local drug store, listen to National Public Radio, and spend their evenings in meeting halls boning up on international affairs so they can offer knowledgeable critiques of current events. They are thoughtful people who once might have stated with certainty that the United States of America would send its soldiers to protect oil but never to help starving Africans. Now they are confused.

Before them on the stage they see two young and polished marines and Cassidy, a nervous man in a suit. Cassidy has a thick blond lumberjack beard mounted like a fuzzy wreath around a sharp, angular face with piercing blue eyes and red cheeks. Some of the hairs from his mustache intrude upon his upper lip. He's thin, almost bony, and he steps up to the small stage with the cautious movement of a former athlete whose grace is haunted with memory of injury.

The soldiers speak first. They are polite and very persuasive. Their demeanor radiates the “yes sir/yes ma'am” respect that has been drilled into them. They're reinforcing the rosy images that have come across the television. They're talking about the heroic effort to move through Somalia, secure towns, and open roads over which truck after truck now carried lifegiving food to the mouths of starving children. The operation they describe is an unqualified success, a tribute to America and to people like you. They thank the people in the room for the opportunity to go and perform such deeds. The audience is smiling. They are getting into the spirit of Operation Restore Hope.

Cassidy bends over in his chair, listening. These kids don't know what they're talking about, he thinks. They're public relations commandos who could put a feel-good patriotic face on a bloody massacre. Cassidy is feeling crotchety and angry. What the fuck do they know about Somalia? They've probably spent a week there. I'm the one who put six years of my life into the place. What are they doing telling me anything? What are they doing telling anybody anything, especially at a university. Save that shit for the American Legion, boys. Talk to me again when you've really experienced hunger. When you've lived with the people.

The soldiers' kind of charity, he reflects, is easy, like dropping a shiny coin into a grubby hand passing quickly in the hectic blur of the night. They want you to believe that's enough—for $20 a month little Pedro can have a hot meal and a place to go to school and new pajamas. Problem solved. If everyone gave money we could dispense with all these unpleasant pictures of dying children once and for all.

Cassidy is angry, not at the marines; he's angry at the stupid audience. These guys work for the government. Of course they're going to tell you the bullshit. You're a bunch of mush-minded guilty liberal assholes for believing them, for believing that money and guns can solve the problems of the poor.

“Y
ou know,” Cassidy begins with a stammer, “you just can't send food and help starving people.” You can't, he knows. But how to explain all of this? Why didn't he ever get around to actually writing a speech? “Well, you know, you just can't do that. It's, it's so really complicated.”

And it's hard to explain. A better approach might be to sit and tell his story: Let me tell you what happened to me when I was in Somalia. But Cassidy isn't ready to tell this to anyone.

“Helping people is all well and good, but what's our policy? What is it going to do for our country? Why were those troops sent in there? I don't see a plan. You give a guy a bag of food today and you give him a bag of seeds and…There is no plan to end the relief. There's no phase-out built into the system.” The marines are sitting erect and pokerfaced. Cassidy paces across the stage. His hands are shaking, though he's not nervous.

“You know,” Cassidy begins again, reaching for something, straining to grasp the handle of an idea. Cassidy tells the people he's worried about sending troops without a mission. He's worried because this Somalia of TV and government propaganda, this Somalia crying out for rescue, doesn't at all resemble the Somalia he knows, and one day very soon the
reality of Somalia will burst through and shatter the fragile media images. Then the world will punish Somalia for not living up to the manufactured mirage.

“Somalia doesn't need our help. Somalia can feed itself. The problems are political, and we don't have a plan for solving their political problems. In fact, we caused a lot of their political problems.”

Cassidy looks again at the audience. They hate him. They hate his disjointed presentation, and if they think they understand what he's trying to say to them, they hate that, too. They prefer the modulated saccharine crap the marines are dishing out. They seem to be fading back into the distance. Cassidy has several friends in the audience, and they feel embarrassed for him. He's being inarticulate, almost a buffoon. They're not even sure what it is he's trying to say, and they've heard him before.

Then from the audience, one woman reaches out to him. She grabs hold of one solid thing Cassidy has said. “So are you saying these people were feeding themselves?” she asks seriously.

“Yes. Yes. Yes. Feeding themselves. And exporting it. They are perfectly capable of feeding themselves.” Cassidy blurts out, thankful and exhausted. “They're smart people. They're grown-ups. They don't need your twenty-five bucks.”

“How come we don't read this in the press?” someone asks. “Why is your version so different from what we see on television?”

“Because I lived there. I know. Why do you believe anything you read in the press?”

“T
hey made me look like the bad guy out there,” Cassidy told his friends Roger and Jane as he left that night, “When I was in school, Roger, the idea was to enlighten yourself. But people don't want to fucking hear about this stuff. They don't want to hear that we're hurting people while saying we're helping. There's no spirit of inquiry here. Fuck no, that's not what academia is about these days.”

“Calm down,” Roger counseled. “You can't just fly off the handle every time someone doesn't understand what you're trying to say about Somalia.”

But Cassidy had been like that once. He was a believer who cared. He believed he could help, that it was his duty to help, so he joined the Peace Corps and went to Africa. His disillusionment settled into him over many years; the more he resisted it, the more deeply it seeped inside of him. The more his reality clashed with his idealism the more bitter his sense of betrayal became. He of all people should have been able to explain the gulf
between the idea of aid and the reality of coming colonialism. It is a measure of his disillusionment that he cannot, and even the most sympathetic ear I could offer was barely enough to get his story out of him.

C
hris Cassidy came to Mogadishu for the first time in August 1981. That Mogadishu was very different from the one he fled in December 1990. And it was completely different from the one the marines found when they landed in the early morning hours of December 9, 1992.

In 1981, Mogadishu was still a sleepy and forgotten whitewashed port town, not much different from the one built by Persian and Arab traders a thousand years before. Daily life in Mogadishu started off slowly and then ground to a halt as the midmorning heat settled like damp tissue paper on the city. The bold blue of the ocean and the dominant white of the buildings cut sharp lines and vivid contrasts in the clear morning air. Majestic Italianate villas, crumbling and peeling, loomed above the shoreline.

In the center of town, rising from the seawall, stood the Al Uruba Hotel, the most modern in Somalia, its arabesque portals stupidly out of place with the genuine Mogadishu architecture. It was built by the Soviets, and nothing worked. As with every sealed modern building in a tropical climate, the first time the air-conditioning went out, the place filled with mildew. After that, the stink never went away.

T
he American embassy was a small white building on a quiet main street. It looked like every other little building on the street. Outside the embassy, two Somali soldiers with AK-47s and blue berets always lounged peacefully against the wall, their uniforms slightly tattered, but clean. Inside, an American marine behind a glass partition handled security. There wasn't really much call for such a thing.

Beside the embassy stood shops that sold tea and other basic goods. There was a small book and magazine stand nearby that sold
Newsweek
and
Time
and the occasional copy of the
International Herald Tribune
, valued links to home in the days before CNN.

On each wall of the shops hung a picture of Jalle Mohamed Siyaad Barre, comrade Mohamed. The Somalis called him
afweyne
, big mouth. A little Hitler mustache connected his nose and upper lip. Most of the pictures were air brushed, softening the corners of the dictator's eyes and mouth, though the retouching did little to remove the dour, humorless gaze. In 1981, Jalle Siyaad still had a following, but it was fading fast. The dictator was rarely seen in person. There were few public speeches or motorcades. Somalia had no television in 1981.

At almost any time of the day, it was possible to stand in front of the embassy and hear the breeze in the trees and the surf pounding 300 yards in the distance. Voices drifted out of tea shops and around corners. Rolling Somali syllables cut the air with razor-sharp staccato consonants. Donkey hooves clicked by, towing grinding metal and wooden wheels on the pavement. Ancient red and yellow Fiat taxi cabs sputtered and spit plumes of black exhaust that vanished into the infinite clarity of the air.

Somalis walked slowly in the streets. Men wore the traditional
macawis
, sandals, and collared, vented shirts. Others wore tropical leisure suits of faded pastels with their short-sleeved tunic tops. Somalis with less to spend on new clothes wore combinations of local dress and used clothing imported by the ton from the West. These were drawn from clothes discarded in Goodwill boxes or Salvation Army depots. Garments not fit for resale as trendy vintage clothing in the developed world were sold to private companies that baled them like hay and shipped them off to Africa. “Who died?” one Somali might jokingly ask another who was sporting a new imported outfit. They soon became known as “Hoo-die” clothes, as the Somalis assumed that only the dead would part with a perfectly good pair of trousers.

The few people who had what could be described as a job got to work early and left early. They spent their days in offices that always seemed dark and stuffy. The higher the official the more carpet and fabric hung on the walls. And the more fabric in the room the heavier and more rancid the room was with mildew. Somali officials found comfort in the darkness.

In the old part of Mogadishu called Hamar Weyne, goldsmiths, direct descendants of the original Persian settlers, created intricate jewelry in thirteenth century buildings. The
reer Hamar
, as these people were called, had lighter skin than most Somalis. Some had blue eyes and sandy hair. They were regarded as a national treasure.

By the middle of the afternoon, the streets were quieter still, and everyone went home. There wasn't much traffic because there wasn't much fuel. Many Americans would be picked up in a blue van and taken to and from work at the embassy or USAID. The Somalis called the blue van the Russian bus, because the Soviets who had left recently used it for the same purpose.