The Road to Hell (41 page)

In the end, the Americans accomplished their mission on that day, capturing twenty militia leaders blamed for attacks on U.S. and UN troops. But the mission was never really worth accomplishing: None of the captured men was held very long. The only one who was really held, Mohamed Hassan Awale, had actually been helpful to the Americans in the past. As if to justify the raid and the deaths, he was sent to a place the Americans called Gilligan's Island, an island prison in southern Somalia, where Aydiid's then financier, Osman Ato, was also being held. A U.S. official later confessed that they learned nothing from any of the people they captured.

The reality is that there was nothing to learn, nothing to be gained. There were no plots; Aydiid had no plans. And the final horrible irony was that most of the men who were captured in that bloody battle probably would have shown up at the UN gates with flowers in their hands if they'd been invited for dinner.

The face of captured airman Michael Durant adorned the covers of every magazine and newspaper in America. The mission was over, ended by its own hubris and because it finally revealed itself for what it always was, an exercise in control. Mogadishu had been turned into a testing ground for various Western interests, and many Somalis recognized it as precisely that.

None of this exonerates Mohamed Farah Aydiid from any responsibility. The simple fact about Aydiid was that he was never willing to compromise. He would accept no agreement that didn't leave him in the position he believed he deserved, head of state of Somalia. He supported the UN and U.S. intervention when it seemed to suit his purposes and opposed it with single-minded intensity when it didn't. And he had no qualms about laying waste to Mogadishu and killing tens of thousands of his own countrymen to achieve that end.

After October 3, Robert Oakley came back to Mogadishu and met with Aydiid. He then announced that the hunt for Aydiid was over, and that Michael Durant would be released unconditionally. There would also be an independent investigation of June 5 and other incidents in Somalia. At Oakley's press conference, Keith Richburg of the
Washington Post
asked Oakley if that wasn't precisely what Aydiid had asked for in the beginning. Oakley avoided the question.

The Americans didn't learn anything on October 3 that they didn't know before. The difference on October 3 was that a photographer and a Somali cameraman with a Handicam were there to take pictures of the bodies of the Americans being dragged through the streets.

A week earlier, on September 25, three Americans were killed when their helicopter was shot out of the sky by Aydiid's militia. (A fourth was rescued by a Somali.) The bodies of the dead were torn to shreds. The head of one of the airmen was chopped off and put on display. The military knew it, yet General Colin Powell, in his final appearance as chairman of the JCS, told reporters that the UN mission in Somalia was going well.

“Let's not lose sight of the overall success of the mission,” Powell said at the National Press Club. “We have had good days and bad.” Powell went on to endorse the nation-building strategy. “The exit strategy for the UN is to stand up some sort of a political entity that can take responsibility for Somalia, led by Somalians [sic] with a Somalian police force to keep order.”

The presence of nearly 30,000 heavily armed marines succeeded in calming the situation in Somalia—at least in the short term. As with the 500 Pakistanis, Somalia's fighters backed off and assessed the situation. As they grew used to the American presence, they became emboldened once again. Incidents of violence began to increase after January 1994. By the time the Americans departed in May, 1994, and were replaced with a much weaker and less well organized multinational UNOSOM II force, the militias were itching to get back into action.

I
n the weeks following the raids, I walked through the rubble. There were new designations in Mogadishu now—Crash Site 1, Crash Site 2—denoting where two U.S. helicopters had gone down on October 3.1 went to the Olympic Hotel, where the raid had taken place, past the charred, hollow corpses of armored personnel carriers that had been sent on a failed mission to rescue the Americans. Children climbed on the remains of two American helicopters. As I passed deeper into this area of south central Mogadishu, near the Bukhara market, a man greeted me, saying his name was Artan, a teacher. Artan was tiny—about five feet four—with a beard and probably in his early forties. We talked and strolled past bullet-riddled walls.

As we walked through the rubble, a boy named Liban began to follow us. He told me he was sixteen. When I expressed some skepticism, he admitted to being fifteen. We stopped to rest a moment, and he squatted comfortably back on his heels, his feet pressed flat against the ground. He raised his AK-47 to his shoulder and lined his eyes up to the sight. His moves were rehearsed and fluid. The long barrel of the rifle extended far beyond his tiny compacted body. He yanked back the bolt and loaded a round into the chamber. Then he snapped off the safety and started imitating the sound of gunfire. American, American, American, he barked
out, one for each shot. I used to play this game as a child, killing imaginary Germans. For a moment, he almost looked like a child, but the gun was loaded. The adults in the compound hardly noticed him.

“This was my sister's house,” Artan informed me, pointing to a shredded pile of corrugated iron.

“Was anybody killed here?”

“Yes, my mother and one sister and two of my sister's children.”

Artan's other sister, Haredo, arrived and began to tell me what had happened: When the fighting started on the street, she brought the children into the house. She was just beginning her afternoon prayer when bullets poured through the roof, turning the little house black with dust. Then, as the cloud settled, she found her two sons, mother, and sister cut to pieces on the floor. Haredo maintained a glassy stare. She was still in obvious shock. Her telling of the story was slow and dutiful. She didn't want to talk, but her brother had told her she must. She didn't want to talk because she was filled with guilt. “We told the children they would be safe,” she kept repeating.

“Where is our happiness now? Our happiness has changed to fear,” she said over and over. “When the Americans came, we greeted them with green leaves. Now our happiness has changed to fear.”

Artan took me across the street to where they had buried the dead. There were graves, hundreds of graves. Some were mounds of dirt marked with rocks and branches. Some people with more money were able to buy a little cement and had built concrete cradles around their dead. Most were fresh.

“We call that area the American monument,” Artan told me.

A donkey cart passed through the devastation with “Donated by the People of the United States of America” food bags on it.

A
fter October 3, the battlefield switched from the streets to the pressroom at the UN compound. In mid-October, a thirty-six-member Pentagon Joint Information Bureau, or JIB, was dispatched to Mogadishu. It was headed by a crusty army colonel, Steven Rausch. The JIB would now handle all questions pertaining to U.S. involvement in Somalia. In most press conferences the “jiblets,” as they were known, outnumbered reporters by as many as three to one. The what-the-hell-this-is-Africa atmosphere of the earlier UN press briefings—once held outdoors under the camouflage net—was replaced by a stiff Washington formality.

Rausch's JIB was the leading edge of a 12,750-member Joint Task Force composed of 4,150 troops on the ground and 8,600 afloat off the Somali
coast. On November 1, the JTF was joined by heavy firepower: Some 400 vehicles, including Bradley assault vehicles and Abrams Ml-Al tanks, were paraded to the north of the city and parked on an empty stretch of desert they called, without irony, Victory Base.

The JIB assigned themselves parking spaces and launched an assault on the public perception that U.S. soldiers were under UN command. The image back home, the one that really got people worked up, was that of American soldiers ordered to their deaths by Pakistani or Egyptian officers. Rausch first refused to speak from behind the usual UN lectern in front of the backdrop of a UN flag. He stood, instead, off to the side behind a separate lectern, wrapped in green camouflage netting with a photocopied map of Africa pinned on the front. The message was clear: U.S. troops are
now
firmly under U.S. command.

In reality, of course, they always were. No American soldier ever took an order from a non-American officer, and decisions involving U.S. troop movements, especially the October 3 attack on Aydiid, were made entirely by the U.S. command, sometimes without consulting or even informing the UN.

The perception that the Americans were under UN control was the result of an earlier, more successful public relations effort, one that eventually backfired. When UNOSOM II officially took over from the United States in May, U.S. Army major David Stockwell became the chief military spokesman. He dutifully donned a blue UN beret and sewed a UN patch on his U.S. Army uniform. His press briefings always emphasized the multilateral nature of military activities in Mogadishu, even when they were carried out by U.S. troops under U.S. command. Then, because of concerns that Stockwell's increasingly frequent appearances on television made the whole thing look
too
American, he was replaced at the podium by a New Zealander, Captain Tim McDavitt Stockwell, however, remained in charge, until the JIB showed up.

The new public relations effort got off to an awkward start. When there were no television cameras in the room, heads easily turned to Rausch when he addressed the press from his own lectern. When TV arrived, it became more complicated. Cameras and microphones had to be moved; sound technicians rushed to the front of the room as Rausch began to speak; chairs were kicked aside by cameramen looking for a better position. During one of these exercises, CNN let the cameras roll and aired the commotion. The U.S. lectern was immediately stashed in the JIB office.

Having gained control of the pressroom, the JIB set upon a second task, explaining what the additional U.S. troops and all that equipment were
doing in Somalia. The primary reason, as stated, was to protect U.S. troops already there. But since the administration had called off the hunt for Aydiid, the troops already in Mogadishu didn't need any protection. The second stated goal was to “open lines of communication,” that is, to clear roadblocks so humanitarian relief supplies could get through. This effort to re-spin the mission in humanitarian terms, so popular a year earlier, also ran into discrepancy problems with the facts on the ground. A few visits to relief agencies revealed that all the supplies they were sending were getting through anyway. And in the previous three weeks of driving around Mogadishu, I'd yet to encounter a roadblock on a major road. When I raised these facts with an American officer, he just grinned and said, “Exactly. The mission can't fail. We need to be able to claim one success before we leave on March 31.”

Against the mounting evidence that thousands of U.S. soldiers were sent to Somalia on a purely face-saving mission, it was announced that the Americans would establish a “presence” on the streets. Exactly what that “presence” was to consist of or when it would begin was never made clear. When Ambassador Robert Oakley was in Somalia during the first days of November, he met with representatives of Aydiid's Somali National Alliance and informed them of U.S. intentions to venture outside their barracks. Oakley reported that an agreement had been reached and that Americans would be able to patrol the streets without fear of being shot by the militia. In fact, they never went back on the streets. They were kept safely away from danger. Their mission, to rescue the future of peace enforcement, didn't require that they actually use their weapons.

Then, just as all the new troops were finally settled in, it was time to go.

A
t the end of March 1994, on the final day of the U.S. presence in Somalia, I climbed up on a towering sand dune between the Mogadishu airport and the beach-front final command post of the American forces in Somalia. From the top of that dune, members of the Command Assault Vehicle Team had been watching the steady departure of their comrades. Off the south side of their dune, the white prefab, sandbag-covered bunkers of the officer corps were perched on modest cliffs above the Indian Ocean. Along the shore to the west, amphibious assault vehicles shuttled troops to the fleet offshore. To the immediate north was the airport runway with its steady flow of massive C-5 transport planes and Sea Knight twin-rotored helicopters carting away soldiers and equipment. Beyond the runway was Mogadishu, and Somalia. Staff Sergeants Olga Pohalski and Aaron S. Dudley and Sergeant John Hamen were spending their final days in Somalia
avoiding the sun and sand and maintaining the mobile radio control center that was parked with them atop the dune.

“We're first in, last out,” said Sergeant Pohalski.

“Last out?”

“Well, maybe not exactly last, but pretty close to last. When this truck goes, all communications will be shut down.”

Locating the last soldier out, defining the precise moment the American adventure in Somalia would end, became an obsession for many of the reporters, who rushed back to Mogadishu to cover the American exit. Like the final episode of M*A*S*H, this would be the end of a TV event. Many of these reporters had stood on the beach at the beginning of Operation Restore Hope on December 9, 1992 as the marines stormed ashore and tens of thousands of Somalis lined the dunes, waving branches and wreathes to greet them. There was no question about the very moment the operation had begun. The departure would not be nearly so dramatic, that was certain, but the press needed at the very least to identify an event, a ceremony of some sort, a final gesture—a lowering of a flag, for example— to frame the adventure with the high and heady drama of that December morning. The military was determined that there would be no flag ceremony (although the cameras did catch some flags being packed away), no departing pomp that could be juxtaposed against any future violence in Somalia. The only Somalis who showed up to say good-bye were there to scavenge the crates of bottled water, MREs (meals ready to eat—military rations), and other items the military left behind.