by Mark Bowden
He inspired loyalty and affection by not taking himself too seriously. If he told a story—and the general was a hilarious storyteller—the punch line was usually at his own expense. He loved to tell about the time he went to great lengths to hire a rock band (with $5,000 out of his own pocket) to entertain his troops, mired for months in the Sinai Desert on a peacekeeping mission, only to have an unsuspecting soldier cheerfully inform him that the band “sucked.” He’d shift the cigar stub to the other side of his mouth and grin sheepishly. He could even joke about his own ambition, a rarity in the army. “If you guys keep pulling this shit,” he’d whine to his executive staff, “how’m I ever gonna make general?” On his career climb to leadership of JSOC (Joint Special Operations Command) he’d served a stint as Delta commander. When he arrived at Bragg as a newly leafed colonel in the mid-eighties, his crew cut alone invited scorn and suspicion from the D-boys, with their sideburns and facial hair and civilian haircuts down over their ears. But soon after he started, Garrison saved their ass. Some of America’s secret supersoldiers were caught double-dipping expenses, billing both the army and the State Department for their covert international travel. The scandal could have brought down the unit, which was despised by the more traditional brass anyway. The new bullet-headed colonel could have scored points and greased his own promotional path by expressing outrage and cleaning house. Instead, Garrison placed his career in jeopardy by defending the unit and focusing punishment on only the worst abusers. He’d salvaged a fair number of professional hides in that caper, and the men hadn’t forgotten. In time, his insouciant Lone Star style and understated confidence rubbed off on the whole unit. There were guys from suburban New Jersey who after weeks with Delta were wearing pointy boots, dipping tobacco, and drawling like a cowpoke.
Garrison had been living for six weeks now in the JOC, mostly in a small private office off the operations room where he could stretch his long legs and prop his boots up on the desk and shut out all the noise. Noise was one of the biggest problems in a deal like this. You had to separate out signals from the noise. There was nothing of the general’s in this private space, no family photos or memorabilia. It was the way he lived. He could walk out of that building at a moment’s notice and leave behind no personal trace.
The idea was to finish the job and vanish. Until then, it was an around-the-clock operation. The general had a trailer out back where he retreated at irregular intervals to grab about five hours of sleep, but usually he was camped in this command post, poised, ready to pounce.
Take the previous night, for instance. First they were informed that Aidid, who had been code-named “Yogi the Bear,” was paying a visit to the Sheik Aden Adere compound, up the Black Sea. A local spy had been told this by a servant who worked there. So powerful cameras zoomed in from the Orion, the fat old four-prop navy spy plane that flew circles high over the city almost continually, and Garrison’s two little observation birds spun up. The troops pulled on their gear. The Aden Adere compound was one of their preplanned targets, so the workup time was nil. But they couldn’t commit—or at least Garrison refused to commit—without firmer intelligence. The task force had been embarrassed too often already. Before he launched, Garrison wanted two of the Somali spies to enter the compound and actually see Aidid. Then he wanted them to drop an infrared strobe by the target building. Two informants managed to get in the compound, but then exited without accomplishing either task. There were more guards than usual, they explained, maybe forty. They continued to insist that Aidid was in the compound, so why didn’t the Rangers just move? Garrison demanded that one of them return with the strobe, find Yogi the fucking Bear, and mark the damn spot. Only now the informants said they couldn’t get back in. It was dark, past 9 P.M., and the gates had been locked for the night. The guards wanted a password the spies didn’t know.
Which was all just bad luck, perhaps. Garrison reluctantly scratched another mission. The pilots and crews shut down their helicopters and the soldiers all stripped back down and went back to their cots.
Then came a late bulletin. The same Somali spies said Aidid had now left the compound in a three-vehicle convoy with lights out. One of their number had followed the convoy west, they said, toward the Olympic Hotel, but lost it when the vehicles turned north toward October 21st Road. All of which sounded significant except that the two OH-58s were still in place, equipped with night-vision cameras that lit up the view like green-tinted noon, and neither they nor anyone watching the screens back at the command center were seeing any of this!
“As a result of this, we have experienced some weariness between [the local spy ring] and the Task Force,” Garrison wrote out longhand that morning at his desk in his operations center, venting a little of the frustration that had built up over forty-three days. The memo was addressed to Marine General Joseph Hoar, his commander at CENTCOM (U.S. Central Command, located at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Florida).
“Generally, [the local spy ring] appears to believe that a secondhand report from an individual who is not a member of the team should be sufficient to constitute current intelligence. I do not. Furthermore, when a [local spy ring] team member is reporting something that is totally different than what our helicopters are seeing (which we watch here back at the JOC), I naturally weigh the launch decision toward what we actually see versus what is being reported. Events such as last night, with Team 2 stating that Aidid had just left the compound in a three-vehicle convoy, when we know for a fact that no vehicles left the compound ... tends to lower our confidence level even more.”
There had been too many close calls and near misses. Too much time between missions. In six weeks they’d launched exactly six times. And several of these missions had been less than bang-up successes. After that first raid, when they’d arrested the nine UN employees at the Lig Ligato compound, Washington had been very upset. Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Colin Powell would later say, “I had to screw myself off the ceiling.” The United States apologized and all the captives were promptly released.
On September 14, the assault force had stormed what turned out to be the residence of Somali General Ahmen Jilao, a close ally of the UN and the man being groomed to lead the projected Somali police force. The troops were restless and just wanted to hit something, anything. In this frame of mind, it didn’t take much of an excuse to launch. When one of the Rangers thought he’d spotted Aidid in a convoy of cars outside the Italian embassy, the assault force was rallied and a duly startled General Jilao was arrested along with thirty-eight others. Again an apology. All of the “suspects” were released. In a cable detailing the debacle for officials in Washington the next day, U.S. envoy Robert Gosende wrote, “We understand that some damages to the premises took place. ... Gen. Jilao has received apologies from all concerned. We don’t know if the person mistaken for Gen. Aidid was Gen. Jilao. It would be hard to confuse him with Aidid. Jilao is approximately ten inches taller than Aidid. Aidid is very dark. Jilao has a much lighter complexion. Aidid is slim and has sharp, Semitic-like features. Jilao is overweight and round-faced. ... We are very concerned that this episode might find its way into the press.”
That episode didn’t, but among official circles the task force again looked like Keystone Kops. Never mind that every one of these missions was a masterpiece of coordination and execution, difficult and dangerous as hell. So far none of his men had been seriously hurt. Never mind that their latest outing had netted Osman Atto, Aidid’s moneyman and one of his inner circle. Washington was impatient. Congress wanted American soldiers home, and the Clinton administration wanted to remove Aidid as a player in Somalia. August had turned to September had turned to October. One more day was one day too long for the wishes of America and the world to be stymied by this Mogadishu warlord, this man America’s UN Ambassador Madeleine K. Albright had labeled a “thug.”
Garrison could ill afford another misstep, even though caution could mean missing opportunities. He knew that his superiors and eve
n some people on his own staff thought he was being too tentative about choosing missions. With such shaky work on the ground, what could you expect?
“As a rule, we will launch if [a member of the local spy ring] reports he has seen Aidid or his lieutenants, our RECCE [reconnaissance] helo picture approximates what is being reported, and the report is current enough to be actionable,” Garrison wrote in his memo to Hoar. “There is no place in Mogadishu we cannot go and be successful in a fight. There are plenty of places we can go and be stupid.”
And just that morning, like manna, the general’s rigid criteria had been met.
Every Sunday morning the Habr Gidr held a rally out by the reviewing stand on Via Lenin, where they hurled insults at the UN and its American enforcers. One of the main speakers that morning was Omar Salad, Aidid’s top political adviser. The clan had not caught on yet that the Rangers had targeted the entire top rung of Aidid’s gang, so Salad wasn’t even trying to hide.
He was one of the UN’s “Tier One Personalities.” When the rally broke up, his white Toyota Land Cruiser and some cars were watched from on high as they drove north toward the Bakara Market. Salad was observed entering a house one block north of the Olympic Hotel. At about 1:30 P.M. came confirmation from a Somali spy who radioed that Salad was meeting with Abdi “Qeybdid” Hassan Awale, Aidid’s ostensible interior minister. Two major targets! Aidid might also be there, but, again, nobody had actually seen him.
High above, the Orion zoomed its cameras in on the neighborhood, and the observation choppers took off. They moved up over the Black Sea to watch the same street. The TV screens in the JOC showed many people and cars on the streets, a typical weekend afternoon at the market.
To mark the precise location where Salad and Qeybdid were meeting, a Somali informant had been instructed to drive his car, a small silver sedan with red stripes on its doors, to the front of the hotel, get out, lift the hood, and peer into it as if he were having engine trouble. This would give the helicopter cameras a chance to lock on him. He was then to drive north and stop directly in front of the target house where the clan leaders had convened. The informant did as instructed, but performed the check under his hood so quickly that the helicopters failed to fix on him.
So he was told to do it again. This time he was to drive directly to the target building, get out, and open the car hood. Garrison and his staff watched this little drama unfold on their screens. The helicopter cameras provided a clear color view of the busy scene as the informant’s car entered the picture driving north on Hawlwadig Road.
It stopped before a building alongside the hotel. The informant got out and opened the hood. There was no mistaking the spot.
Word passed quietly to the hangar and the Rangers and D-boys started kitting up. The Delta team leaders met and planned out their attack, using instant photo maps relayed from the observation birds to plan exactly how they would storm the building, and where the Ranger blocking positions would be. Copies of the plan were handed out to all the chalk leaders, and the helicopters were readied. Just as Garrison was preparing to launch, however, everything was placed on hold.
The spy had stopped his car short. He was on the right street, but he’d chickened out. Nervous about moving so close to the target house, he’d stopped down the street a ways and opened the hood there. Despite Garrison’s finicky precautions, the task force had been minutes away from launching an assault on the wrong house.
The commanders all hustled back into the JOC to regroup. The informant, who wore a small two-way radio strapped to his leg, was instructed to go back around the block and this time stop in front of the right goddamn house. They watched on the screens as the car came back up Hawlwadig Road. This time it went past the Olympic Hotel and stopped one block north, on the other side of the street. This was the same building the observation choppers had observed Salad entering earlier.
It was now three o’clock. Garrison’s staff informed General Thomas Montgomery, second in command of all UN troops in Somalia (and direct commander of the 10th Mountain Division’s “Quick Reaction Force” [QRF]), that they were about to launch. Then Garrison sought confirmation that there were no UN or charitable organizations (NonGovernmental Organizations, or NGOs) in the vicinity—a safeguard instituted after the arrests of the UN employees in the Lig Ligato raid. All aircraft were ordered out of the airspace over the target. The commanders of the 10th Mountain Division were told to keep one company on standby alert. Intelligence forces began jamming all radios and cellular phones—Mog had no regular working phone system.
The general made a last-minute decision to upload rockets on the Little Birds. Lieutenant Jim Lechner, the Ranger company’s fire support officer, had been pushing for it. Lechner knew that if things got bad on the ground, he’d love to be able to call in those rockets—the two pods on the AH-6s each carried six missiles.
In the quick planning session, Lechner asked again, “Are we getting rockets today?”
Garrison told him, “Roger.”
4
Ali Hassan Mohamed ran to the front door of his father’s hamburger and candy shop when the choppers came down and the shooting started. He was a student, a tall and slender teenager with prominent cheekbones and a sparse goatee. He studied English and business in the mornings and afternoons manned the store, which was just up from the Olympic Hotel. The front door was across Hawlwadig Road diagonal from the house of Hobdurahman Yusef Galle, where the Rangers seemed to be attacking.
Peering out the doorway, Ali saw American soldiers sliding down on ropes to the alley that ran west off Hawlwadig. His shop was on the corner of that street and the gate to his family’s home was just down from there. The Americans were shooting as soon as they hit the ground, shooting at everything. There were also Somalis shooting at them. These soldiers, Ali knew, were different than the ones who had come to feed Somalis. These were Rangers. They were cruel men who wore body armor and strapped their weapons to their chests and when they came at night they painted their faces to look fierce. Further up Hawlwadig, to his left about two blocks over, another group of Rangers were in pitched battle. He saw two of them drag another who looked dead out of the street.
The Rangers across the street entered a courtyard there and were shooting out. Then a helicopter came down low and blasted streams of fire from a gun on its side. The gun just pulverized his side of the street. Ali’s youngest brother, Abdulahi Hassan Mohamed, fell dead by the gate to the family’s house, bleeding from the head. Abdulahi was fifteen. Ali saw it happen. Then the Rangers ran out of the courtyard and across Hawlwadig toward the house of Hobdurahman Yusef Galle, where most of the other soldiers were.
Ali ran. He stopped to see his brother and saw his head broken open like a melon. Then he took off as fast as he could. He ran to his left, down the street away from the Rangers and the house they were attacking. At the end of the dirt alley he turned left and ran behind the Olympic Hotel. The streets were crowded with screaming women and children. People were scrambling everywhere, racing around dead people and dead animals. Some who were running went toward the fight and others ran away from it. Some did not seem to know which way to go. He saw a woman running naked, waving her arms and screaming. Above was the din of the helicopters and all around the crisp popping of gunfire.
Out in the streets there were already Aidid militiamen with megaphones shouting, “Kasoobaxa guryaha oo iska celsa cadowga!” (“Come out and defend your homes!”)
Ali was not a fighter. There were gunmen, they called them mooryan, who lived for rice and khat and belonged to the private armies of rich men. Ali was just a student and part-time shopkeeper who joined the neighborhood militia to protect its shops from the mooryan. But these Rangers were invading his home and had just killed his brother. He ran with rage and terror behind the hotel and then, turning left again, back across Hawlwadig Road to the house of his friend Ahmed, where his AK-47 was hidden. Once he had retrieved the gun he met up with several of his friends. They ran bac
k behind the Olympic Hotel, through all the chaos. Ali told them about his brother and led them back to his house and shop, determined to exact revenge.
Hiding behind a wall behind the hotel, they fired their first shots at the Rangers on the corner. Then they moved north, ducking behind cars and buildings. Ali would jump out and spray bullets toward the Rangers, then run for cover. Then one of his friends would do the same. Sometimes they just pushed the barrels of their guns around the corners and sprayed bullets without looking. None of them was an experienced fighter.
The Rangers were better shots. Ali’s friend Adan Warsawe stepped out to shoot and was hit in the stomach by a Ranger bullet that knocked him flat on his back. Ali and another friend risked the shooting to drag Adan to cover. The bullet had punched a hole in Adan’s gut and made a gaping wound out his back that had sprayed blood on the dirt. When they dragged him it left a smear of blood on the street. Adan looked both alive and dead, as though he were someplace in between.
Ali moved on to the next street, leaving Adan with two friends. He would shoot a Ranger or die trying. Why were they doing this? Who were these Americans who came to his neighborhood spraying bullets and spreading death?
5
After bursting into the storehouse off Hawlwadig, Sergeant Paul Howe and the three other men on his Delta team rounded the corner and entered the target building from the southern courtyard door. They were the last of the assault forces to enter the house. A team led by Howe’s buddy Matt Rierson had already rounded up twenty-four Somali men on the first floor, among them two prizes: Omar Salad, the primary target, and Mohamed Hassan Awale, Aidid’s chief spokesman (not Abdi “Qeybdid” Hassan Awale, as reported, but a clan leader of equal stature).
They were prone and docile and Rierson’s team was locking their wrists together with plastic cuffs.
Howe asked Sergeant Mike Foreman if anyone had gone upstairs.
