Oppose Any Foe

by Mark Moyar

  CHAPTER 7

  GOTHIC SERPENT

  Lifting off from a dilapidated airfield next to the Arabian Sea, the Black Hawks flew low and fast along the coast, where the Rangers could see, between their dangling legs, the azure-blue waters splashing onto black rocks and sand. Those who kept their eyes on the beach could be forgiven for imagining themselves over the shore of a Caribbean island where the wealthy came to lounge and scuba dive, rather than on the periphery of the world’s most lawless and desolate city. The Rangers had launched raids into Mogadishu on six previous occasions, but this would be the first time they would enter the Black Sea District, heart of the empire of Somali warlord Mohamed Farrah Aidid, or the Bakara Market area, which was the heart of the heart. One week before the raid, the commander of the US task force had informed Washington, “If we go into the vicinity of the Bakara Market, there’s no question we’ll win the gunfight, but we might lose the war.”

  The twin-engine Black Hawks had been stripped bare of seats and other accoutrements to accommodate the muscle-bound men and their fearsome weapons. Seated in the middle of one of the aircraft, with his back to the cockpit, Sergeant First Class Sean Watson listened to the radio chatter through a corded headset. Flanking him on either side were other Rangers clad in Kevlar helmets and desert fatigues. This Black Hawk, and each of the three other Black Hawks flying in its formation, carried a twelve-man infantry “chalk”—militaryspeak for a unit inserted by a single aircraft.

  The helicopter was three minutes out when Watson heard that hostile forces had just been seen on the target. If the news had any impact on his thoughts or emotions, his face did not show it.

  The Americans were intruding during the middle of the afternoon, the least auspicious time of day for battle in Mogadishu from the American point of view. They would have much preferred to arrive at night, when the sudden appearance of scores of heavily armed white men would be less conspicuous and night-vision equipment would provide the Americans a huge edge over Aidid’s ragtag militiamen. Somali men were most active in the afternoon, for it was during those hours that the high from their daily ritual of chewing khat leaves peaked. US intelligence on Aidid had been scarce, however, so the Americans took targets whenever and wherever they could get them.

  “One minute!”

  In an effort to throw the enemy off balance, the helicopters flew past the objective and then doubled back. Banking around toward the Bakara Market, the aircraft divided into two lines. At an altitude of sixty feet, they flew along the streets where they planned to unload their passengers.

  When the Black Hawks reached the drop zones, they came to a hover. Sergeant Keni Thomas, a University of Florida graduate whose squad was sandwiched on the left side of Watson’s helicopter, was supposed to inform the crew chief when he had “confirmed the target building.” But neither Thomas nor anyone else could see any of the structures on the ground. The helicopters had stirred up so much dust that they had surrounded themselves in a brownout. Normally, the infantrymen descended from the Black Hawks on ropes at a distance of thirty to thirty-five feet from the ground, but the lack of visibility and the accompanying risk of collision with ground structures dissuaded the pilots from descending to such altitudes.

  “Ropes!” shouted one of the crew chiefs on Thomas’s helicopter, signaling that it was time to kick out the nylon fast ropes. Thomas shoved his ninety-foot coil into the brown murk, and another Ranger did the same on the opposite side of the helicopter. Thirty feet of the coil was left on the helicopter when the rope thudded down on the Somali street.

  “Go! Go! Go!”

  As Thomas swung himself toward the rope to make the descent, the starboard crew chief, Sergeant Ned Norton, pointed at his own forehead. Norton was sporting a black visor and dust mask, which reminded Thomas of Darth Vader. The red, white, and blue sticker to which Norton’s finger was directed read, “No Fear.”

  “Remember!” Norton yelled above the din of the helicopter. “No fear!”

  Peering at Norton in disgust, Thomas thought to himself, Fuck you, pal, you’re not the one going in. As he grasped the nylon rope, Thomas yelled at Darth Vader, “Screw you!”

  Below, nothing was visible but the brown dust cloud. Thomas took a deep breath and slid down the rope, choking on dust.

  When the last of Sergeant Watson’s Rangers had come down, the helicopter crewmen released the ropes and the pilot took the aircraft to a higher altitude. From there, the helicopters were to watch over the infantrymen, protecting them with mighty 7.62mm miniguns if necessary. With its rate of fire of 100 rounds per second, each minigun could spew as many bullets as one hundred riflemen firing assault rifles on full automatic.

  The last Black Hawk to arrive at the objective was carrying chalk number four, under the command of Staff Sergeant Matt Eversmann. The helicopter’s crew had encountered more trouble than the other helicopters in finding its drop zone. “I can’t see shit!” the pilot kept saying. Struggling to identify landmarks they had seen in photographs distributed hours earlier, the pilot eventually decided to drop the passengers off a short distance from the original destination, telling Eversmann that he should move his Rangers a few blocks on foot once they had landed.

  Eversmann’s Rangers threw down the ropes from a height of seventy feet. For reasons that were never clearly established, Private First Class Todd Blackburn lost hold of the nylon rope as soon as he brought his body over the side. Weighed down by fifty pounds of gear, Blackburn was little impeded by wind resistance as gravity pulled him to the earth.

  When Eversmann’s boots reached the ground, he looked over to see Blackburn lying in a crumpled heap, bleeding from the mouth, ears, and nose. Two medics were already working on the eighteen-year-old. Although Blackburn was unconscious, he was still alive, much to the surprise of his fellow Rangers.

  Within a matter of seconds, Somalis were shooting at the cluster of Americans around Blackburn. Rangers responded with loud bursts from their assault rifles and automatic weapons, while the medics rushed to open Blackburn’s airway and stabilize his neck. Then two Rangers picked Blackburn up and carried him behind two parked cars.

  Although Blackburn was now out of immediate danger, massive internal hemorrhaging was bringing him closer to death by the minute. The medics informed Eversmann that Blackburn would have to be evacuated immediately if he were to stand any chance of survival.

  FROM A DISTANCE, an American onlooker might have surmised that the Rangers were flying into central Mogadishu on the afternoon of October 3, 1993, to rescue hostages. That, after all, was the primary mission for which they had been created, and the stealth and speed with which they moved were the hallmarks of hostage-rescue operations. But these Rangers were seeking to take hostages rather than liberate them. With opportunities to save hostages few and far between, the temptation to assign hostage-rescue forces to different but similar tasks had become irresistible.

  Chief among the sibling missions were surgical strikes to capture or kill enemy leaders, which, in a post–Cold War world of uncertain boundaries and challenges, appeared to be a high-growth industry. By cutting off the head of the beast, the reasoning went, these strikes could eliminate the messiness and costliness of tearing an adversary limb from limb. But the special operators did not have much experience in decapitation operations. In Vietnam, they had been frustrated by the inaccessibility of Viet Cong leaders, while in Panama a lack of timely information had prevented the nabbing of Manuel Noriega. Thus, the feasibility and strategic value of decapitation strikes were largely matters of speculation and abstract theorizing.

  Since the ousting of President Siyad Barre by rebel forces in January 1991, Somalia had been devoid of centralized authority, fragmented into fiefdoms of clan warlords who vied for control over resources with the cunning and ruthlessness of their nomadic ancestors. In Mogadishu, the militias of the Habr Gidr clan, led by Mohamed Farrah Aidid, and the Abgaal clan, led by Ali Mahdi Mohamed, waged a cruel war for preeminence. Lobbing art
illery shells into each other’s neighborhoods and firing automatic weapons at crowds in the city streets, they spurned the precautions that most peoples have employed to protect civilian bystanders. Somali hospitals treated hundreds of people every day for war wounds. The warlords used food deprivation as an instrument of warfare, and when the United Nations and United States responded by flying relief supplies to Mogadishu, the warlords seized the goods on the runway at gunpoint or stole them from the warehouses of relief organizations.

  By the fall of 1992, famine, disease, and war had killed somewhere between 300,000 and 500,000 Somalis. American reporters in Somalia and their editors in the United States bombarded the American people with photographs of starving women and children and unabashedly championed US military intervention as a solution to the humanitarian crisis. “It is intolerable and unthinkable to remain aloof while teen-age hoodlums impede the delivery of emergency food and medicines,” the New York Times editorialized. “There is no alternative to the threat or use of force if food is to reach those trapped in a chaotic clan war.” Washington Post correspondent Stephen Richburg recounted that he and other journalists advocated the application of US military force to “raise the flag for a new kind of interventionism, a benevolent, selfless interventionism with no American interest at stake other than the collective revulsion at violence and a desire to relieve suffering.”

  At the end of November 1992, a few weeks after losing his reelection bid, President George H. W. Bush decided to dispatch 29,000 troops, most of them Marines, to intimidate the clan leaders into submission and permit the distribution of food from the ports to the country’s interior. Impressed by the American show of force, the warlords refrained from provoking the Marines or interfering with the dispensation of humanitarian aid. The UN leadership prodded Bush to commit the United States to a far more ambitious agenda, aimed at ensuring that hunger would never strike Somalia again. UN officials advocated full disarmament of the Somali warlords, creation of new Somali national security forces, and the holding of democratic elections. The Bush administration balked, out of the conviction that Somali clans would take up arms against those seeking to impose such a fundamental transformation, dragging the United States into a costly, protracted, and quite possibly fruitless war.

  Bush’s successor, Bill Clinton, was more amenable to the UN’s plans to reshape Somalia, and more willing to commit US troops to the execution of those plans. In March 1993, the Clinton administration transferred authority for the international task force in Somalia from the United States to the United Nations and agreed to keep 6,000 US troops in Somalia under the UN banner. Madeleine Albright, Clinton’s ambassador to the United Nations at the time of the transition, announced, “We will embark on an unprecedented enterprise aimed at nothing less than the restoration of an entire country as a proud, functioning and viable member of the community of nations.”

  The Asian, European, and African peacekeepers who took charge of security in March 1993 did not patrol the streets as the US Marines had done. As a consequence, the clans regained control over much of the nation’s territory. An emboldened Aidid resisted foreign efforts to monitor his weapons and restrict his activities, resulting in several armed clashes that claimed the lives of UN peacekeepers. In August, the killing of four American soldiers by a bomb traced to Aidid’s forces convinced Clinton to take new measures against the Somali strongman. Clinton was unwilling to send more conventional forces to Somalia, owing to reservations among congressmen in his own party, some of whom were already calling for removal of all US forces from what they considered the “next Vietnam.” But Clinton was open to sending special operations forces, since they were smaller and designed to maintain a low profile.

  The UN special representative in Somalia, retired US admiral Jonathan Howe, advocated the deployment of Delta Force to Somalia. So did a large element of the special operations community, which saw an opportunity for the special operators to show their worth and bury the ghosts of Desert One. Among both civilians and soldiers, a considerable number of voices contended that employment of special operations forces in Somalia would prove the theory that SOF could solve big problems without the participation of conventional forces.

  Much of the senior military leadership, however, opposed sending Delta Force. General Joseph P. Hoar, who as head of US Central Command was the regional military commander responsible for Somalia, warned that Delta Force had only a 25 percent chance of capturing Aidid, owing to Aidid’s clan support network and his intimate familiarity with the city. In the view of Hoar and a number of other experts, suppressing Aidid’s clan would require a long-term commitment of conventional forces to counterinsurgency operations, an approach that enjoyed little support in the US military or Congress.

  Clinton decided in favor of sending Delta Force to Somalia. From the White House, orders went out to Fort Bragg for deployment of a Delta Force squadron to apprehend Aidid. The supporting units would include a Ranger company and a detachment of aircraft from what had grown into the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment. The White House leaked word of Delta Force’s imminent departure to friendly journalists in order to show the world that Clinton was getting tough. In turn, Aidid undertook new precautions against capture.

  The special operators flew into Mogadishu’s airport on August 26, 1993. A tall, imposing man, older than the rest, stepped from one of the C-141 Starlifter transports onto the tarmac. His graying hair had been cut to the “high and tight” style of a Ranger, and he wore a Ranger uniform bearing the rank of a young man, rather than the two stars he had earned in twenty-seven years of service. A cigar hanging from his mouth, he sucked in the sweltering Mogadishu air while surveying the Soviet-era hangar where the special operations task force, code-named Task Force Ranger, would set up its headquarters.

  Major General William F. Garrison, the commander of JSOC, may have looked the consummate warrior, but he had not been born one. When the Vietnam War had heated up in the mid-1960s, he had tried hard to avoid the draft. It proved to be of no avail, as he was inducted into the Army in 1966 as an infantryman. During a tour in Vietnam, Garrison discovered that the life of a soldier at war actually suited him quite well, and he chose to go back to Vietnam for a second tour before making a career of the military.

  It was not difficult to see why Garrison had risen to such lofty positions. He had the combination of charisma and competence that subordinates crave. He loved his job and relished a good fight, pulsing with an infectious confidence in the face of danger. He also had a penchant for self-deprecating humor. “If you guys keep pulling this shit,” he would tell his staff, “how’m I ever gonna make general?”

  Garrett Jones, the CIA’s chief of station, had been busy sniffing around for Aidid in the hope that he could serve Aidid’s location to Garrison on a platter the moment his task force arrived. The previous month, the CIA had established a relationship with a subclan leader who enjoyed access to Aidid and was willing to betray him for a price. According to the CIA’s plan, this individual would present Aidid with a hand-carved ivory cane, inside of which was a homing device. On the day of Task Force Ranger’s arrival in Somalia, however, the CIA chief informed Garrison that before the subclan leader could bestow the cane, he had shot himself in the head during a game of Russian roulette.

  The CIA now had to turn to communications intercepts and human informants. But Aidid, aware that the Americans would try to locate him through communications devices, scrupulously avoided using phones and radios. Finding reliable informants in Mogadishu was similarly daunting. Plenty of individuals offered to provide information for money, but most either failed to deliver or mysteriously disappeared.

  Garrison and the Delta Force operators were not the type of men to lean back in the sun while waiting for the fish to bite. Dissatisfied with the information the CIA was providing during Task Force Ranger’s first days in Mogadishu, Garrison pressed Jones to get more and better information. Garrison’s irritation turned to rage
on August 29, when Aidid’s militiamen conducted a mortar attack on the task force’s base, wounding five of the special operators. With the enemy now up five to nothing and Task Force Ranger having yet to swing the bat, Garrison vowed to “kick somebody’s ass.” Dialing up the CIA station, he informed Jones that he needed “your number-one target where Aidid has been reported.”

  Within hours, Garrison had the information for his first operation. Task Force Ranger set out that night for a building that was alleged to house top aides of Aidid. At 3 a.m., elements of the task force landed on the roof of the building while others broke through doors on the ground floor. The Americans found a handful of sleepy-eyed expatriates and Somalis who claimed to work for the UN. Their story gained in credibility when someone noticed that the UN flag was flying outside the building. Delta operators handcuffed the detainees and hauled them away in helicopters, but had to release them four hours later after determining that the individuals did in fact work for the UN.

  In their next operation, Task Force Ranger stopped a convoy and arrested thirty-nine Somalis. The detainees turned out to be a Somali general and his staff.

  The two fiascos made the international newspapers, much to the embarrassment of the US government and its ballyhooed special operations forces. At a meeting inside the Pentagon, Secretary of Defense Les Aspin fulminated, “We look like the gang that can’t shoot straight!” People on all sides were beginning to wonder whether Delta Force had been vastly overhyped.

  Task Force Ranger conducted four more missions in the ensuing month, with significantly better results. They netted several important figures in Aidid’s organization, and they avoided apprehending any more friendlies. Aidid himself, however, continued to elude them, flitting inconspicuously through the city’s sprawling neighborhoods.