The Legacy Of Black Hawk Down

Oct. 3, 1993, Mogadishu, Somalia. — Sundays at my house in the United Nations residential compound in Mogadishu are almost normal. I crank up the air conditioning, sleep late and pretend it's a fall football weekend back home in Ann Arbor. I go up on the roof to read under the weakening sun and turn on Armed Forces Radio. They have a sexy-sounding female D.J. on Sundays: "99.9 FM Mogadishu, rockin' the Dish. Keep your head down and the volume up. And you thought the desert was hot." I plop down and try to do a few push-ups. But it's too hot and I'm too lazy. This is the first moment I've been able to relax since I was ambushed six days ago.

As a civilian officer in the United Nations' Justice Division, I've been working with Somali judges to re-establish the court system in south Mogadishu. When we tried to inaugurate the courts the previous Monday, we were attacked by militia loyal to Gen. Mohammed Farah Aidid — the Somali warlord who is battling with United Nations and American forces, as well as other Somali factions, for control of Mogadishu. The Somalis sprayed heavy and inaccurate AK-47 fire at us for more than an hour; our blue-helmeted United Nations escorts returned deadly accurate fire from their huge mounted .50-caliber machine guns and we eventually escaped unhurt.

So I'm happy just to be alive and to feel the setting sun on my face. But it's hard to relax because there's increasingly heavy helicopter traffic. Four or five Black Hawks are in fixed positions a couple of miles away in south Mogadishu. They usually don't do that. Another helicopter keeps patrolling in an indecipherable pattern that takes it right over my head.

I go over to the edge of the roof and squint into the low sun. There are two pockets of black smoke billowing in town and there's gunfire crackling in the distance. But lately there's always smoke and gunfire in Mogadishu. And it can't be too bad because there's nothing on the United Nations radio network. If there were anything to worry about, we would have been told to go into lockdown. I go downstairs for another night of uneasy sleep.

Early Monday morning. The radio crackles. The United Nations watch officer announces that all operations are canceled for today; civilian staff are instructed to go into lockdown, stay inside our residences and await further instructions — we are in a security emergency.

Curious and unwise, I go back up to the roof. I'm not the only one. United Nations staffers dot the rooftops around the compound, peering into the city, radios pressed to their ears. Nervous-looking armed Somalis stand guard in the alley below. A Black Hawk flies over the roof. The pilot waves me down violently, motioning for me to get off the roof.

I head downstairs, where my house mates are watching CNN. A story about Boris Yeltsin is interrupted by a report of a battle in Mogadishu with casualties, as many as five United States soldiers dead. Yesterday I was reading and sunning myself while Americans were fighting and dying two miles away. And I didn't even know until CNN told me.

At noon the security coordinator arrives at the house. They want me to come to the United Nations headquarters for a special briefing, he says. The feeling that history is unfolding before me in real time is tangible. This is why I volunteered to come here. When the Clinton administration took office, it promised that the United States would practice "assertive multilateralism." It was a heady moment: the promise of a new world order seemed real to my generation at the United Nations. We were true believers — we were going to spend the peace dividend, export democracy, enforce human rights. The phrase "never again" would mean something at last.

But that dream isn't coming true in the Dish, which is what everyone here calls Mogadishu. In theory, the Somalia mission is groundbreaking. It's the first time the United States military has ever conducted joint peacekeeping operations with the United Nations in a hostile setting. But in practice, the American military doesn't trust the United Nations, and so there are two parallel, competing command structures, one for United Nations forces and one for the Americans. Washington even inserted a retired Navy admiral as the civilian head of the United Nations mission and a retired Marine general as his chief of staff.

When I arrive at the prefabricated briefing room in the office compound, the faces arrayed around the table are grim under a bright blue United Nations flag. We get a staccato review. Army Rangers and Delta Force soldiers tried to capture two of General Aidid's top lieutenants yesterday. They succeeded but two Black Hawks were hit with rocket-propelled grenades and went down. The Rangers ran to the crash sites to protect the pilots. There was a firefight that lasted all night. More than 10 Americans were killed, more than 50 were injured and several are still missing.

The Marine general calls me into his office after the briefing. The commander of American forces in Somalia is convening a hostage task force meeting. I'm to represent the United Nations civilian side with another, more senior officer. Because I'm American, the general wants me there to field questions on his behalf. Be careful, he says, don't let them railroad you into making a commitment at that meeting, son. Bounce everything back to them, listen to what they say and report back to me.

The meeting is at the United States command headquarters, a three-minute walk from the United Nations offices but a world away. The two-star commanding general leads the meeting, flanked by his staff and a team from the Central Intelligence Agency. The general looks tired and the agency guys look mean.

The general gives a more detailed and gruesome review than the one we received earlier. The bodies of several American soldiers were desecrated — dragged through the streets, mutilated and worse. Eighteen Americans are dead or missing. It's not clear if those unaccounted for are dead or alive. They may be hostages. We are going to send helicopters out tonight calling the names of the missing men, he says, telling them to hold on. We have to try to make contact, intervene and request humane treatment.

The obvious military options have been ruled out: too much blood has already been spilled. So the general wants to review other options — for example, can the United Nations help contact the hostages?

They all turn to look at me. I'm the youngest person in this room by 10 years. I'm afraid my voice is going to shake. It reminds me of the first time I was called on in law school, but then it doesn't remind me of that. "I'm here to listen to the options and report back to the civilian command, that's all," I say. This is probably enough for them to know I'm worthless to them, which I think is the role I'm supposed to play. There's a hostage crisis and I'm a bureaucrat.

The head C.I.A. guy, who until this point hasn't said a word, looks at me, disgusted. "Why don't you go talk to some imam and ask him for help?" he says.

I've imagined this scene hundreds of times: mature, steady, rational men tackling a crisis head on, fixing the problem. The task force meeting is full of such men. I am honored to attend. But the bodies of Americans are being desecrated, and soldiers are unaccounted for. The United Nations is impotent and the task force doesn't know what to do. Maybe — since outside these walls there's a frenzied mob made up of people who are unafraid to die — there is no rational response. Maybe that was our first mistake.

I'm at the American airfield a few miles from the office compound. It's quiet today, there's been an uneasy cease-fire in the last few days — no Black Hawks swarming, no air traffic at all. But there's a C-130 Hercules supply plane with its jaws hanging open, waiting for cargo. Soldiers are gathered in a room by the hangar, next to a broken green board on a trolley. No, it's a green bag on the trolley. And that's a stretcher. Wait. There's a coffin in the room. And that's a body bag. I stop in my tracks. On the tarmac there's a pair of boots, with a helmet nestled in the middle and an M-16 resting across. That must be some kind of traditional tribute — and that must be the body of one of the Rangers killed on Sunday.

I'm awed and sad and angry. The day before, in a speech we read word for word here, President Clinton said that if we pull out now, "All around the world, aggressors, thugs and terrorists will conclude that the best way to get us to change our policies is to kill our people. It would be open season on Americans." But then he announced that we would pull out by March. Which is it?

All the American soldiers I know want to stay and fight. One of the Somali judges I work with came running into my office yesterday. "Why did the Americans stop the attack?" he said. He was pounding my arm. Sunday's firefight was the biggest they'd ever had, he claimed, and he'd heard that General Aidid's militia was beginning to run out of ammunition at the end. "You had them weak," the judge said. "Why did you stop?"

Then he lowered his voice: "You know, Ken, if you were out of ammunition, Aidid would never stop fighting. You know that, right?" He was pounding my arm again. "You know that, right?"

I check in at the United Nations' intelligence and operations center. There's a guy from American military intelligence watching CNN. This time the breaking news is from Haiti. The intel guy fills me in. Yesterday a Navy ship, the Harlan County, arrived in Port-au-Prince harbor to deploy American and Canadian peacekeeping troops to train the Haitian National Police and Army in preparation for the return of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who had been exiled in a violent coup two years earlier. A crowd of drunken anti-Aristide thugs came to the dock to meet the ship, fired shots in the air and shouted, "Somalia! Aidid!" Today, the Harlan County weighed anchor and left.

I look at the intel guy. He's young, no older than I am, so there's no reason for me to defer to him: Are you kidding? We retreated from Haiti? The death squads will go wild now. He looks back at me with a cold stare. I try to hold his gaze. An entire doctoral dissertation on the weaknesses of American foreign policy is communicated in the silent, three-second staredown: these humiliating withdrawals are a failure of civilian leadership, not military skill. From his perspective, only civilians — only people like me — could imagine that we could keep the peace in a hot war without fighting.

On March 25, 1994, American forces completed their withdrawal from Somalia. Just after that, on April 6, Rwanda entered the abyss. One of the first moves of the Interahamwe Hutu militia, as it embarked on a genocidal campaign against the Tutsis, was to kill 10 Belgian United Nations soldiers and to mutilate them in a manner that was similar to what General Aidid's militia had done in Somalia. The United Nations immediately evacuated 90 percent of its forces in Rwanda. The United States took no meaningful action to stop the genocide.

A year later, in July 1995, while the dead in Rwanda were still being counted, 7,000 men and boys in Srebrenica, Bosnia, were executed. Within two years of 18 Rangers dying in the Dish, one million Rwandan and Bosnian civilians had perished. So had America's willingness to prevent humanitarian disasters.

While American foreign policy is activist once again, it is an activism driven by the war on terror. In places like Liberia, where just a few American troops could have saved thousands of lives, the United States remains reluctant to intervene, haunted still by the ghosts of Oct. 3.

Kenneth L. Cain, who was a United Nations human rights officer in Somalia, Rwanda, Haiti and Liberia in the 1990's, is co-author of a forthcoming book on peacekeeping.

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6 posted on 10/03/2003 11:15:31 AM PDT by visualops (It might look like I'm doing nothing, but at the cellular level I'm really quite busy.)

I can't believe it has been ten years.

I left Somalia 27 September 1993. As I got to the top of the stairs leading into the C-5, I stopped, turned around and flipped off the city.

I can still smell that place.

I am glad someone posted this. God bless those 19 brave men that lost their lives on this day, and the numerous others that were wounded. I just finished reading Michael Durant's book, "In the Company of Heros" about his tribulations after he was shot down and captured in Mogadishu. I am proudly wearing my bracelet to remember the actions of heros MSG Gary Gordon and SFC Randy Shughart whom earned the Congressional Medal of Honor for their actions that helped save Durant. May we never forget them.

I met MSGT Gordon about two weeks before I left Somalia. We were at the airport, near the aircraft hangar where the Rangers and D Boys were billeted. It was gettin' along about 1900, which was PMT, or "prime mortar time" at the airport. Nearby was a sandbagged bunker, so I sorta slide my HMMWV near that sanctuary. A few moments later a tall, somewhat gaunt looking man in tri-color desert cammos walked up and informed me that I was parked near the entrance to an aid station, and that if we took rounds I'd have to move my hummer. He had the look of "mess with me and I'll kill you here and now" on his face...totally serious and totally professional. He was a warrior.

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