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Before him, jammed on both sides of the Black Hawk helicopter, was his “chalk,” twelve young men in flak vests over tan desert camouflage fatigues.
Counting the three surveillance birds and the spy plane high overhead, there were nineteen aircraft, twelve vehicles, and about 160 men.
The swell of all those revving engines made the earth tremble and their pulses race. It was stirring to be part of it, the cocked fist of America’s military might.
The prospect of getting into a scrape didn’t worry them. Not at all. They welcomed it. They were predators, heavy metal avengers, unstoppable, invincible. The feeling was, after six weeks of diddling around they were finally going in to kick some serious Somali ass.
Mogadishu spread beneath them in its awful reality, a catastrophe, the world capital of things-gone-completely-to-hell.
the national memory stripped bare not out of revolutionary fervor, but to sell the bronze and copper for scrap.
Every open space was clotted with the dense makeshift villages of the disinherited, round stick huts covered with layers of rags and shacks made of scavenged scraps of wood and patches of rusted tin. From above they looked like an advanced stage of some festering urban rot.
They were immensely proud of their Ranger status. It spared them most of the numbing noncombat-related routine that drove many an army enlistee nuts. The Rangers trained for war full-time. They were fitter, faster, and first—“Rangers lead the way!” was their motto.
Every man had worked to be here, probably harder than he’d ever worked in his life. Those with troubled pasts had taken harsh measure of themselves.
The Hoo-ahs couldn’t wait to go to war. They were an all-star football team that had endured bruising, exhausting, dangerous practice sessions twelve hours a day, seven days a week—for years— without ever getting to play a game.
When the world sent food, the evil warlords hoarded it and killed those who tried to stop them. So the civilized world had decided to lower the hammer, invite the baddest boys on the planet over to clean things up.
That sort of thing just fired the guys up more, but to the public, and to Washington officials keenly concerned about how things played on CNN, the task force was so far a bust.
Intellectuals could theorize until they sucked their thumbs right off their hands, but in the real world, power still flowed from the barrel of a gun.
Madeleine Albright, America’s emissary to the UN, who was an unabashed enthusiast of New World Ordering.
there were plenty of politicians, diplomats, and journalists with bright hopes for a new millennium of worldwide capitalist free markets. America’s unrivaled big stick could right the world’s wrongs, feed the hungry, democratize the planet.
Aidid’s men received some expert guidance in shooting down helicopters from fundamentalist Islamic soldiers, smuggled in from Sudan, who had experience fighting Russian helicopters in Afghanistan.
They were America’s elite fighters and they were going to die here, outnumbered by this determined rabble. Their future was setting with this sun on this day and in this place.
They belonged to the strongest military power on earth, but until some additional force could be brought to bear, they were stranded, fighting for their lives on city streets surrounded by thousands of furious well-armed Somalis.
There was always a temptation to avoid taking such ominous precautions, like the way the D-boys went into battle with their blood types taped to their shoes. You didn’t want to jinx yourself, but prudence dictated preparing for the worst.
Everybody wanted a chance to play in this war. There were plenty of guys who rose above such pettiness, but there was enough of it in the hangar to color Wilkinson’s weeks of deployment. It was something he and the other air force specialists had learned to live with.
He had been a hellion of a teenager growing up in Detroit, drinking and partying, breaking all the rules, running completely out of control. The Rangers had taken all that fearless exuberance and pointless bravado and channeled it. That was the secret core of all the Hoo-ah discipline and esprit. You would be given permission, in battle, to break the biggest social taboo of all. You killed people.
It occurred to the sergeant that Sammy was unschooled in the art of ambush. The idea was to let the lead vehicle pass and suck in the whole column, then open fire. The unarmored flatbed trucks in the middle loaded with cooks and clerks and other volunteers would have made fat, vulnerable targets. By opening up on the lead vehicles, it gave the convoy a chance to back out before things got worse.
Sheik Ali was a professional gunman, a killer, a man who had fought for and against the dictator, and then had put himself and his weathered weapon up for hire. Most Somalis had come to regard Sheik Ali and men like him as a plague. They were feared and despised. Now, with the Rangers to fight, men like him were valued again.
Sheik Ali believed the radio broadcasts and flyers printed up by the Aidid’s SNA. The Americans wanted to force all Somalis to be Christians, to give up Islam. They wanted to turn Somalis into slaves.
I’m gonna die on this dirty little street in Africa. It was much too frantic a moment to be thinking about such things but it occurred to Floyd anyway, a sudden image in his mind’s eye of a late summer Sunday morning at home with his parents sitting down to breakfast without the slightest notion that their precious son David was here, a million miles away, fighting for his life in this insane city they’d never even heard of, much less cared about. What in the hell am I doing here?
It seemed to Howe that most of the men failed to grasp how desperate their situation had become. It was a form of denial. They could not stop thinking of themselves as the superior force, in command of the situation, yet the tables had clearly turned. They were surrounded and terribly outnumbered. The very idea of adhering to rules of engagement at this point was preposterous.
He drew a bead on three Somalis who were running across the street two blocks to the north, taking a progressive lead on them the way he had learned through countless hours of training, squaring them in his sights and then aiming several feet in front of them. He would squeeze two or three rounds, rapidly increasing his lead with each shot.
“When war starts, a soldier wants like hell to be there, but once he’s there, he wants like hell to come home.”
The only thing he could compare it to was the feeling he found sometimes when he surfed, when he was inside the tube of a big wave and everything around him was energy and motion and he was being carried along by some terrific force and all he could do was focus intently on holding his balance, riding it out. Surfers called it The Green Room. Combat was another door to that room. A state of complete mental and physical awareness.
The Little Birds made wall-rattling gun runs throughout the night. One of the birds shot at a Somali carrying an RPG who must have been toting extra rounds on his back. They placed a seventeen-pound rocket on him, which killed him and must have blown the extra rounds, because he went up like a Roman candle. When the chopper went back to refuel they found pieces of the man’s body pancaked on their windshield.
The quiet had lulled him into a false sense of safety. He reasoned with himself. Okay, I might die here. I’d rather not but if I do, then that’s what’s supposed to happen and there’s not a damn thing I can do about it. And he thought about what a terrible thing it was to have turned over responsibility for his life, his very existence, to the U.S. government, and that because of it he might be breathing his last breaths in this shithole back room, on this back street dirt floor in Mogadishu-fucking-Somalia.
By midnight the rescue convoy was getting close. The men pinned down listened to the low rumble of nearly one hundred vehicles, tanks, APCs (armored personnel carriers), and Humvees. The thunderclap of its guns edged ever closer. After a while, the rhythm of its shooting sounded like an extended drum solo in a rock song, very heavy metal. It was the wrathful approach of the United States of America, footsteps of the great god of red, white, and blue. It was the best fucking sound in the world.
“What these guys need right now from you is to see you being a stand-up guy. Don’t let them see you being nervous because that just makes them nervous.”
His life was being put at risk and he was being thrust into a situation where he had to shoot and kill people in order to survive ... and it was hard to see why. How could some politicians in Washington take men like him and put them in such a position, guys who are young, naive, patriotic, and eager to do the right thing, and take advantage of all that for no good reason?
Then Bashir heard a great stir of excitement, people chanting and cheering and shouting. He ran to see. They had a dead American soldier draped over a wheelbarrow. He was stripped to black undershorts and lay draped backward with his hands dragging on the dirt. The body was caked with dry blood and the man’s face looked peaceful, distant. There were bullet holes in his chest and arm. Ropes were tied around his body, and it was half wrapped in a sheet of corrugated tin. The crowd grew larger as the wheelbarrow was pushed through the street. People spat and poked and kicked at the body. “Why did
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After depositing their dead and wounded, the D-boys quickly boarded helicopters and were flown back to the hangar. Sergeant Howe and his men went solemnly back to work, readying themselves to go right back out. They had trained to function without sleep for days at a time, so they were in a familiar place, one they called the “drone zone,” a point at which the body transcends minor aches and pains and grows impervious to hot and cold. In the drone zone they motored on with a heightened level of perception, nonreflective, as if on autopilot. Howe didn’t like the feeling, but he was used to it.
She’d met Ray on her birthday twenty-two years earlier, when she was managing a bar in Newport News. Her employees had surprised her with a cake, and everybody ate it except Ray. When she’d asked him why, he’d told her, like it was something everybody in the world with any sense would know, “You don’t eat cake when you’re drinking beer.” They’d gotten married in Las Vegas that same year.
It was galling to watch the Skinnies strutting around the bodies, poking at them with rifles, dragging them. What kind of animals ... ? The pilots wanted to get up over those crowds and mow them down, just mow them all down. Fuck the whole lot of them. Then land and recover the bodies. These were American soldiers. Their brothers.
Rangers struggled to accept their profound losses. There was no doubt that they had more than held their own in the battle. What other ninety-nine men would have survived a long afternoon and night besieged by the well-armed angry citizenry of a city of more than a million? Still, each death mocked their former cockiness and appetite for battle. A whole generation of American soldiers had served careers without experiencing a horror of an all-out firefight. Now another had. There was a recognition in the faces of the survivors, a hard-won wisdom.
Whoever does not have the stomach for this fight, let him depart. Give him money to speed his departure since we wish not to die in that man’s company. Whoever lives past today and comes home safely will rouse himself every year on this day, show his neighbor his scars, and tell embellished stories of all their great feats of battle. These stories he will teach his son and from this day until the end of the world we shall be remembered. We few, we happy few, we band of brothers; for whoever has shed his blood with me shall be my brother. And those men afraid to go will think themselves lesser
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Then the former ambassador delivered a chilling message. He was careful to say, “This is not a threat,” but the meaning was plain. “I have no plan for this, and I’ll do everything I can to prevent it, but what will happen if a few weeks go by and Mr. Durant is not released? Not only will you lose any credit you may get now, but we will decide that we have to rescue him. I guarantee you we are not going to pay or trade for him in any way, shape, or form. ... So what we’ll decide is we have to rescue him, and whether we have the right place or the wrong place, there’s going to be a fight with
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The Battle of the Black Sea, or as the Somalis call it, Ma-alinti Rangers (The Day of the Rangers), is one that America has preferred to forget. The images it produced of dead soldiers dragged by jeering mobs through the streets of Mogadishu are among the most horrible and disturbing in our history, made all the worse by the good intentions that prompted our intervention.
The larger world has forgotten Somalia. The great ship of international goodwill has sailed. The bloody twists and turns of Somali clan politics no longer concern us. Without natural resources, strategic advantage, or even potentially lucrative markets for world goods, Somalia is unlikely soon to recapture the opportunity for peace and rebuilding afforded by UNOSOM. Rightly or wrongly, they stand as an enduring symbol of Third World ingratitude and intractability, of the futility of trying to resolve local animosity with international muscle. They’ve effectively written themselves off the map.
it changed the world. The awful price of the arrests of two obscure clan functionaries named Omar Salad and Mohamed Hassan Awale rightly shocked President Clinton, who reportedly felt betrayed by his military advisers and staff, much as an equally inexperienced President Kennedy had felt in 1961 after the Bay of Pigs. It led to the resignation of Defense Secretary Les Aspin and destroyed the promising career of General Garrison, who commanded Task Force Ranger. It aborted a hopeful and unprecedented UN effort to salvage a nation so lost in anarchy and civil war that millions of its people were
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The mistakes made in Mog weren’t because people in charge didn’t care enough, or weren’t smart enough. It’s too easy to dismiss errors by blaming the commanders. It assumes there exists a cadre of brilliant officers who know all the answers before the questions are even asked.
most of the last half of the twentieth century, we as a country forgot about war and soldiers as a legitimate subject matter for serious writing. We didn’t completely forget about them, but the only acceptable way of treating war in literary circles was to decry it, or make fun of it.
So here for the first time in decades was a war story entirely free of literary finesse. It was most definitely free of black irony and high style. In other words, it was not a book about a writer writing about war, a la Herr or Liebling, for that matter, but a simpler book about soldiers at war. A book that showed how terrible war was, but that did not portray war as pure madness or soldiers as sadists, stooges, victims, or lunatics, or any combination of those things. It was a return to an age-old literary form, a story of brave men at war.
