Black Hawk Down (4 page)

The khat chewers had crashed. So today's mission called for going to the worst place in
Mog at the worst possible time.

Still, the chance of bagging two of Aidid's top men at the same time was too good to pass
up. They had done three previous missions in daylight without a hitch. Risk was part of
the job. They were daring men; that's why they were here.

The Somalis had seen six raids now, so they more or less knew what to expect. The~ task
force had done what it could to keep them guessing. Three times daily, mission or no
mission, Garrison would scramble the whole force onto helicopters and send them up over
the city. The Rangers loved it at first. You piled into the back end of a Black Hawk and
held on for dear life. The hotshot Night stalkers would swoop down low and fast and bank
so hard it would stack your insides into one half of your body. They'd rocket down streets
below the roofline, with walls and people on both sides lashing past in a blur, then climb
hundreds of feet and scream back down again. Corporal Jamie Smith wrote to his folks back
in Long Valley, New Jersey, that the profile lights were “like a ride on a roller coaster
at Six Flags!” But with so many flights, it got old.

Garrison had also been careful to vary their tactics. They usually came in on helicopters
and left by vehicles, but sometimes they came in on vehicles and left by helicopters.
Sometimes they came and left on choppers, or on vehicles. So the template changed. Above
all, the troops were good. They were experienced and well trained.

They had come close to grabbing Aidid several times, but that wasn't their only goal.
Their six previous missions had struck fear into the Habr Gidr ranks, and more recently
they'd begun to pick off the warlord's top people. Garrison felt they had performed
superbly so far, despite press accounts that portrayed them as bumblers. When they'd
inadvertently arrested a group of UN employees on their first mission-the “employees” had
been in an off-limits area with piles of black market contraband- the newspapers had
dubbed them Keystone Kops. Garrison had the stories copied and posted in the hangar. 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. They
had been handed what seemed like a simple assignment, capture the tinhorn Somali warlord
Mohamed Farrah Aidid or, failing that, take down his organization, and for six weeks now,
they'd had precious little visible success. Patience was wearing thin, and pressure for
progress was mounting.

Just that morning Garrison had been stewing about it in his office. It was like trying to
hit a curveball blindfolded. Here he had a force of men be could drop on a building--any
building--in Mogadishu with just a few minutes' notice. These weren't just any men. They
were faster, stronger, smarter, and more experienced than any soldiers in the world.

Point out a target building and the D-boys could take it down so fast that the bad guys
inside would be hog-tied before the sound of the flashbang grenades and door charges had
stopped ringing in their ears. They could herd the whole mess of them out by truck or
helicopter before the neighborhood militia even had a chance to pull on its pants.
Garrison's force could do alt this and even videotape the whole operation in color for
training purposes (and to show off a little back at the Pentagon), but they couldn't do
any of these things unless their spies on the ground pointed them at the right goddamn
house.

For three nights running they had geared up to launch at a house where Aidid was either
present or about to be (so the general's spies told him). Every time they had failed to
nail it down.

Garrison knew from day one that intelligence was going to be a problem. The original plan
had called for a daring, well-placed lead Somali spy, and the head of the CIA's local
operation, to present Aidid an elegant hand-carved cane soon after Task Force Ranger
arrived. Embedded in the bead of the cane was a homing beacon. It seemed like a sure thing
until, on Garrison's first day in-country, Lieutenant Colonel Dave McKnight, his chief of
staff, informed him that their lead informant had shot himself in the head playing Russian
roulette. It was the kind of idiotic macho thing guys did when they'd lived too long on
the edge.

“He's not dead,” McKnight told the general, “but we're fucked.”

When you worked with the locals there were going to be setbacks. Few people knew this
better than Garrison, who was the picture of American military machismo with his gray crew
cut, desert camouflage fatigues, and combat boots, a 9 mm pistol strapped to a shoulder
holster and that unlit half cigar jammed perpetually in the side of his mouth. Garrison
had been living by the sword now for about three decades. He was one of the least-known
important army officers in America. He had run covert operations all over the world-Asia,
the Middle East, Africa, Central America, South America, the Caribbean. One thing all
these missions had in common was they required cooperation from the locals.

They also demanded a low threshold for bullshit. The general was a bemused cynic. He had
seen just about everything, and didn't expect much-except from his men. His gruff
informality suited an officer who had begun his career not as a military academy graduate,
but a buck private. He served two tours in Vietnam, part of it helping to run the
infamously brutal Phoenix program, which ferreted out and killed Viet Cong village
leaders. That was enough to iron the idealism out of anybody. Garrison had risen to
general without exercising the more politic demands of generalship, which called for
graceful euphemism and frequent obfuscation. He was a blunt realist who avoided the pomp
and pretense of upper-echelon military life. Soldiering was about fighting. It was about
killing people before they killed you. It was about having your way by force and guile in
a dangerous world, taking a shit in the woods, living in dirty, difficult conditions,
enduring hardships and risks that could-and sometimes did-kill you. It was ugly work.
Which is not to say that certain men didn't enjoy it, didn't live for it. Garrison was one
of those men. He embraced its cruelty. He would say. this man needs to die. Just like
that. Some people needed to die. It was how the real world worked. Nothing pleased
Garrison more than a well-executed hit, and if things went to hell and you had to slug it
out, then it was time to summon a dark relish for mayhem. Why be a soldier if you couldn't
exult in a heart-pounding, balls-out gunfight? Which is what made him so good.

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-toe 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 enough 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 OH58s were still n
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 canter 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 throe-vehicle convoy,, when we know for a fact that no
vehicles left the compound tend to lower our confidence level even more.”

There had been so many close calls and near misses. Too much time between missions. In
six weeks they'd launched exactly six times. And several of those 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 the 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.”