Black Hawk Down (52 page)

The rescue column would have had to have left tour or five hours before it did to save
his life, assuming surgeons could have saved him--by no means a definite thing. Again, the
quarrel is over Garrison's call, not with weak-kneed Washington politicians undercutting
forces in the field. Maybe Garrison, General Wayne Downing, General Joseph Hoar General
Powell, and the rest of the military command should have insisted on armor and the AC-130
from the start. They didn't. I believe these are issues over which well-meaning military
experts differ. But it was, as the general noted in his letter, his call.

The suggestion that Garrison and his men should have refused to fight without getting
their full force request puts me in mind of General George McClellan, whose battle-shy
Union army stayed safely encamped for years demanding more and more resources. President
Lincoln finally fired him for suffering a terminal case of “the slows.” The men of Task
Force Ranger were daring, ambitious soldiers. They were more inclined to think in terms of
working with what they had than refusing to work until they got everything they wanted.

As battles go, Mogadishu was a minor engagement. General Powell has pointed out that the
deaths of eighteen American soldiers in Vietnam would not have even warranted a press
conference. Old soldiers may snort over the fuss generated by this gunfight, but it speaks
well of America that our threshold for death and injury to our soldiers has been so
significantly lowered. This does not mean that military action is never worth the danger,
or the price. Our armed forces will be called upon again to intervene in obscure parts of
the world-as they already have in Bosnia. To prepare for these twenty-first-century
missions, there are probably few more important case studies than this one.

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. How many airborne rescue teams should there have been? One for every Black
Hawk and Little Bird in the sky? Some of the failures deserve further study. During the
battle, efforts to steer the lost convoy from the air turned into a black comedy. At risk
of a cliché, how is it that a nation that could land an unmanned little go-cart on the
surface of Mars couldn't steer a convoy five blocks through the streets of Mogadishu? Why
did it take the QRF fifty minutes to arrive at the task force's base when things started
to go bad? Shouldn't they have been better positioned at the outset? But these are all
questions that are only obvious in retrospect. The truth is, Task Force Ranger came within
several minutes of pulling off its mission on October 3 without a hitch. If Black Hawk
Super Six One had not been hit, the “bad” choices made by Garrison would have been called
bold. We will never know if Admiral Jonathan Howe was right to believe a lasting peace
might have been achieved in Somalia if Aidid had been captured or his clan dismantled as a
military force. It seems unlikely. In the years since the warlord's death, little in
Mogadishu has changed. The Habr Gidr is a large and powerful clan planted deep in
Somalia's past and present political culture. To think that 450 superb American soldiers
could uproot it violently, thereby clearing the way for, as General Powell puts it, “an
outbreak of Jeffersonian democracy,” seems far-fetched. In the end, the Battle of the
Black Sea is another lesson in the limits of what force can accomplish.

I began working on this story about two-and-a-half years after the battle was fought. I
had been intrigued by the early accounts of the fight, both as a citizen and as a writer.

It was clearly an important and fascinating episode, one with tragic consequences for
many and lasting implications for American foreign policy. Given the fierce but limited
nature of the gunfight-a small force of Americans pinned down overnight in an African
city-I realized that it might be possible to tell the whole story. But the undertaking
intimidated me. I had no military background or sources, and assumed that someone with
both would tell the story far better than I could.

Nevertheless I remained curious enough to read whatever stories I saw about the incident.
I was especially intrigued by President Clinton's subsequent struggles to deal with it.
Particularly poignant were newspaper accounts I read of Clinton's meetings with the
parents of the men killed in the battle. Larry Joyce and Jim Smith, the father of Corporal
Jamie Smith, had reportedly questioned the president sharply in one of those meetings. I
wondered about the informal visit the president paid to soldiers wounded in Mogadishu as
they recuperated at Walter Reed Army Hospital. How did those men feel about meeting with
the man who had sent them on the mission, and then abruptly called it off? At the Medal of
Honor ceremony for the two Delta soldiers, I read that the father of posthumous honoree
Sergeant Randy Shughart insulted the president, telling him he was not fit to be commander
in chief.

When I was asked by The Philadelphia Inquirer to profile President Clinton in its
magazine as he ran for reelection, I tried to answer some of these questions. Interviewing
some of the families for an account of their session at the White House, I drove up to
Long Valley, New Jersey, one spring afternoon to meet with Jim Smith, a retired U.S. Army
captain and former Ranger who had lost a leg in Vietnam. Jim and I sat in his den for
several hours. He described the meeting with Clinton, and then talked at length about his
son Jamie, how it had felt to lose him, and what little he knew about the battle and how
his son had died. I left his house that day determined to find out more.

My initial requests to the Pentagon media office were naive and went nowhere. I filed
Freedom of Information requests for documents that, two years later, I have not received.
I was told the men I wanted to interview were in units off-limits to the press. My only
hope of finding the foot soldiers I wanted was to ask for them by name, and I knew only a
handful of names. I combed through what little had been written about the battle, and
submitted the names I found there, but I did not receive a response. Then Jim Smith sent
me an invitation. The army was dedicating a building at the Pixatinny Arsenal near his
home in memory of Jamie. I debated whether to drive up. It would take the whole day and,
with my lack of success, the story had receded in priority. Still, I had been moved by my
conversation with Jim. I have sons just a few years younger than his Jamie. I couldn't
imagine losing one of them, much less in a gunfight someplace like Mogadishu. I made the
drive.

And there, at this dedication ceremony, were about a dozen Rangers who had fought with
Jamie in Mogadishu. Jim's introduction helped break down the normal suspicion soldiers
have for reporters. The men gave me their names and told me hew to arrange interviews with
them. Over three days at Fort Benning that fail I conducted my first twelve interviews.
Each of the men I talked to had names and phone numbers for others who had fought there
that day, many of them no longer in the army. My network grew from there. Nearly everyone
I contacted was eager to talk. In the summer of 1997, the Inquirer sent Peter Tobia and me
to Mogadishu. We flew to Nairobi, paid our weight in khat, climbed in the back of a small
plane with sacks of the drug, and flew to a dirt airstrip outside Mogadishu. Accompanied
by Ibrahim Roble Farah, a Nairobi businessman and member of the clan, we spent just seven
days in the city, long enough to walk the streets where the battle had taken place and to
interview some of the men who had fought against American soldiers that day. We learned
how Somalis had perceived the sometimes brutal tactics in the summer of 1993, as UN troops
led a clumsy manhunt for Aidid, and how widespread appreciation for the humanitarian
intervention had turned to hatred. Peter and I left with a feel for the place, for the
futility of it. local politics, and some insight into why Somalis fought so bitterly
against American soldiers that day.

In the months after I returned, I found military officers who were eager to hear what I
could tell them about the Somali perspective, and about the battle. My work from the
ground up eventually led me to a treasure of official information. The fifteen-hour battle
had been videotaped from a variety of platforms, so the action I had painstakingly pieced
together in my mind through interviews could be checked against images of the actual
fight. The hours of radio traffic during the battle had been recorded and transcribed.
This would provide actual dialogue from the midst of the action and was invaluable in
helping to sort out the precise sequence of events. It also conveyed, with frightening
immediacy, the horror of it, the feel of men struggling to stave off panic and stay alive.
Other documents fleshed out the intelligence background of the assault, exactly what Task
Force Ranger knew and was trying to accomplish. None of the men on the ground, caught up
completely in their own small corner of the fight, had a complete vision of the battle.
But their memories, combined with this documentary material, including a precise
chronology and the written accounts of Delta operators and SEALS, made it possible for me
to reconstruct the whole picture. This material gave me, I believe, the best chance any
writer had ever had to tell the story of a battle completely, accurately, and well.

Every battle is a drama played out apart from broader issues. Soldiers cannot concern
themselves with the forces that bring them to a fight, or its aftermath. They trust their
leaders not to risk their lives for too little. Once the battle is joined, they fight to
survive as much as to win, to kill before they are killed. The story of combat is
timeless. It is about the same things whether in Troy or Gettysburg, Normandy or the Ia
Drang. It is about soldiers, most of them young, trapped in a fight to the death. The
extreme and terrible nature of war touches something essential about being human, and
soldiers do not always like what they learn. For those who survive, the victors and the
defeated, the battle lives on in their memories and nightmares and in the dull ache of old
wounds. It survives as hundreds of searing private memories, memories of loss and triumph,
shame and pride, struggles each veteran must refight every day of his life.

No matter how critically history records the policy decisions that led up to this fight,
nothing can diminish the professionalism and dedication of the Rangers and Special Forces
units who fought there that day. The Special Forces units showed in Mogadishu why it is
important for the military to keep and train highly motivated, talented, and experienced
soldiers. When things went to hell in the streets, it was in large part the men of Delta
and the SEALS who held things together and got most of the force out alive.

Many of the young Americans who fought in the Battle of Mogadishu are civilians again.
They are beginning families and careers, no different outwardly from the millions of other
twenty-something members of their generation. They are creatures of pop culture who grew
up singing along with Sesame Street shuttling to day care, and navigating today's hyper
adolescence through the pitfalls of drugs and unsafe sex. Their experience of battle,
unlike that of any other generation of American soldiers, was colored by a lifetime of
watching the vivid gore of Hollywood action movies. In my interviews with those who were
in the thick of the battle, they remarked again and again how much they felt like they
were in a movie, and had to remind themselves that this horror, the blood, the deaths, was
real. They describe feeling weirdly out of place, as though they did not belong here,
fighting feelings of disbelief, anger, and ill-defined betrayal, This cannot be real. Many
wear black metal bracelets inscribed with the names of their friends who died, as if to
remind themselves daily that it was real. To look at them today, few show any outward sign
that one day not too long ago they risked their lives in an ancient African city, killed
for their country, took a bullet, or saw their best friend shot dead. They returned to a
country that didn't care or remember. Their fight was neither triumph nor defeat; it just
didn't matter. It's as though their firefight was a bizarre two-day adventure, like some
extreme Outward Bound experience where things got out of hand and same of the guys got
killed.

I wrote this book for them.

AFTERWORD

It makes perfect sense for people to assume that someone who has written a book about a
battle has some experience and expertise with the military. I have spent a lot of time
since the publication of Black Hawk Down explaining to people that I don't. Nevertheless,
people continue to make that assumption and to seek out my presumably trenchant insights
into the battle's strategy and tactics. I have had officers at the U.S. Army War College
in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, asking whether General Garrison ought to have requested armor
as part of his force protection package, and officers at the Special Operations Warfare
School at Ft. Myers, Florida, ask me whether the air support package was adequate. I
continue to plead ignorance on these issues. I think before anyone holds a strong opinion
about, say, a Bradley Armored Vehicle, he ought to at least know what one looks like. I
don't qualify.

One caller, inviting me to address the Military Operations Research Society at their
annual convention, called back after I accepted to find out what my security clearance
was. It turned out that the whole conference was classified.

“I don't have a security clearance,” I said. “I suppose you could say I have something
like a negative security clearance. I'm a reporter. I'm the sort of person they try to
keep secrets from.”

The conference kindly rented a separate hall so that they could hear me talk about the
battle.