by Mark Bowden
That was the best they got out of him. Those were the words people all over the world would be seeing on their TV the next day. Somalia had been a back-burner news item in the weeks before this battle. None of the major American newspapers or networks even had a correspondent in Mogadishu. Now this east African coastal city was front and center. The coup d’état fizzled in Moscow and the images of the Somali crowds humiliating American bodies had drawn the attention of the world, and the outrage of America. Durant’s swollen, bloody face, with that wild, frightened look in his eye, lifted off the videotape, would soon be in newspapers and on the covers of news-magazines worldwide. It was an image of American helplessness. More than one American asked the same question President Clinton had asked, How could this have happened? Didn’t we go to Somalia to feed starving people?
Willi Frank got down on her hands and knees and peered closely at the TV. She was trying to see around the corners of the screen. She was sure, if they had Durant, they must have other members of the crew. They probably had Ray, too. He was probably sitting right next to Mike, just off the frame!
Durant felt okay about the interview. After the camera crew left, a doctor came. He was kind, and he spoke English well. He told Durant he had been trained at the University of Southern California. He apologized for the limited supplies he had with him, just some aspirin, some antiseptic solution, and some gauze. He used forceps and gauze and the solution to gently probe Durant’s leg wound, where the broken femur poked through the skin, and he cleaned off the end of the bone and the tissue around it.
It was sharply painful, but the pilot was grateful. He knew enough about wounds to know that a femur infection was relatively common and deadly, even with simple fractures. His was compound, and he had been lying on a dirty floor all night and day. Durant asked about his crew and the D-boys, but the doctor said he knew nothing.
When the doctor left, the pilot was moved from the room where he had awakened that morning to the sounds of birds and children. He was pushed to the floor in the back of a car, and a blanket was placed over him. It was terribly painful. Then two men got in the car and sat on him. His leg was moving all over the place. It had swelled badly, and the slightest move was torture.
They brought him to a little apartment and left him in the care of a gangly, nearsighted man he would come to know well over the next ten days. It was Abdullahi Hassan, a man they called “Firimbi,” the propaganda minister for clan leader Mohamed Farrah Aidid.
The pilot didn’t know it, but the warlord had paid his ransom.
Now, to get Durant back, America would have to negotiate with Aidid.
17
Garrison and the task force were willing, but Washington had lost its stomach for the fight.
Former U.S. Ambassador to Somalia Robert Oakley had been attending a party at the Syrian embassy in Washington on Tuesday, October 5, when he got a phone call from the White House. It was Anthony Lake, national security adviser to President Clinton.
“I need to talk to you first thing in the morning,” Lake said.
“Why, Tony?” Oakley said. “I’ve been home for six months.”
Oakley, a gaunt, plainspoken intellectual with a distinguished career in diplomacy, had been President George Bush’s top civilian in Mogadishu during the humanitarian mission that had begun the previous December. With the famine over and a new administration in Washington, Oakley had departed the city in March 1993, at about the same time his old friend Admiral Jonathan Howe had taken over the top UN job in Somalia.
Since his return, Oakley had watched with dismay the course of events in Somalia. He had frequent conversations with former colleagues in the State Department, but despite his long experience there, no top officials in the administration had consulted with him. He wasn’t offended, but he was concerned about prospects for the government-building process he’d help set in motion. He’d watched with growing concern as events and UN resolutions pushed Aidid out of the peace process, and felt the idea of tracking the clan leader down like an outlaw was bound to fail. But no one had asked his opinion.
“Can you come to breakfast tomorrow at seven-thirty?” Lake asked.
Now they were in trouble. The day after the October 3 battle, Secretary of Defense Les Aspin and Secretary of State Warren Christopher had been grilled by angry members of Congress. How had this happened? Why were American soldiers dying in far-off Somalia when the humanitarian mission there had supposedly ended months before? As many as five hundred Somalis had been killed and over a thousand injured. Durant was still a captive. The public was outraged, and Congress was demanding withdrawal.
Senator Robert C. Byrd, Democratic chairman of the Appropriations Committee, called for an immediate end “to these cops-and-robbers operations.”
“Clinton’s got to bring them home,” said Senator John McCain, a Republican member of the Armed Services Committee and former prisoner of war in Vietnam.
There were perceived intelligence failures up and down the line. In Mogadishu, the escalating violence between the Habr Gidr and UN forces had been perceived as individual incidents, not the probing actions of a determined enemy force. In Washington, officials at the Pentagon, White House, and Congress were stunned by the size, scope, and ferocity of Aidid’s counterattack on October 3. In retrospect, Aspin’s inaction on General Montgomery’s September request for tanks and Bradley armored vehicles seemed indicative of an administration that had fallen asleep on its watch—something Republican legislators could use to batter the Clinton administration.
The battle was also a blow to an administration already unpopular with the military establishment. It made Clinton look uninterested in the welfare of America’s soldiers. The president had been getting briefed on Task Force Ranger’s missions in advance. This one had been mounted so quickly he had not been informed. Clinton complained bitterly to Lake. He felt he had been blindsided, and he was angry. He wanted answers to a broad range of questions from policy issues to military tactics.
At the breakfast table in the East Wing on Wednesday were Lake and his deputy, Samuel R. Berger, and U.S. Ambassador to the UN Madeleine K. Albright. They talked about what had happened informally, and then walked Oakley into the Oval Office, where they joined the president, the vice president, Christopher, Aspin, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and several other advisers.
The meeting lasted six hours. The thrust of the discussion was: What do we do now? Staying in Mogadishu to pursue Aidid was out of the question, even though Admiral Howe and General Garrison were eager to do so. They believed Aidid had been struck a mortal blow and that it wouldn’t take much more to finish the job. If the reports from local spies were correct, some of Aidid’s strongest clan allies had fled the city fearing the inevitable American counterattack. The clan’s arsenals of RPGs were severely depleted. Others were sending peace feelers, offering to dump Aidid to ward off more bloodshed. But it was clear listening to the discussion that morning in the White House that America had no intention of initiating any further military action in Somalia.
America was pulling out. The meeting ended with a decision to reinforce Task Force Ranger, make a show of military resolve, but call off any further efforts to apprehend Aidid or his top aides. After enough tanks, men, planes, and ships poured into Mogadishu to level the city, the forces were to simply stay put for a while. Renewed efforts would be made to negotiate a stable Somali government that would include Aidid, but the United States would make a dignified withdrawal, by March 1994. The Somali warlord didn’t know it yet, but his clan had scored a major victory. Without U.S. muscle, there was no way the UN could impose a government on Somalia without Aidid’s cooperation.
Oakley was dispatched to Mogadishu to deliver this message and to try to secure the release of Durant.
There would be no negotiating with Aidid over Durant. Oakley was instructed to deliver a stern message: The president of the United States wanted the pilot released. Now.
18
/> Firimbi was a big man for a Somali, tall with long arms and big hands. He had a potbelly, and squinted through thick, cloudy black-framed glasses. He was extremely proud of his position in the SNA. Once Aidid had purchased Durant back from the bandits who had kidnapped him, Firimbi was told, “Anything bad that happens to the pilot will also happen to you.”
When Durant arrived that night, Firimbi found him angry, frightened, and in pain. He met the pilot’s sullen demeanor with his own earnest hostility. America had just caused a bloodbath in Firimbi’s clan, and he held men like this pilot accountable. It was hard not to be angry.
Durant had no idea where he’d been taken. In the drive through the city he had been under a blanket in the backseat. They might have been taking him out to kill him. The men who brought him carried him up steps and along a walkway and set him down in a room.
Firimbi greeted him, but the pilot at first didn’t answer. Durant could speak a little Spanish, and Firimbi, like most educated Somalis, could speak Italian. The languages were similar enough for them to communicate somewhat. After they had been alone together for a time they spoke enough to establish this basis for limited conversation. Durant complained about his wounds. Despite the efforts of the doctor who visited him at the other place, they had become swollen, tender, and infected. Firimbi sullenly helped wash him again and rebandaged them. He passed word along that Durant needed a doctor.
That night, Monday, October 4, Durant and Firimbi heard American helicopters flying overhead, broadcasting haunting calls:
“Mike Durant, we will not leave you.”
“Mike Durant, we are with you always.”
“Do not think we have left you, Mike.”
“What are they saying?” Firimbi asked.
Durant told him that his friends were worried about him, and would be looking for him.
“And we treat you so nicely,” said his captor. “It is a Somali tradition never to hurt a prisoner.”
Durant smiled at him through his battered, swollen face.
19
For Jim Smith, the father of Corporal Jamie Smith, the nightmare had begun during a Monday afternoon meeting in the conference room of the bank where he worked in Long Valley, New Jersey. The meeting was interrupted when his boss’s wife opened the door and stepped in.
She said she was sorry to interrupt, then turned to Smith.
“I just got a call from Carol,” she said. “Call home.”
Obviously, Smith’s wife, Carol, had felt this was urgent. They’d been ignoring the office phones during the meeting, so Carol had called the boss’s home number, looking for a way to track him down.
Smith called his wife from an adjoining office.
“What’s the matter?” he asked.
He will always remember her next words.
“There are two officers here. Jamie has been killed. You have to come home.”
When he opened the door at home, Carol said, “Maybe they’re wrong, Jim. Maybe Jamie is just missing.”
But Smith knew. He had been a Ranger captain in Vietnam, and lost a leg in combat. He knew that in a tight unit like the Rangers, death notification wouldn’t go out unless they had the body.
“No,” he told his wife quietly, trying to make the words sink in. “If they say he’s dead, they know.”
Camera crews began to arrive within hours. When everyone in his immediate family had been given the news, Smith walked out to the front yard to answer questions.
He was repulsed by the attitude of the reporters and the kinds of questions they asked. How did he feel? How did they think he felt? He told them he was proud of his son and deeply saddened. Did he think his son had been properly trained and led? Yes, his son was superbly trained and led. Whom did he blame? What was he supposed to say: The U.S. Army? Somalia? Himself, for encouraging his son’s interest in the Rangers? God?
Smith told them that he didn’t know enough about what had happened yet to blame anybody, that his son was a soldier, and that he died serving his country.
A Mailgram arrived two days later with a stark message signed by a colonel he didn’t know. It resonated powerfully with Smith, even though he knew its contents before reading the words. It joined him in a sad ritual as old as war itself, with every person who had ever lost someone beloved in battle:
“THIS CONFIRMS PERSONAL NOTIFICATION MADE TO YOU BY A REPRESENTATIVE OF THE SECRETARY OF THE ARMY, THAT YOUR SON, SPC JAMES E. SMITH, DIED AT MOGADISHU, SOMALIA, ON OCTOBER 3, 1993. ANY QUESTIONS YOU MAY HAVE SHOULD BE DIRECTED TO YOUR CASUALTY ASSISTANCE OFFICER. PLEASE ACCEPT MY DEEPEST SYMPATHY IN YOUR BEREAVEMENT.”
20
Stephanie Shughart got word about her husband, Randy, that same Monday morning. She had been up all night after getting the word that “one of the guys” had been killed. Anticipating further news, she had called her boss to say she wouldn’t be in for work—a family emergency. The families at Bragg braced themselves. At least one family was going to take a hit.
Stephanie’s boss knew that Randy was in the army, and he sometimes did dangerous work. She also knew how uncharacteristic it was for Stephanie to stay home from work. She drove straight over to the Shugharts’ house.
The two women drank coffee and watched CNN. Stephanie was in a perfect agony of suspense as the first TV reports aired about what had happened in Mogadishu. She and her boss were talking when two silhouettes appeared outside the door.
Stephanie opened it to two men from her husband’s unit. One was a close friend. This is it. He’s dead.
“Randy is missing in action,” he said.
So it was better news than she expected. Stephanie was determined not to despair. Randy would be okay. He was the most competent man alive. Her mental image of Somalia was of a jungle. She pictured her husband in some clearing, signaling for a chopper. When her friend told her that Randy had gone in with Gary Gordon, she felt even better. They’re hiding somewhere. If anybody could come through it alive, it was those two.
News came rapid-fire over the next few days, all of it bad. Families learned of the deaths of Earl Fillmore and Griz Martin. Then there were the horrible images of a dead soldier being dragged through the streets. Then word came that Gary’s body had been recovered. Stephanie despaired. When proof came that Durant was alive and being held captive, her hopes soared. Surely they had Randy, too. They just weren’t showing him on camera. She prayed and prayed. First she prayed for Randy to be alive, but as the days went by and her hopes dimmed, she began to pray that he not be someplace suffering, and that if he were dead, that he died quickly. Over the next week she went to several funerals. She sat and grieved with the other wives. Eventually all the missing men except Shughart had been accounted for. All were dead, their bodies horribly mutilated.
Stephanie asked her father to stay with her. Her friends took turns keeping her company. This went on for days. It was hell.
When she saw a car pull into her driveway with several officers and a priest inside, she knew.
“They’re here, Dad,” she said.
“The Somalis have returned a body, and it’s been identified as Randy,” one of officers said.
“Are you sure?” she asked.
“Yes,” he said. “We’re sure.”
She was discouraged from viewing Randy’s body—and, being a nurse, Stephanie could imagine why better than most. She sent a friend to Dover, Delaware, where the body had been flown. When he came back, she asked, “Could you tell it was him?”
He shook his head sadly. He hadn’t been able to tell.
21
DeAnna Joyce had been feeling lucky. On Friday night, two nights back, they’d held a lottery over at the lieutenant’s house on post at Fort Benning to see when the wives would get to talk to their husbands. They hadn’t seen the men for months, ever since they’d left to train at Fort Bliss earlier that summer. Eighteen of the women would get to take phone calls Saturday night, eighteen more Sunday night, and two on Monday. DeAnna had gotten stuck with on
e of the Mondays, but as she was leaving another of the wives had wanted to switch, so she’d gotten to speak to Casey Saturday night. Then all the calls for Sunday and Monday were canceled.
There had always been that good fortune in Casey’s smile. She’d met him at a mall in Texas. DeAnna was working as a saleswoman for a clothing store chain, The Limited, and this guy she knew stopped in to ask her a question about a girl. He’d introduced her to Casey. They must have said all of two words to each other.
“Hey.”
“Howyadoin’?”
Like that. Only, she learned later, on his way out of the store Casey had informed his friend, “I’m going to marry that girl.”
They started dating, and then Casey transferred from the University of Texas to North Texas University in order to attend the same school as DeAnna. He was studying journalism. But he didn’t like going to class and wasn’t doing that well and told her one day in 1990 that he was going to leave school and join the army. Or, he asked her. She’d said, “Do what you want.” So he’d gone through basic, then airborne school, where he’d gotten this horrible fist-sized tattoo on the back of his right shoulder. It was supposed to be a Rottweiler, but it looked more like a wildcat. It sported an airborne unit maroon beret. Then he decided to push on through the Ranger Indoctrination Program.
Casey’s father, a retired lieutenant colonel, had never won a Ranger tab, so it was something Casey was bound and determined to do. It wasn’t easy. He and his buddy Dom Pilla had both just about decided to quit—Casey called and asked DeAnna if she’d think less of him, and she’d said no—but then Casey and Dom had talked each other into staying. They’d both made it. He returned home a Ranger, making plans to get the maroon beret on his tattoo recolored with the black beret of the Rangers. They were married on May 25, 1991.
DeAnna started crying when she got on the phone with him Saturday night, and couldn’t stop. It upset Casey, too. They both just sobbed back and forth how much they loved each other. She was desperate for him to come home.