We drove through the gates of the port, basically a vast parking lot with warehouses and berths for ships. Marines were pounding stakes into the hot sticky asphalt and raising tents. Enormous cargo ships were being unloaded. Guys with torches cut windows into the sides of empty shipping containers to convert them into offices and places to sleep. Everywhere there was the rumble of heavy machinery and the beep-beep of forklifts backing up. An American flag snapped in the wind above the scarlet and gold flag of the Marine Corps.
One warehouse was filled with long rows of cots draped with green mosquito nets that shimmered in the breeze blowing off the ocean. The port—the entire country—no longer had electricity, running water, or sewage disposal. Marauding Somalis had pulled out the city’s electrical grid to sell the copper wire. They had torn out and sold the pipes, the sinks, and the toilets, too. Before the Marines turned it into a dormitory, the warehouse had served as a giant communal toilet. A grader was needed to scrape the human waste off the floor. The smell, inside and out, was burning garbage and excrement.
In the morning, before the sun came up, a big, off-key voice sang the words to “That’s Amore.” The accent wasn’t Italian; it was pure Tennessee. It wasn’t in tune, either, but it was loud, very loud. Lieutenant Colonel James was up and ready to work. His Marines in the First Landing Support Battalion, wearing distinctive red patches on their uniforms to identify them as the lords of the port, were in charge of unloading the fast-arriving ships and planes carrying military equipment and food for the starving.
The home base of the Red Patchers—a cluster of tents and shipping containers under camouflage nets—was named Camp Bubba because Lieutenant Colonel James called everyone Bubba, as in, “What do those army bubbas want?” The ten women Marines with the battalion, known officially (and awkwardly) as WMs, were called “Bubbaresses.” Soon Camp Bubba even had a regular newsletter known as “Rack Talk,” filled with essential Marine lore such as “the five types of wounds” and the word-of-the-day.
James was most pleased to learn his guys had fixed a broken grader. He shouted at them—he was always shouting—“OUT-FUCKING-STANDING!” They were jazzed by the attention and praise. That made it even more uncomfortable when, in front of everyone, a Marine general lit into Lieutenant Colonel James for having stubble on his chin. I almost spoke up and said, “He hasn’t shaved because he’s been up all fucking night working. Sir.” I held my tongue, and James did, too. He spent a good deal of energy trying to keep his mouth shut.
I rode along on missions to deliver food, and to disarm warlords, and then returned to the port to write. Like most people I knew in the business, I preferred reporting to writing, and I always felt a little deflated after I filed. The reporting was energizing—out there in the world learning new things—and then I forced all that energy into just five hundred words of copy. One second later the story was gone, and I was finished, spent.
The idle moments were not good for me. I was very aware that Christmas was coming, more aware than anytime since I had stopped believing in Santa Claus. Having a baby and a family at home sharpened the meaning of the holiday for me, and that was reflected in the stories I wrote. In truth, my obsession with Christmas was more about me than about the people I was covering. Muslim Somalis didn’t celebrate Christmas, and many of the Marines had lost track of the holiday. The joke was that USMC stood for U Suckers Missed Christmas.
I considered myself lucky to be with the Marines, because my reporter friends were living in uncomfortable and unsafe conditions. A veteran of previous conflicts, Mike Hedges, had rented a house with other reporters, and they had hired their own drivers, cooks, and security. They invited me to their villa for lunch, which was the first locally prepared meal I had eaten. I was careful to try only the food that had been cooked, nothing fresh, and no water unless I saw the bottle. Those were the rules I always followed in less-developed parts of the world.
I had fun catching up with Hedges and the other reporters, including Larry Jolidon, a friend from El Salvador and the Gulf War. I felt at home with them, and it was safe to relax. We were competitors, that was part of it, but over a meal it was just laughs and war stories and nods of recognition. We traded gossip about people we knew, and horror stories about boneheaded editors back home.
My reporter friends and I never talked about politics as partisans, although we did share a disdain for most politicians in all countries. I now thought of journalism as something higher than politics, almost a religion, and war correspondents belonged to the most extreme and tight-knit order. This place was rough and scary, which made sitting around the table after a good meal with friends even more beautiful.
Hedges had the brains of a professor and the strength of a lumberjack, but he looked thin and drained. I knew they all had been knocked down by diarrhea. I also wondered how safe they were with rented security. If the guards could be hired by one side, there was a chance they could be hired by the other side. I was relieved, if maybe a little ashamed, when I returned before dark to the safety of the port and “my Marines.”
Sticking close to the Marines was my assignment. My instructions from the desk were clear: write about the US troops. The editors told me not to worry about Somali politics, because our readers were going to care more about fellow Americans than suffering Africans. I didn’t take this as racist or narrow-minded. Racism did taint some coverage, of course, but I would have gotten the same instructions if we had invaded France or Germany.
Every reporter learned from the first day that the closer a story was to home, the more carefully it would be read. For me, “local” meant the Marines, especially if I could find them from cities where we had newspapers. I sometimes yelled into a crowd of uniforms, “Anybody from Denver or Memphis? Abilene?” Quotes from them would be gold in the hometown newspapers.
People teased us about looking for the “local angle,” but that was what our experience told us was valuable to readers. And by valuable I don’t mean money. I didn’t care about “selling papers” (because I didn’t share in the profits), but I did want to be read.
Attached to one of my stories, I included this personal note to my editors: “Dear Desk: Your correspondent is sharing a Conex container with a snoring Marine first sergeant just a few feet from the harbor. Thank God for the breeze. The flies are bad, especially because they are tiny bombers loaded with disease that they drop on our food. There is no mess hall, so we eat MREs. I still cannot eat tuna casserole for breakfast (especially served cold in a green plastic bag), but I’m a big fan of crackers and peanut butter. That is good because the goal is to be constipated in order to stay out of the latrines. The smell is so strong that it creates gusts of wind. No showers yet, but you can get fairly clean with a canteen cup. Anyway, it’s only been a week. I am trying to hook up with the landing at Kismayo. That may mean I will be out of touch for a few days, so don’t worry if I don’t call.”
In addition to safety, another benefit of being with the Marines, which I kept to myself, was the ships in the port. I was having trouble finding a way to file my stories until one of the Marines suggested, “Why don’t you use the phone on the ship?” A phone? Genius! He led me on board a huge civilian cargo ship, which was delivering military supplies, and introduced me to the radio operator named Harmon. Nobody but me called him Harmon. He and all the radio operators on ships were known as “Sparks.” I didn’t want Harmon to get in trouble, so I offered to call collect, but he waved his hand to say no problem.
He invited me to stay for dinner: thick juicy steak, baked potato, and corn-on-the-cob. The food was so good I was embarrassed to tell the Marines. Harmon, perhaps inspired by the odor radiating off my clothes, let me use the shower in his quarters. I also kept that to myself. I had one cold beer and just about fell asleep right there. I tumbled down the stairs, dragged my cot out of the shipping container to sleep in the fresh air, and didn’t wake until the next morning.
I enjoyed special status with the military’s elabo
rate press operation in Somalia because I covered the Pentagon. Familiarity was the first step in a trust-based relationship. The organization you represented mattered—the New York Times and the Washington Post were not going to be frozen out—but so did the character of the reporter. I liked the people I covered, and they knew I cared about getting the story right. I put in a lot of “face time” at the Pentagon, and kept my hair trimmed and shoes polished. I had respect for the uniform, and I didn’t automatically assume people were lying to me. I wrote critical stories that occasionally made them pull out their hair—that was expected and honorable—but people knew I tried to be fair.
Too much familiarity, however, could lead to an occupational hazard of a beat called “going native.” Reporters who identified more with the people they covered than with their readers needed to change beats. I saw this happen with foreign correspondents, but also with Pentagon reporters who fetishized weapons systems, and police reporters who refused to see brutality. Covering the Pentagon and other beats, I tried to keep my demeanor courteous and my attitude somewhere between skeptical and cynical.
Now, in the Pentagon hallway called Correspondents Corridor, my grinning mugshot was displayed with the other beat reporters who covered “the building.” I was proud to belong to that group, and I sent a snapshot of the gallery to my parents. The little room called the Ernie Pyle Alcove now had deep meaning for me. The memorial honored Pyle and other reporters killed during World War II, including those from Scripps Howard newspapers and from the Scripps wire service, United Press. When I had first seen the portrait of Pyle years before, I felt only mild historical interest. Now, after spending so much time as the “Scripps Howard reporter” with troops in the field, I was constantly reminded of him. Pyle’s fifty-year-old columns, which I read in collections my parents had found for me at used bookstores, did not feel dated. The combat he wrote about felt like what I had experienced, only worse. Before I went to Washington as a reporter, I had never heard of Ernie Pyle. Now I felt him everywhere.
Like Pyle before me, I had spent much of my time in the field with the army rather than the other services. So when I was told to go to Somalia, my first call was to Army Public Affairs. They were happy to help, but the army was deploying after the Marines and couldn’t get me there soon enough. I understood, but I did plant a little seed of jealousy that I would be traveling with a rival service. Then I told the Marines that the army couldn’t get me to the action on time, which just confirmed the army’s lumbering stereotype. A couple of days later, I was on the way to Somalia with the Marines.
I had help understanding the Marines from Otto Kreisher, who covered the Pentagon for Copley News Service, part of a ninety-year-old family newspaper group similar to mine. Otto had been an enlisted Marine before becoming a commissioned officer and aviator in the navy. Like me, Otto had started as a cub reporter in Chicago, but he was more than a decade older, and his military experience gave him a unique perspective. Since World War II, fewer reporters were veterans, and sometimes the lack of military experience showed in our coverage. If anything, Otto’s time in uniform made him tougher on the officer class, and he had little tolerance for incompetence or lying. He was tolerant of me, however, and my dumb questions about the Marines and the navy.
Otto wanted to join up with the amphibious landing in Kismayo, a port city about three hundred miles south of us. I went back and forth about whether to do it. What if fighting broke out in the capital and we were stuck on a ship? Also, I dreaded the hurry-up-and-wait pace of the field trips and the lack of control. On the other hand, what a great adventure. And there would be hot food on the ship, maybe a real shower. More seriously, there was the ghost of Ernie Pyle pushing me forward. I could not allow myself to stay in the rear.
Reporters were fighting over the few available seats for the flight to the Kismayo landing ship. I got into a tug-of-war over a seat with someone from NBC until David Bloom, a twenty-nine-year-old rising star at the network, stepped in. He was jovial and funny, always on. At first I thought it was an act, but the more time we spent together, I saw it was real. He was the opposite of me—he made me feel like a wallflower—and I really enjoyed him. I wanted to be more like he was, more outgoing and less fearful. There was room on the plane for everybody, Bloom declared, and I got a seat. We flew to the USS Juneau and joined 100 Belgian commandos and 224 US Marines for the landing the next day.
The ship’s crew invited the visiting reporters to a steak dinner. The commanders were upbeat and relaxed, and to be honest, the whole thing felt a little staged. There was no compelling reason for the Marines to make an amphibious landing, other than because they could. It was good training, though, and the Marines were experts at keeping their image in the news.
“Our intention is to go ashore with a smile on our face,” John Peterson, a navy captain and the commander of the task force, told us. “There always is some risk, so we will not go to shore unarmed.”
After dinner, we were taken to bunks somewhere in a windowless room inside the ship. I never knew where we were below decks, so I followed Otto. The bunk beds—and the floor, ceiling, and walls—were freshly painted metal, and I felt enclosed inside a thick can. I cleaned up in the head and enjoyed the hot water, folded my pants, and got into bed wearing a t-shirt and underwear (for modesty and readiness).
Lying on my back staring at the metal ceiling, which was just inches from my nose, I fell asleep listening to the gentle rumble of the engines. Then I woke in a sweaty, fast-breathing panic, convinced the ceiling was pressing down on me. I jumped out of bed and landed with a thump on the metal floor. My hard landing woke Otto, who was sleeping just below me. He didn’t laugh at my nightmare; he just told me to go back to sleep.
Reveille sounded at 3 a.m. and we struggled out of the racks. I packed my stuff, got coffee, and climbed down to the cavernous well deck. The engines of the tracked amphibious vehicles—called “hogs”—were idling, spewing a thick gray cloud of exhaust that floated above the men in the darkened belly of the ship. Marines, stripped to shorts and t-shirts and shiny with grease and sweat, spread their combat gear on poncho liners for one last check.
I was told to squeeze into Track #102 with fifteen Marines, weapons, food, and gear. We raced to get everything packed, we climbed in, the doors were closed and sealed, and then we sat. Just as on land, military life at sea was comprised of long periods of getting ready and waiting, and then bursts of heart-pounding excitement. A reporter’s job, even back home, had a similar rhythm.
The air inside the closed vehicle was thick with diesel fumes and body odor. There were no windows, so I couldn’t tell if our track was moving or just rolling with the ship. I felt mildly nauseated, over-tired, and a little anxious. A talkative Marine corporal named Charles Luke, who said he was twenty-two and from Farmington Hills, Michigan, tried to be nice. “Don’t worry about rolling over because we will probably come up right. The bad thing is we’ll be rolling around in here with ammo boxes and other stuff, so there’ll be some broken bones.”
Then I heard louder engine noises and metal grinding. I couldn’t see it, but the ship’s doors had opened, and our hog was on the move. We plunged into the ocean and bobbed a couple of times before the unwieldy craft stabilized, and we motored toward shore. I kept one hand on my gear and one hand clutching something solid so I wouldn’t be tossed around.
The young Marines thunderously pounded their boots on the metal floor and roared the lyrics of a Queen song. The stomp-stomp-clap rhythm of the classic rock song was familiar from high school football, and it did feel like we were heading into a big game, only better armed.
Saltwater dripped on us from leaky seals, the water filling up around our feet. “If you have to puke, do it in your helmet so it doesn’t plug up the drain holes,” shouted Jason Davis, 22, a lance corporal from Ewing, Missouri.
“When we get to the beach our favorite people are going to be there,” Davis told the men. I wasn’t sure what he meant until he adde
d, “Don’t shoot any media personnel. As much as we’d like to shoot ’em, we can’t. So don’t.” Again, this was not meant personally, and I never took it that way.
The next sound was a grinding, grating noise when the track rose out of the surf and onto the beach. Then we stopped, and the flat metal door in back was lowered to the sand. I looked at my watch and made a note: 6:30 a.m. Sunlight filled the chamber and the Marines scrambled out the back shouting, “To the right! To the right! Go to the right!” I jumped out, too, holding my helmet on my head with one hand and my notebook and gear with the other. I stuck close to the Marines, not sure what to expect.
The sand was white and fine where the Marines fanned out and hunkered in fighting positions behind grassy dunes. I fell onto the sand with them and tried to get my bearings. After the ship, then the darkness inside the track and the choppy sea, I was sick to my stomach and disoriented. The sun burned my eyes. A pair of fierce-looking Cobra attack helicopters, with shark teeth painted on the front, thumped overhead. Hovercraft loaded with jeeps, trucks, and heavy equipment roared toward the shore behind us in misty clouds of white sea spray. Farther out on the horizon were darkened silhouettes of the big ships. The scene was straight out of a recruiting video. It was glorious.
Two whistle blasts from the platoon leader ordered everyone to scramble back inside the vehicle. There was no opposition on this beach, so we were marching inland. I stood in the open top while we thundered down a dirt road, fishtailing through the sand. Grabbing both sides of the vehicle to keep from flying out, I looked over at the speedometer when we hit forty-six miles per hour, which felt closer to one hundred. Somalis came out to cheer, rhythmically clapping their hands and singing. The mood was more Rose Parade than armored assault, and people appeared welcoming. The Marines quickly accomplished their mission, and within hours relief planes were flying into the town.
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