AUGUST 29, 1993
Under the black cloak of Sunday morning, we flew on a Black Hawk helicopter 3 miles northwest across town to the Mogadiscio Stadium—Somalia’s national stadium for soccer and other events, seating thirty-five thousand people. The trip only took five minutes. Because it housed the Pakistani UN troops’ compound, we called the bullet-riddled stadium the Pakistani Stadium. From there, we loaded onto three indigenous trucks. Only needing two trucks, we used a third as a decoy and also in the event that one broke down. Looking at the vehicles, it seemed a miracle they even ran. The Somalis used things until they were no longer mechanically viable. Then they used them some more. Someone did a pretty good job of keeping those pieces of crap running.
We drove out of the stadium and into the city. Mogadishu smelled like urine and human excrement mixed with that tangible smell of starvation, disease, and hopelessness. The odor hung in the air like a dark cloud. It made my heart feel heavy. The Somalis dumped raw sewage in the streets. It didn’t help that they used trash and animal dung to fuel the fires that constantly burned in rusted metal barrels. Elementary-school-age boys carried AK-47 rifles. We’d heard that cholera ran rampant because of a nasty water supply. Mogadishu seemed like the end of the world in I Am Legend—our mission was to stop the mobs of evil Darkseekers and save the good Somali humans. No problem, we’re SEALs. This is what we do.
After driving half a mile, we arrived at Pasha. Somali guards armed with AK-47s opened the iron gates for us. Earlier, we had sent one of our assets to give them a radio in preparation for our arrival. Altogether we had four guards protecting Pasha at one time. Four others would rotate with them in shifts. All of them looked alert. Their skinny arms weren’t much thicker than the width of three fingers, making the AK-47s appear huge in comparison. They wore T-shirts and macawis, a colorful kiltlike garment. We sped inside, and the guards closed the gate behind us.
Pasha stood two stories tall and was surrounded by an enormous concrete wall, the house of a wealthy doctor who left with his family when Somalia became too volatile for them. Somalia’s widespread poverty fueled robbery, so when the concrete was originally poured for the wall around the property, the builders stuck bottles in the holes of the blocks while the concrete was still wet. When the concrete dried, the builders broke the bottle tops off. Anyone trying to climb over the wall would have to climb over broken glass. Although effective, it looked butt-ugly. One evening, a shot was fired two houses down. Later, we found out that it came from a homeowner warding off a robber. The robbers liked to frequent our area, where the more affluent lived.
Inside, the running water was fed to the faucets by gravity, rather than pressure. Opening a valve allowed the water to come down from a large holding tank on the roof—the weakest shower I’d ever taken. We couldn’t drink it, unless we ran the water through our Katadyn pump for filtering out dangerous microbes. Sometimes we boiled the water. For the most part, we brought in cases of bottled water. By Somali standards, we were well-off.
I’m sure that when the doctor left, he took all the nice furniture. We had a basic table to sit around at mealtime. I had a cotlike bed made out of 2 × 4s and a thin mattress. Compared to living in a shack and sleeping in the dirt like most people in the city did, we lived like kings.
As we quickly unpacked our gear, one of the skinny guards, probably no more than 110 pounds, bent over to pick up one of my bags that weighed at least as much as he did. I tried to take it, but he insisted I let him carry it. He put my bag on his shoulder and hiked upstairs.
Our Somali chef arrived on the same day as we did. He cooked halal food, permissible by Islamic law—no pork, no alcohol, etc. Somali food is a mix of cuisines—Somalian, Ethiopian, Yemeni, Persian, Turkish, Indian, and Italian—influenced by Somalia’s long trade history. For breakfast, we ate pancakes, thin and breadlike, called canjeero. Some days we ate Italian-style porridge (boorash) with butter and sugar.
At lunch, the chef made dishes from brown long-grain basmati rice. He spiced up the aroma and taste with cloves, cinnamon, cumin, and sage. We also ate pasta (baasto) served with stew and banana instead of pasta sauce.
The chef cooked azuki beans on low heat for more than half the day, then served them with butter and sugar, a dish called cambuulo, for dinner. He made amazing goat meatballs—amazing everything. Even the camel tasted excellent.
My favorite drink was red (rooibos) tea, which is naturally sweet and nutty. We never ate our MREs at Pasha. Had we known the food would be so good, we could’ve left the heavy, space-consuming packages of MREs at the army compound.
Even though the guards were obviously undernourished, they wouldn’t try to take our leftover food. We had to offer them food and coax them to take it. Except for the items containing pork, which they wouldn’t eat because they were Muslim, we gave them our MREs; they would only eat a small amount themselves and take the rest home for their families. Also, we gave them our empty water bottles, which they used as water storage containers. Often they’d shake our hands and touch their heart as a sign of appreciation and respect. Our interpreter told us that the guards were happy the Americans had arrived. They appreciated that we’d left our families and were risking our lives to help them. Maybe the media wanted to represent America as bullies, but they missed the rest of the story. I think most of the Somalis wanted us to help them end the civil war.
The SEALs’ cost of the chef’s meals came out of the money SEAL Team Six had given us for escape and evasion. I rolled mine up in hundred-dollar bills stuffed in the butt of my CAR-15. If I ever had to E&E on my own, I planned to find a Somali fisherman and hire him to take me down the coast to Mombasa, Kenya, where the United States had people I could reach out to and be well taken care of.
Condor briefed us on the actions of the assets, who would visit Pasha every day. For example, if an asset was supposed to come to Pasha from the southeast, but he came from the southwest, we knew he’d been made or was under duress, so we would shoot the person following him. Our asset might do something simple like pause for a second at a corner—then the person behind him would eat a bullet. If he paused twice, both people behind him would eat a bullet. Our procedures were covert enough that an enemy wouldn’t know a signal was being given, and although we kept the procedures simple enough for our assets to remember, we spent hours reviewing the procedures with them. A SEAL on the roof always covered each asset’s entrance and exit to keep him safe—and to keep impostors out. Usually, when an asset arrived in the dark, he wore an infrared chemlight or a firefly (an infrared strobe light).
The most common motivator for the assets was money—especially in such a poverty-stricken area. Some people had more noble reasons for helping us, but the most common reason was money. We didn’t even have to pay them very much.
On the same day, four SIGINT guys arrived separately from us, using a different infiltration method and route, then set up shop. Their room looked like the NASA control room for launching a rocket into outer space: monitors, control knobs, switches. They also set up their antennas and other gear on the roof. We looked like CNN.
Little Big Man gathered everyone together and briefed us on the E&E plan. As always, he carried his Randall knife in a sheath on his belt. “Little man, big knife.” I rebriefed the battle plan. Casanova split us up into patrol pairs: I’d be with him, and Little Big Man would partner with Sourpuss.
When our mosaic map of the city was complete, it covered the entire wall of the biggest room in the house. If an asset told us about a threat, we would stick a pin in the location and plan grid coordinates in case we needed to call in an attack on it.
In a separate brief, an asset came in and gave us possible locations of Mohamed Farrah Aidid, the Somali warlord. We stuck more pins in the map: Olympic Hotel, an officer’s barracks, etc. Then we sent the eight-digit coordinates to Crescent, back at the CIA trailer up on the hill.
That same day, twenty mortar rounds hit the airfield, tactical operations center, and
CIA headquarters. A round hit so close to the CIA trailer that it blew out the windows. Aidid’s men had figured out that assets had been going to the trailer. The mortar round had just missed us by a day.
We doubled our watch at Pasha and explained the “grab-and-go” to everyone: grabbing the SIGINT encryption devices, loading them in a rucksack, destroying the other SIGINT gear with a thermite grenade, meeting up at a rendezvous point, then moving out to the extraction area.
That first night, Casanova and I kept watch from the roof. A horrible smell like the remains of a dead carcass filled the air. “What the hell is that?”
AUGUST 30, 1993
On Monday, I looked around the neighborhood for the source of the stench, but it had disappeared. Nothing. While I fixed tea downstairs, an asset arrived with some information. I brought him some tea.
He politely refused.
“No, it’s OK,” I said.
He only took half a cup, as though I had given him something of great value. These Somalis conducted themselves so as never to take away too much.
SIGINT told us they’d picked up a conversation between a fire controller and his firing positions. The mortarmen would fire from concealed positions while the fire controller watched where the rounds exploded in relation to the target. If the mortar round hit the target, the fire controller could assess how much damage had been done. The fire controller advised, “Don’t chew your khat until the adjustments and battle damage assessments are made.” Khat, a flowering plant native to Somalia, contains a stimulant in the leaves that causes excitement, loss of appetite, and euphoria. A user would stick a wad of leaves in his mouth and chew on it like chewing tobacco. Most of Aidid’s mortarmen were enticed to do their job for khat. They became dependent on Aidid’s people to continue feeding their addiction, similar to how a pimp strings out his prostitutes on drugs to control them. Because the drug suppressed appetite, Aidid didn’t need to feed them much. They were obviously not well disciplined. Although nothing happened this time, later SIGINT would vector in military strikes and succeed in destroying some of the mortar positions.
That evening, the smell came back. “What the hell is that?” I came down off the roof and covertly went next door. On the front porch, I saw a teenaged boy sleeping on a futon. At a distance of around 10 yards, it was obvious I’d found the source of the stench. Later, I found out the fourteen-year-old Somali boy had stepped on a land mine in his school playground. His right foot was blown completely off. Part of his left foot was missing. Gangrene had set in. Aidid’s people had planted explosives in the schoolyard to kill or maim children, preventing them from growing up to be effective fighters—turning them into liabilities. The infection in the boy’s leg stank so badly that his family couldn’t sleep at night with him in the house. So they made him sleep on the porch. During the day, they brought him back inside. I asked the CIA for permission to help the crippled boy next door. They denied my request, not wanting to compromise the safe house.
We noticed a lot of movement between 2200 and 0400 from the street in front of Pasha and surrounding buildings. Based on a tip that Aidid’s people hung out there, at 0300, Delta Force fast-roped down on the Lig Ligato house. They captured nine people, but they were only UN employees and their Somali guards. Delta had launched on a dry hole.
AUGUST 31, 1993
On Tuesday, an asset sighted Aidid in a vehicle. Crescent wanted the asset to deploy a mobile transmitter in the vehicle, but Condor, not wanting to sacrifice his asset, denied it as being too risky.
Aidid was slippery. Rather than stay home, he lived with relatives, staying in the same place only one or two nights. Sometimes he traveled in a motorcade. Sometimes he only used one vehicle. He would dress as a woman. Although he was popular within his own clan, people outside Aidid’s clan didn’t like him.
Casanova and I dressed up like locals and ran a vehicular route reconnaissance in a Jeep Cherokee that had been beaten more than once with an ugly stick. Secretly, our vehicle was armored. I wore a turban, a flowery Somali shirt, and BDU trousers under my macawi. With my beard starting to grow out and dark skin, I could pass for Arab. For weapons we each had a sound-suppressed CAR-15 down between the seats, partly concealed by our skirts. I carried a magazine of ammo in my CAR-15 and an extra in the cargo pocket of my BDU trousers. We also carried our SIG 226 9 mms in a breakaway butt pack turned around to the front under our shirts—making it look like we had pooch bellies. To get to my pistol, I could just lift my shirt, reach into the upper right corner, and pull down and away, separating the Velcro and readying my SIG. Besides the magazine of ammo in the pistol, an extra magazine sat in the top of the breakaway butt pack.
Clipped inside my pocket was a Microtech UDT tactical automatic knife, a switchblade—extremely sharp. In the cargo pocket on my right thigh, I carried a blowout kit.
By SEAL standards, we were lightly armed. It was a calculated risk. If a bear showed up in the woods, we couldn’t fight him off. However, traveling light allowed us to blend in better to collect intelligence. It was a trade-off. If we were compromised, we’d have to run and gun.
While Casanova drove, I took pictures with a 35 mm camera. We noted a location for a possible helicopter landing zone where Delta and their indigenous people could insert. Then we figured out routes where they could be inserted by truck.
We figured out something else, too. Previously, even though our people walking on foot, riding in Humvee motorcades, hovering in helos, and flying over in planes gathered information, we continued to wonder how Aidid’s people kept transporting mortar rounds to their crews. I took a picture of two women in colorful robes walking side by side, each carrying a baby in her arms. As I rotated the lens to zoom in, I could clearly see the first baby’s head, but the second woman was actually carrying two mortar rounds. The ruse had almost fooled me.
During our vehicle recon, we completed a concept of ops for inserting and extracting people from Pasha. For example, when the time came for turnover, we could drive to an abandoned camel slaughterhouse on the seashore, signal out to sea for a boat of replacement SEALs, and give them our vehicles while we took their boat out to rendezvous with a ship. The replacement SEALs could travel lighter than we had because we’d already stocked Pasha with the heavy SIGINT equipment and other supplies.
The slaughterhouse, huge as a city block, had been owned by the Russians, who abandoned it when the civil war began. They had used the camel meat and bones, but threw everything else out into the ocean. The water along one of the most beautiful beaches in the world became infested with sharks: hammerheads, great whites, and all kinds of bad-ass sharks. I’ve never been afraid to swim anywhere, but I did not want to swim in that water. Neither did the locals, which kept the location private for our needs. As a bonus, the beach was close to Pasha. The slaughterhouse could be seen easily from the water, covering and concealing a large area of the coast. Ideal for the guys to bring Zodiacs—black inflatable rubber boats with outboard motors—or RHIBs in to the shore.
We returned to Pasha, and that evening, the boy next door groaned like he was dying. I knew what it was like to be a child in pain. Screw this. Casanova, a SIGINT medic named Rick, and I did a hard entry on the boy’s house, blacked out with balaclavas and carrying MP-5 machine guns. We didn’t take any chances. Kicked in the door. Flexicuffed the boy’s mom, dad, and aunt. Put them on the floor next to the wall. Of course, they feared we would kill them. We brought the boy inside, so the parents could see what we were about to do. Rick broke out his supplies. We scrubbed the dead tissue out of the wounds with betadine, a cleaner and disinfectant. It hurt the kid so bad that we had to put our hands over his mouth to keep his screams from waking the neighborhood. He passed out from the pain and shock. We gave him intravenous antibiotics, bandaged his wounds, and injected each butt cheek to stop the infection. Then we vanished.
SEPTEMBER 1, 1993
Wednesday, while conducting observation from the rooftop, we saw an elderly man leading
a donkey pulling a wooden cart mounted on an old vehicle axle. On top of the cart were stacks of bricks. During his return trip, he had the same load of bricks. What? We asked an asset to follow him. The asset found out the old man hid mortars in the stack of bricks. We reported it. Our superiors issued compromise authority—giving us permission to off the old man.
A sniper must be mentally strong, firmly anchored in a religion or philosophy that allows him to refrain from killing when unnecessary, and to kill when necessary. During the Beltway sniper attacks in 2002, John Allen Muhammad killed ten innocent people and critically injured three. Shooting can make a person feel powerful. Obviously, a good sniper must not give in to such impulses. On the other hand, if a sniper allows himself to be overcome by Stockholm syndrome, he cannot perform his job. (In 1973, robbers held bank employees hostage in Stockholm, Sweden. During their six-day ordeal, the hostages became emotionally attached to the robbers, even defending them after being released.) Through his scope, the sniper becomes intimately familiar with his target, often over a period of time, learning his lifestyle and habits. The target probably has done nothing to directly hurt the sniper. Yet, when the time comes, the sniper must be able to complete the mission.
On the roof of Pasha, a walkaround wall concealed Casanova and me. I aimed my Win Mag in the old man’s direction, 500 yards away.
Casanova viewed him in the spotter scope. “Stand by, stand by. Three, two, one, execute, execute.”
Target in my sights, I squeezed the trigger on the first “execute.” Right between the eyes—I nailed the donkey.
SEAL Team Six: Memoirs of an Elite Navy SEAL Sniper Page 18