Barrel of a Gun

by Al Venter

  When we got out of the USAF Hercules that had brought us from Mombasa, we were met by an Arab soldier who didn’t bother even to check our papers before herding us into a rattletrap bus that had once belonged to the Mogadishu Municipality. He deposited us at what was left of the old terminal building.

  It took me hours to cadge a lift to the United Nations Operation in Somalia (UNOSOM) headquarters north-east of the airport. There, I reckoned, I’d be able to put phase two of my plan into effect.

  The force guarding the airport was about to be relieved, I was told. I could go into the city and from there to the UN compound. ‘But first, you must sign this indemnity, if you please’, an Egyptian officer ordered: If you get killed or wounded, there can be no claim on the United Nations.’

  I signed: what else could I do?

  Since we’d all be travelling through hostile territory on the back of a truck, the pre-convoy briefing was specific: ‘Keep to the middle of the vehicle. Stay well down. Don’t expose yourself. They snipe at us from time to time… if we stop and they climb on board, hold onto your bags, your wallet and your spectacles. If you don’t, they’ll steal everything that isn’t bolted down.’ The order came from a cynical Canadian NCO who had clearly been through the mill.

  With that we were off into Mogadishu proper, or what American grunts liked to refer to as ‘The Dish’. The column of five UN vehicles was escorted fore and aft by French armoured personnel carriers with their hatches shut. I sat behind a group of Gulf soldiers manning a .50 Browning and the rest of the troops had their weapons cocked, facing outwards.

  We drove past the old Russian compound, and then turned left before we reached the Villaggio Quattro Chilometri.

  Suddenly I was in a world a lot more outlandish than anything I’d known before, even second-hand. Nor was it for lack of experience. I had been in Beirut when the Israelis invaded Lebanon in 1982 and though war raged, the city and the people who lived there had some sort of shape to their lives. It was dangerous, sure, but the chaos, as one wag wrote, was ordered. Mogadishu, in contrast, was utter pandemonium.

  The city sprawls. Approach it from the sea during the monsoon and it is an awesome mish-mash of muddy pools, piles of garbage, open sewers coupled to the turmoil of hoards of the kind of pullulating crowds that only Africa can sometimes produce. The conglomeration stretched as far as you could see and it really did intimidate.

  Just about every building that we passed had been blasted. The road was lined with the wrecks of cars and trucks blown apart in who-knowshow-many battles for control. A burnt-out Humvee, already speckled with rust, spoke of the events of months before. There was a time when any American military vehicle was fair game for Aideed’s rag-tag horde.

  As I – and the rest of the world – was only to discover afterwards, there was no clear line of demarcation between the various factions. In a sense, it was Beirut incarnate, only worse…

  American troops – in this case female soldiers – loading ammunition at one of the military bases in the interior. (Author’s collection)

  Every man carried a weapon, and that often included youngsters not yet ten years old. Women, children, the old, crippled and the maimed milled about on and off the road and in and out of narrow alleys. There were hundreds of paths and improvised weapon-pits between the few structures that remained intact. The road itself was impassable in parts because jagged blocks of concrete, oil drums and wrecked cars had been hauled across the pot-holed tarmac to slow movement. Pools of filthy green water remained from the monsoons and children played in the muck.

  When we reached the marketplace after what was listed on the charts as 27th October Square, the throng overflowed onto the road and the convoy was forced to slow. There were times when we were limited to a crawl. One felt terribly vulnerable in that mishmash of humanity where just about every other male was armed, if only with a pistol secreted in the belt or a switch-blade in the pocket. The fact that the entire route had suddenly become a kind of Middle Eastern souk was worrying.

  Arms flailing, the people alongside were in our faces, shouting, gesticulating at us, at each other. Their expressions were contorted, their eyes glazed or bloodshot, the effects of Qat, no doubt.

  One of the soldiers on board told me that near this same market, American Blackhawks had been hit by RPGs, twice in past weeks. One of the aviators had been killed and those who’d survived were savagely mauled.

  He pointed to a mass of twisted metal. ‘That was once a helicopter, a Blackhawk’, he intimated. It was almost unrecognizable. It took a little longer before we eventually pulled into the American diplomatic compound with its heavy weapons bunkers bristling with firepower.

  ‘We go here’, said the soldier. ‘You go now’, he pointed his carbine towards some buildings and smiled when I thanked him in Arabic: Shukran.

  The big UN flag on its pole on the roof of the tallest building hardly stirred, but it did tell me that I’d reached the headquarters of the American commander of UNOSOM.

  I didn’t stay long in Mogadishu. Following an identity check, I was sent to the office of Lieutenant Colonel Fred Peck, a Marine officer who dealt with the foreign correspondent community in what had already become a dubious enterprise for the Americans. Congress was baying for ‘our boys’ to get the hell out of that African shit-hole. Placating journalists every day, Colonel Peck couldn’t afford to put a foot wrong.

  A charming, forthright veteran of several American military ventures of his own, including Vietnam, this professional soldier handled this delicate assignment with aplomb. What he didn’t do was stand on ceremony.

  He looked me up and down for a few seconds when I told him that I wasn’t too much interested in East Africa’s starving millions, a comment that raised a few eyebrows among those nearest me. Instead, I explained what I wanted and showed him a dummy copy of The Chopper Boys that I’d prepared for the Frankfurt Book Fair.

  ‘Yep,’ said Peck: ‘Reckon you do have different needs.’ He addressed one of his officers nearby.

  ‘Take Mr Venter here to Marty [Major Martin Culp II] and let’s see whether we can get him up to Baledogle. They can fly him out on one of the Hawks’, he ordered.

  Baledogle, as I was to learn, was the main American helicopter base, about 150 clicks north of Mogadishu and situated alongside a remote village in the interior. It had formerly been used as a staging base by the Soviets before Somalia switched sides halfway through the Cold War.

  US Marine helicopters formed about half the complement of roughly 100 choppers that operated out of Baledogle. Many were CH-53s, which played a valuable transport role during the war. (Author’s Collection)

  ‘Everything that happens with choppers you’ll find there’, a female major told me. The Army flew mainly UH-60 Blackhawks and the Marines CH-53 Sea Stallions as well as Super Cobra AH-IW gunships. Baledogle had originally been chosen by the Russians as a strategic air base because of its isolation.

  It took a couple of days before I was flown north and I entered a part of Africa that had never been kind to man. In fact, it reminded me most of the Sahel: almost all of it desert with sparse grass cover, but more than enough stunted thorn bushes. Here and there an ill-nourished acacia poked through, the only foliage not ravaged by goats. This was a hard place in which to survive, one of the most inhospitable I’ve encountered on any continent.

  The town by the base – more of an assemblage of low buildings that appeared to be held together by bits of twine, plastic bags, animal skins and wire – was typically Somali hardscrabble. Its signature, like most settlements in the Somali interior, was rotting heaps of garbage that surrounded it. There had once been a clinic, distinguished by its whitewashed walls, but the doctor had long since gone. A clutch of vultures perched on its roof.

  From the air, the base looked impressive, but this was misleading. There were a few barn-like concrete buildings that had been built by the Soviets, but that was long ago. Some looked like barracks, others had clearly been head
quarters of one form or another. The control tower was skeletal, its roof held up by a dozen steel struts. Above flew two flags, that of the United States and that of the UN.

  As with Mogadishu Airport, almost every fitting had been ripped out of the walls. It had clearly been years since the windows had last seen glass and the doors had been smashed for firewood long ago.

  Once the Americans arrived, they erected several huge tent-like sheds along the perimeter; in fact, these were the first structures we spotted as we approached by chopper from the south. Always assiduous on foreign soil, it hadn’t taken the Yanks long to set up their own hangars and workshops, each of them portable and flown in from America. Alongside were hundreds of cargo stacks, some two or three storeys high: enough stores, containers, vehicles, aircraft and spare parts to keep the war going for a year. In between stood the tents for the men and women who worked there.

  Rows of what were once to have been engines for a Soviet aircraft factory to be built in Somalia lie scattered in the bush at Baledogle, about 100 miles north of the capital. (Author’s collection)

  As we circled, the pilot pointed at dozens of circular metal objects below: jet engines, dozens of them, neatly laid out in the bush and some half-buried in sand.

  ‘Russian… MiG-21 engines’, he shouted into the mike. He explained afterwards that Baledogle was to have become an assembly point for MiG-21 fighters, the first of its kind in Black Africa. This gear originally included thousands of cases of machinery, spares and other equipment that had been hauled up to Baledogle in a succession of truck convoys, the entire operation taking a year.

  ‘We were ecstatic’, said the Somali interpreter. ‘We were to have our own factories for those planes. Somalia was to be a leader in Africa. We thought at the time that there would be work for everybody. Somalia would become a power. The Russians told us so. Like fools, we believed them.’ His eyes blazed. Then, he added, some bureaucrat killed the project. He didn’t get the bribe he’d been offered, or perhaps it ended up in somebody else’s bank account. ‘The project was stillborn even as we were digging the foundations.’

  Nobody in Mogadishu knows the whole story. Most of those involved were dead anyway. From what I could make out, cover-ups in Mogadishu and the universal corruption of Africa smothered the project before it got properly under way. Yet, my informant ventured, millions had been spent in getting as far as they did, to which all this abandoned hardware testified.

  ‘All wasted. Think of the hospitals we could have built… schools.’

  None of us had even heard of Baledogle until Operation Restore Hope. It was the best-kept Russian secret in Africa and I could see why.

  The Blackhawk had been late in getting to Mogadishu Airport to pick me up. I had to be taken there in a Humvee, one of a new generation of American military vehicles that became familiar during Operation Desert Storm and afterwards, throughout Iraq and Afghanistan.

  From Colonel Peck’s UNOSOM headquarters, we retraced our previous route back to the airport. This time there was a Marine sergeant standing in a ‘well’ at the back of the infantry carrier with an extremely useful wooden staff that he used to dissuade hopeful Somalis from clambering on board. Even so, one made a dive for my Nikon. We struggled for possession until a smart blow knocked the thief sideways and he fell almost under our wheels.

  If the Humvee had been moving at speed, we’d have driven over him in the middle of the main market, among thousands of people. Certainly, the mob would have turned on us in a flash. The troops on board carried live ammunition for just such an event, and they would have used it had they needed to. Their instructions were clear: don’t hesitate to use your weapons if your lives are threatened.

  It’s worth mentioning that all the journalists in Mogadishu knew about rough measures handed out by the troops, especially to robbers and thieves who wouldn’t think twice about sticking a knife to your throat if they thought they could get away with it. Consequently, because these scribes were at the receiving end, and being continually threatened, few ever mentioned anything about this kind of retaliation in their reports.

  We all knew that we needed these soldiers for our own security, especially those of us who couldn’t afford personal bodyguards. If it involved a few cracked skulls to keep the rabble at bay, then so be it.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Air Operations in the Horn of Africa

  ‘It seemed like another 10th Aviation Brigade field exercise as a 3-17 Cavalry Scout weapons team lifted into the blue African sky. Crew Chiefs of the 3-25 Assault Helicopter Battalion serviced their UH-60 Skyhawks, staff planning continued without a break in the tactical operations center, mechanics and cooks carried out their tasks…’

  Captain Tom McCann reports from Baledogle, Somalia, early 1993

  BECAUSE WE ARRIVED LATE AT Baledogle, at one stage the largest operational American air base on the continent of Africa, we missed dinner. Somebody organized some fruit, a can of sardines and bottled water and we were grateful, for there are few favours meted out in most military establishments I’ve visited.

  I shared a tent with the padre and his first words to me in the fading light were: ‘Watch out for scorpions in your boots in the morning. And snakes in the dark, when you take a leak.’

  Baledogle, I quickly learnt, was serpent country. Quite a few of the troops had been bitten and a handful had to be flown to the military hospital in Mogadishu. None had died from a bite, though, so it could have been worse. According to the padre, they killed snakes every day, cobras of ten feet or more and sometimes a viper. There were enough of the venomous variety around to start a herpetarium. The men towed a dead cobra at the end of a length of nylon gut through the women’s showers one evening with the satisfying result of several naked ladies bolting into the night.

  One of my first impressions of the base was that there were a lot of women at Baledogle, including senior officers. Major Pauline Knapp commanded the 159th Medical Company. Her husband, also in the army, had stayed behind at the base in Germany, ‘to play golf’ she joked. Hers was the wing responsible for most medical evacuations in Somalia.

  The unit’s motto, she pointed out, was appropriate: Anywhere, Any Place, Anytime – You Call, We Haul.

  Pauline Knapp was a firm, sassy and very professional lady who boasted that she hailed ‘from the wrong side of the Hudson in New Jersey’. A graduate of Rutgers, much of her time off duty was spent preparing for her Masters.

  That said, she had her time cut out for her. With her crews, the helicopter unit covered almost the entire country (except the north-east, where the French operated their Super Pumas). Her medical company, she reckoned, was there to bring back casualties – as well as the dead – to field hospitals ‘as quickly and as humanely as possible’.

  The work kept her busy. If she and her husband could manage a weekend a month together, they were lucky. ‘But when we do, it’s quality time’, she joked with a delightful smile that said it all.

  ‘I run a lot… keeps me sane’, she added quickly.

  At Baledogle I also met Captain Yvette Kelly and her husband Colonel James Kelly, Executive Officer at the base. They’d met some years before at a military base in California and served together through Operation Just Cause in Panama, where Yvette flew combat helicopters.

  Each week the couple shared two important events: a film, and thereafter, ‘big eats’, which comprised some cans of food from home that might even include a good-quality imported pâté de foie gras, all nicely laid out on a table – covered by a spotless white tablecloth – and decorated with a few bottles of Evian water between them. It usually happened in the mess where there was much coming and going, but these two lovers – a couple of ordinary Joes anywhere else in the world – were oblivious to anything else.

  I was soon to discover that routines at Baledogle rarely varied. The first call came shortly after five in the morning and entailed an five- or eight-kilometre run depending on the mood of the duty officer. Nobody was excl
uded, unless with good reason. It wouldn’t go on your record if you didn’t make it, but the omission would be noted. Likewise with the last run of the day towards evening, not compulsory but conscientiously observed.

  There were two meals: a regular brunch and a dinner, both adequate, but hardly memorable. The cooks had a job to do and they weren’t looking for stars, though I never heard anybody complain.

  In Mogadishu and Baledogle officers and men alike ate together. In Mogadishu the mess hall was vast and pre-fabricated, fitted with only two doors, one for entry and another for those on their way out. In Baledogle, by contrast, everything took place outside, under whatever shade could be found.

  We ate standing up to make room for those who came later and there was no loitering. As with everything else, you did what you had to and got on with your duties.

  If you didn’t like the menu, there were always MREs which provided variety and you could eat them, hot or cold, anywhere you liked. ‘Dishes’ – such as they were – were all freeze dried and included meatballs and spaghetti, sirloin and mushrooms, a variety of chicken prepared every which way and neatly presented in little vacuum sachets that could be heated on a solid fuel cooker. It was the same sort of thing that American astronauts and their Russian counterparts ate when they were aloft.

  Apart from the need to exercise, life at the air base was about as laid back as it might be with a unit serving under difficult conditions. All ranks used the same showers and toilets, although there were particular times reserved for the women to wash. Since water was controlled it was only available for an hour a day.