Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, January 31, 1993 TAG: 9301310072
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: GREG SCHNEIDER STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: MOGADISHU, SOMALIA LENGTH: Long
A WORN LAND OF GREAT NEEDS, FEW THANKS
Her diamond ring flashed against the black M-16 as 1st Lt. Rosalind Jackson whacked her ammunition clip with the heel of her hand.Five civilians sat on their gear in the bed of the 2 1/2-ton truck, facing outward, awkward in helmets and Kevlar body armor. We were about to drive across Mogadishu, the capital of Somalia, from the airport to the seaport.
"Do not chamber a round; do not shoot anybody unless I tell you to," Jackson barked at the four soldiers stationed around the rim of the truck bed.
"If we come under sniper fire, you people in the middle, I need you to lie as flat as possible," Sgt. David Hullett said.
Count on it, I thought, looking around for the flattest spot to hurl my flat body.
It had taken us 17 grinding hours in a C-141 cargo plane to get there. My head already was aching to the jawbone from the weight of the helmet. The air was filled with a strange, stale dust. And the simple act of driving across a town occupied by 10,000 or so friendly troops was starting to sound like some kind of suicide mission.
Jackson, Hullett and the other soldiers didn't seem any more comfortable. We had arrived together from Fort Eustis, Va. They were members of the 7th Transportation Group helping to keep the international relief efforts running; I was part of a media pool to report on the condition of the local troops.
All of us kept a grim grip on our belongings - cameras or weapons - and set out with a dry-mouthed silence into what we believed was an unpredictable nest of bandits and warlords.
Which it was. But Mogadishu also was a place of great need and subtle rewards. The setting, the people, the mission - together a confusing jumble that produced conflicting emotions.
"They throw rocks at us, they shoot at us, they steal stuff," 22-year-old Pvt. Chad Johnson of Fort Eustis would tell me later. "If that's the way it's gonna be - no gratitude - maybe we shouldn't be doing this. We're just trying to bring them food."
The port is in one of the most dangerous parts of town, but it's the ritziest address for American troops because it has the most amenities. The waterfront warehouse where most live is dubbed the "Mogadishu Marriott."
"We have a `five-fly' rating," said Capt. Mary K. Luddy of Fort Eustis, newly installed as port commandant (or "mayor," as she prefers).
Luddy briefed the latest Fort Eustis arrivals - about 850 were already on hand - next to a sign listing that night's videos: "The Fly" and "The Fly II." She warned that the troops must take care to stay clean.
"We were knee-deep at one time in cow s--t, bat s--t, human s--t, any kind of s--t you can imagine," Luddy said, introducing what would prove to be one of the most popular topics of the camp. When the Marines came ashore in December, the Somalis - who seem to answer nature wherever it calls them - had left the warehouse awash in animal and human waste. Bulldozers and fire hoses have made the football-field-sized building habitable, but you don't want anything important to touch the floor.
Shaded, cooled by generator-powered fans and wind from the Indian Ocean, the warehouse climate is comfortable. The soldiers sleep in row after row of cots shrouded with mosquito nets, about 120 women and 10 times that many men.
Outside the warehouse, latrines consist of buckets beneath wooden benches; most are open on three sides. Many people wait until nighttime to go, though it's not a regular need because military rations are designed to discourage such activity. The latrines are emptied daily and the contents burned around-the-clock; the smoke drifts mostly away from camp.
Urinals for men consist of a row of old fuel barrels at the base of a hill, atop which is posted a sentry to discourage rock-wielding Somali youths from taking advantage of soldiers in a vulnerable moment.
Between the latrines and the living area are shower tents. Men and women shower in separate shifts, each individual getting about three minutes of water a night. Half the time the water is hot.
Mess tents are next to the showers. Dinner is served hot every evening, eaten standing up. Otherwise the troops consume MRE - Meal, Ready-to-Eat - pouches that come in 12 combinations of apparently indestructable food, such as "Pork, with Rice and BBQ Sauce," "Ham and Escalloped Potatoes" and "Chicken a la King."
This, then, was the general layout of our home for the next five days. It is home to the troops indefinitely. Talking to the troops
That first night, Friday, Jan. 15, the commanding officer met us at the waterfront to talk about his domain. Col. Daniel Labin is directing his Fort Eustis troops in the reconstruction of the Port of Mogadishu, which they hope to make viable again for commerce and then to hand off to a private contractor.
For now, the military and relief cargo that comes into the port is unloaded by Fort Eustis stevedores. Fort Eustis soldiers run the same kind of operation at the airport and are trying to clean up the port city of Kismayu, about 240 miles south and just below the equator. A trucking battalion from Fort Eustis is at work at the scorched inland village of Baledogle, establishing a crossroads headquarters to oversee relief missions to the interior.
"The port is the doorway to this country," Labin said. "Every time a 7th Trans soldier does something here, thousands of lives are saved."
The soldiers on the port are relatively safe, surrounded by a wall of metal cargo containers and armed sentries. No one is allowed to leave without a reason, a weapon and at least one armed companion, so most of the troops have seen nothing of Somalia but the short ride from the airport to the port.
The greatest danger for soldiers in the compound is disease. Despite getting pincushioned with vaccinations before leaving home, everyone has to take a malaria pill every week. Sunburn sometimes confines one to the warehouse for a day, the breeze being a false cloak for the equatorial sun and the daily 98-degree heat. And any little cut or cough means a trip to the medical tent for protection from infection because of the ever-present subject of Luddy's arrival briefing.
"A lot of the dust you're breathing," Labin said, "is dried human excrement."
Heart of rubble
Next morning - after a long night of staring up at pigeons and flashlight beams criss-crossing the warehouse roof, punctuated by the retorts of gunfire from somewhere in the city around 3 a.m. - we headed out for a tour of Mogadishu.
This part of Somalia was an Italian colony until independence in 1960. The main road outside the port is called Via Roma. The buildings generally are lower than four stories, made of concrete or stucco and painted white, pink, green, yellow or lavender. Many businesses advertise with bright murals, and the overall atmosphere is almost like an old amusement park - simple, sunny, open.
It must have been beautiful once.
In the old heart of town, the buildings are now rubble, as if they had been built of sugar and then a hard rain came. Homes, hotels, the national bank, the national museum and library - so full of bullet and mortar holes the walls seem to defy gravity.
Turn left out of the port, and you are in one of the most dangerous zones, outside the Somalifruit Co., where many shots have been fired and crowds of people regularly rush the military Humvee vehicles. That morning our little convoy of three Humvees made the turn and kept moving briskly.
It wasn't far before we started seeing market stalls, selling fly-drenched meat and gray, spotted fruit. One open area, a soldier said, is a butchery field where camels or cattle are slaughtered. Donkeys ambled down the middle of the road, biting fleas on their hindquarters.
Somalis argued and studied over stalled cars, which seemed to be the safest use for a Somali vehicle; few had intact windshields and virtually all were smashed and mangled, like an automotive version of "Night of the Living Dead." Most of the cars and vans were crammed with impossible numbers of riders.
The entrance to the airport was marked with two gaily painted old airplanes, now ripped up and bullet-ridden. Less than a mile farther began the worst stretch of road, which the troops call the Gantlet.
This is a business section that runs past the old U.S. Embassy compound. Our escorts feared attack every time we drove through, because the Gantlet is jammed with people and livestock and the military vehicles often get stuck. (On the day after we got home, Somalis fired shots at U.S. soldiers along this strip.)
Whenever our Humvee slowed down, hordes of children and young men converged on it, shouting "Ameri-CAHN" and gesturing and peering to see what we had of value. Our guards stared them down with their M-16s, nervously aware that the weapons could not be fired except in cases of extreme danger.
The children knew that, too. One afternoon at the port, I ran into a Fort Eustis soldier with a fresh bandage on his left hand, just below his wristwatch.
"I was driving a Humvee, and about 200 yards before we got to the front gate, a bunch of kids hanging around stopped us in the middle of the road," said PFC John Sutryk, 24. "One of them went to grab my sunglasses, and I managed to jerk my head away and take them off. I had my arm out the window, and when I was grabbing my glasses they tried to grab my watch, and they clawed my hand. I got three scratches."
Sutryk was slightly pale and shaken. With all the worry about disease, the soldiers regard any Somali-inflicted wound - and the children are said to carry knives and syringes - as potentially as deadly as a gunshot. The edgier the soldiers get, the more they worry about overreacting to a threat.
"It made me want to get out and shoot one," Sutryk said. "Now I know why they send us out in groups."
Men from the warring Somali clans are said to pay children to harass the troops; the most common method is throwing rocks. Three of the five reporters in our group had rocks thrown at them, and children we passed made rock-throwing motions as if to frighten us.
Not all were so hostile. We drove back through the Gantlet, passed the port and kept on into the ancient heart of Mogadishu, an area with less commerce and more troops. Here the boys and girls along the route cheered, shouted "Viva America!" and gave smiles and thumbs-up.
When we stopped, a tall Somali man walked up to an Army interpreter and told her he knew of a cache of weapons stashed nearby. Labin reacted cautiously, sending military police back later to check out the man's story. By the time we left for home, they still hadn't determined whether the man's tip was genuine or a setup.
We parked the Humvees in a Marine compound and walked out on a pier to look back at the city. Here the Indian Ocean is a crisp, almost phosphorescent green, and you can see giant turtles and dolphin and ballyhoo. But the local sewage system was obliterated along with the electricity and water supply, so the emerald waves are too polluted for Americans to swim.
That doesn't stop the little boys. Two squads of the endless orphan army of Somalia cavorted on the white sand on either side of the foot of the pier. They threw rocks at us, but lazily, playfully. Their mahogany bodies slick and wet, they jumped and screamed with utter, terrible freedom against the giddy backdrop of their devastated homes.
Back in the safety of the port, there is no such freedom for the troops. That night, like most nights, Spec. Calvin A. Brown of Portsmouth sat with his buddies and played "Spades" or chess, or just hung around one of the warehouse entrances and gave people a hard time.
Talking to a reporter was a welcome hint of home.
"My mom gonna say, `Ooooo, that's my baby in the newspaper!' " said Brown, 22, who is stationed at Fort Eustis.
"She's gonna say, `That's my little Ninja Turtle!' " teased Spec. George Hart, 28.
Brown hadn't gotten any mail since he arrived two weeks before. He works as a stevedore, loading and unloading ships, but the hardest part is the time off-duty. There is a small weight-lifting room, a volleyball net and a basketball hoop, none of which Brown felt like messing with after a hot 12-hour shift.
"It would be better if they would send us stuff like they were sending. Different food companies were sending, like, food and stuff. Walkmans and stuff, for free," Brown said. "But then they stopped, because this is not, like, a war. But we're still living like this."
The fact that the mission isn't combat like Desert Storm makes it a mixed bag for Brown and the other troops. On the one hand, they're proud of being called out to help a struggling people.
"I always said one day if I got rich I wanted to come over here to Africa, you know," said Brown, who is African-American. "I didn't think I was ever going to come do this, but I'm glad to be able to come do this for the African people, you know."
The flip side is that Brown never gets to see starving people being fed, and the Somalis he does encounter usually are throwing rocks at him.
"But we can't look at the evil people. We've got to look at the people that's dying, you know. We got to help them."
A convoy moves
Nighttime in the warehouse was peaceful. The fans made a soothing hush, crickets chirped and the mosquito netting breathed in the breeze. Again around 3 a.m., there was gunfire in the city, followed by the sound of helicopters. Mostly the gunfire is from Somali clan conflicts, and the U.S. troops don't get involved except perhaps to shoo them away.
Sunday morning, we headed back over to the airport to meet with the 6th Battalion, a Fort Eustis trucking outfit. They were sending a convoy 62 miles inland to Baledogle, where an old Soviet airstrip is being converted to a major transportation crossroads.
The 6th's temporary headquarters is on a windswept ridge between the airport and the ocean, a dramatic spot. Almost as spectacular as the view of the sea is the sight of the vast, dusty encampment around the airport, home to thousands of troops from all over the world. We saw Pakistanis, Australians, New Zealanders, French, Italians, Canadians and Turks; soldiers from Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Morocco, Belgium and the United Arab Emirates; and flags I couldn't recognize.
Americans make up about two-thirds of the 35,000 international troops now in Somalia, and they seem to get most of the attention from the locals. That's what Maj. Brian Waters was talking about as he prepared to get his convoy under way.
Nine vehicles were taking food, mail, medical supplies and personnel to an outpost of seven Fort Eustis soldiers at Baledogle. The route would run through two danger zones: the Gantlet and, a few miles outside the city, an area called Afgooye.
In Afgooye was a bridge over the Shabeelle River that had caused all manner of troubles. It had a constant sniper problem, and only two days before, Waters said, a group of Marines was ambushed and had to kill six Somalis.
Last night, troops had discovered a major cache of weapons at the bridge, he said, including 500-pound bombs.
"What do you do in the event of sniper fire and the road is not blocked?" Waters asked his assembled troops. He answered his own question: "Keep moving, pedal-to-the-metal, get out of there as fast as possible."
If the road is blocked, he said, use the rules of engagement. Fire if fired upon.
No one needed to be reminded.
Coming Monday: Convoy to Baledogle, a dangerous inland village where the Magnificent Seven are holding out for reinforcements to establish a major transportation crossroads. Back at the port, a revival, new latrine technology, the Port Irregulars, the doctor's boondoggles and, finally, candy and the bullet.