Black Hawk Down (53 page)

Response to the book has been nearly overwhelming, far beyond anything I expected. It has
been hard keeping up with the letters, phone calls, E-mails, and personal thanks extended
by thousands of readers. I am most proud of having salvaged Task Force Ranger from the
dusty footnotes of military history and placing it more squarely in modern memory. The men
who fought there are less likely today to meet people who never heard of their engagement.

Some of the men I wrote about have been good enough to show up at my promotional
appearances at bookstores around the country. Clay Othic drove out to a tiny bookstore in
Kansas and wound up-quite appropriately-taking over the presentation. He told the audience
that when he first came home from Somalia, people would stare at the terrible scar on his
forearm and ask him, “How did that happen?”

“I was wounded in that battle in Mogadishu,” he'd tell them.

“And they'd look at me with this blank stare,” said Clay. “What battle in Mogadishu? We
fought a battle in Africa?” Jeff Young and Tory Carbon came to an appearance in Tampa, and
after my talk they sat and answered questions for hours.

Dan Schilling and Clay Othic joined me in Los Angeles for Book Expo, and even came along
when my publisher threw a party at the Playboy Mansion. The last time I saw Clay he was
posing with the Playmate of the Year. At least partly inspired by Black Hawk Down,
Schilling has become a writer. He wrote a brief account of his experiences during the
battle for Cigar magazine. He also joined Shawn Nelson and me for a joint appearance on
The Charlie Rose Show.

Kurt Schmid, the medic who fought so hard in vain to save the life of Jamie Smith,
finally met Jamie's father and mother and told them firsthand of their son's last moments.
He had promised Jamie to do so, but had never been able to bring himself to do it. The
army based him in Japan, which made it more difficult. But as the publication date of
Black Hawk Down approached, he made the effort on a trip back to the States. Both he and
Jamie's parents found the meeting important and helpful.

When I was signing books at Ft. Lewis, outside Seattle, one of the soldiers showed me a
battered copy of the book signed by John Macejunas, one of the silent professionals of
Delta Force whose heroism is recorded in Black Hawk Down.

“You don't need my signature in this,” I told him.

A VFW post in Piano, Texas, was dedicated this Veterans Day to Casey Joyce; a TV special
on courage recently featured the stories of Medal of Honor winners Randy Shughart and Gary
Gordon; Matt Eversmann has been invited to lecture the cadets at the US. Military Academy
at West Point; and other members of Task Force Ranger have found that their losses and
sacrifices are no longer completely forgotten. Keni Thomas has formed a band, whose most
recent CD, Headspace and Timing (terms familiar to Ranger gunners), is dedicated to “The
men of Task Force Ranger.”

“Through your work you have helped to tell our story,” he wrote in a letter shortly
before the book came out. “You have given people an understanding. You have given me, in a
sense, validity. Validity to say, 'This is what I did, and it is important you know about
it. This is what I did and I can be proud of that. I need not feel guilty anymore.' The
solutions to my healing process have begun thanks mostly to you. And that, my friend, is
why I thank you.”

This sentiment, expressed so many times through official and unofficial military
channels, has been the biggest and most pleasant surprise to me since the book was
published. Black Hawk Down is hardly the version of this battle that would have been
produced by some arm of military public relations. It tells of miscalculations and
embarrassing inter-unit squabbling. It offers at least a glimpse of the Somali point of
view during the fighting, and of alarmingly ill considered United Nations and U.S. actions
that led up to this battle. It reveals simple blunders like failing to take sufficient
water and night-vision devices on the raid, and soldiers leaving armored plates out of
their bulletproof vests and wearing little plastic hockey helmets instead of the heavy
Kevlar helmets that are standard issue. It deals unblinkingly with the horrors of combat,
with death and dismemberment, with fear and indecision. There are plenty of instances of
hesitation, second thoughts, and even callous actions by American soldiers. It reveals
details of the battle that the army still regards as classified, not least of which is the
role played by its top secret Delta Force unit. If you had asked me before Black Hawk Down
was published, I would have predicted an angry response from the military, even though I
knew the book accurately reflected the experiences of the men who fought there.

Instead, the military has embraced Black Hawk Down. It is now one of the mandatory books
on the curriculum of the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College at Ft. Leavenworth,
Kansas, where I have received three separate invitations to speak. The book has received
several honors from the U.S. Marine Corps and has been personally recommended by the corps
commandant. I have lectured twice at Central Intelligence Agency headquarters as well as
at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point (where I was invited to dine with the cadets as
a guest of honor), and have signed books at the Pentagon Mall bookstore before being taken
off for a personal meeting with U.S. Army Secretary Louis Caldera. I have received
personal notes of thanks from General Henry Shelton. chairman of the Joint Chiefs of
Staff, and General Anthony Zinni, USMC, commander in chief of the U.S. Central Command.
President Bill Clinton even sent me a handwritten note thanking me for writing it. I am
deeply flattered and grateful for all these things, and still surprised.

One reason for the resonance of Black Hawk Down is that it illustrates a central problem
of our time. One of the many kind reviews I have received about the book concluded by
calling it “an adventurous look at the predicament of being an American at the turn of the
century.” I think that's right. It is too easy to dismiss what happened in Mogadishu as
the work of incompetent politicians, diplomats, and generals. You can't just blame
President Clinton, Madeleine Albright, Les Aspin, or General Garrison. The policy that led
Task Force Ranger to Somalia in the summer of 1993 was the result of America's new and
uncomfortable role in the world. President Bush committed the United States to the
mission. and the decision to nation-build once the famine ended was the perfectly logical
outgrowth of that policy. The famine in Somalia had not been caused by a natural disaster,
it was man-made, a result of cynical, feuding warlords deliberately using starvation as a
weapon. It would not have made much sense to simply walk away after delivering food for a
few weeks or months and allow the crisis to renew. There were those (they seem prescient
in retrospect) who argued that there are limits to what America can accomplish, but if the
United States erred in overreaching, it was for laudable reasons. Our intervention begged
the central issue: As the world's only military superpower, should we stand by and let
terrible human tragedies unfold? Aren't we morally obligated to do something? And in this
age of instant global communication, there isn't much that happens in the world that
Americans don't witness, in color, in our living rooms.

The decision to go after Mohamed Farrah Aidid was not some foolhardy adventure in
Clintonian nation-building, although there certainly was some overreaching involved. Its
primary advocate was Admiral Jonathan Howe, a former member of Bush's National Security
Council who was then the United Nations' top man in Somalia. Howe was rightly indignant
when Aidid's militias began attacking and killing the UN peacekeepers he supervised. If
Aidid was responsible for the deaths of twenty-four Pakistani soldiers on June 24, 1993,
as he appears to have been, he deserved to be branded an outlaw. Bringing him to justice
was a worthy cause, and Howe was precisely the person who ought to have been forcefully
advocating it.

None of the steps that led us to the Battle of Mogadishu were wild departures from the
normal course of post-cold war foreign policy. The battle came at the end of a chain of
eminently defensible decisions made carefully by sensible people. The same could be said
of the military decisions. Task Force Ranger was dispatched to Mogadishu reluctantly, but
if the United States was serious about going after Aidid. then Delta Force and the Rangers
were the best-trained men for the job. To dismiss the incident as a blunder and those who
were responsible as fools assumes that different leaders would have seen things more
clearly and known better what to do. The foreign policy lesson I take from this story is
like the old prayer. “Lord, grant me the strength to change the things I can, to accept
the things I can't, and the wisdom to know the difference.” Learning what America's power
can and can't accomplish is a major challenge in the post-cold war world. The answers are
not easy.

Still, everywhere I've gone people have asked me for answers. Mine are no better or more
significant than those of anyone who has studied this incident and thought seriously about
it, but here they are. I believe it would have been hard for the United States not to go
after Aidid, but it would have been better not to try. Ending a famine was a good deed,
one that Americans can take pride in, and making efforts to resolve the interclan fighting
in Somalia through negotiation was advisable and admirable. But Aidid's hard line forced
the Clinton administration to take sides in what was nothing more than a civil war. We
should have said no. Once a peacekeeping force starts shooting, it becomes part of the
problem. Arresting Aidid would most likely have just given the Habr Gidr leader a more
fervently motivated following, and would have elevated a two-bit Somali warlord to the
status of an anti-imperialist hero in many parts of the world. I acknowledge that it would
not have been easy to back away from this fight with Aidid. If the United States and the
UN had tried to simply phase out their involvement in Somalia, critics all over the world
would have accused Americans of leaving an important humanitarian task undone, and they
would have been right.

That said, once we had committed ourselves to the effort, I believe the United States
should have seen the mission through even after the battle on October 3-especially after
the battle. There was every indication that Aidid was on the ropes. The story would have
had a much more satisfying ending if he had been delivered up in chains (and ironically,
if he had, he would probably still be alive today). Arguing in favor of the decision to
withdraw was the memory of Vietnam, where the generals felt victory was always within
reach so long as the country kept notching up its commitment. The American public and its
elected officials were led down a primrose path in that war, and the nation paid a
terrible price. In Somalia the chances of success were far greater and more tangible
because the mission was so limited. There was little danger of American troops being drawn
into a quagmire in Somalia. No matter what ultimate impact Aidid's arrest would have had
on the UN's goals in Somalia, it was important to see the mission through once Task Force
Ranger was committed. The lesson our retreat taught the world's terrorists and despots is
that killing a few American soldiers, even at a cost of more than five hundred of your own
fighters, is enough to spook Uncle Sam. Perhaps more important, however, is the lesson it
sent to Americans, and in particular the men and women who serve. It's hard enough
convincing Americans that events in some distant part of the world are worth jeopardizing
American lives without being halfhearted about intervention. Try rallying troops with the
battle cry. “We'll fight them on the beaches, we'll fight them on the cliffs.. . but we'll
give up if they fight back.” Military credibility is not just a matter of national pride.
It lessens the chances of war because enemies are less inclined to challenge America. This
principle is especially important in a world with only one military superpower. The
eight-hundred-pound gorilla's only weakness is his will. Routing Aidid would have, in the
long run, saved American lives.

It is easy, of course, to say that now. President Clinton would have faced a rebellion in
Congress and a firestorm of criticism in the press if he had attempted to stay the course
in October 1993.

Beyond these policy issues, I attribute the military's warm response and the book's
larger success to something else. Thanks to the exceptional candor of the men whose
stories make up Black Hawk Down, what comes through most strongly is their determination,
their willingness to put themselves at risk-indeed, to die-in service of their country and
out of loyalty to their fellows. Beyond the politics of the situation, beyond the critical
debate over strategy and tactics, the story of what happened in Mogadishu resonates with
the nobility of military service.

Nobility is not a word often associated with the military these days. For the last three
decades, most of the stories about soldiers that have made their way into popular culture
have been about atrocities, failures, and scandals, from My Lai to Desert One to Tailhook.
The public image of the military is of a vast, impersonal, callous, dangerous, and often
inept bureaucracy. Even when victorious, as in the Persian Gulf, Panama, and Grenada, the
U.S. military is seen as just bigger, richer, and more powerful than the army of any other
nation. America is often perceived as the world's bully.

Black Hawk Down is a reminder that the seemingly inhuman machine of the American military
is made up of individual men and women, often serving at great personal sacrifice even
when not thrust into war. The men of Task Force Ranger gave more than will ever be asked
of most of us. They deserve to be honored and remembered.