SEAL Team Six: Memoirs of an Elite Navy SEAL Sniper (24 page)

That night, we stayed in the hangar with the rest of the American military, about 160 men in all. Each soldier had a 4' × 8' place to call his own. On my cot, four wooden poles stood up, one in each corner, to drape a net on to keep the mosquitoes out. Hawks swooped down and caught rats the size of small dogs, flying them back up to the rafters for dinner. Sections of the tin walls had space between them, allowing Mother Nature in. The hangar doors were stuck open. Beyond the doors, helicopters sat quietly on the tarmac, filling the air with the smell of fuel. The elevation inland rose, and I could see lights and fires in Mogadishu. Behind us an American flag hung from the rafters. I could taste the salt in the air from the ocean behind our hangar. Despite the luxurious accommodations, our four-man team wouldn’t be staying long. Aidid sent three mortar rounds near the hangar to wish us good night. Someone wisely turned out the hangar lights.

AUGUST 28, 1993

Saturday, we encrypted our PRC-112 handheld survival radios before gearing up. Outside, the tarmac simmered under our feet as we walked to our helicopter. I put on my Oakley sunglasses. The best sunglasses tone down the sun’s glare and protect my eyes from debris, helping my sense of peace. They also make eye contact impossible. Sunglasses can disguise identity, be intimidating to others, project detachment, and hide emotions. Like a good friend, a good pair of sunglasses is hard to forget.

Some Delta boys were on board the chopper ready to take off on a training flight.

The Task Force 160 helicopter pilots, among the best in the world, told Delta, “Hey, sorry, we got a real-world op. You know, you need to let these guys on.”

Delta unassed the helicopter. They were not happy. “Heaven forbid; we wouldn’t want to stand in the way of a
real
-
world op.
”

We boarded the chopper. “Tell you about it when we get back.” The four of us, two sitting in the doorway on each side with our legs dangling out, buckled our gunner’s belts, and the helicopter lifted off. The Delta operators became smaller and smaller as we gained altitude.

The chopper flew us inland so we could look for routes and alternate routes to drive to and from our safe house. Sunshine and war had blasted much of the color out of Mogadishu. The only structures held sacred by both sides in the civil war had been the Islamic mosques—among the few buildings standing unmolested. Many of the other major buildings had been destroyed. People lived in mud huts with tin roofs in a maze of dirt roads. Hills of broken concrete, twisted metal, and trash rose from the landscape, with charred car frames scattered about. Militiamen wielding AK-47s rode in the back of a speeding pickup truck. Fires steadily burned from piles of rubbish, metal drums, and tires. It looked like flames from hell.

Turning back toward the ocean, we scouted out possible landing zones near our safe house—just in case we had to call in a helo to get out in a hurry. During our flyover, we also checked the seashore for possible locations where we could be extracted by boat. Light brown and white sand bordered the emerald sea. It would’ve been the perfect setting for a vacation resort.

After coming back down to earth from our reconnaissance, we drove a Humvee from the compound through a secret hole in the back fence and up the hill to a trailer where the CIA gave us a human intelligence (HUMINT) brief. Technological gizmos and doodads are useful in the spy game, but they mean little without brave human beings to infiltrate the enemy’s territory and ask the right questions—human beings who can see and hear what technology can’t, who can extract meaning from the surrounding context.

Using a diagram of Pasha, Little Big Man made plans for getting to the safe house and setting up. He delegated the patrol order to me and the course of action for battle stations to Casanova. Little Big Man also worked out the communications drills. Sourpuss loved the training aspect of SEAL Team Six, swimming and running, but when it came to actually operating, he fell behind us in talent and desire. Although he should’ve played a more central role in leading and planning, he limited his role to setting up who would stand watch on Pasha’s roof at what times. The four of us also began constructing a large mosaic map of the city.

Before we headed out, Crescent gave a brief. Even though my Teammates and I had just met the CIA, SIGINT, and our interpreter, we would be working with them in a district in northern Mogadishu called Lido, close to the heart of where the enemy gunslingers lived. At Pasha, we would add more strangers to our team: guards, a chef, and assets—locals providing us with intelligence. “If you aren’t comfortable with anyone on your team, they’re gone,” Crescent said. “This is your show. If your cover is compromised, General Garrison will get you out of there within fifteen minutes. Good luck.”

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.