COLUMN ONE : Black Like Me: Troops in Somalia : On a mercy mission, African-American soldiers confront intense emotions--from pride to disappointment. In land of their ancestors, they wonder what went wrong.

Sgt. Doug Anderson was lugging his M-16 rifle down one of this city’s roughest streets the other day when a breathless, barefoot Somali boy raced up to him.

“Somali or Americano?” the boy said, grinning and squinting at the hefty African-American Marine in camouflage fatigues, flak jacket and helmet. “Somali or Americano?”

“I’m not Somali!” the 30-year-old from Camp Pendleton exclaimed, laughing. Turning to a reporter, he added with a shrug, “They always ask us that.”

If Somalis are baffled by the thousands of dark-skinned Americans in their midst, the African-American troops have been left baffled, heartsore, sometimes angry and always more than a little intrigued by the Somali people during their 7-week-old encounter with Africa.

Operation Restore Hope, the largest operation ever for U.S. troops in sub-Saharan Africa, has given several thousand young black men and women among the 24,000 Americans their first view of Africa. And among Marines, soldiers, sailors and airmen who feel the ancestral tug of this continent, it has engendered a whole range of intense emotions that have bypassed their comrades in arms who happen to be white.

“Black people in L.A. may think they got it bad,” said Anderson, who is from Peoria, Ill. “But the L.A. riots were a cakewalk compared to this. It sure hurts to see people in a bad way, and it especially hurts to see black people this way.”

Many African nations have political, ethnic and economic problems. But Somalia is the most deeply troubled. It has no functioning government, no police force, no law and precious little commerce. Guns rule the land, and its recent history has been plundered by fights among clans, sub-clans and even sub-sub-clans, battles that helped turn a one-year drought into one of the worst famines in modern times.

For many of the African-American troops looking for a sample of their heritage, Somalia has been an understandable disappointment.

“When I saw this place, I was just glad I was born in America,” said Lance Cpl. Maurice Poe, 22, a Camp Pendleton Marine from San Jose.

“These are beautiful people, and I feel sorry for them,” Poe added. “But I’m just glad I don’t live here. I don’t even think my mom or grandmother know where we came from. I’m African-American. But I’m American.”

Lance Cpl. Timothy Joyner, a 22-year-old Marine from Atlanta, says it “hurts me a little bit more when the Somalis ask us for things and we can’t give them anything. I wish I could give food to everybody out here. It hurts real bad, you know.”

But being part of the U.S.-led effort to pull Somalis from the teeth of famine “has been an outstanding experience,” Joyner added. “I feel I couldn’t be doing anything better.”

The several dozen Somali-Americans who are part of Operation Restore Hope, either as regular military members or civilian translators, feel the pain of this country deeply. Their return home has been a depressing experience.

“I used to hear my parents and their friends say how beautiful Somalia was,” said Abshir A. Ahmed, a 21-year-old Army corporal based at Ft. Ord in California. “But I knew the tribal situation was the weak link. When I got here, though, I was shocked. The nation I had been hearing so much about was a shambles.”

As he spoke, Ahmed sat on a curb in the old U.S. Embassy compound here, sharing a mango with Mohamed, an 11-year-old Somali boy Ahmed had met in his first few days in town.

Ahmed was just 2 years old when he left Somalia with his family, but he learned the language at home in Washington, D.C. In the early days of the mission here, he went door to door in some rough areas, gathering intelligence. Now he’s an interpreter assigned to the headquarters of the coalition force, and he chats frequently with the country’s youth.

“The big shock to me is that the little kids know so much about what’s happening in this country,” he said.

Ahmed and other Somali-born Americans with the U.S.-led forces have been meeting to discuss what they can do to help this land get back on its feet. “We’re hoping to do a little something for the people of this country,” Ahmed said, “to make sure that things change here.

“But it takes a lot of optimism to believe in this place,” he added. “It’ll take at least five years to restructure this country, and even longer to rebuild. So long as there is tribalism, there won’t be much hope for Somalia.”

To many Somalis, the black and white Americans in uniform are just Americans, period.

“A foreigner is just a foreigner to me, whether he’s black or white or yellow,” said Ahmed Fidow, a 32-year-old former pilot with the defunct Somali Airlines.

And Fidow detects a certain hostility from the African-Americans he meets.

“Some don’t think they belong to Africa,” he said. “Maybe they think this is a backward continent. But you can’t run away from your identity.”

On the other side, though, some African-American troops have felt hostility from Somalis. Black as well as white troops have been taunted and called names on the streets. And Somalis often single out the black troops, calling them “Negro Americans.”

“I was happy to come here at first, but the attitude of some of the people makes you think you aren’t an African,” said Pfc. Malik Moore, 20, who grew up in the projects on Philadelphia’s south side.

Still, like many black troops here, Moore is sensitive about the way his white colleagues view Somalia. When a white corporal in his platoon began telling about a rock-throwing incident the other day, Moore cut him short.

“Enough of the war stories,” Moore said. “This isn’t a bad place. Sometimes a lot of people, even African-Americans, blow it out of proportion. This isn’t like Beirut, where they smiled at us and the next minute blew 241 of us up.”

The anger of some Somalis, especially the bandits, toward the U.S. forces is understandable. The troops have made it more difficult for the gangsters to operate. And Moore writes the rock-throwing off as adolescent mischief.

“Kids will be kids anywhere you go,” Moore said. “It’s not a racial thing. When I was a kid, we did stuff like that when adults weren’t around.”

The general attitude of Somalis, though, is much different from blacks back home because the Somalis have been hardened by war and hardship unknown even in U.S. ghettos, many troops say.

“Back in the States, people in the ghetto say, ‘I’ve worked hard for what I’ve got, and don’t down me, because I’m doing the best I can,’ ” Moore said. “But here it’s like, ‘I got mine, and nobody else can take it.’

“I was raised in the projects, but the situation for these people is more desperate,” Moore added. “They need a lot, but we can only give a little bit.”

Nevertheless, he said, “If they establish a government here, I’ll bring my family here for a visit. It had to be a very civilized place at one time. And if they had a government, it would be beautiful.”

Staff Sgt. Vidaurri Higgins gets a lot of attention when the mostly white unit under his command goes out to patrol the streets of Mogadishu, the capital. The children crowd around him, and when they ask whether he’s Somali or American, he answers proudly, “I’m African.”

“That makes them real happy,” said Higgins, a 33-year-old Marine from Hearne, Tex. “I’m just sad to see the shape they’re in. Just putting a smile on their face is worth it.”

At first, some African-American troops admit that they were a bit ashamed by what Somalis had done to their country in the two-year civil war. And they worried that their white colleagues might jump to the conclusion that black rule always means unending conflict.

“But I’ve been happy to hear other (white) Marines say this used to be a beautiful place. They notice that straight away,” Higgins said. “That makes me feel better about the whole thing. But why they destroyed their own country, I’ll never know.”

A few Marines and soldiers were worried, and even suspicious, when they first learned that the United States was dispatching them to Somalia.

“A lot of us black guys wondered: Are we really coming here to do a humanitarian mission for Africa, or are we setting up a strategic point for the U.S.?” said Marine Lance Cpl. Anthony Price, 23, of Baltimore.

“We didn’t really want to kill some other African, when we didn’t know what he’d done,” Price added. “And that’s the basic job of the Marines, to kill. So most of us had mixed feelings.”

But those feelings evaporated when Price’s unit came under sniper fire dozens of times, and when a member of his unit was shot and wounded. Price even fired 137 rounds at Somalis in a firefight at the fortified headquarters of one warlord.

“They were shooting at me,” Price explained. “I was protecting myself at that point.”

The sniping has changed the attitude of many African-American troops toward this country.

Marine Pvt. Robert Lowery IV of Detroit brought plenty of curiosity about Africa to his Somalia assignment, but that disappeared when the troops became targets.

“I descended from this continent, and that made me curious about how life was lived here,” Lowery added. “From what I’ve seen, though, this place is a war zone. And I’ve lost my interest in the people and the culture here since people started taking potshots at us.”

Sgt. Doug Anderson isn’t bothered by the sniper fire, which he ascribes to a disgruntled minority. And he delights in joking with Somalis on the street.

He discovered a gesture that kids were aiming at black troops--holding their noses and then pretending to curl their hair. Somalis say the gesture is meant to ridicule black Americans, whose tightly curled hair is different from the softer curls of most Somalis.

Anderson doesn’t know what the gesture means, but whenever he makes it to Somalis, they giggle with delight. And, he said, “As long as I keep getting a positive reaction, I’ll keep doing it.”

Being in Somalia, Anderson added, “is an experience I’ll be able to look back on in 50 or 60 years and say, ‘I was there.’ I hope this is a bustling capital by then.”