Soldiers of the New World Order : Aggressive Peacemakers, U.S. Marines Draw Down the Warlords of Somalia and Write a Military Blueprint for Future Campaigns

Sgt. Jim Church swivels in the elevated Hollywood seat of the battered Marine Humvee, scanning a blown-out urban nightmare more than 10,000 miles from home. He’s shouting, “How ya doin’, ladies?” as he passes a group of smiling Somali women carrying water jugs and tinting a landscape of death with their rainbow-colored saris. With his left hand, Church is flashing thumbs-up and waving to the clumps of kids who gather along the way as Lance Cpl. Daryl Desimone wrenches the steering wheel of the Humvee, jamming the three-man Marine patrol through sandy lanes, cratered roads and the gutted houses of unseen assassins. Not once through it all does Church’s right index finger stray far from the trigger of the SAW-249, a mounted machine gun that can pour out 1,000 rounds a minute, cut a tree in half or kill a dozen Somalis any instant his brain registers “life-threatening danger.”* Thunk! A rock slams into the side of the Humvee. Church swivels again in the turret. His finger stays put. A few minutes later, crack! crack! crack! “Gunshots, 9 o’clock,” Church shouts, swiveling in their direction. “A hundred, maybe 200 yards off.” Desimone drives on. Church’s finger moves gently onto the trigger, but no farther. * Just another day on the beat at the cutting edge of the New World Order. * “Hell, this is standard stuff,” says Sgt. Mike Kowalski, who’s riding shotgun in the passenger seat. “You shoulda seen it during the riots a few days ago. They threw burning tires at us. Burning sticks. They stoned us. Threw grenades at us. Shot at us.”*”Scared the shit out of me,” Desimone chimes in. “Church got it the worst,” he adds. “He got a rock in the--well, it’s a sore subject. It kind of gave a sense of futility--for me, at least. I’ve wanted to go home since I got here, but the rocks, the riots, well, it made me want to a whole lot more so.”* Church isn’t laughing anymore as he half-listens and half-watches. Every few minutes, he’s making a split-second decision that could cost the lives of people he was sent out to East Africa to save--and maybe his own. Yet, even when the rock slammed into his crotch the other day, he laid off the trigger. “A rock isn’t gonna kill me, though I wished I was dead for a few minutes there,” he explains later. “But as time goes on, it gets harder and harder to maintain composure. And if I do kill somebody over here, that follows me home; it follows me the rest of my life.”* “You see,” says Kowalski, the leader of this typical two-hour patrol, one of thousands the Marines would run through the lethal Green Line that separates warring Somali clans in Mogadishu, “we under-stand our mission. We understand what we’re supposed to be doing. And I do believe there was a need for us to be here. It needed to be done. * “But I don’t see any reason for us to be here any longer. We’re not humanitarian troops. We’re combat troops. And now, it’s time for us to go home.”

SGT. KOWALSKI AND HIS COLLEAGUES IN THE ANTI-ARMOR PLATOON, Weapons Company, 1st Battalion, 7th Marines, would not go home that day--nor any day soon after. Along with more than 12,000 other U.S. Marines and thousands of U.S. Army soldiers, they stayed on in Somalia for two more months after those dark days of late February. It was then, in the blaze of burning tires, Somali hatred and slogans of “Marines, Go Home,” that America’s bold experiment to use its men of war to enforce peace in a nation that had self-destructed appeared on the brink of ending the same way. The prototype campaign of tomorrow’s U.S. military was being put to the test.

Today, Kowalski, Church and Desimone are finally out of Africa. They’re back at their base in Twentynine Palms, along with the thousands of other Somalia veterans based there and at Camp Pendleton. Most of them are still trying to make sense of their tour in a faraway land of anarchy and ingratitude, well after their commanders had declared them heroes and their mission an unconditional success. The soul-searching that filled Sgt. Kowalski’s Humvee that day illustrates the many fine lines America’s soldiers were forced to straddle in imposing the New World Order in Somalia.

Somalia was a laboratory for the U.S. high command. From the Pentagon to NATO headquarters, the campaign was deemed a successful blueprint for a world that increasingly views the United States and its unparalleled might as the ultimate referee of regional anarchy, ethnic warfare and civil disintegration.

Operation Restore Hope, a mission that included more than 25,000 American troops at its peak, left eight Americans dead, only half of them from combat-related injuries. There were two courts-martial, Marine careers ruined for making the wrong split-second decision with a trigger or a fist. Time took a toll. Marriages broke up. Engagements collapsed. But most endured.

For the American taxpayers, the price was high: Between $750 million and $1 billion, according to estimates by Marine accountants on the ground in Somalia the day the U.S.-led mission ended on May 4, almost five months after the first elements waded ashore in classic Marine fashion.

On his last day on the job in the gutted and sweltering U.S. Embassy compound that the Marines used as their headquarters in the Somali capital of Mogadishu, the mission commander, Lt. Gen. Robert P. Johnston, a veteran of the U.S.-led war against Iraq and of the Marine Corps’ ill-fated mission in Beirut a decade ago, pronounces his read on the lessons of Somalia.

“There’s no question that this has been a very useful blueprint, although a blueprint implies that you’re going to replicate it,” the general begins, his hands punctuating sentences in the heavy African air. “Not in every case. I think that you’re going to have to adjust it to meet the scenario, the geography. But I think this has been a milestone in U.N. operations, and for U.S.-led operations.”

Johnston, as a young battalion commander in Beirut 10 years ago, watched a similar experiment in U.S. intervention end with 241 Marines and other servicemen blown to bits by a truck bomber. Now he draws an almost Orwellian conclusion from his months in Somalia. The future, Johnston says, has no place for peace keepers ; it will belong to peace makers , front-line troops like Sgt. Church who know when to shoot and when to wave.

With visions of both Beirut and Bosnia in mind, the tanned and tired commander says: “Principally, I think there’s a blueprint here for U.N. operations in the rules of engagement. I think the (U.N.) blue hat and the white vehicle, quite frankly, may be a little bit OBE (Marine-talk for obsolete). I think that in every (future) scenario, if the U.N. forces come in with good troops and with rules of engagement that allow them to protect themselves, then you’re not going to find people driving through U.N. roadblocks, ignoring them as they have, making them extremely vulnerable and making them, oftentimes, ineffective. I think that’s hopefully behind us now.”

The American general was referring to the hapless days of 1992, when the United Nations dispatched a handful of troops, 500 Pakistanis, to protect its famine-relief operations in Somalia. The Somali clans, which had broken the corrupt presidency of Mohammed Siad Barre in 1991, were battling each other for the opportunity to rip off U.N. and Western relief agencies with extortion, theft and mayhem. The outgunned Pakistanis could do nothing to stop them.

Then President Bush, in his last full month in office, sent in the first elements of the American force--under U.S.-engineered U.N. sanctions--on Dec. 9. The campaign was designed to give the New World Order its first practical test since the Persian Gulf War, and develop strategy for stamping out world’s brush-fire anarchies. The operation ended in May when--with considerable trepidation--the American command handed over control to an 18,500-man multinational U.N. force. About 4,200 U.S. troops are part of that contingent.

Early this month, the warlords began to test the mettle and mission of the U.N. troops, killing 23 Pakistani peacekeepers and wounding three Americans in a series of ambushes in Mogadishu. Over the next week, the Pakistanis responded, firing into taunting crowds of Somalis, and U.S. forces deployed helicopters and big AC-130 gunships to pound sites believed to be weapons caches of strongman Mohammed Farah Aidid. The brittle peace the Marines had enforced was cracking.

Gen. Johnston, closing this pioneering campaign, takes stock, his face showing a few more creases from his five months of 20-hour days in the blistering heat of the Horn of Africa. “The bottom line is you must have in your strategy, in your way of doing business, a way of clearly showing the people that you’re there to help them,” he says, “but that you mean big business with those who will try to create their own bases of power at the end of a gun, which is what we did with them.”

IT’S CAPT. ROB ABBOT’S LAST DAY ON THE BEAT. THE 33-YEAR-OLD commander of Charlie Company, 3rd Light Armored Infantry Battalion, has already turned over to the U.N.’s newly arrived Pakistani troops the patrol area that was both his duty and his obsession for the past four months--a battered and bandit-infested district straddling Mogadishu’s Green Line, where the shell-pocked shanties are packed so tight that the Somalis nicknamed it Little Tokyo.

There’s no need for Abbot to send his men out again into the lethal streets of Little Tokyo, where four of Charlie Company’s 146 men were wounded or injured during their hundreds of day-and-night patrols. But Abbot never did just the minimum in Somalia; he was singled out, in fact, by Gen. Johnston as one of the commanders who went beyond the Marines’ primary mission of securing food-supply routes and neutralizing Somalia’s warring clans and bandits--a task accomplished within two months of the Marines’ arrival--into such development projects as rebuilding local police departments, schools and community centers. Johnston called it “Mission Creep.”

So here’s gung-ho Capt. Abbot on his last day still going the one step beyond, taking one more risk to say goodby to the elders who were his intelligence link to the streets and, in the end, his friends. Six of Abbot’s best men cover his back as he ducks through a shell hole in a wall of the Little Tokyo compound. He strides through a dusty yard blanketed with small mounds and sticks--the graves of the hundreds of Somali men, women and children who died here during the two years of civil war before the Marines arrived. As he approaches the concrete skeleton in the middle of the courtyard that is all that remains of Little Tokyo’s Community Center, a rail-thin, white-bearded Somali greets him. “Hellooooooooaaaaahh! Thanks to Allah, you have come once again.”

And, as the young captain waits in the dim and sweltering building for a quorum to form--women and old men shouting, arguing and arranging in clipped Somali--he explains how he and the men of Charlie Company used the elders and some Marine can-do to pacify Mogadishu’s streets.

“Basically, they would tell me where the bandits were. And I would go out and hit the bandits first thing in the morning, about 5 or 6 o’clock, when they were all drugged out from qat,” Abbot says, referring to the leafy stimulant that Somalis chew at the end of each day. “And we’d just go”--Abbot raps the battered desk in front of him three times--” ’Hello. United States Marines. Can we have your guns?’

“We’d take their guns. And then we’d stencil a red horse with a black police crest on the house. Red Horse is the radio call sign for Charlie Company. That way, the house is marked as a bandit house. So any time a patrol would see a house with a red horse, they would stop, go to the door (he knocks the desk three times more) and say, ‘Hello, U.S. Marines. You got any guns?’ We would just keep harassing the bandits until finally they would just get so tired of it, they moved out.

“The ulterior motive was right out of the counterinsurgency manual. The way to beat insurgents is to take away their power base. If you convince the people not to support the bandits, they’re finished. And the only way to take away their power base is to win the hearts and minds of the people.”

As the elders whose hearts and minds Abbot clearly has won are about to start their final meeting with this American who came from so far away to save them from war and hunger, Abbot is asked whether the bandits are still operating in Little Tokyo.

“Sure,” he says, the frustration ringing clearly in his voice. “They’re still here, and I would imagine they will come back if the Pakistanis are not aggressive in patrolling.”

And, as the meeting finally begins, one of the grunts who protected Abbot as he took Charlie Company beyond the Marines’ stated mission puts it a bit more strongly. He is standing point in the hallway outside, sweating bullets, staring at the field of graves and grumbling, “Hell, we’ll all be lucky to get out of this alive. Gung-ho? This guy’s too gung-ho. Besides, it’ll all go to shit when we leave anyway.”

THE QUESTIONS FOR THE U.S. high command in coming years are where it will fight, with what weapons and which troops. If the United States once again accepts the role of world policeman--this time in a single-superpower world--the shape and size of its forces are likely to change. The only certain signal from the Clinton White House is that U.S. forces will continue to shrink.

The President has sent Congress a $263-billion defense budget for fiscal 1994 that would cut troop strength to roughly 1.6 million, a level not seen since the period before the Korean War. Active Army divisions would be cut from 14 to 12, and Air Force fighter wings from 28 to 24. The proposal would begin a sharp reduction in the American blue-water fleet, with 28 active warships ticketed for mothballing.

And for the first time, the Defense Department is seeking a separate budget for peacekeeping operations. The request is in part a bookkeeping measure--up to now those costs have drawn from the overall operations budgets of each military service--but the proposal indicates that the Administration is committed to more Somalia-style policing missions.

The focus on regional conflicts has driven the Pentagon to move away from strategic weaponry and to invest in equipment that would get troops more quickly to Third World flare-ups and allow them to move around there more effectively. That has dictated the stepped-up purchase of fast sea-lift ships and a new generation of cargo planes.

At the same time, the Pentagon has begun to wrangle with the more subtle challenges of operating in regional conflicts. After years of resisting arrangements that would place U.S. troops under foreign command, U.S. generals have begun to focus on the prospect of American forces fighting--or keeping the peace--as part of hastily engineered coalitions of unfamiliar allies.

That will require procedures and equipment for more coordinated communications and a greater willingness to subordinate U.S. troops to the United Nations or to other countries. Many experts believe that peacekeeping operations, especially, will also require new and specialized training for U.S. combat troops, and possibly the creation of a separate corps of soldiers for such missions.

It’s no surprise, then, that the Navy and the Marine Corps are seeking a new image, a late start in the race with the Army and Air Force for dwindling federal funds. Late last year, Navy and Marine Corps planners defined a dramatic shift from Cold War blue-water operations against the Soviets to a focus on so-called littoral warfare, the unglamorous but vital operations that would send the Navy into the brown waters of foreign coasts and the Marines into urban jungles like Mogadishu.

“Over the next 20 years, we estimate that fully 80% of the populations of developing nations in Latin America, Africa and on the Pacific Rim will migrate to, or concentrate in, urban coastal regions,” Marine Corps planners noted in one study on potential hot spots.

The Corps’ new watchwords became “the foot in the door.” Instead of landing, wave-upon-wave, in the teeth of an enemy, the new, expeditionary-style force would pick its spot, come stealthily ashore and seize ports and coastal air bases. Such an “enabling” capability, in the argot of the Pentagon, casts the Marine Corps and the Navy in a role that neither the Army nor the Air Force could fill, a prospect that could reheat old interservice rivalries.

Col. Andrew Duncan of London’s prestigious International Institute of Strategic Studies notes, for instance, that the Pentagon’s budget proposals indicate few cuts for the Corps. The Marines, he says, were designed to take a beachhead, turn it over to another outfit and move on. “But the way they’re being used, one would suppose they’re expected to take whole countries now. I’m surprised the Army isn’t jumping up and down.”

FROM THE OUTSET, THE SO-campaign was divisive. It certainly appeared unpalatable at best to Smith Hempstone, who until March was Washington’s irascible ambassador to neighboring Kenya. Operation Provide Relief, the progenitor of Restore Hope, was a U.S. Air Force sky-lift of food to the famine-ridden country, and it was based out of Mombasa, Kenya’s primary port. Hempstone predicted that the airlift could lead to wider involvement and he was not diplomatic in his opposition.

Marine Col. Fred Peck, the official spokesman for Restore Hope, recalled a dinner with the ambassador long before Bush ordered the Marines ashore. “He was very outspoken. ‘This is the tar baby, and (screw) the Somalis, we should let ‘em all die. They’re doing it to themselves. It isn’t worth a single American life.’

“And our perspective in Mombasa was, it looked like it could be a little bit more bloody of an operation than it turned out to be. We thought the militias would resist with force when we came in.” Peck’s opinion changed with time: “My own personal observation from having gone to (the Somali towns of) Baidoa and Oddur was, ‘Give me a battalion of Marines and I’ll take this country. The militia are just a bunch of punks with guns.’ ”

In the Marines, bravado comes with the boots. At one point Peck’s deputy was briefly taken hostage by a lieutenant of one of Somalia’s most powerful warlords. He was freed and returned to Mombasa just in time to catch Bush on television announcing that he was sending in the Marines. The deputy’s reaction: “Restore Hope? I want it to be Operation Kick Butt.”

Peck, asked on his final day in Somalia how he reckons with the notion of heroism in a Marine combat mission in an undeclared war, quotes from memory George C. Scott’s final lines in the movie “Patton”:

“For over a thousand years, Roman conquerors returning from the wars enjoyed the honor of a triumph--a tumultuous parade. In the procession came trumpeters and musicians and strange animals from the conquered territories. Together, with carts laden with treasure and captured armaments, the conqueror rode in a triumphal chariot, the dazed prisoners walking in chains before him. Sometimes his children, robed in white, stood with him in the chariots or rode the trace horses.

“A slave stood behind the conqueror, holding a golden crown and whispering in his ear a warning: That all glory is fleeting.”

And, in his own words, Peck adds, “I think history will record hopefully that we came over here in a humanitarian role and we were successful.”

THEY HAVE THEIR ORDERS, it’s their last day in Somalia, and the men of Charlie Company are sitting on their field cots with hundreds of other homebound Marines from different units inside a cavernous warehouse at Mogadishu’s seaport, several miles from the bombed-out soccer stadium that had been their home and patrol base for the past four months. That stadium was so exposed, so constantly under fire, that Charlie Company nicknamed it Fort Apache. Many nights, they slept in their helmets and flak vests.

Today they’ve got seats on a Tower Air 747 charter home to Twentynine Palms, and they’re killing time in the relative safety of the warehouse, playing Trivial Pursuit, TV Edition. “These people are--how do you describe it--deranged?” Lance Cpl. Brandon S. Snowdy of Corpus Christi says of Somalis, looking up from a question about “Our Miss Brooks.”

Does Cpl. Snowdy feel good about what he did here on the cutting edge of peace enforcement? “In a way, but as soon as we leave, it’s gonna crumble. Like the (Somali) police. They’re just Keystone Kops.” Snowdy, a scout on hundreds of foot and vehicle patrols through Little Tokyo, turns to his partner and says, “You remember that chick that was getting raped? We went to the police with it, and they said, ‘We haven’t got weapons. We can’t do anything about it.’ I know they got weapons now, but heck, they wouldn’t help that chick anyway. Different clan.”

The conversation turns to the snipers and rock-throwers, the Marines’ invisible enemy and one known all too well to Snowdy and the other Charlie Company Marines who served on foot patrols.

“You can never see ‘em out there,” the corporal says. “They’re slimy little sons-of-bitches. You can never see ‘em till they’re on you. And I know there’s a lot of ‘em left here. There isn’t one night out here--even now--you don’t hear a gunshot. Oh yeah, we made a large dent. But hell, they’re still out there. I think we did make a difference. But it’s going to be short-lived. I mean, the people here will remember us--especially in our area. They liked us pretty much. But as soon as we’re gone, well, let’s see what happens.

“Look, it sucked living out here. Living out of your C-bag. Sleeping in this cot--the most uncomfortable thing in the world. And I hate eating MREs (Meals Ready to Eat). First thing I’m gonna do after I get home is go to Pizza Hut. But I’ll tell ya, months after I get home, I’ll still be speaking Somalian. I know almost every cuss word in Somalian. I ain’t proud of it, but it helped.”

Snowdy is asked what the Marine Corps as an institution learned in Somalia. “I think they’re going to look at what happened here, and I think they’re going to say, ‘No.’ Maybe the Army, but not the Marine Corps. This isn’t what the Marine Corps is designed for. The Marine Corps is a short-time element. They’re supposed to come in, set up and move on.”

No one could disagree more with Snowdy than Capt. Abbot, who strolls into the warehouse right about then, strips off his shirt, pistol and helmet, sits on the floor beside his cot, uncorks what must have been his 500th bottle of water in Somalia and opens the April issue of the Marine Corps Gazette.

While Snowdy has taken the experience of Restore Hope personally, his captain has a broader view. “I’m thinking about things we would probably do if we had more time here, and things I might’ve done a little differently,” Abbot says. “Toward the end, we were moving really fast with community development projects. It’s been rewarding. And I know if we stayed, we could leave something really lasting behind. Do I think we need to stay here longer? No. But I do wish somebody would come in here and approach it with the same enthusiasm we had.”

Abbot shakes his head thoughtfully when asked about criticism from some of his men that he went too far beyond the Marine mission. “Look, it would have been real easy for these guys to say, ‘Bag it! I’m not getting out of the vehicle.’ But, in an environment like this, consistency is everything. If the pressure is consistent,it actually reduces your risk by reducing the threat.”

But what about the thousands of Marine grunts who think that--good or bad--this simply is not the job of the United States Marines? “I don’t believe that,” Abbot says. “In fact, a couple officers have drawn parallels to the Marines in the Banana Wars,” he continues, launching into an articulate and passionate summation of the Marine Corps’ historic yet little-remembered “Small Wars” intervention in the Caribbean island states earlier this century.

“They were restoring order. They were setting up governments. They were winning medals for cutting down bandits in Haiti and Santo Domingo. What we’re doing here is the exact same thing.

“Careerists study the history of the Corps to gain some insights into the future. Is Somalia typical of our future? Probably . . . .

“The Marine Corps was never an organization that was supposed to duke it out on a German plain with a tank brigade. This operation in Somalia, well, this has always been more our style. So I think our mission has probably increased and will continue increasing. And when you start downsizing the military the way President Clinton is talking about doing while at the same time not doing away with America’s commitments to its allies, well, we’re going to find ourselves with the same commitments, less toys and less troops. The Marines are going to have to stay out longer on deployments, and we’ll be spread thinner in the future.”

Bosnia? “Whoa!” he replies, shaking off the thought. “Right now, I’m just thinking about going home.”

And, as Lance Cpl. Snowdy is sitting over his Trivial Pursuit board a few feet away thinking about his first slice at Pizza Hut, the boss is dreaming of the one thing he missed most during his four months on the beat in Somalia--playing with his two boys, aged 3 and 2, and trying to explain where he has been the past four months. “Well, I guess I’ll tell ‘em pretty much what I told ‘em before I left,” Abbot says. “My eldest son is into pirates with the Lego blocks right now. So, I told him Daddy was going off to fight pirates, but these were pirates who took food away from people.”