BOOK REVIEW The debacle in Somalia, in fine detail By DAVID BEARD c) 1999, The Boston Globe America's Somalia misadventure began as a mercy mission. It dissolved into a shoot-'em-up search for warlords and ended with the bodies of US soldiers dragged through the streets of Mogadishu. Perhaps no episode better illustrates the intellectual poverty of US foreign policy following the Cold War. The Oct. 3, 1993, debacle has haunted US policymakers ever since, prompting a US force a week later to pull back just before intervening in Haiti and paralyzing the Clinton administration a year later as more than a half million people were killed in Rwanda. Mark Bowden's harrowing, authoritative account of the Somalia debacle, ``Black Hawk Down,'' benefits from auspicious timing, coming just as Washington debates whether to intervene in Kosovo. Bowden, a Philadelphia Inquirer reporter, manages to bridge the broad gulf between Americans, who thought they were doing good, and Somalis, who saw the US forces as destructive agents of a United Nations that was trying to frustrate a legitimate bid for power by a clan leader. That clan leader, Mohammed Farrah Aidid, became America's white whale. And Captain Ahab in this story was retired Admiral Jonathan Howe, the unyielding UN mission leader trying to abduct Aidid, who was frustrating international peace efforts. Howe, Bowden writes, had evidence that Aidid was inciting demonstrations, then gunning down his own people to accuse the UN of genocide. Howe and US military leaders, with the backing of Clintonites Anthony Lake and Madeleine Albright, aggressively used US muscle to try to counter Aidid in mid-1993. On July 12, TOW missiles slammed into a home where Aidid's leadership was meeting, killing at least 54 people and wounding 200. The brutality of that attack was eclipsed overseas by the deaths of four Western journalists, who rushed to the scene only to be killed by enraged Somalis. Using extensive interviews with US soldiers and Somalis, Bowden skillfully recreates the weeks leading up to the biggest firefight since the Vietnam War. Bored troops trapped rats in their hangar barracks, cut limbs off goats to practice field medicine, and sat around reading John Grisham novels or playing board games like Risk, Scrabble, or Stratego. ``Black Hawk Down'' comes alive as it recreates the disastrous Oct. 3 mission by 140 elite US Rangers and Delta squad ``operators'' to abduct two Aidid lieutenants. Bowden intersperses the interviews with transcripts of military radio traffic to detail how an intended hourlong mission stalled, how Somali fire brought down two Black Hawk helicopters and how troops fought to rescue their buddies and make it back to base from a city suddenly out to destroy them. To survive, precision shooting turned into indiscriminate fire at the Somalis, dehumanized as Sammies or Skinnies by the US troops. Bowden writes that soldier Eric Spalding ``saw a little Somali boy who looked no more than five years old with an AK-47, shooting it wildly from the hip, bright flashes from the muzzle of the gun. Somebody shot the boy and his legs flew up into the air, as though he had slipped on marbles, and he landed flat on his back.'' Minutes earlier, Spalding had urged a colleague not to shoot a woman in flowing purple robes who was carrying a baby. ``The woman abruptly turned. Holding the baby in one arm, she raised a pistol with her free hand. Spalding shot her where she stood. He shot four more rounds into her before she fell. He hoped he hadn't hit the baby. ... He thought he probably had. ... There wasn't time to fret over it.'' Bowden may be faulted for overreliance on direct quotes in battle and in a paucity of sources and 20/20 hindsight in describing Aidid's strategy against the Americans. But he gets the finale right. Although the ferocious battle severely depleted Aidid's forces and stockpile, the impact came from the TV footage _ of corpses of several of the 18 fallen Americans, carried as trophies by Somali mobs. And with those images, Operation Restore Hope, begun to feed starving Somalis and find peace, was dead. President Clinton pledged to reinforce the US troops while his administration planned their pullout. Critics said the Pentagon failed to back up the troops with heavy armor _ and did not think through the entire intervention. No new rules have emerged since for possible US involvement in civil wars. US inaction in Rwanda was matched in Congo and in Sierra Leone, where more people were killed in one month than throughout the yearlong conflict in better-publicized, European Kosovo. Aidid died in 1996, but Somalia's chaos continues. Just Sunday, a dozen Somalis from warring clans were killed in a firefight over roadside bribes. It didn't make much news. BLACK HAWK DOWN A Story of Modern War By Mark Bowden< Atlantic Monthly Press, 386 pp., illustrated, $24
