Where War Lives: A Journey into the Heart of War

Where War Lives: A Journey into the Heart of War

by Paul Watson
Where War Lives: A Journey into the Heart of War

Where War Lives: A Journey into the Heart of War

by Paul Watson

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Overview

A Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist takes us on a personal and historic journey from Mogadishu through Rwanda to Afghanistan and Iraq.

With the click of a shutter the world came to know Staff Sgt. William David Cleveland Jr. as a desecrated corpse. In the split-second that Paul Watson had to choose between pressing the shutter release or turning away, the world went quiet and Watson heard Cleveland whisper: “If you do this, I will own you forever.” And he has.

Paul Watson was born a rebel with one hand, who grew up thinking it took two to fire an assault rifle, or play jazz piano. So he became a journalist. At first, he loved war. He fed his lust for the bang-bang, by spending vacations with guerilla fighters in Angola, Eritrea, Sudan, and Somalia, and writing about conflicts on the frontlines of the Cold War. Soon he graduated to assignments covering some of the world’s most important conflicts, including South Africa, Rwanda, Afghanistan, and Iraq.

Watson reported on Osama bin Laden’s first battlefield victory in Somalia. Unwittingly, Watson’s Pulitzer Prize–winning photo of Staff Sgt. David Cleveland—whose Black Hawk was shot down over the streets of Mogadishu—helped hand bin Laden one of his earliest propaganda coups, one that proved barbarity is a powerful weapon in a modern media war. Public outrage over the pictures of Cleveland’s corpse forced President Clinton to order the world’s most powerful military into retreat. With each new beheading announced on the news, Watson wonders whether he helped teach the terrorists one of their most valuable lessons. 

Much more than a journalist’s memoir, Where War Lives connects the dots of the historic continuum from Mogadishu through Rwanda to Afghanistan and Iraq.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781605297897
Publisher: Harmony/Rodale
Publication date: 09/16/2008
Sold by: Random House
Format: eBook
Pages: 368
File size: 3 MB

About the Author

Canadian journalist Paul Watson has been covering world events and wars for nearly two decades. While at the Toronto Star he earned several National Newspaper awards for social and cultural reporting. Watson earned international acclaim and the 1994 Pulitzer Prize for his photograph of a dead American soldier being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu.

Paul Watson is currently the South Asia bureau chief for The Los Angeles Times, covering Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, and Iraq.

Read an Excerpt



1

THE BEGINNING OF THE END

War would end if the dead could return.

STANLEY BALDWIN

Little Birds and Black Hawks crisscrossed the sky like dragonflies darting over a pond at dusk. The helicopters were a few miles away, far enough to be a faint hum against a warm, salty breeze blowing in from the Indian Ocean. The sky was slowly shifting from indigo to gold as the sun set. I was on the roof of Mogadishu's low-rise Sahafi Hotel. Arabic for journalist, the Sahafi was the retreat where I went each evening to get above it all, to hear the wind and to toast another day of surviving Somalia's anarchy. With each tilt of my beer can, I tried to flush my mind, but the alcohol only shifted the fear a little, sending it slithering down to the void where it coiled up like a snake, tensed to strike.

It was a Sunday evening: October 3, 1993, and I was on assignment in Somalia for the Toronto Star. The day's news seemed far away: in Moscow, Boris Yeltsin was amassing tanks to capture Parliament. Next to the drama of war on the streets of a nuclear-armed former superpower, yet another skirmish in the swirling grit of Mogadishu was easily missed by the world. Murders and kidnapping threats had cleared the city of all but a few reporters, and the main wire service offices had been evacuated. I didn't have my own satellite phone, so there was no worry about being on the foreign editor's speed-dial. I could file when I felt like it. And on this beautiful evening in Mogadishu, after weeks of chasing a story that had dropped off the map, I felt like getting drunk.

The charcoal black U.S. Army helicopters flying low over the city, banking hard this way or that, were a pleasant diversion, like a country-fair air show for the tailgaters far below in the parking lot. The soldiers sitting on the Black Hawks' door sills, their legs dangling in mid-air, had tried and failed so many times to arrest fugitive Somali warlord Mohammed Farah Aideed that a sky buzzing with combat helicopters wasn't much to get excited over any longer.

I'd never heard of Operation Gothic Serpent. I had no idea that the code- named raid for this October day, one that would weaken the U.S. for years to come, was unraveling before my eyes. And I never would have guessed that more than a decade later I'd still be struggling to escape its vortex.

The afternoon had been as ordinary as one could be in the anarchy of Mogadishu, capital of a looted country where warring clans ruled the land and blood in the water lured shivers of man-eating sharks to blinding white beaches. My driver and gunman got me safely through the ten-minute hurtle from the Sahafi to the Pakistani army checkpoint, and then on to the heavily fortified U.S. embassy com£d for the afternoon briefing. I pushed past the begging kids, who pawed at me with grimy fingers, calling me by my street name, Gamay, or "The Man with One Hand," in Somali. "Give me money! Gamay, give me money!" they shrieked.

After shaking them off, I entered through the sandbagged gate and into the safe cocoon of the JIB, or Joint Information Bureau, where military flacks dispensed each day's ration of spin, half-truths, and outright lies. They often passed around a plate of candies or cookies, as if we were hyperactive kids easily soothed with a sugary snack and a good nap. When that game was over, and I had little more in my notebook than the day's troop number update and numerous assertions that the world was unfolding as it should, I walked to the Israeli PX, military shorthand for Post Exchange, a makeshift duty-free shop in a circle of rusty shipping containers on the embassy grounds. True to habit, I bought a twelve-pack of Amstel and drinking snacks. After almost two years covering Somalia, I needed the better part of a case of beer just to get through each day, order the disorder into some kind of story, and put myself to sleep. Around the same time that the Israeli duty-free man was ringing up my purchases, a U.S. Army Special Forces crew was approaching its target area in a Black Hawk code-named Super Six-Four.

Not long after 4:30, when my gunman, Mohomud Hersi Ali, had loaded the beer and groceries into the trunk, my driver wheeled the car around for the race back to the relative safety of the Sahafi. Less than three miles away, Staff Sergeant William David Cleveland had his finger on the trigger of a machine gun pointing out the chopper's side door, near the Olympic Hotel in Aideed's Bakara Market stronghold. He was trying to cover the crew of another Black Hawk brought down by a rocket-propelled grenade (RPG). Below, he could see swarms of Somali fighters running along a warren of streets and back alleys, sprinting from behind one tin shack only to disappear behind another. Gray smoke trails snaked up into the sky around him as the guerrillas tried for another aerial takedown. Attackers fired a barrage of more than one hundred airburst RPG rounds at the choppers.

Cleveland was a fifteen-year military veteran, the son of a Navy chief petty officer, and the latest to serve in a family that has had a soldier in every generation since the Civil War. Now Cleveland was a Night Stalker, a member of the U.S. Army's 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment. They are an elite corps of warriors who live and die by the creed that theirs "is a calling only a few will answer, for the mission is constantly demanding and hard. And when the impossible has been accomplished the only reward is another mission that no one else will try." Cleveland and the rest of the five-man crew on Super Six-Four had each sworn a solemn pledge to "guard my unit's mission with secrecy, for my only true ally is the night and the elements of surprise."

And here they were, hovering in the harsh afternoon light, a chopper full of soldiers sent in to arrest some of Aideed's top lieutenants. The operation was in the middle of the warlord's turf, and hundreds of guerrillas in his Somali National Army faction were fighting back hard. They'd shot down one Black Hawk, and were taking aim at Super Six-Four as it flew some seventy-five feet above the street, in a blitz of bullets and rocket-propelled grenades, trying to save fallen comrades. Cleveland, one of two crew chiefs on board, was manning an M134, a six-barrel, air-cooled Gatling gun that could spew four thousand bullets per minute. The chopper's pilot, Chief Warrant Officer Michael Durant, wouldn't throw the cockpit switch to arm Cleveland's electric weapon until the last minute. He didn't want any friendly fire coming from his bird. The troops would fast-rope down to the target, the chopper would pull out, and Cleveland would be back to base with the rest of Super Six-Four's crew in a matter of minutes. He was just weeks away from going on leave to his hometown, Peoria, Arizona, with a plan he had rehearsed over and over in his mind. He would walk up to the door of his mom's trailer home and surprise her for Christmas--and then . . .

BANG

An RPG exploded near Super Six-Four's tail rotor, blasting the blades and gearbox, and sending the Black Hawk into a fatal spin as the pilots fought to keep control.

"We're going in hard," Durant radioed.

Just over a mile from the crash site, I was still alone in my rooftop world, oblivious to the quickening battle, which would inflict the worst combat losses on U.S. troops since Vietnam. The day's tension was starting to melt from my shoulders. I felt a warm touch of nostalgia for the person I was before I came to this place. I remembered how much I used to love helicopters. When I was a child, watching Hueys sweeping over the jungles of Southeast Asia on the news, I thought for the first time: War is cool.

To a suburban kid like me, a sponge for sterilized media images flickering across the TV screen, a Huey was just another 1960s mod icon, like Twiggy or the peace sign. Hueys shared their rounded lines. Front on, their noses were blunt, not hard-edged and sinister-looking like the generations of attack helicopters that followed. I was thrilled by the thump of rotors and the sheer magic of their hover, as brave men with a rifle in one hand and the other holding down a helmet jumped into rice paddies swirling in the downdraft. Hueys often flew low and slow into combat drop zones, daring the enemy to take his best shot. They came to save lives as much as take them. Huey medevac crews who did the ambulance runs were airborne white knights.

Somalia made me hate helicopters and the men who looked down from them. I vividly remember the first time that I saw helicopters as most Somalis did, with a mixture of awe at the choppers' power and anger at the military arrogance they came to symbolize. I was in a weapons collection point where militias stored their aging artillery guns and tanks to meet the U.N.'s demand for disarmament. To make sure militia fighters didn't suddenly reclaim the weapons, the U.S. military decided to put them permanently out of commission with hovering Cobra attack helicopters. The three-barrel 20- mm cannon mounted under a Cobra's nose is wired to nimbly swivel wherever the pilot looks. One of the two-man crew wouldn't take his eyes off me. He hovered overhead, just to one side, and as I held my arms and notebook above my head in mock surrender, the Cobra's nose cannon scanned me up and down, focusing in on my head, doing a tight circle as it traced the perimeter of my face, like some nightmare of a giant mosquito sniffing around for the softest spot to stab its proboscis. Every day after that, I wondered while driving through Mogadishu whether someone was staring from above through a gun sight trained on my rented white Toyota Cressida.

The mission to save Somalia from itself was a tragicomedy from the moment, ten months earlier, when the white TV lights fired up just after midnight on December 9, 1992, at the start of Operation Restore Hope, the U.S.-led invasion to help feed starving Somalis. There was a party atmosphere on the beach as a few dozen journalists awaited the nighttime landing of U.S. troops dispatched to stop marauding militias from stealing relief food. In the town of Baidoa, the famine's epicenter, gunmen went on a final spree of looting and killing and, like cockroaches skittering from the light, fled into the desert as foreign troops approached.

Many Somalis welcomed the U.S.-led invasion as their salvation. The warlords all promised their men would not fire on foreign troops. They even vowed finally to make peace with each other. In the time since the Cold War had ended, and U.S.-backed dictator Mohammed Siad Barre's regime collapsed in anarchy in 1991, this cursed country on the Horn of Africa had never seemed so connected to the rest of humanity. Suddenly Somalia mattered. If it was only to be a backdrop in a morality play to showcase the military's new humanitarian face, well, that was better than shouting to the wilderness about war and famine, as I'd been doing with other journalists for almost two years.

The big three U.S. network anchors were all in place, seated in front of banks of studio lights, powered by rumbling generators deployed outside the derelict airport terminal. We were clowns in a media circus, ridiculous pawns of a Pentagon information strategy that was supposed to bring the military fully out from under the shadow of Vietnam. The politicians wanted heroic pictures of U.S. soldiers coming to the rescue to replace the embarrassing horrors of defenseless, starving children, so U.S. military officials gave advance details of the landing place and time to make sure the networks were ready for live coverage. They ended up making brave soldiers trained to fight and kill look like bit players in a comical propaganda newsreel.

There were so many reporters and cameras waiting in Mogadishu to watch the Americans invade Somalia that back in Washington, Pentagon spokesman Pete Williams had to make a bizarre appeal for the media to stay off the beach so they didn't get in the way of the Marine assault. He even offered to meet with the networks to suggest the safest camera positions. This was a made-for-TV drama.

I found a quiet spot on the beach and fell asleep, only to be rudely awakened by the ruckus of journalists stumbling over cables and each other in the dark as they chased the first Navy SEAL frogmen who waded ashore a little after 12:30 a.m. The commandos squinted in the glare of the TV lights, like some rare aquatic species just dredged from the bottom of the sea. These were among the best-trained stealth warriors and all they could do was shout at us to go away. The photographers' strobes kept flashing into the SEALs' grease-painted faces. Less than an hour later, the assault's second wave hit Mogadishu beach: three Marines seized a rocky dune near the airport's main runway, only to be surrounded by a phalanx of journalists and TV crews. "Can you smile for the cameras, please," one French reporter asked, pushing her microphone closer as the soldiers stared stone-faced into the white light.

During a lull around 2 a.m., Lieutenant Kirk Coker of the 15th Marine Expeditionary Unit walked alone out of the darkness, and like a field producer, asked the twenty-five journalists lounging in the sand if they'd mind making way for amphibious landing vehicles heading toward shore. "You guys here really spoiled our nice little raid that we came in with," Coker said, and disappeared back into the night.

The famine that the troops had come to end was already long past its peak. In early 1992, when aid agencies were warning that drought and civil war threatened to set off mass starvation in Somalia, hunger was killing thirty people a day in Bur-Acaba, a bush town in what would become the heart of the famine hot zone, about one hundred miles northwest of Mogadishu. By September, the death toll climbed to 350 a day in nearby Baidoa, where relief workers were feeding some twenty thousand people a day, and then in the next month, it began a steady decline. Famine deaths had fallen sharply to around fifty a day by the time U.S. troops landed in December 1992. The declining death toll had more to do with the stamina of aid workers, and the cold laws of Malthusian mathematics, than the belated military intervention. Starvation killed the young and sick first, and then it slowed, like a brush fire running out of fuel.

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