August 23, 1993, was an overcast day when the plane touched down at Mogadishu Airport. Yet when the U.S. Army officers stepped off the chartered Boeing 737, they were greeted by a blast of intense humidity. The air was filled with the suffocating stench of burning garbage, rotting ocean waste, and the sweat of the more than one million souls who dwelled in the Somali capital. Decrepit Soviet transport aircraft left from the 1960s sat rusting on the tarmac. Sloping upward beyond the airport’s perimeter, the officers could see Mogadishu devastated “like Stalingrad after the battle.” The city’s streets were cratered and strewn with debris, its buildings were either bullet-ridden or collapsed.
Among the officers disembarking was a tall, muscular lieutenant colonel (LTC) with a gray crew cut wearing desert fatigues. To the casual observer, he was just another replacement officer for the U.S. Forces Somalia staff. Yet in reality, Major General (MG) William F. Garrison was America’s most accomplished commando. A veteran Green Beret with two tours in Vietnam – including participation in the Phoenix program – Garrison had run covert operations all over the world for 25 years, including a four-year stint as commander of the Delta Force. He was the youngest man in U.S. Army history to hold the ranks of Colonel, Brigadier General, and Major General. Now leading the Joint Special Operations Command, Garrison was travelling incognito in hopes of surprising the man he had been sent half way around the world to capture: the Somali warlord General Mohammed Farrah Aideed.
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| Major General William Garrison* |
*(Note: It is surprisingly difficult to find good pictures of Major General Garrison in uniform, so much so that I was tempted to post a photo of Sam Sheppard portraying Garrison in "Black Hawk Down," just because he looked the part so well. But this is the inevitable result of Garrison spending the overwhelming majority of his career in covert ops, I suppose).
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