Jerry Boykin & Lynn Vincent Read Free Page B

first instinct should have been prayer, but it wasn’t. I wanted to charge in. I wanted to fight back. But I immediately realized that despite my more than two decades in special warfare, I had no idea how to fight in this situation. In my career, I had faced down warlords and drug lords, dictators and terrorists, kidnappers, guerillas, and murderers. Them, I knew how to deal with.
    Osman Atto flashed into my mind. He seemed to be exhibit A in NBC’s “case” against me—and yet the man was corruption in human skin. In addition to helping Mohamed Farrah Aidid starve his own people, Atto built “technicals,” half-ton pickups with gun mounts in the beds Aidid and his Habr Gidr clan used to intimidate and murder members of rival clans. The warring factions often spilled each other’s blood in Mogadishu’s narrow, dusty streets, with Aidid’s more heavily armed clan mowing down men, women, and, if they got in the way, children.
    Also, Atto was a major dealer in
khat
, a narcotic weed that transformed so many otherwise strong and able Somali men into walking zombies.
    A medium-sized man with eyes like onyx, Atto spoke nearly perfect English, which made him a good PR man for Aidid when news cameras rolled through the area. Despite his dark profession, Atto, whenever possible—and especially whenever a camera was in range—invoked Allah, trying to create the impression he was a devout, practicing Muslim. In fact, Osman Atto’s gods were the oldest idols of all: money and power.
    In the summer of 1993, Joint Chiefs chairman General Colin Powell signed off on a plan to send an American unit, Task Force Ranger, to capture Aidid and restore peace to Mogadishu. The task force was under the command of General Bill Garrison, a cool-headed Texan who, it is rumored, has never been seen without an unlit cigar poking out of his mouth. Composed of an Army Special Operations unit, about three hundred Rangers, the task force also included 150 men from Delta Force, of which I was in command. But we’d named the entire operation Task Force Ranger to obscure that fact. In August, we set up a joint operations center (JOC) on the ragged edge of Mogadishu, and commenced operations.
    As Aidid’s chief of finance, Atto topped our list of high-value targets. In September, we received a snippet of intel on his location. Within thirty minutes, we launched a helo assault, dodging rocket-propelled grenade fire to land a H-6 Little Bird gunship with four black-clad Delta Force operators riding shotgun on the pods on top of one of Atto’s garages.
    We missed him by sixty seconds. But CNN gave Atto more time than that to crow to the world about how we would never catch him. Less than a week passed before we had an opportunity to put Atto’s prophecy to the test. A CIA informant offered to lead us to Atto in exchange for a position in the new, legitimate government he hoped would be restored after Task Force Ranger booted Aidid out of Somalia. Hours later, five H-60 Black Hawks lifted skyward, their massive rotors drumming the air like thunder. Four carried the assault element—Rangers and Delta operators, including six Delta snipers. One carried a combat search-and-rescue (CSAR) package—Delta operators and Air Force PJ’s, or parajumpers, medics who parachute in to tend wounded friendlies.
    To that point in Mogadishu, the Rangers had been an untouchable force. With an average age of twenty-two or twenty-three years old, each had completed the Army’s physically and psychologically punishing Ranger School, where they trained in air assault, close quarters combat, demolitions, and marksmanship. They were well prepared, but young and untested in the field. Still, they were ready to mix it up, kick some warlord ass. I remembered the feeling from my first Huey flights over the jungles of Vietnam.
    The Delta operators weren’t built quite the same way. With an average age of thirty-two, they were more circumspect. They had seen combat and knew