Black Hawk Ground

Cactus and bitterness grow where an American chopper was shot down.

MOGADISHU, Somalia - She lived here once, in a house behind this pitted dirt alleyway. But now, Maria Osman cannot bear to raise her head as she walks past.

This is, after all, the place where her already difficult life slipped the last few notches into misery, the place where pain can last a dozen years without pause. The place, she says, where an American Black Hawk helicopter fell from the sky and crushed her three-year-old daughter.

"There was not enough of her left to bury," she says, nervously covering her mouth with the end of her hejab (a traditional Muslim head scarf).

When American forces tried to protect the fallen chopper, gunfire broke out and Maria, still nearby the crash site, was hit. It took her two and a half years to recover from the wound.

She pulls back the material covering her right arm to show me a brown, leathery roadmap of scar tissue that runs from above her wrist to below her shoulder. The arm is nearly worthless, Maria says, useful now only as another reminder of that day.

That day, Oct. 3, 1993, became known as the Battle of Mogadishu, when an American mission against Somali warlord Mohammed Farrah Aidid went terribly wrong.

The Somalis shot down not one but two Black Hawks that day -- one of them, call sign Super Six One, would change Maria Osman's life forever.

"I hate them"

"I hate the Americans," she says, her eyes maintaining their empty sadness rather than shifting to anger. "I hate them for what happened to my daughter. If I saw one I would cut them up into so many pieces."

The crowd that has gathered around us laughs, but some begin to eye me suspiciously.

Most of those who live here are part of the Habr Gedir clan -- connected by blood to Aidid.

Maria and her husband have three more children, she says, but both parents are jobless so they can't always afford to feed them.

"I have no hope," she says, eyes downcast. "No hope for Somalia."

Homemade barbed wire

I wander over to the exact spot where the chopper came down. Over the years, locals snatched up most of the wreckage as souvenirs. But a small bit of Black Hawk Super Six One is still here.

Through my camera's viewfinder I can just make out some twisted fuselage under a dense thicket of cactus. Someone tells me the cactus was planted as a kind of homemade barbed wire, to preserve the memory by keeping people from carrying away what was left of the Black Hawk.

For many here, it's a memory that hardly seems ready to fade.

When the film "Black Hawk Down" premiered here in 2002, thousands went to see it. Going to a movie is easy for even the poorest of the poor here -- it costs only a penny.

Many were angered by the film, calling it propaganda that focused on the 18 Americans killed and 73 wounded in the 15-hour battle, when an estimated 600 Somalis were also killed.

And now they have learned the battle has been turned into a game for

Another woman in the crowd shouts that she lost four family members in the fighting that day, including a child. This seems to agitate the crowd of 50 or so people.

"Why did you bring a white man here?" one of them demands from Duguf, my interpreter. While I continue to videotape, Duguf taps me on the shoulder and nods toward the truck. We make haste just as fingers begin to point and voices grow louder and angrier.

Welcome to Somalia

When my plane landed in Somalia on a remote airstrip 100 kilometers from Mogadishu earlier that day, I felt some of the same trepidation I felt before entering

Somalia is a failed nation-state, as still-teetering Afghanistan once was. For the past 14 years it has existed without a central government.

Although I have never covered Somalia, I had heard enough stories from colleagues about it. It's a place where human life has little meaning, where feuding clan militias, juiced up on khat (a chewable stimulant herb), roar down dusty backstreets in "technicals" (pickup trucks modified with anti-aircraft or machine guns mounted on the bed).

Despite Somalia's reputation, my trip here is easy enough, a regularly scheduled African Express Airways DC-9 flight landing on an airstrip in the middle of nowhere.

As soon as I exit the plane, Duguf, my fixer (local guide and translator), is waiting to greet me. I hired him over the Internet.

Duguf is famous in Somalia. A cameraman and stringer on retainer for Associated Press Television News (APTN), he makes a good living fixing for foreign journalists.

We leave the airstrip and stop near a shack on the roadside where eight heavily armed men hop in the back of Duguf's pickup truck.

Two of them have Russian-made RPK machine guns and bullet rounds worn bandolier-style around their bodies. The others are armed with the most popular assault rifle in the world, the AK-47, and are chock-a-block with extra magazines of ammo. They are dressed in a mix of

Security team

This is my security team, essential for any outsider doing any kind of business in Somalia. Duguf put together a squad from different clans. That way, regardless of who they pass on the streets, they might be able to talk instead of shoot. Duguf pays his men with money, but some warlords pay their men in khat.

In Somalia a show of force is the only way to get from one block to another without getting shaken down for cash by other heavily armed gunmen at ad hoc roadblocks.

One warlord, Duguf tells me, bragged that he was making the equivalent of $40,000 a day in Somalia by operating dozens of roadblocks throughout the area. Even empty passenger buses must pay between $4 and $6 at each blockade, a fortune in a country where the average annual income is only $600 (according to 2004

When we arrive in the capital of Mogadishu I feel a twinge of deja vu. The city has the familiar patina of Third World poverty: dirt streets covered in garbage with corrugated metal shacks on each side where vendors sell anything they can get their hands on, from meat to brightly colored pillows. From a nearby mosque streams the sound of afternoon prayers being broadcast over a battered public address system.

Somalia's population of about 10 million -- 2.5 million in Mogadishu -- is predominantly Muslim.

Dead soldier dragged through the streets

So much of what many Americans, including myself, know about Somalia comes from watching news coverage of the aftermath of the Battle of Mogadishu, and the chilling image of Somalis dragging a dead American soldier through the streets.

It was a seminal moment for Americans who collectively shook their heads and wondered how Operation Restore Hope, a joint humanitarian effort to protect

Historians say the key moment was when the mission shifted from protecting food supplies to capturing Aidid.

A major misstep in the operation, acknowledged even in the U.N.'s own independent inquiry, was a United States-led attack on what was believed to be a safe house in Mogadishu where members of Aidid's Habr Gedir clan were supposedly meeting to plan more violence against U.S. and U.N. forces.

In reality, elders of the clan, not gunmen, were meeting in the house. According to U.N. officials, the agenda (which was advertised in the local newspaper) was to discuss ways to peacefully resolve the conflict between Aidid and the multinational task force in Somalia, and perhaps even to remove Aidid as leader of the clan.

17-minute combat mission

What eventually took place on July 12, 1993, was a 17-minute combat operation in which U.S. Cobra attack helicopters fired 16 TOW missiles and thousands of 20-millimeter cannon rounds into the compound.

When the operation was over and the smoke had cleared, more than 50 of the clan elders, the oldest and most respected in their community, were dead. Many here agree that was the turning point in unifying Somalians against the U.S. and U.N. efforts here.

It would also lead to the deaths of four journalists, killed by angry Somali mobs when they arrived to cover the incident.

Concrete block of Swiss cheese

Duguf takes me back to the house where the elders had been meeting. Twelve years later, it is still standing but is nothing more than a concrete block of Swiss cheese. Large blast holes pock most of the walls, and pieces of metal rebar poke through the concrete. The back staircase is completely blown apart.

"That was to prevent (the elders) from escaping," Duguf says. "It was the first thing (the helicopters) shot at."

A family of squatters now occupies the building. A man is cutting his hair in the front yard while children play in the ruins.

He tells me, "We live here because we don't have the money for anything else."

Inside the building, where there was once so much death, there are now signs of life: charcoal cooking fires, pots and bowls, sleeping mats. On a wall in the front room the date 12.06.93 is written, and beside it, in Somali, the word "Remember."

Back outside, Duguf takes me to an intersection on the street.

"This is where Dan Eldon died"

"This is where Dan Eldon died," he says, pointing to the ground.

Eldon was a promising 22-year-old Reuters photographer who had spent much of his life in Africa. He also was a talented artist who made elaborate collages of his photographs and whatever scraps, wrapper, matchbooks or other images he could gather up. After Dan's death his mother turned them into a book, "The Journey is the Destination."

Eldon was clubbed and stabbed to death by Somalis enraged at the bloody carnage inside the destroyed house. Journalists Hos Maina, Hansi Kraus and Anthony Macharia also were killed.

Ironically, one who survived, but just barely, was the journalist who got to the site first, my friend and colleague Scott Peterson.

Duguf had been working for Scott as a driver at the time, and when Scott arrived on the scene after witnessing the attack from the roof of a local hotel, the crowd immediately surrounded him and began beating him.

He emptied his camera bag to the outstretched hands, trying to buy time, but then someone in the crowd struck him on the head with a machete.

According to Scott's account in his book "Me Against My Brother," Duguf shot the man with the machete with his 9-millimeter Beretta, then bundled Scott into the car and took him back to the hotel. Scott lived, but the attack reflected the anger and brutality of the crowd.

Cactus needles

Duguf tells me from that day forward a kind of blind, raging anger built up in Somalis, culminating in the Battle of Mogadishu three months later in which 18 American soldiers and as many as 600 Somalis died.

This October, 12 years will have passed since that ill-fated battle. Time has done little to blunt feelings here though, especially among Maria Osman and her neighbors. Their anger now seems as sharp and unforgiving as the cactus needles that protect the memory and remains of Black Hawk Super Six One.

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