My Share of the Task(36)

                In the first days, Annie, Kathy Abizaid, and other unit leaders spent most of their time at the hospital. The hospital staff was terrific, but White Devil troopers and spouses provided essential support for people facing uncertain futures. Assisting parents and young wives in visiting badly burned, sometimes dying young paratroopers, then making difficult decisions on things like burial locations and insurance money, were searing experiences.

                So, enabled by a chain of command above us that would not tolerate bureaucracy preventing us from doing the right thing for our paratroopers and their families, we buried our dead, visited our wounded, and simultaneously prepared ourselves to assume our planned rotation as the division’s Ready Force-1 battalion. Immediately after the crash, John Abizaid asked me if, after the losses, I thought we needed another unit to replace us as the first in the division to deploy if needed. I said no. We both agreed that responsibility would help the battalion move beyond the loss.

                On March 29, six days after the accident, at an 82nd memorial service for the fallen, I spoke to more than 3,500 people gathered inside the Ritz-Epps Fitness Center at Fort Bragg. The audience included a number of the injured, bandaged soldiers, some moving by crutches, others visible on the white hospital gurneys that had been wheeled in to allow them to watch. I tried to express how I felt.

                “The depth of our loss does not mean we are beaten. As long as young men and women volunteer to jump, when no one would question the choice of an easier path, we cannot lose.”

                While the first days were tough, my reactions were more mechanical than emotional. I grabbed onto the task of leading the battalion through a challenge, and to some degree that focus insulated me from more personal emotion.

                Those feelings came later. In the weeks and months after the crash, we visited injured paratroopers at Duke Hospital, and at the Army’s burn center in San Antonio. On one visit to Brooke Army Medical Center, in a ward of badly burned paratroopers, most lying flat with little clothing or coverage to avoid infecting sensitive wounds, I spoke with a young paratrooper I knew. I had to lean forward, straining to understand what he said.

                “Sir, I’m trying to salute, but my arm doesn’t work.”

                My stomach knotted. I needed to salute him.


* * *

                I thought often about the risks that the paratroopers I led had accepted. Six months before the tragedy, I’d sat outside my battalion tactical operations center, a waterproofed canvas tent that held maps, radios, and selected members of the staff, with Mike Canavan. We were in a wooded training area on the western part of Fort Bragg but talked about a location some eight thousand miles away: Somalia.

                A day or so prior, on the afternoon of October 3, 1993, U.S. forces had launched a raid into the Bakara Market in Mogadishu, Somalia, to capture clan leaders opposing efforts to bring stability to part of the tragically chaotic Horn of Africa. Although the daylight raid had begun well enough, the shoot-down of an MH-60 Black Hawk had begun a series of events that ultimately resulted in the loss of eighteen American soldiers, including Army special operators, Night Stalker crewmen, and Rangers.

                Even from initial, incomplete accounts, it was clear that there had been a ferocious firefight in which the magnificent courage of the force had been apparent. But because Mike Canavan and I had both served in and would eventually command the task force that conducted the raid, the operation had special resonance for us. We knew that the losses, many of them friends, would be deeply felt in the small special operations community. In the days ahead, media coverage that included heart-wrenching photographs of American corpses, our former comrades, being dragged by raucous crowds through the streets of Mogadishu evoked anger and revulsion.

                The fight in Mogadishu was to have lingering effects on America, her special operations forces, and my experiences in the years ahead. Just as Grenada, Panama, and the first Gulf War had done much to erase the frustrations of Vietnam, Mogadishu carried a whiff of failure, a reminder that despite the progress we’d made since Eagle Claw thirteen years earlier, the possibility of death and defeat was always at hand. That reality focused and drove us as we labored to develop a force that would win.