When they think of American involvement in Somalia, many people remember “Black Hawk Down.” But for every such incident, there are hundreds of other stories waiting to be told.
In the early ’90s, Sgt. Ryan Jackson served with the Army’s 10th Mountain Division during the relief effort in Somalia. After one mission, his unit’s convoy headed to Mogadishu. The landscape varied drastically from the desert, with rows of crops to jungle terrain in the river delta. It was monsoon season, and the convoy pulled out of the delta under the scorching sun. Six hours later, they knew they wouldn’t reach Mogadishu before dark. Air support had been called away for another mission. The convoy pulled off the main road into the empty desert and circled for the night. The men hastily dug fighting positions.
By 4 a.m. sheets of rain poured on Jackson and his fellow soldiers. It gushed into Humvee gun turrets. “Usually it would rain for an hour and then let up,” he recalled. “This kept coming. Real warm. Kind of refreshing.” Rain does strange, unpredictable things to the desert when it finally comes.
The red-brown, sandy soil softened. Men sank ankle-deep into the mud. Vehicles slowly sank. Larger trucks, the fuel trucks in particular, weren’t equipped for difficult off-roading.
By 5:30 a.m. they decided to get back on the road. The light Humvees had flat bottoms, and they stuck to the mud like suction cups. A few gunshots through the floor released the suction, and the Humvees made it out to the road. Winches helped extract ambulance Humvees, but the semis were buried to the axles. Soldiers connected winches to the big fuel trucks and in this way managed to free a couple of them.
The rainwater just off the road was now waist-deep. As often happens with soaking soldiers, there was suddenly a lot of horseplay. A lieutenant got dunked. Then the first sergeant. Then more soldiers were messing around, trying to break up the monotony, trying to bring fun to a bad situation.
“Sgt. Jackson, come help with this,” someone called from the vehicles. Jackson ran down off the road, waist-deep in water. Suddenly, he was completely submerged. He’d stepped in a hole. Trying to surface, he felt a moment of panic when his foot became stuck in the roots of some scrub brush. He wondered if he would survive the dangers from enemy militias only to die in a watery mud hole.
Jackson pushed away his panic, reached down into the mud, and broke the root loose. But when he surfaced, gasping for air, he realized it wasn’t a root at all, but a rib. “Hey, Doc,” he called to their medical officer. “Check this out. It’s a goat or something.”
“That’s human,” came the reply.
Jackson thought about the sludge he’d reached into to break free. “What is mud and what is entrails? You don’t know.”
Word spread that they were swimming in an old, unmarked graveyard, and fun time was over. Tough soldiers spat out water and threw up. They searched for iodine to scrub their faces and scrambled to escape the field of human remains they’d accidentally disturbed.
They quickly rescued as many vehicles as they could, while bones and body parts washed up by the road as they worked. Two fuel trucks and a large transport were hopelessly mired. There was no choice but to strip the vehicles down and call for helicopter gunships to destroy them.
Trent Reedy served as a combat engineer in the Iowa Army National Guard from 1999 to 2005, including a year’s tour of duty in Afghanistan.
