BECAUSE WE ARRIVED LATE AT Baledogle, at one stage the largest operational American air base on the continent of Africa, we missed dinner. Somebody organized some fruit, a can of sardines and bottled water and we were grateful, for there are few favours meted out in most military establishments I’ve visited.
I shared a tent with the padre and his first words to me in the fading light were: ‘Watch out for scorpions in your boots in the morning. And snakes in the dark, when you take a leak.’
Baledogle, I quickly learnt, was serpent country. Quite a few of the troops had been bitten and a handful had to be flown to the military hospital in Mogadishu. None had died from a bite, though, so it could have been worse. According to the padre, they killed snakes every day, cobras of ten feet or more and sometimes a viper. There were enough of the venomous variety around to start a herpetarium. The men towed a dead cobra at the end of a length of nylon gut through the women’s showers one evening with the satisfying result of several naked ladies bolting into the night.
One of my first impressions of the base was that there were a lot of women at Baledogle, including senior officers. Major Pauline Knapp commanded the 159th Medical Company. Her husband, also in the army, had stayed behind at the base in Germany, ‘to play golf’ she joked. Hers was the wing responsible for most medical evacuations in Somalia.
The unit’s motto, she pointed out, was appropriate: Anywhere, Any Place, Anytime – You Call, We Haul.
Pauline Knapp was a firm, sassy and very professional lady who boasted that she hailed ‘from the wrong side of the Hudson in New Jersey’. A graduate of Rutgers, much of her time off duty was spent preparing for her Masters.
That said, she had her time cut out for her. With her crews, the helicopter unit covered almost the entire country (except the north-east, where the French operated their Super Pumas). Her medical company, she reckoned, was there to bring back casualties – as well as the dead – to field hospitals ‘as quickly and as humanely as possible’.
The work kept her busy. If she and her husband could manage a weekend a month together, they were lucky. ‘But when we do, it’s quality time’, she joked with a delightful smile that said it all.
‘I run a lot… keeps me sane’, she added quickly.
At Baledogle I also met Captain Yvette Kelly and her husband Colonel James Kelly, Executive Officer at the base. They’d met some years before at a military base in California and served together through Operation Just Cause in Panama, where Yvette flew combat helicopters.
Each week the couple shared two important events: a film, and thereafter, ‘big eats’, which comprised some cans of food from home that might even include a good-quality imported pâté de foie gras, all nicely laid out on a table – covered by a spotless white tablecloth – and decorated with a few bottles of Evian water between them. It usually happened in the mess where there was much coming and going, but these two lovers – a couple of ordinary Joes anywhere else in the world – were oblivious to anything else.
I was soon to discover that routines at Baledogle rarely varied. The first call came shortly after five in the morning and entailed an five- or eight-kilometre run depending on the mood of the duty officer. Nobody was excluded, unless with good reason. It wouldn’t go on your record if you didn’t make it, but the omission would be noted. Likewise with the last run of the day towards evening, not compulsory but conscientiously observed.
There were two meals: a regular brunch and a dinner, both adequate, but hardly memorable. The cooks had a job to do and they weren’t looking for stars, though I never heard anybody complain.
In Mogadishu and Baledogle officers and men alike ate together. In Mogadishu the mess hall was vast and pre-fabricated, fitted with only two doors, one for entry and another for those on their way out. In Baledogle, by contrast, everything took place outside, under whatever shade could be found.
We ate standing up to make room for those who came later and there was no loitering. As with everything else, you did what you had to and got on with your duties.
If you didn’t like the menu, there were always MREs which provided variety and you could eat them, hot or cold, anywhere you liked. ‘Dishes’ – such as they were – were all freeze dried and included meatballs and spaghetti, sirloin and mushrooms, a variety of chicken prepared every which way and neatly presented in little vacuum sachets that could be heated on a solid fuel cooker. It was the same sort of thing that American astronauts and their Russian counterparts ate when they were aloft.
Apart from the need to exercise, life at the air base was about as laid back as it might be with a unit serving under difficult conditions. All ranks used the same showers and toilets, although there were particular times reserved for the women to wash. Since water was controlled it was only available for an hour a day.
The latrines at Baledogle, plastic ‘porta-potty’ boxes, faced each other with a modest hessian screen separating the sexes. It was the job of one of the female soldiers each morning to empty night soil into a great pit on the edge of the camp, douse it with kerosene and put a match to it; an unenviable task in that heat, but somebody had to do it.
There was one difference in rank. At Baledogle the warrant officers – almost all of them chopper pilots – managed to set up a rudimentary open-air mess for themselves a short distance from the rest. In that remote wilderness it was an extravagance to which only a select few were invited. Since I was the first journalist to stay over in the camp, I was inducted by a ritual that also included something a little more potent with our coffee afterwards.
The outdoor senior NCO mess – it was actually more like a mobile canteen – was operated by CW4 Dave Coates, an old Vietnam hand who, in Somalia, flew AH-1 Cobra helicopters. He was a veteran soldier typical of any army and junior officers tended to steer clear of him because he wasn’t afraid to say what was in his head. As head honcho, Dave dominated his little coterie with scant regard for rank. As he blandly stated while pouring us another ‘wee dram’ long after the others had got their heads down, he was due for his ticket anyway.
The senior NCO mess had the only working fridge outside the sick bay and it was kept locked. That might be why there were always beer cans in the unit’s garbage bags each morning.
Alcohol was forbidden among American forces while serving in Somalia, ostensibly because it was a Muslim country. That was nonsense of course, since the French, Australians and Italians all got a drinks issue. No Mediterranean native would start a meal without his half-litre of red, but for the Americans, one couldn’t help but get the impression that booze seemed to be a taboo left over from prohibition.
It was the same with tobacco. The no-smoking rule at Baledogle, while not promulgated, was effectively enforced among these adult men and women serving their country thousands of miles from home. No drink, no smokes, and (for most) no sex. Small wonder then that some of the troops needed counselling halfway through their deployment.
Naturally there were those who smoked. There were even cigarettes and Skoal chewing tobacco for sale at the base PX, but it was clear that those who partook were ‘observed’ by those who didn’t. Like outcast lepers, they’d wander about the camp looking furtively over their shoulders whenever they pulled out a pack. Since I smoked occasionally, I joined them, if only to offer moral support.
For all that, just about everyone at Baledogle – and Mogadishu – was on first-name terms, officers included. A walk through the operations centre, where I spent quite a few days while still at headquarters, was as casual as a country club in Miami.
Martin Culp II, Captain, United States Army, was Marty to everybody. Yet he was a senior air force officer with a good deal of responsibility for what was going on in the country at the time. A helicopter pilot himself, his job at HQ was to lead a group of officers who planned daily strikes against hostile groups in the interior. It entailed flying armed helicopters against both Aideed’s men and those Somalis who opposed him, like the Qat-chewing Colonel Morgan and the irascible Ali Mahdi Mohammed.
If there was a line of demarcation between officers and the men and women under their command, I didn’t detect it, except routine salutes when moving about base. Culp would ask, rather than command, somebody to do something. More accustomed to British military tradition, the level of familiarity astonished me.
There was a limit, however, and to a large extent it applied to the sexes. Any officer who used rank to entice a female soldier into his bunk did so at risk. ‘Career terminators’ was the phrase most often used, but judging by the number of women soldiers who were sent home pregnant, discipline couldn’t have been that well enforced. As they say, love laughs at locksmiths and military regulations.
Part of the problem lay in the isolation of the base. It was a rough and tumble reality that Somalia must have been one of the few countries in which UN forces were never able to have ‘R & R’ within its borders. Even in Angola, had these soldiers been serving there, they would have been able to get away to some of the most beautiful beaches in Africa, all within a day’s drive south of Luanda.
In Somalia, most of those who wished to escape the strain of living within an arm’s reach of some of the worst violence anywhere, had only one option and that was Kenya. Troops could sometimes get onto one of the C-130 transports that ferried supplies between Mogadishu and Mombasa. There were also flights to Nairobi.