for a toll. You could see what the deal was when you stood on the Land Rover seat and looked out the sunroof at the surrounding thornbush. Armed creeps lurked. If you had more guns than the creeps, the harmless-looking old fellow raised the pole and obsequiously waved you through. If you didn’t have more guns, you were robbed and shot. We had more guns. We arrived outside Baidoa in the middle of the night and found a crappy, but defensible, place to stay. It was a roadside restaurant with a wall around it. In Somalia everything has a wall around it. That must have been around 1 in the morning – 9 a.m. New Year’s Day back in the States. We’d brought a bottle of whiskey from the Mogadishu compound. We had a couple of drinks. I was thinking about the beautiful woman. I said to the reporters, technicians, and camera crew, “I met this beautiful woman right before I left. I’m crazy about her. I’d like to call and wish her a Happy New Year. We’ve got to set up the dish first thing in the morning anyway...” “Ooooo... A beautiful woman half a world away,” said everyone. (We foreign correspondents of yore were a sentimental bunch.) “Let’s do it.” The Somali “security” was on the restaurant floor, sleeping off overindulgence in Somalia’s national dish. (Which is, of all things, spaghetti – due to Italian occupation from the 1920s until the end of World War II.) Not that they would have been much help.
Young men waving AK-47 assault rifles pushed among the crowd. Rusted, dent- covered, windshield-less pickup trucks with machine-gun mounts welded into their beds sputtered by on predatory errands. We spent Christmas Eve on the roof of our mansion. ABC’s London Bureau had shipped us bottles of whiskey in camera tripod case tubes. We broke into the medical supplies and handed out the pain pills. Somali gunfire provided a light show. Bush, on his final foreign trip as president, arrived in Somalia December 31. He spent the day visiting American troops. We’d found out, through military sources, that the president was planning on a New Year’s visit to an orphanage in Baidoa, a small famine-gripped city 160 miles of bad road away fromMogadishu. The president would travel by helicopter. We were not so lucky. On the last day of 1992 we set out to get to Baidoa before the president did. We went in a four-vehicle convoy. There was a Land Rover full of reporters and another full of satellite technicians and a camera crew. Each Land Rover hauled a trailer, one carrying a satellite dish and the other loaded with a generator and fuel. Somali “security” were needed to guard us – one stake bed truck full of them in front and a second truckload behind. Along the road to Baidoa, a dozen or more impromptu roadblocks had been set up. These were lengths of iron pipe balanced on an oil drum and counterweighted with a chunk of concrete. One harmless-looking old fellow squatted at each roadblock. He was not asking
American Consequences 61
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