Blithering On

In early 1996, I was a member of Marine Medium Helicopter Squadron 162 (HMM-162), the aviation element of the 22nd Marine Expeditionary Unit (Special Operations Capable) on board the USS Guam (LPH-9). We were operating in the Adriatic Sea and ashore in Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Albania as part of the peace enforcement force, the "implementation force" (IFOR), during Operation Decisive Endeavor. We were wrapping up our work in the Adriatic in early April, preparing to head to Israel for some exercises, when we received an order to prepare to redeploy to the west coast of Africa for potential operations in embattled Liberia. As we steamed toward the southern end of the Adriatic, we were either going to turn left toward Israel or right toward Liberia. By the time we reached the Mediterranean, it was a right turn. We arrived at "Mamba Station" off the coast of Liberia early in the morning of April 20th. When we arrived, fighting around the U. S. Embassy was pret...

I think we all have had times when we did something, or thought about doing something, that didn’t seem like much of a big deal at the time, but then later its importance grew over time, and the decision you made to either do that thing or not turned out to be more meaningful than we had imagined at the time we made the choice. One such time for me was the time some friends and I climbed Mount Fuji in Japan. We were deployed to a camp at the base of the mountain from Okinawa. It was July 4, 1976 and we had a military parade in honor of the 200th birthday of our Nation and about a dozen of us thought it would be cool to climb it to celebrate the day after the parade. Mount Fuji isn’t a difficult mountain to climb, there’s just a lot of it: a little more than 12,000 feet of it. A lot of Japanese successfully make a pilgrimage of the climb every year. You can climb it in about eight hours if you follow a trail. It’s certainly no Denali. We wanted the climb to be special though, so we ...

Hurry Up and Wait... I grew up in a small community in southern Illinois–Newton, Illinois–where people generally knew each other or at least knew   of   each other. It was–and still is–a nice town. It’s the kind of town that still holds a fall parade where tractors and marching bands own the streets. People sit along the curb in their chairs while the kids play along the street. The people there cherish the tempo and lifestyle, quietly aware that if everyone lived that way, it would be a much better world. I wasn’t exactly setting any academic records in high school, so I needed a change of pace and some way to transition to a successful track somewhere, somehow. I had thought about the military, but I hesitated to follow through. I wasn’t sure I would be cut out for the military life, and I didn’t know which branch of the service to enter. I was very certain that if I did join the military service, it wouldn’t be the Marines because I was pretty sure I couldn’t make it there....

Marine Corps aviators in fleet squadrons have two “jobs.” The obvious one is their flying job. In my day, the other was simply what we referred to as our “ground” job, an assignment that contributed to the running of the squadron. When I checked in to HMM-365 in the Fall of 1985, my CO asked me what ground job I wanted, probably just to see where my head was. He was going to put me where he wanted to either way. "I don't care" wouldn't have been a good answer. With my experience as an enlisted infantryman, I wanted to be in a position where I could lead Marines. The place to do that in a squadron is in the aircraft maintenance department, so that’s where I told him I wanted to work. He said that he didn’t put new guys in the maintenance department right away, but he’d see how things worked out.  H e put me in an office pushing paper instead, but when someone told me that the best way to earn my way into the maintenance department was to jump on every post-maintenance ...

Each of our aircraft passenger manifests told a story. One listed the names of Kuwaiti and Soviet diplomats.  Another roster included the name of a woman who had been shot, another named a man who had suffered knife wounds, and another named the Sudanese ambassador’s wife who was about to give birth. The manifest of LtCol Wallace’s aircraft included the name of a woman who boarded a helicopter with a parachute draped around her, the only personal belonging she had salvaged. [1] She reassured crew chief Corporal Tommy Sheffield that she wouldn’t jump out of the aircraft during the flight to the Guam. [2] The evacuation in Mogadishu ultimately extracted 281 people from 30 nations, including sixty-one Americans, thirty-nine Soviet citizens, seventeen British citizens, twenty-six Germans, and various numbers from twenty-six other nations. That included twelve heads of diplomatic missions: eight ambassadors and four chargés d’affaires. [3] U.S. Embassy Public Affairs Officer Karen Agui...

At just before 11:00 PM on January 5th, ten CH-46E helicopter crews, five from HMM-263 and five from HMM-365, began bubbling up to the Guam’s flight deck to man their aircraft. The plan called for the mission to be completed in four waves of five aircraft. Five of our HMM-263 aircraft—callsign “ Thunder ”—would go in for a load of evacuees first. As we departed the Embassy grounds and headed back to the USS Guam , mission commander LtCol Wallace would radio a code word that would signal the five HMM-365 aircraft—callsign “ Rugby ”—under flight leader LtCol Bob Saikowski to launch toward Mogadishu. That would happen twice. As we walked across the dimly lit flight deck toward our aircraft, the Guam’s flight deck speaker system, which was normally active with calls and instructions dedicated to controlling the movement of aircraft, instead grabbed the attention of the Marines and sailors on the flight deck with the familiar strains of Lee Greenwood’s God Bless the USA . We stopped and t...

As soon as the helicopters landed, the 60-man security force quickly took up positions around the Embassy compound. The SEALS ran in a vee formation toward the Chancery while the Marines forced the aggressors with the ladders away from the Embassy wall. [1] The SEAL team was primarily responsible for working with the Embassy’s five-member Marine Security Guard (MSG) force to protect the Ambassador. Meanwhile, the 46 Marines who comprised the balance of the security force established a perimeter to secure the Embassy compound. [2] Karen Aguilar, the Public Affairs Officer for the U.S. Embassy in Mogadishu, later said that the arrival of the Marines was both startling and fearsome, “They must have been carrying 200 pounds of equipment, they looked about seven feet tall, and on every inch of their bodies they had this terrible paint. They looked ugly. They looked like swamp creatures.” [3] The description was a compliment. As desperate as Ambassador Bishop had been to get Marines in the ...

At 5:15 PM (Mogadishu time) on the 4th, the two Super Stallions took off from the Trenton and landed on the Guam where the crews turned in for a little sleep before launch time. The crews were awakened at 12:45 AM (Mogadishu time) on the 5th so they could conduct final mission briefings, review intelligence and weather reports, and receive updated maps and satellite images of the Embassy compound. Threats included small arms fire, SA-2 and SA-3 high-altitude surface-to-air missiles, and anti-aircraft artillery (AAA) scattered throughout the Mogadishu area. By 2:30 AM (Mogadishu time), the 60-man security force consisting of Marines from the 1st Battalion, 2nd Marine Regiment and a 9-man SEAL team, boarded the two aircraft. Seventeen minutes later, the two giant helicopters, armed with .50 caliber machineguns on each side of the aircraft and an M-60 machinegun mounted on the ramp, lifted off from the deck of the Guam to begin their 466-mile overwater flight to Mogadishu. [1] Operatio...