Blithering On

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...

As aggressively as we planned on the Guam , we couldn’t do anything about what was happening at the Embassy, at least not yet. Late in the evening on January 3rd, Embassy buildings were hit by machinegun fire. Then the next morning on the 4th, an Embassy warehouse was struck by a rocket-propelled grenade (RPG) and armed looters fired through gaps in the Embassy fencing until the guards and security staff returned fire and forced them to retreat. [1] By around midday on January 4th, Ambassador Bishop believed the Embassy couldn’t hold out much longer as he reported that the Embassy was “falling behind the curve in our ability to protect ourselves from the lawlessness which now prevails in Mogadishu.” He was certain that they couldn’t hold out until January 7th when the Marine helicopters were originally estimated to arrive, so he requested an “immediate airlift from Saudi Arabia of a parachute force sufficient to provide augmented security to the Chancery and JAO (Joint Administrative O...

With the situation at the Embassy falling apart rapidly, we needed to consider options for putting troops in the Embassy compound earlier than the projected January 7th evacuation date.  The Trenton , which had been traveling with us, had two giant U.S. Marine CH-53E Super Stallion helicopters from Marine Heavy Helicopter Squadron 461 (HMH-461) that were able to refuel in flight. This refueling capability meant that theoretically, we were never too far from the Embassy to help. However, the first look at that option wasn’t very promising. None of the pilots had practiced aerial refueling in six months and the refueling probes had been removed from the helicopters to make room for the aircraft on the Trenton . [1] That option had other practical limits too, including crew rest requirements and the risks associated with conducting inherently dangerous aerial refueling evolutions on long overwater legs in the dark. Still, something had to be done. If the CH-53Es had their refueling p...

The timing of the threat against the American Embassy in Mogadishu on January 2, 1991 was far from perfect as Washington’s attention was centered on the approaching January 15th deadline for Iraq to withdraw from Kuwait. It was with that deadline in mind that on the night of Wednesday, January 2nd, we boarded our aircraft for an evening of NVG training in the Omani desert. However, before we launched, word was circulating around the ship about trouble in Somalia where the civil war was endangering diplomats. President Bush ordered U.S. Air Force C-130s to fly to Mombasa, Kenya with the expectation that they would fly to the Mogadishu International Airport once arrangements could be made for the aircraft to land and for Embassy staff to move to the airport for evacuation. [1]  Somalia had been a place we had paid absolutely no attention to during our time in the region, and with our night training being so important to the liberation of Kuwait, we didn’t give Somalia another thought...

At about the same time that LtCol Wallace was preparing his squadron for the pre-empted deployment to the North Atlantic in July of 1990, James K. Bishop was being sworn in as U.S. Ambassador to Somalia. But, as Ambassador Bishop assumed his posting in Mogadishu, the Somali capital, the nation was slipping badly into turmoil and ruin. It had become a particularly dangerous place where ethnic groups, street gangs, clans, and others fought and created a breakdown of societal order, [1]  a condition accurately characterized in the Marine Corps’ “Operational Maneuver from the Sea” concept paper as a “war of all against all.” [2] Embassies and Somali government buildings had been bombed, senior law enforcement officials had been assassinated, Westerners had been attacked and injured, and killings increased by the day. Twice in three weeks, a U.S. Embassy driver was shot and his vehicle was stolen. Ambassador Bishop later reported, “Vehicles were being taken and their drivers killed by s...

“(Operation) Eastern Exit received relatively little attention as it was conducted on the eve of the war with Iraq. In other circumstances, the execution of such a short-notice and high-risk operation might have garnered front page headlines around the world... The military operation itself might seem more like a Hollywood script than reality.” –Adam Siegel “An American Entebbe” U. S. Naval Institute Proceedings The arrival of 1991 found us wrapping up our fourth month in the Middle East. I had been a member of Marine Medium Helicopter Squadron 263 (HMM-263) since July of 1990 when a few of us joined the squadron from a neighboring squadron, HMM-365, for a two-month deployment to the North Atlantic. As members of HMM-365, we had just completed a lengthy and highly successful deployment to the Mediterranean as part of the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit (Special Operations Capable) (24th MEU (SOC)) when the call went out from HMM-263’s new commander, Lieutenant Colonel R. J. Wallace ...