Hartley's account of all this is revealing and well observed, though it buckles a few swashes too many, particularly telling of post-ordeal orgies of drink and sex. Back in Nairobi, Kenya, from one grueling sortie, and repairing to a favorite nightspot, the author enters "the red hell of a thousand girls."
All affectations drop away or are swallowed up in the book's centerpiece. Hartley covered the Somalia drama from beginning to end: from the overthrow of the dictatorship of Muhammad Siad Barre, through the rampage of warring chiefs that followed, the famine aggravated by the war, the UN intervention spearheaded by the US Marines, to the withdrawal of the UN forces, again spearheaded by the Marines.
Hartley writes with powerful detail of the pillaging of Mogadishu by the anti-Barre rebels. He writes of subsequent perilous daily sorties he made with his fellow Africa veterans. The Big Feet (star reporters) arrived of course, but they were never big enough to pick their way, unaided, through a quicksand.
He writes the horrors along with the sharpest of vignettes. At a Somali checkpoint armed tribesmen demand the clan affiliations of those seeking passage. One man is pulled out and shot. "He should have borrowed the ancestors of a friend," a Somali remarks.
Hartley is scathing about the US intervention: not its intentions but its disastrous misapprehension of the place and the people. Inevitably of course Iraq comes to mind. He writes of the bloody attack on what intelligence reported as a meeting of warring chieftains; they turned out to be tribal elders seeking to broker a truce. Seventy were killed, according to the Red Cross; a UN official quit in protest.
He quotes the commanding US admiral calling attention to the drone of choppers off on another sortie, possibly ill informed: "How I love the sound of freedom in the air." And a spokesman's bitter assessment of a mission that began as humanitarian aid, went on to topple the bad guys, then became -- haplessly -- bad guys and finally left after 150 peacekeepers and thousands of Somalis died, with nothing much accomplished: "We fed them. They grew strong. They killed us."
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