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By Jeffrey Bartholet
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In a foxhole outside Mogadishu's old air base, Lance Cpl. Marcus Washington waits and worries. The rains drench him, but he keeps his head down: he's been warned about snipers. While his eyes try to patrol the perimeter, his field of fire is filled with raggedy children. They peer through an empty window in the gutted husk of a nearby sentry house, asking for smokes and demanding to know if the black Marine is Somali. Actually, Washington is from Washington, D.C., and knew little about the Horn of Africa. He expected jungles and wild animals and the exotica of a faraway land. What he found, sadly, reminded him of home. "The fear of walking the streets without a gun, the fear of someone shooting at you," says the 24-year-old Washington, "these are things I go through every time I go back to D.C." His younger brother was shot in the back two years ago while on the way to buy groceries and is still recovering. In his hometown, Washington says, "we have what I guess you'd call drug warlords."
Now, a world away, there are warlords of a different sort. As U.S. troops arrive by the thousands, American blacks find themselves confronting Somalia and Africa with conflicting emotions: pity and dispassion, empathy and distrust. Their ambivalence reflects the paradox of being African-American. This is Africa, home of their forefathers. Yet their humanitarian and defensive mission is colorblind. They come as rescuers for the starving, but also as soldiers prepared to kill. Looking down the barrel of an M-16 assault rifle at another dark face-maybe a child-can be a deeply troubling prospect. "My homeboy might be white," says Cpl. Patrick White of his compatriots in arms. "He's ready to go, anxious to lock and load. I'm not." The dilemma is reminiscent of Los Angeles during last spring's riots, when black and white troops often had divergent views of the causes of the violence.
At Fort Drum, a military reservation in upstate New York, soldiers of the U.S. Army's 10th Mountain Division awaiting deployment are thinking already of the racial element in their mission. Sgt. Derrick Blue says blacks and whites will react differently to the starvation they'll soon witness. "We're used to suffering," he says. "Whites will have to deal with it for the first time." Second Lt. Teressa Woodson worries that there will be tension in the American ranks. "Not only are the victims black, but the ones doing the killing, the stealing and the looting are, too," she says. "It's not any different from what you see in America. When these young white soldiers see this, are they going to think this is the typical black man?"
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Racist jargon has long existed in the U.S. armed forces. In World War II, Japanese epithets were used frequently; in the gulf conflict last year, "ragheads" was common parlance in the military to describe Arabs. In the case of Somalia, even before they landed, Corporal White said he overheard one white Marine tell another: "I'll shoot the first black motherf--- I see." That kind of slur can undercut camaraderie, particularly in a military that is 23 percent African-American. Some blacks try to be philosophical. "I'd like to believe it's not intentional racism," says Capt. Kenneth Wells, who heads the Marine Corps air-control group at the Mogadishu airport, "but rather a way of characterizing your enemy and putting him in a general category."
So far, American soldiers have yet to be confronted with the calamity they were expecting. Instead of being met by gunmen or skeletal figures, many soldiers have been greeted by ordinary Somalis. At the airport, some Somalis who could speak English referred to the black soldiers as "brothers." There were glimpses of hunger, though. Children begged for handouts and picked through American garbage at the airport, even as they tore their clothing on the barbed wire intended to keep them away. Eventually, the scale of the Somalia tragedy will be unavoidable. Then the soldiers-black and white-will have to deal with their reaction to so much intense suffering. "They will have to find a balance between overidentifying and dehumanizing the situation," says Maj. Jim Cartwright, division social worker at Fort Drum.
Whatever the differences between American blacks and whites serving in Operation Restore Hope, the utter misery of the Somali people can't help touching all of them. Virtually no U.S. soldier will be able to look at scenes of agony in the African nation and remain unmoved. "All of us have feelings about those people starving," says Corporal White. "I see white guys and blacks out there handing food to kids," adds Captain Wells. And, of course, there is the matter of staying alive yourself in a place where death does not discriminate. "If a person is shooting at you," says Wells, "you don't think about what color their skin is. It all comes down to survival-either you go or he goes." Every soldier in Somalia knows that bullets and shrapnel are the ultimate equalizer.
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