Overview
"Somalis are fierce warriors who (until they ran the U.S. and the U.N. out of town) have never won a war. They have a problem with central government and don't like strangers telling them what to do."When soldiers are sent to what bureaucrats call a hostile fire zone, they get imminent danger pay amounting to $150 a month. The troops still call it combat pay. When Maj. Martin Stanton and the rest of the infantrymen of the 2d Battalion, 87th Infantry, deployed to the Horn of Africa in December 1992 as the first U.S. Army battalion for Operation Restore Hope, this easily divided down to "Somalia on $5 a day."
Major Stanton led the advanced detachment of U.S. Army troops into Somalia on 13 December 1992. Task Force 2-87 would be responsible for humanitarian relief sector (HRS) Marka, south of Mogadishu. These soldiers were determined to keep that tiny and fractured nation from literally starving to death. Their mission was to ensure that relief supplies were distributed to feeding centers, suppress banditry, disarm the warlords ("like trying to disarm the National Rifle Association"), and separate fighting factions.
Stanton and the men of the 2-87 suddenly found themselves in unfamiliar surroundings trying to accomplish a vague and constantly changing mission. Knowing the good guys from the bad guys was nearly impossible. The period that would become known for its "mission creep" soon approached, when the focus of Restore Hope changed from limited famine relief to nation building. This change of direction inevitably led to armed clashes with Somali warlords.
In this exciting and often humorous memoir, Stanton relates the mounting futility experienced by the Restore Hope soldiers, futility that culminated in the streets of Mogadishu as related in Marks Bowden's Black Hawk Down.
Somalia on Five Dollars a Day: a must read for anyone who wants to truly understand America's post-Cold War military experience.