The blast wave thundered through the compound, ripping the expletive on my lips in two and cramming half of it back down my throat. The radio-room supervisor, Hassan Osman, and I stumbled to the balcony. In that cathedral-quiet moment between the detonation of the car bomb and the staccato barrage of gunfire, we knew they were coming. It was June 19, Over the P. With every rifle crack, my world flashed in a monochrome of stark, tactical decisions, like life and death reduced to their lowest common denominators.
Even in the moment, the irony of stumbling into my first firefight more than a decade after leaving the Marine Corps was not lost on me. Mogadishu was a study in violent coexistence, a brutal ecosystem where new conflicts sprouted up without ever quelling the old.
After the initial blast, our Somali guards immediately returned fire, dropping the first two Shabab gunmen who came through the breach. Between clipped radio transmissions from the African Union Mission and the Somali government, four more militants unhesitatingly charged over the bodies of their companions.
Under cover of suppressive fire from the towers, several of the guards and I leapfrogged the buildings on the accommodation side to herd staff members to the safe rooms on the opposite end of the compound. Pulling back the bolt on the office Kalashnikov to reveal brass bolstered my courage before our mad dash through the compound, but it was the valor and tenacity of our Somali allies that actually saved lives. Mogadishu left a permanent scratch on my heart, but talking about the attack remains difficult.
The Shabab murdered 15 civilians, aid workers and contractors at the compound that day, including four of our Somali guards. In Mogadishu, I led a United Nations Department of Safety and Security office consisting of three other international field security coordination officers β a Russian, a Ugandan and a Bulgarian β and about 20 local advisers, drivers and radio operators. Save for an unauthorized Chinese-made Kalashnikov, purchased by one of my predecessors and handed down to every senior field security coordination officer since, we were armed with nothing more than our wits.
