Nobody Gets Left Behind.
Thirty-three years ago tomorrow, a couple hundred Americans went into the worst part of Mogadishu to grab two of Mohamed Farrah Aideed’s men. It was supposed to take an hour. You know how that turned out.
Here is what I want to talk about, and it ain’t the movie.
The Third of October
Task Force Ranger was about four hundred men. Rangers out of 3rd Battalion, 75th. Delta. The Night Stalkers flying them. Air Force PJs and combat controllers. SEALs. They went in on the afternoon of October 3, 1993, near the Olympic Hotel, right in the middle of the Bakara Market, which is about like picking a fight with a hornet’s nest.
Well, as you recall from Black Hawk Down, they got the men they went after. Then an RPG took down Super Six One, and a little while after that another one took down Super Six Four, and the whole thing turned to ****. The Pentagon’s after-action report says it all:
That is a sentence written by a staff officer, and it still gives me chills. Everything those men did for the next fifteen hours, they did to get their people out.
Now About Those Numbers
You have heard 18 killed and 73 wounded. That’s what the book and movie says.
The declassified Task Force Ranger report, sitting in the Pentagon’s own FOIA reading room, says something a little different. For October 3 and 4 it counts:
But then we count one more killed and thirteen more wounded on October 6, when a mortar round came into the compound and took out Sergeant First Class Matt Rierson, who had survived the whole fight…up until that point. KIA.
Now, I am not here to argue with anybody’s count. Different tallies fold in different men and different days, and every one of those numbers is somebody’s boy, someone’s husband. I point it out because I have spent years now proving that the government’s own paperwork will tell you the truth if you go get it, and because a man who wants to know what happened to his unit can read the report himself instead of taking my word or Hollywood’s for that matter.
Brotherhood
Two men on that night made the decision that everybody who has ever worn the uniform hopes they would make.
Master Sergeant Gary Gordon and Sergeant First Class Randall Shughart were Delta snipers, up in a bird, watching Mike Durant’s crash site from the air and watching the mob move toward it. Put us on the ground, damn it, they demanded. They were told no. They asked again. They were told no. They asked a third time, and somebody let them go, and they were put in with what they could carry, and they held that wreck until they were overwhelmed.
Gordon was killed. Shughart was killed. Durant lived and spent eleven days as a prisoner before he was let go on October 14. Both men got the Medal of Honor, posthumously. You may find this interesting, as I did. They were the first Medals of Honor recipients since Vietnam.
And it was not just them. A relief column of 10th Mountain, Malaysians, and Pakistanis drove back into that city in the dark to get the rest out. A Malaysian soldier, Private Mat Aznan Awang, was killed doing it. Men who did not share a flag or a language with our people went in anyway, because that is the arrangement. You do not leave folks behind.
Here We Are, 33 Years Later
Those Rangers are in their fifties and sixties now. Grandkids. Bad knees. Some of them are doing fine. A lot of them are not. What they need from their government now is not a helicopter, but help for what Mogadishu left them with.
And here is where I have to be the advocate instead of the feller on the porch. Most Somalia Veterans I talk to have no idea about this, so pay attention. (Believe it or not, they are more common than you think. I honestly am surprised at how many Veterans I represent who were in Somalia.)
Under the PACT Act, Somalia is a covered location for toxic exposure, for service on or after August 2, 1990. Same list as Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Qatar, Oman, and the UAE.
That means a Mogadishu Veteran with one of the presumptive conditions does not have to prove what he breathed in. The presumptive cancers include brain, gastrointestinal, glioblastoma, head, kidney, lymphoma, melanoma, neck, pancreatic, reproductive, and respiratory cancers. The respiratory list includes asthma diagnosed after service, chronic bronchitis, COPD, chronic rhinitis, chronic sinusitis, emphysema, interstitial lung disease, pulmonary fibrosis, and sarcoidosis.
If you were there and you have one of those, file. And if VA already denied one of these before the PACT Act, that denial may be worth another look.
But the Line Stops at the Gulf of Aden
Now here comes the part that leaves me scratching my head wondering what Congress was thinkin’ (or if they even were).
There is a second presumption, the Gulf War one, for undiagnosed illness and “chronic multisymptom” illness. That is the one for the fatigue, the joint pain, the gut trouble, the headaches, the IBS, all the misery that never gets a name a doctor will write down. It lives at 38 C.F.R. § 3.317, and it reaches what the regulation calls the Southwest Asia theater of operations, which the regulation defines like this:
Read that list again and tell me what is missing.
Somalia is not on it. The Gulf of Aden is. The Gulf of Aden is the water off the top of Somalia. So, a sailor sitting offshore is inside that presumption, and the Ranger who fought in Bakara Market is outside it. Same deployment. Same war. Same year. One is in and one is out, and the line between them is the beach.
I am not telling you that is unlawful. Stupid? Sure. Congress and VA wrote the lists, and lists have edges. I am telling you it is stupid, and that a Veteran who does not know where the edge falls will file the wrong thing, get denied, and figure the whole system is rigged against him. However, that doesn’t mean you can’t prove direct service-connection.
And If He Needs a Caregiver, There Is a Line for That Too
Here is something I picked up this month that has really piqued my interest.
A lot of the men who came home broken need somebody with them all day. VA has a program for that, the Program of Comprehensive Assistance for Family Caregivers, PCAFC for short. It pays a stipend to the spouse or the daughter or the buddy who does the work, and it comes with training, respite care, and health coverage for the caregiver. For a seriously wounded Veteran it is the difference between staying home and going into a facility. Honestly, once you finally get enrolled into the damn program, it is the cat’s pajamas.
Veterans get denied for it constantly. Veterans I would call obviously eligible, i.e., missing limbs. I have never had a satisfying answer for why.
Well, a little birdie got an answer from a fellow who works inside that program at his local VAMC. It goes like this. Each VA medical center gets an allotment of social workers to supervise PCAFC participants. Each of those social workers is capped at about 80 participants. Huntsville, where my little birdie is, has five. Five times eighty is four hundred. So, four hundred is the house limit. Show up as number 401 and you are out, and it will not matter what the doctors say about you. You could have lost all four limbs and you would still be 401.
Now I want to be careful, because this isn’t anything official.
Obviously, nothing the VA publishes confirms a per-worker cap or a per-facility ceiling. VA’s own caregiver program planning documents talk about filling vacancies, not about capping participants. So, either my little birdie was wrong, or VA is running a limit it has never written down where a Veteran can see it.
I know which one I would bet on, and I know how to find out. I am filing FOIA requests for the per-facility caregiver program staffing numbers, the participant counts, and any caseload standard or guidance VA uses to set them. Same as I did with the docket data. If there is a number, it is written down somewhere, and paper leaves a trail.
If you were denied PCAFC and the denial letter reads like boilerplate, hold onto it. It may turn out to be evidence of something other than your husband’s medical condition.
The Names
Thirty-three years is a long time. Long enough that the men who were nineteen on that rooftop are old enough to be somebody’s granddad, and long enough that the government they served has had every chance in the world to build a benefits system worthy of what they did.
It has not.
On this anniversary, let’s remember the men who did not come home, and for the two who went down into that crowd on purpose because leaving a man behind was not something they were willing to live with.
1st Special Forces Operational Detachment–Delta
SSG Daniel D. Busch
SFC Earl R. Fillmore, Jr.
MSG Gary I. Gordon — Medal of Honor
MSG Timothy L. Martin
SFC Randall D. Shughart — Medal of Honor
3rd Battalion, 75th Ranger Regiment
CPL James M. Cavaco
SGT James C. “Casey” Joyce
SPC Richard W. Kowalewski, Jr.
SGT Dominick M. Pilla
SGT Lorenzo M. Ruiz
CPL James E. “Jamie” Smith
160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment
CW3 Donovan L. Briley — Super Six One
SSG William D. Cleveland, Jr. — Super Six Four
SGT Thomas J. Field — Super Six Four
CW4 Raymond A. Frank — Super Six Four
CW4 Clifton P. Wolcott — Super Six One
10th Mountain Division
SGT Cornell L. Houston — C Co., 41st Engineer Bn.; wounded on the rescue convoy, died of wounds October 6 at Landstuhl
PFC James H. Martin, Jr. — 2d Bn., 14th Infantry
Godspeed.
