Johnson isn’t the only one. As Operation Restore Hope enters its fourth month, a once buoyant sense of mission has soured into boredom and impatience-even anger. The thugs who once terrorized Mogadishu’s port have been cleared away; convoys laden with grain now travel without incident into outlying feeding centers in Baidoa and Bardera. With the threat of famine receding, many of the 16,000 American soldiers who remain in Somalia engage in a dismal routine of policing checkpoints and dodging missiles thrown by teenagers-and wondering when to shoot back. Two U.S. soldiers are facing military hearings in Mogadishu for shooting Somali youths while on patrol, and anti-American riots erupted in Mogadishu two weeks ago. Somalis pass the soldiers handwritten warnings of imminent AK-47 attacks that never materialize, and discoveries of weapons caches buried a few feet below ground have many Americans convinced that disarmament is a futile goal. There’s a “culture gap” between the Americans and the Somalis, says Willy Huber of the relief group SOS Kinderdorf International. “The Americans haven’t been consistent in their aims or their behavior.”
The soldiers are even catching grief from some of the relief workers they are here to protect. Before December, say relief officials, workers protected themselves from marauding gangs by hiring bodyguards armed with heavy weapons. But the U.S.-led forces now let relief workers carry only one light weapon per car-which, they complain, has left them far more vulnerable to attack. Two weeks ago an Irish nurse was shot while traveling in a convoy to Baidoa. She was the third aid worker killed since December. “The people who really need the guns,” says a Somali doctor with Save the Children, “had them taken away by the troops.”
Most U.S. soldiers are eager to clear out and turn the job over to U.N. peacekeepers. (A contingent of 3,000 to 5,000 American troops will remain in Somalia to serve with the U.N.-led forces.) Until the riots broke out in Mogadishu, they were counting on April as the withdrawal date. Now they’re guessing May or June. “I wake up in the morning and I wonder why I’m here,” says 24-year-old Cpl. Eddy Rowin, hanging out in front of the club Arroyo. It’s a makeshift beach cabana erected in memory of the first U.S. soldier killed in Somalia-and a telling monument to the U.S. military presence.
