The Americans Won’t Go Back In — How Australian SASR Took the Zone That Broke Black Hawk Down
Brian Dawson stepped off a transport into Moadishu in October 1993 with the smell of burning plastic already in his throat. He was a lieutenant colonel and 3 days earlier the last American Black Hawk had come down in the Bakara market 2 km from where he was standing. His second child had been 6 weeks old when he left Australia.
Someone in Canberra had decided the United Nations needed an Australian at its headquarters in the city. A man who could write the plan for what came next. That man was Dawson. The officers already in that building had made up their minds about what the plan should say. The answer was leave. The question the rest of this story answers is whether Australia took 30 years to say thank you for what was written in that building or whether Australia simply forgot.
The city Dorson drove through on the way to headquarters had once been a proper place. The main colonial avenue Corso Vtorio Emanuel had tiled footpaths and buildings with plaster on their walls. Italian architects had built it that way during the colonial years when Mogadishu had cafes and evening markets and people who walked slowly because they had nowhere urgent to be.
By October 1993, the tiles were broken and the plaster was gone. Most of the buildings were concrete frames with holes where windows used to be. The streets were quiet in the way that only places with fresh danger go quiet. 3 days before Dorson landed, 19 American aircraft had come in from the north at 3:32 in the afternoon. 160 soldiers went into the Bakara market to catch two of the Warlord Adids men.
The mission was supposed to take less than an hour. It took 15 hours. When it was over, 18 Americans were dead. 84 more were wounded. 84 men hurt in a single afternoon in one district of one city in a mission that was supposed to be finished before dark. Two Blackhawk helicopters were on the ground burning.
Somali fighters dragged the bodies of American soldiers through the streets while cameras recorded it. People watching from lounge rooms in Sydney and London and Washington understood immediately that something had broken that was not going to be fixed. On October 7th, 4 days after the battle, President Clinton went on television and gave America a date.
March 31st, 1994, every American soldier would be out of Somalia by then. Italy and Belgium and France and Sweden looked at the same footage and reached the same decision. In February 1994, the United Nations Security Council met and removed the part of the mission’s rules that allowed its forces to actually make the militias disarm.
The operation that was supposed to rebuild a broken country, the one that had cost $1.6 billion and claimed the lives of more than 140 United Nations personnel in hostile incidents, could no longer push back when someone pointed a rifle at it. By March 3rd, 1994, the American combat forces were gone. Most of the Western nations were gone, too.
The city they left behind was not calmer than the one they had entered. That is where the story most people know ends. This is the one that comes after. After Blackhawk Down, when the world ran, Australia stayed. 6 months after America left, 10 Sassa operators were still inside Mogadishu. Not by accident, Australia flew them in on purpose in April 1994 because 67 other Australians were still in the city, unarmed with no way to protect themselves.
This is the story of what those 10 men did and why Australia took 30 years to say it was worth remembering. To understand how those 10 men ended up there, you need to go back to before the cameras arrived. In the years of civil war that followed the collapse of Somalia’s government in 1991, roughly 300,000 Somali died of starvation.
4 million more were at risk by 1993. There were no courts, no police, and nothing resembling law except the gun of whichever warlord controlled your street that morning. 26 nations sent people to try to help. Australia was one of them. The Australians who arrived in 1992 were not soldiers sent to fight. They were supply workers and air traffic controllers there to keep the airport running and the food moving.
They worked unarmed in a city where gunfire at night was so ordinary that people only paid attention when it came unusually close. Some days the small Australian group was caught in crossfire between Somali factions who had no interest in them at all. They kept working anyway. By October 1993, Australia had already rotated three groups of people through Somalia.
The work they did was quiet and unnoticed. None of them had failed. When the big American force arrived in early 1993 and took over the security mission, the Australian supply group stayed on and kept supporting the United Nations. When the Americans got into a fight they could not finish in the Bakara market, the Australians were still at the airport.
When Brian Dawson drove through the shattered streets of Moadishu in October 1993, 67 Australians were still doing their jobs in that city, keeping the airfield open, logging the cargo lists. They had nowhere to go until Australia gave the order to leave. And Australia had not yet given that order. More than 140 United Nations personnel would die from hostile acts before the Somalia mission was finished.
The Security Council had taken away the mission’s ability to enforce anything. The nations with the most power had decided the problem was too hard and too far away. The warlord who had just beaten the Americans was still in the city, still armed, still in control of the streets where the helicopters had burned.
The 67 Australians at the airport, had no weapons and no protection. They had a job to do and they were doing it and they needed someone to cover them. Dawson walked into the United Nations headquarters and found officers who had already given up. He described what he found in a single sentence. later when people asked. The force, he said, was basically in shock.
He pulled out his notebook. He put his pen to the paper. He would be in that city for seven more months, writing plans in a headquarters that everyone else was quietly preparing to leave until the very month Australia flew in the men who would protect the people his plans were written to keep alive. Before Somalia broke America, it was already breaking other things.
The first Australians to serve there did not arrive with fanfare. In October 1992, the Australian government sent a 30 person movement control unit to Somalia to coordinate transport for the United Nations mission. The unit was commanded by Major Greg Jackson. His people arrived before most of the world had heard of Moadishu.
What they found was a port that smelled like diesel and old rot. The cranes on the waterfront were working barely under the watch of armed men who answered to nobody except the warlord who controlled that section of dock that particular morning. The roads behind the port ran through neighborhoods where entire blocks had been gutted.
Window frames gone, doors gone, copper wire pulled out of the walls. The city had been eaten alive by people desperate enough to sell scrap metal for something close to food. Major Jackson and the small Australian team were there to keep the machines moving. They logged the cargo lists. They managed the flow of aid through the airport and the seapport.
Unarmed in a city that was at war with itself. On some nights, gunfire broke out close enough that they could hear the individual shots. Sometimes they were caught between two Somali factions fighting over something that had nothing to do with the United Nations and nothing to do with Australia. They did not run.
They went back to the manifests and the schedules and the radios and kept doing the thing they had come to do. The regiment that would one day send men to stand guard over those Australians and everyone who came after them had been built for exactly this kind of situation. The Special Air Service Regiment had been part of the Australian Army since 1957.
Campbell Barracks, Swanborn, Western Australia, a long way from any city that looked like Moadishu. The regiment ran on small groups of men who could operate deep inside places with no safety net. Four men, five men, six men. No quick reaction force 2 minutes out. No air cover on standby.
Just the team, the ground, and the problem in front of them. The men who stayed in that regiment were not the ones who needed people watching. They were the ones who did not notice the difference. Lieutenant Colonel David Hurley had not served with the Sassar. His regiment was the Royal Australian Regiment, the Infantry, the Big Conventional Force.
But when Australia deployed its largest Somalia contingent in January 1993, Hurley was the man in command. His battalion, more than 900 soldiers, was given the Bidoa humanitarian relief sector. 17,000 km of contested countryside centered on the town of Bidoa in south central Somali. The Americans who handed it over described it as manageable.
Hurley walked through the main town of Bidoa in the first week and did not use that word. The buildings had been hollowed out the same way the buildings in Moadishu had been hollowed out. Broken glass on the streets, the smell of something long dead nearby. Gang shootings every single night without exception. Hurley wrote home early in the deployment.
He did not soften it. He wrote that it was a frustrating little war. No real enemy, he said, just people shooting at his patrols. Elders who claimed they wanted help, but would not provide information. Nobody you could trust to tell the truth. It was an honest letter from a man who understood what kind of problem he was inside.
His battalion stayed for roughly 5 months. They escorted more than 400 food convoys, delivering more than 8,000 tons of grain to the villages around Bidoa. They left in May 1993, and what they left behind was genuinely better than what they had found. Aid was moving. People were eating, unglamorous, unnoticed, important work.
Hurley kept serving after Somalia. He kept climbing through the ranks. Two decades later, he would be the chief of the defense force. A few years after that, the king’s representative in Australia. He would be standing in a room in April 2023 when Somalia veterans finally received the recognition they had been waiting 30 years to receive.
By the time Blackhawk Down happened in October 1993, four Australian service contingents had already rotated through the country. Each one doing the same quiet work Major Jackson had started. Keeping the airport open, keeping the manifests accurate, working unarmed in conditions that would have been considered extraordinary anywhere else but had become routine for the Australians in Moadishu.
None of them had failed. All of them had done their jobs. When America announced it was leaving and the other western nations began to follow, Australia looked at the 67 support personnel still inside Moadishu and did not give the order to leave. The mission was not finished. The commitment was not broken. Australia was staying.
The problem with staying was that those 67 people had no weapons and no training for what Mogadeshu could throw at them. They were logistics workers and air traffic controllers who could keep a runway operational in a war zone but could not fight their way out of one. The militia that had just driven the American Rangers out of the Bakara market was still in the city, still armed, still angry, still looking for weakness.
Australia was staying. That meant Australia needed to supply its own protection. It meant 10 men in a C130 flying toward a city the world had already written off with a very simple job. Keep 67 unarmed Australians alive long enough for Australia to decide it was time to come home. No one was going to write it up.
No one was going to give them a parade. That was fine. The job was the job. But first, it had to be done. April 1994, Mogadishu, the American combat forces had been gone for about a month when the Australian C130 touched down at the airport on the edge of the city. 10 men walked down the ramp into air that smelled like hot concrete and something else underneath it.
Something the city gave off in the afternoon heat that you could not name but would not forget. They carried weapons, comm’s gear, and everything a small team needs when the nearest help is a very long flight away. They were from J Troop Three Squadron Special Air Service Regiment. Their job, written simply in the orders that had sent them here, was force protection for the Australian Service Contingent in Moadishu.
Keep 67 unarmed Australians alive until Australia decided it was time to leave. The compound they walked into was an island. The airport perimeter was wire and sandbags and the hope that the fighters in the surrounding buildings would decide there were easier targets somewhere else. There usually were. Usually was not always.
Somali gunmen had taken to climbing into the buildings that overlooked the airfield and firing down into the compound when the mood took them. Not coordinated assaults. Single rounds, short bursts from above, random enough that you could not predict it and common enough that you could not ignore it.
Mortar rounds came in the same way. Most of them landed outside the wire. Most of them. The New Zealand troops at the nearby seapport recorded the same conditions. Some days vehicle movement outside the wire stopped entirely because the roads were too dangerous to drive. On those days, helicopters flew the route instead. The city was not at war the way the movies show war. It was something worse.
It was a place where violence happened constantly in small amounts, just often enough to keep everyone alive to the fact that it could be more at any moment. The coalition that was supposed to be holding all of this together had been gutted. At its peak, Unisome II had been authorized for 28,000 troops. 28,000. By the time J troop arrived, the Western nations had taken the bulk of that force home.
What remained was drawn mostly from African and Asian member states, less equipped, operating under a revised mandate the United Nations Security Council had stripped of enforcement authority in February. The mission could no longer make anyone do anything. It could ask, it could request, it could write reports. It could not make a single Somali fighter put down his weapon.
The warlord who had driven the Americans out was still in the city with all his men and all his guns and a reputation that had just grown to a size that would take years to work around. The 10 Sasar operators understood the arithmetic. 10 men, 67 people to keep alive, no quick reaction force, no dedicated air support. The nearest significant Australian military asset was a long flight away.
If something went badly wrong inside Moadishu, the response would come from the 10 men themselves and nobody else. Their presence was the deterrent. Their visibility, their capability, their willingness to be seen operating in the city were the things that were supposed to keep the calculations simple for any militia commander thinking about testing the wire.
It was a thin margin and everyone in J troop knew exactly how thin it was. The man who had commanded American forces through the worst of what had led to this moment was General Thomas Montgomery. The United States deputy commander of Unisome II Montgomery had watched the whole collapse from the inside.
He had asked for armored vehicles before October 3. He had asked for tanks. The requests went to the American Secretary of Defense Les Aspen and Aspen said no. On the afternoon of October 3rd, when the first Black Hawk came down in the Bicara market and Rangers and Delta operators were pinned in the streets for 15 hours, the absence of those armored vehicles cost American lives.
Aspen resigned in December 1993 under the weight of that decision. But what Montgomery said later about the withdrawal itself was the thing that reframed everything. He did not describe the American pull out as a defeat. He described it as a gift. His words on the record were direct. He said that the United States wound up giving a victory to Adid that Adid had not won [music] on the 3rd day of October.
The battle had not beaten America. America’s own response to the battle had handed the warlord exactly what he wanted. The 10 SAS operators, now running patrols in Moadishu, were not simply protecting Australian logistics workers from general danger. They were operating inside a city where the man who had just received that gift was still present, still powerful, and still watching to see who else would leave.
In August 1994, 4 months into the Sasar deployment, a Unisome convoy was ambushed southwest of Moadishu. Seven Indian peacekeepers were killed. Nine more were wounded. Mortars, anti-aircraft weapons. Small arms. [music] A planned attack in the middle of the afternoon on a road UN forces used regularly. The violence that the American withdrawal was supposed to have somehow resolved was continuing.
It had not stopped. It had just found different targets. Brian Dawson was still in Mogadishu that April when the C130 came in from the south, still writing plans in a headquarters full of officers who had already given up. He watched the 10 men walk off the ramp and start setting up. One month later, in May 1994, he packed his notebook and flew home to Australia.
The 6-week old baby he had left behind was 9 months old. The plans he had written during the worst months of Anosam the Tekken’s collapse had led in some small part to those 10 men being in that compound. His work was done. Theirs was just beginning. The 10 Australians were still in Moadishu through the summer. Still doing the same thing they had been doing since April.
Check the wire. Check the vehicles. Check the roots. Go out. Come back. Do it again tomorrow. Nobody outside the compound was watching, but they were there. And being there, it turned out, meant something. Muhammad Farah Adid understood something in mid 1994 that very few people outside Somalia were willing to say out loud.
The international community had flinched. The most powerful military on earth had come to his city, lost 18 men in a single afternoon, and gone home. The United Nations had rewritten its own rules to remove the part that might have forced Adid to give up his weapons. The Western Nations were packing their offices.
The cameras that had made him famous were pointed somewhere else. The warlord who had spent years fighting to control Moadishu now looked at his city and saw something that was almost within reach. He began to move accordingly. He opened talks with other faction leaders presenting himself as the natural political authority. His fighters held the Barara market, the same streets where the Black Hawks had burned, and they held it openly and without apology.
He was telling anyone who would listen that the next step was a government and that he would lead it. He had not won a military victory over the United Nations. He had won something more useful. He had won the departure of his most dangerous opponent. And he had watched every other Western nation follow that opponent toward the airport.
Think about what I did was looking at in those months. Every Western nation had gone. The Americans were home. The Europeans were gone. The UN had rewritten its own rules to stop itself interfering. In the streets where the Blackhawks had burned, his fighters moved without any force pushing back. He had good reason to believe the problem was solved.
And then there were these 10 men at the airport. They were not looking for him. They were not there to fight him or arrest him or disrupt what he was building. They were driving routes between the airport and the seapport and keeping 67 Australians alive. But they were there. One Western nation had looked at everything Adid thought he had won and decided it was not reason enough to leave.
That presence did not stop the civil war. It did not bring the factions to a table, but it meant the international community’s retreat from Mogadishu was not total. When the world ran, one flag held its ground. It was Australian. September 15th, 1994, the United States liaison office in Moadishu, which had maintained a small American diplomatic presence and a security platoon since the main military withdrawal, packed its files and relocated to Nairobi.
The security conditions had deteriorated past the point where the Americans were willing to keep their people there. The platoon redeployed to Mombasa in Kenya and 3 days later went home. The last American military personnel in Moadishu were gone. The Sassa operators were still there. After September 15, the 10 men of J troop were operating in a city with no American military presence of any kind, no American diplomatic presence, and a United Nations force that the Security Council was preparing to dismantle entirely.
The November 4 vote to end UNISAM II was 6 weeks away. Everyone inside the mission who was paying attention knew it was coming. The coalition was contracting around them week by week the way a fire contracts when the fuel runs out. The remaining UN troops were drawing their perimeters tighter. The city was not getting safer.
It was getting quieter in the way that places get quiet when the people with options have already left. The Australian Defender magazine would later publish photographs of SASSA operators working in the streets of downtown Mogadishu in late 1994 in the urban core in the streets and laneways that ran through the part of Moadishu that had been most dangerous throughout the entire mission.
The article carried a single word nickname for the men in the pictures, the Gerbles. They were not at the airport. They were not behind wire. They were downtown in a city where the warlord who had broken American resolve was operating freely. The men of J troop are not named in any public record available today.
Their specific operations in those months are not documented for the public. But the conditions they worked in are documented and from those you can build the picture. One of the 10 men preparing a vehicle movement from the airport to the seapport in October 1994 would have checked the route first, checked the time of day, checked what had changed in the city in the last 12 hours that might make the route more dangerous than it had been the day before.
loaded the vehicles, driven through streets mostly empty because the people who lived there had learned to be somewhere else when armed men moved through past buildings with no glass in the windows. Laundry hanging from the upper floors. Children visible in doorways who watched without expression. Arrived, unloaded, assessed, driven back, logged it, done it again.
The mission was not to fight. This point mattered more than anything else. 10 men could not hold a perimeter against a militia force the size of the one 80 commanded. They were there to make the calculation simple for any commander thinking about testing the Australian position. The people at the airport had 10 operators from a regiment that had spent 30 years learning to make problems disappear quietly.
The cost of finding out exactly what that meant was higher than whatever the airport was worth to anyone who was not Australian. Most days, nobody tested it. The November vote was coming. The withdrawal was coming. The 67 Australians were still alive and still working. until the job was finished.
The 10 men stayed at their work the same way they had stayed at it since April, quietly, completely without any expectation that anyone outside that compound would remember it. November 1994, the last Australians loaded their gear onto the transport at Mogadishu airport and walked up the ramp. The 10 SSA operators were among them.
The 67 support personnel were among them. The RAF air traffic controllers who had kept that runway open through one of the most dangerous years in the history of United Nations peacekeeping were among them. The ramp closed. The aircraft taxied. It lifted off the same strip of concrete they had been protecting for months and climbed away from the city and pointed south toward home. That was it.
No ceremony, no parade on the other end, no press release from Canberra saying Australia had completed its mission in Somalia and brought every one of its people home alive. The aircraft landed and the Australians got off and went back to their lives. The thing they had done in Moadishu went into the files.
The files went into the cabinets. The cabinets sat in the dark. The 67 unarmed support personnel came home alive. That was the outcome. That was what the 10 Sasar operators had been sent there to achieve. They achieved it. Not one Australian support worker was killed during the period J troop was running force protection in Moadishu.
Not one was seriously wounded in a hostile incident. The people who needed protecting went home. The people who protected them went home. By any measure that counted, the mission was a success. Here is the partial answer. The Sassa were in Moadishu because 67 unarmed Australians needed to get home on Australia’s terms and not someone else’s. They did. The job was finished.
But it opens a harder question, one that takes 30 years to answer properly. If the mission was a success, if 67 Australians came home alive because 10 operators did their jobs in one of the most dangerous cities on Earth, why did Australia take three decades to say it mattered? Unison II continued without Australia for four more months.
The mission shrank further. The remaining troops pulled their perimeters tighter. On November 4th, 1994, the United Nations Security Council voted to withdraw all remaining forces. By early March 1995, the last UN troops left Somalia. The mission was over. It had not achieved what it set out to achieve. The civil war continued.
The militias kept their weapons. The warlords kept their power. Muhammad Farahid declared himself president. The international community did not recognize the claim, but that was not the point. He controlled enough of the city to make the title feel real to the people living under his authority. In August 1996, he was wounded in fighting between rival factions in Moadishu.
He died from those wounds shortly after. He never consolidated the power he thought October 3rd, 1993 had given him. The city he had fought his whole life to control was still burning when he left it. Back in Australia, the accounting had already begun to go wrong. In November 1993, before J troop had even deployed, the first battalion Royal Australian Regiment received a chief of general staff commendation for its work on Operation Solace.
Not a unit citation, the proper recognition for sustained outstanding service. A commendation lower than a citation, a handshake rather than a medal. When the case was subsequently made for a meritorious unit citation, the chief of the general staff rejected it. The documented reason was brief and final.
The service, the determination stated, did not warrant such a recommendation. 211 Australians had served in Somalia across the four operation iguana contingents. Not the big deployment, not the one ray battalion group that had gone to Bidoa with armored vehicles and a full logistics chain. The quiet one, the movement controllers and the air traffic controllers and the small liaison teams who had been in Mogadishu since 1992, [music] unarmed in the middle of a civil war, keeping the airport and the seapport working so that food could reach people who were dying
without it. When the big American force arrived and [music] the cameras pointed at the dramatic story, the Australians who had been there before the cameras arrived [music] kept doing their jobs in the background. When the big American force left and the cameras went with it, those Australians stayed.
19 of the 211 received individual medallic recognition over the years. The units they belonged to received nothing at the formal level for a very long time. The weight of what had actually happened in that city did not fit in the files. The months of daily threat assessment, the vehicle movements through hostile streets.
The knights listening to mortar rounds land outside the wire. That weight had no box to go in. It sat with the men who had carried it home, waiting for someone to eventually say out loud that it had been worth doing. If you want to make sure stories like this one reach the people who should hear them, subscribing to the channel costs you nothing and means we can keep telling them.
The Somalia veterans waited 30 years for the record to be corrected. The least we can do is make sure the record gets told. The city that broke America did not only break America’s appetite for Somalia. It broke something larger. And the effects spread out from Moadishu like rings from a stone dropped in still water, reaching places that had nothing to do with Africa and nothing to do with warlords.
There is a phrase that military historians and foreign policy analysts use to describe what happened after October 3rd, 1993. The Moadishu effect. The idea is simple. The images of American soldiers being dragged through the streets were broadcast around the world on October 4. By October 7th, the most powerful nation on Earth had announced a withdrawal date.
The lesson that governments and military planners and political advisers took from that sequence of events was brutal. Casualties in a foreign country shown on television could end a mission faster than any military defeat. The cameras were more dangerous than the bullets. And the response to that lesson for the United States in particular was to become extremely careful about where it put its people.
The cost of that carefulness was paid by people who had nothing to do with Somalia. In April 1994, Jroop was settling into its routine at Mogadishu airport. Halfway across the continent in Rwanda, Hoou militias had begun killing Tootsie civilians. They killed somewhere between 500,000 and 800,000 people in 100 days. Work out what that means.
Roughly 8,000 people killed every single day for more than 3 months. men with machetes moving through villages doing something that required deliberate sustained effort from a large number of people over a very long period of time. The Clinton administration watched it happen and chose its words carefully. The word genocide carried legal obligations under international law.
If it was genocide, the United States was obligated to act. The administration’s spokespeople were instructed not to use the word. They used phrases like acts of genocide instead, which was a way of describing the thing without triggering the requirement to do anything about it. The United Nations had peacekeepers in Rwanda.
Their commander, a Canadian general named Romeo Delair, sent cables to New York asking for permission to intervene. The cables were not answered the way he needed them to be answered. The UN reduced the size of its force in Rwanda in the middle of the killing rather than increasing it. The thinking in Washington was the same calculation it had been running for months. Intervening meant casualties.
Casualties on television meant political collapse at home. Somalia had proved that. The people of Rwanda paid for that proof with their lives while the world’s most powerful nation watched from a careful distance. Haiti came next. A month after American forces completed their withdrawal from Somalia, a US Navy ship called the US Harland County sailed into the harbor at Porto Prince carrying troops who were supposed to help restore order to the country.
On the dock, fewer than 200 armed demonstrators appeared and began shouting and firing into the air. The ship’s commanders saw the television cameras recording the confrontation and understood immediately what a clash would look like on the evening news back home. The Harland County reversed out of the harbor and left. Fewer than 200 lightly armed people standing on a dock and making noise had turned away a United States Navy vessel.
The Moadishu effect had crossed the Atlantic. Bosnia was different in its details, but the same in its shape. The killing of Muslim and Croatian civilians by Bosnian Serb forces had been documented by journalists and observers for years. The United States had the military capacity to intervene and declined to deploy ground forces throughout that period.
The cost calculation in Washington had shifted after Somalia. The people dying in Bosnian towns and villages were paying part of the price of what had happened in the Bakara market. None of what the Mogadishu effect cost the world was the fault of 10 men at an airport in Somalia.
They were keeping 67 people alive. That was the whole scope of what they had been asked to do. While the world around them made larger decisions with larger consequences, they drove the roots, checked the wire, and brought their people home. All of this was happening while 10 Australians were still in Mogadishu. After Somalia, the world had learned that showing up cost [music] something.
Australia had learned something different. Showing up quietly [music] without the cameras and the air strikes and the mission creep was still the job. The people who needed protecting still needed protecting whether the television was watching or not. The Sassa that would land in East Teeour in September 1999.
Ahead of the main Interfett force into a country where Indonesianbacked militias had spent weeks burning everything they could reach was a regiment that had already learned what it meant to operate in a collapsing environment without a safety net. Mogadishu had not been their hardest deployment. It had been a rehearsal. the capacity to hold a position in a broken city.
To run force protection without a large national force behind you, to complete the mission without the recognition structures that normally confirm military service. Those things had been practiced in Somalia before they were needed in Teeour and they were needed in Teeour badly. The men of J troop came home in November 1994 and did not hold a press conference.
They did not give interviews. They went back to Campbell Barracks in Swanborn and continued their careers. And the seven months they had spent running force protection in a city the rest of the world had abandoned became one entry among many in a regimental record that was not available to the public and was not meant to be.
This is not unusual for SASSA operators. The regiment is not built for noise. It is built for the work. The men who had been in Mogadishu understood that. Most of them would have said if asked that the silence was fine, that the mission had been completed and the people they were protecting had come home alive.
And that was the only measure that mattered. What was not fine was what happened to the formal record. And it took a very long time for anyone with the authority to fix it to try. 211 Australians had rotated through Operation Iguana across four contingents. Not the big deployment, not the one battalion group that had gone to Bidoa with armored vehicles and a full logistics chain behind it. the quiet one.
The movement controllers and the air traffic controllers and the small liaison teams who had been in Moadishu since 1992 unarmed in the middle of a civil war keeping the airport and the seapport working so that food could reach people who were dying without it. When the big American force arrived and the cameras pointed at the dramatic story, the Australians who had been there before the cameras arrived kept doing their jobs in the background.
When the big American force left and the cameras went with it, those Australians stayed. 19 of the 211 received individual medallic recognition over the years. The units they belong to received nothing at the formal level for a very long time. In 1993, the chief of general staff gave one raar a commendation.
When the case was made for a meritorious unit citation, the proper recognition for sustained outstanding service in warlike operations, the chief of general staff rejected it. The service, the decision stated, did not warrant such a recommendation. That decision went into the files and the men who had been unarmed in firefights and had kept the airport running through mortar attacks and had done their jobs in a city where more than 140 United Nations personnel died from hostile acts went home to a country that had officially decided
their collective service was not worth a unit citation by 2019. 19, a man named Jim Masters, who led the one raar association, wrote directly to the chief of the defense force, General Angus Campbell, and asked him to look at it again. The original determination had been made in a different time under different leadership with different standards applied. Campbell received the letter.
The process began to move again slowly, the way processes inside large institutions always move. But it moved. In 2021, the Minister for Veterans Affairs and Defense Personnel directed the Independent Defense Honors and Awards Appeals Tribunal to conduct a full inquiry into unit recognition for Australian service in Somalia.
The inquiry covered everyone. David Hurley had been a lieutenant colonel in Bidoa in 1993 when he wrote that letter home about the frustrating little war. He had kept climbing after Somalia. Brigadier, Major General, Chief of Joint Operations, Vice Chief of the Defense Force, Chief of the Defense Force, Governor of New South Wales, and then in 2019, the 27th Governor General of Australia, the King’s Representative in the country, the man whose signature appeared at the bottom of the most formal documents the nation produced, the officer who had
once tried tried to explain Somalia to his family in a letter from a hollowedout town in South Central Africa became the man who represented the crown on Australian soil. Brian Dawson had kept climbing too. He rose to major general over a 40-year career. In the 1995 Australia Day Honors, he received the Conspicuous Service Cross awarded specifically for his service in Somalia.
the service he had performed in a headquarters full of officers who had already given up. He later retired from the army and joined the Australian War Memorial where he served as assistant director of the national collection. The man who had written plans to keep Australians alive in Moadishu ended up working in the building whose entire purpose is to make sure Australians remember what service cost.
There is something right about that. On April 23rd, 2023, 30 years after the first Australian contingents had been catching firefight crossfire in the streets of Moadishu, the recognition that had been denied in 1993 was finally given. The Australian government accepted the tribunal’s recommendations. Merritorious unit citations were awarded to all four operation iguana contingents to the one row battalion group and to Mastobrook.
Minister Matt Kio announced the decision on April 18 and chose his words carefully. He said the meritorious unit citation would recognize the service contribution and sacrifice of those AF members deployed in Somalia. He said it was long overdue. He was right. The specific men of J troop who ran force protection in downtown Moadishu from April to November 1994 are not named in any public record available today.
Their individual fates after Somalia are not documented in sources that can be confirmed. What is documented is that no SASA personnel died in Somalia. What is documented is that 67 unarmed Australians came home alive from a city where the previous occupants had needed a 15-hour battle just to survive a single afternoon.
The mission was completed. Every person who needed protecting was protected. That is the record. It took 30 years to say it out loud, but it is the record. Somalia did not get better [music] after the last UN troops left in early March 1995. The civil war that had been running since 1991 kept running.
The militias kept their weapons. The warlords kept fighting each other over the same streets and ports and roads they had been fighting over when the Australians first arrived in 1992. Aided was dead by August 1996, but his death did not end anything. It just changed the names of the men doing the fighting.
In the years after Unisome the Cerso collapsed, the absence of any functioning state in Somalia created conditions that allowed something new to grow in the wreckage. A radical movement called al-Shabaab developed in the chaos the failed UN mission left behind. It grew slowly at first, finding recruits among young men who had grown up in a country with no schools, no courts, no jobs, and no future that did not involve a weapon.
By the mid 2000s, it controlled significant territory. By the time it formally declared itself connected to Al Qaeda, it was operating across large parts of southern Somalia and launching attacks in neighboring countries. The United States, whose departure from Somalia in March 1994, was captured by a journalist reporting a handlettered sign in an abandoned American messole reading operation get the hell out of Somalia, was conducting drone strikes there again within a decade.
The problem that Blackhawk Down had made too hard to care about had not gone away. It had just changed its shape and waited. None of this is the story of the 10 men at the airport. Their story ended in November 1994 when the ramp closed and the aircraft lifted off and the city dropped away below them. What happened to Somalia after that was not their responsibility and was not in their power to prevent.
They had done the job they were given. The rest was someone else’s problem and then eventually everyone’s problem. The Sassa kept going after Somalia in the way the regiment always keeps going, which is forward and without much public comment. East Teeour, Afghanistan, Iraq, the regiment built a record across two decades of sustained operations that is among the most distinguished in its history.
Those deployments are the ones people know. Those are the stories that get told at Anzac ceremonies and written up in books. Somalia is not usually in those stories. It is a footnote in most accounts of the regiment’s modern history. A deployment that happened between the peaceime years and the serious work.
A quiet chapter that did not produce the material of great military narratives. Now the full answer to the question this story planted at the beginning. On the day America finally left Moadishu, 10 Australians were still inside the city because 67 unarmed Australians needed protection and Australia had decided its commitment was not conditional on whether the conditions were comfortable.
They were there because the Sassar does not leave until the work is done. They were there because Australia made a promise to the United Nations and to the people of Somalia. And the promise did not come with an exit clause reading unless it gets difficult. The full answer is not complicated. It is just the sentence that took 30 years to say out loud. Australia showed up.
Australia stayed. Australia brought its people home. That was the job and that was what they did. The meritorious unit citations awarded in 2023 are not simply corrections to an administrative record. They are a statement about what the Australian Defense Force considers worth remembering. Not only the battles that produce Victoria Crosses and front page photographs.
Also, the 7 months at an airport where nothing dramatic happened and 67 unarmed people came home alive because 10 operators did their jobs in silence. Also the logistics workers who kept the food moving in 1992 when nobody was watching. Also the air traffic controllers who kept the runway open while mortar rounds landed in the compound.
The citation says this work counts. That presence counts. That showing up counts even when no one is looking. The question this story cannot answer because the records do not contain it and the men who know it have not said it publicly is whether the operators of J Troop understood in the moment what they were demonstrating about Australia by staying.
Whether those downtown patrols in late 1994 in the streets where the cameras had once captured burning helicopters and now captured nothing at all felt like something that mattered beyond the immediate task. Whether the weight of being for a period the last western special forces operators in Moadishu registered as history or just registered as work. Probably it registered as work.
That is usually how it goes with the people who actually do these things. The significance is something that attaches later from the outside when enough time has passed for the shape of what happened to become clear. In the moment, there is just the vehicle to check and the route to assess and the 67 people to get home safe and the job to finish before dark.
Probably it just felt like Tuesday.
