Armando Micheli
Ed. Seven Cities
pp. 176
With this story I want to tell "my 2 July 1993", what I remember of that long terrible day, what I felt in the hours when I participated in the fights, fears, thoughts, feelings, memories, emotions, facts, people, actions ... And it was not easy to re-emerge from memory what was unconsciously removed. So I do not want those who feel offended by my dissertation, because it is not my intention to harm the sensibilities of anyone, but only to recall facts and feelings experienced ...
The book Somalia, Mogadishu. My 2 July 1993, by Major Armando Micheli, a raider who spent many years in the Ninth Col Moschin, is not a simple amarcord, although we are talking about one of those episodes that Italy should have in mind, if only out of respect for the soldiers who their duty, everywhere in the world, they return home with the awareness, too, of not having fully lived a private life, of having left home a newborn child, of having experienced something that today we identify as post traumatic stress. Or injured, but still lucky not to have gotten off a C130 in a coffin wrapped in the tricolor. And in a country with a poor memory like ours, of removal, where the argument "soldiers" is often used and abused for mere and sinister politics, those who help remember the commitment and value of those who, with a uniform , honor your country, your homeland.
Somalia, Mogadishu. My 2 July 1993, speaks of the Canguro 11 operation which began at the first light of dawn with a round-up and ended with a fight against the Somali militias of Aidid, who had shielded themselves with women and children and a very heavy result between wounded and killed by both set off. And it is also a further demonstration, if needed, that a real soldier is a warrior but not a warmonger and the difference is substantial.
Armando Micheli's book is an introspective journey, written with virile sensitivity, as well as with excellent knowledge of the Italian language. Micheli is a man of culture, as well as of arms. He was 25 years old, in Somalia in '93 and today, after as many five decades, he is 5 and is back in Somalia, in the European Eutm-S mission with Italian lead, now under the command of Brigadier General Matteo Spreafico.
The facts of the 2 July 1993 we know them, mediately, as the "Battle of the Pastificio or the" Pasta check point "in Mogadishu. Although there were other checkpoints in Mogadishu, for example Iron o Banking, the latter not far from our former embassy and where the drawings in the few remaining walls stand there indicate another outpost of Italian paratroops. The Italian contingent was, among the Westerners and after the United States, the one with the greatest number of soldiers, many of them. For the poor memory of the Italians, above, but not the American one, we remember Black Hawk Down and very little Italian support, which was also important for the benefit of the Americans themselves.
“It's true, 25 years ago I was in Somalia and the book comes out 25 years later and I'm back in Mogadishu, even if it's a coincidence… but they are completely different missions. That UN had the task of facilitating the distribution of humanitarian aid and trying to eliminate the anarchist situation that had arisen; today the Eutm-S mission is to train the local Armed Forces, despite the objective difficulties of helping to re-establish the rules in a country where the population at 60% is under 28 years old and has always lived with anarchy, without laws and rules ... These boys, at the time of the coup, were not even born ... ", Micheli observes, reached on the phone. The book is well structured and follows the five Ws of Anglo-Saxon journalism (Who? What? When? Where? Why?), To which is added the How, How? Rules also used in the military field to facilitate the explanation of certain tasks.
The author remembers the whole mission, the various steps, but also the moment before, the civilian life in Viterbo, his city, the choice to enlist, his path as a raider. And then Mogadishu, as an escort to General Giampiero Rossi, first commander of the Italian Ibis contingent in Somalia from December 1992 to May 1993, who then handed over to General Bruno Loi, under whose command the Battle of the Pastificio took place. The book is basically a 25-year introspective journey.
"I have to be honest: when I started writing this book, I was uncertain about the result I could get, but my intent was to write the story of those events and not how I had lived them. Instead, when I sent the first draft to General Loi, who read it and replied in a very short time with beautiful words, he made me realize how, in reality, the book was a psychological introspection triggered by the Somali experience. And for this I thank him. Sometimes you write, but you do not always know what the real motivation is for you to do it. Loi made me understand that the purpose was to free me, through the telling, of that experience that I had kept inside ... ", adds Micheli.
And this is perceived, as the pages flow. This is also why the book is special. The author has the gift of making you see those events through his eyes, which are emotional and professional filter at the same time. If you are lucky enough to have been in Mogadishu, you can even better contextualize, you seem to see those guys who fix the premises of our former embassy, almost hear the voices, the blasphemies, the laughter, the melancholic and sensual music of the singer Sade that was the soundtrack of Micheli in that mission, in those somali nights full of wet heat, without interruption. And then the actual battle, the first that involved our Armed Forces after almost 50 years since the end of the Second World War.
The author tells us, too, what goes on in the head of those who fight. “In the moments of pause during the phases of the fight, the feelings that took me were many, but the dominant, I would be hypocritical if I didn't say it, was fear. Fear of what? To die? Yes, why not, I repeat: I have never been a warmonger, so I have always had in mind the meaning of having to kill or be killed. It wasn't a video game that kids like so much nowadays ... A single loose shot could have ended my life by destroying my projects, my ideas, my feelings, my sensations ... Another dominant feeling it was a deep feeling of displeasure ... ". Displeasure not only for the father and mother who would have lost a child, but above all to regret not having, at the time, a woman, wife or girlfriend, who would regret and remember him. “As happens today for Stefano Paolicchi's girlfriend, who still remembers him with so much love. I know it could be understood as selfishness, why think of dedicating such great pain to a woman I would have left alone? I don't know, but the human brain is wonderfully and dramatically strange ... ", Micheli writes.
The book is a way out and enter between the beginnings of an incursor and the Somali experience, between training and the Battle of the Pastificio with the memory of wounded colleagues. And the thought of those fallen in that damn 2 July '93, the sergeant major Col Moschin Stefano Paolicchi, the para of the 186 ° regiment thunderbolt Pasquale Baccaro and the lieutenant of the 8 regiment of the Lancieri of Montebello Andrea Millevoi, is a wound still open.
"The fulcrum of the narrative is centered in the fifth chapter, dedicated to my battle of the Pastificio," mine "because I tell my experience, but there is a premise in which I tried to tell how Somalia had arrived at that point and how I I had arrived in Somalia, to then describe the battle and the subsequent events. What I wanted to convey is what you could also try from the psychological point of view ... ".
Here is another proof, if it were necessary, that a soldier is a warrior but not a warrior and that to do this job, to command, to carry a weapon and sometimes have to defend and use it, you have to be balanced, otherwise it is better than a uniform you do not wear it and it is advisable that you stay at home, to do something else.
"... Do you know what the fact is? That very often, especially when it comes to special forces, it is not clear that the conviction is there, of course, but for the exalted who thinks of war and arms there is no place. Among the non-professionals there are many stereotypes and sometimes even in the military environment. If you go out of the special forces, if you speak to them of raiders, they immediately think of people prepared but a little out of the norm. And so in the book I also wanted to debunk this way of seeing special forces. Which are made, as you know, of people who have experience and are balanced. It is true that sometimes you can find the arrogant attitude, a "similguerrafondaio" in the young just qualified, but generally those who start with that mentality are eventually hunted, because that is not the right approach for that kind of work. Also because it becomes dangerous, for you and for others. And anyway training also prepares you to be balanced ... ", Micheli reiterates.
"In Somalia we have had several clashes, also addressed to support other UNOSOM contingents, but that of the 2 July is the event that has most committed the Armed Forces ... Do you wonder what I have left? It remained, I wrote in the book, a professional experience of the highest level, because despite being very young, the variety of operations in which I participated gave me the opportunity to put into practice all that I had been prepared for; but also from the human point of view it was a fundamental experience to understand what work I had chosen and what kind of life I was going to meet. Operating there, in that context, meant risking your life, but also defending yourself and having to eliminate other lives and that you think about it, you're not a car ", concludes the author.
There is this and much more in Armando Micheli's book, but let's not reveal further, because it is right that anyone who wants to be accompanied on a journey that is sometimes hard, but tastes good.
Giusy Federici
