What was the significance of the June 5th attack?
The United Nations was attacked and we were at war. And I believe that Aidid said, ‘we were at war.’ Now Admiral Howe and his staff continued to try and open channels of communication to do something about that. But when you look at events, Aidid was, I think, committed at that point in time to running the UN out and so we were all at war. After that we were almost nightly attacked by mortar attacks. We had frequent ambushes. There were paths like that 21 October Road that we could not safely use. There were a couple of major fights after that because again, the Pakistanis were on the other side, and had to go up and down that road at times, and there were some major fights that involved US Quick Reaction Force. US Engineers one time were caught with a bulldozer, trying to get to the Pakistanis. And the typical way the Somalis would open an attack would be to press with women who, very often, were rifle-carrying combatants. There was a lot of criticism, particularly of the Pakistanis e
