William F. Garrison
William Garrison commanded the raid in Mogadishu and retired the day after the report on it was published. He enlisted as a private in 1966, took a commission, served two tours in Vietnam including work with the Phoenix programme, and spent most of his career in special operations - Delta Force, then Joint Special Operations Command. He was sent to Somalia in 1993 with Task Force Ranger to capture Mohamed Farrah Aidid, whose militia had killed twenty-four Pakistani peacekeepers, in a country where a famine had already killed hundreds of thousands. Six raids succeeded. The seventh, on 3 October, was planned as an hour's work to seize two of Aidid's lieutenants from a building near the Bakara market. Two Black Hawks were brought down by rocket-propelled grenades and the force spent the night surrounded, reaching safety the next morning behind Pakistani tanks and Malaysian armoured vehicles that had to be borrowed because armour had been refused to him earlier. Eighteen Americans and a Malaysian died, along with a number of Somalis that has been estimated between three hundred and over a thousand. He wrote to the president taking full responsibility, saying the decision to go in was his alone. The United States withdrew from Somalia within six months, and the reluctance to intervene that followed is generally held to have shaped the response to Rwanda the next year. He retired in 1996, the day after the army's report on the battle was released, and gave no interviews about it afterwards. Aidid was never captured; he died of gunshot wounds in a Somali factional fight in 1996, and his son, a former United States Marine, succeeded him as clan leader.
- Lived: 1944 CE – 2018 CE
- Nationality: American
- Roles: military
