Morale Wilts in Heat of Troubled Somali Mission : Africa: U.S. troops who came to feed the starving increasingly find themselves under attack. Some say it’s time to withdraw.

MOGADISHU, Somalia — It was a typical week for U.S. Army Staff Sgt. Merald Murchison and his fuel-supply platoon at the fraying edge of the United Nations’ $1.5-billion mission to disarm and rebuild the dangerous streets of this nation.

The Susanville, Calif., native was ambushed twice by Somali gunmen. He found himself in a roadside ditch, firing his M-16 on automatic, shooting back at Somalis he was sent here to save.

When the smoke cleared from the attack just over a week ago on his 18-truck supply convoy outside Mogadishu, no one among his platoon was injured. But five Somalis were dead, 20 others were in plastic handcuffs--several of them armed women and children--and half a dozen of their weapons were seized.

Finally, 24 hours later and only 10 minutes before the bloodiest single attack on American troops since the United States intervened last December to save Somalia from self-destruction, Murchison drove his 5,000-gallon fuel truck over the same remote-controlled bomb that would kill four U.S. Army military policemen on patrol.

“It makes you think this is a worthless cause,” he said reflectively in the compound that is both headquarters and self-imposed prison for his Army transport company. “You can’t help somebody unless they want to help themselves.”

Murchison, 27, is one of the 3,000 U.S. Army logistics personnel the Pentagon assigned to the United Nations’ multinational peacemaking force in Somalia when the U.S. Marines handed over command here May 4.

He is neither a combat officer nor a politician. And yet his view from the front lines of a humanitarian mission--which more and more resembles a guerrilla war--was typical of that of many of his friends and relatives back home as the debate over America’s continued military presence in Somalia intensified last week.

“It just seems like it’s getting worse and worse,” the soft-spoken soldier--who has been in the Army for 9 1/2 years, including six months in Saudi Arabia in Operation Desert Storm--said after returning from another hairy day on the streets of Mogadishu. “Two ambushes in one week. Then our MPs (who were slain) over there. Evidently, something’s going terribly wrong. Sometimes I think we should just pull everybody out of here.”

The Pentagon has no plans to withdraw anytime soon. Despite a heated debate in Washington after the lethal Aug. 8 ambush, a Clinton Administration review of the United States’ role in Somalia concluded that American forces will likely remain here well into 1994, continuing an unprecedented U.S. military commitment to the United Nations’ 24,000-member multinational force in Somalia.

This mission has been billed as a historic blueprint both for American participation in U.N. missions and for the reconstruction of a nation in an age of increasing regional anarchy.

The American commitment includes a 1,200-man U.S. Army Quick Reaction Force and a two-star U.S. Army general as deputy force commander. And, for the first time, the entire U.N. operation has been placed under a retired U.S. Navy admiral, who confirmed last week that the loss of the American contingent would deal the United Nations’ already embattled efforts to disarm and rebuild Somalia a near-fatal blow.

“I think it would be absolutely wrong to pull the Americans out,” retired Adm. Jonathan Howe told The Times late last week.

Although his force maintains air superiority through the Quick Reaction Force’s combat helicopters, Howe stressed that Army transport soldiers like Murchison provide the U.N. lifeline of fuel, water and equipment to all two dozen of the multinational armies also coming under fire in the Somalia mission. “They’re also teaching. They’re showing. They’re demonstrating,” he added. “And they have performed very professionally, very courageously.”

But Howe, who views the ambushes on American forces as part of a strategy of terror by a small number of gunmen loyal to a renegade warlord he considers a wanted criminal, quickly added that he deeply sympathizes with the low morale of most American troops here, particularly after four died in the attack Aug. 8. “It’s always a blow. It’s always hard to lose anybody--especially people who’ve come here to help,” he said.

In fact, the Somali gunmen began their attacks on Americans in Somalia only after Howe ordered U.S. air strikes on key strongholds of Somali warlord Mohammed Farah Aidid two months ago. It was a “painful” though “necessary” act of retaliation, Howe insisted, for the brutal massacre of 24 Pakistani U.N. peacemakers allegedly by Aidid’s clan militiamen a week before.

The air strikes forced Aidid into hiding, and, within days, Howe declared him a vicious criminal, offering a $25,000 reward for information leading to his arrest and prosecution.

But two months later, Aidid remains in hiding in the war-ravaged capital. He has denounced the United States and the United Nations on a clandestine radio station that the United Nations concedes it cannot locate; he also has given interviews to visiting television journalists.

It is the warlord’s media presence, perhaps as much as the increasing ambushes that Howe blames on Aidid’s clan militiamen, that has hurt the morale of front-line American troops, veterans like Murchison and his transport company who are bearing the brunt of the urban guerrilla warfare.

“It’s Aidid. He’s the No. 1 problem. Just take him out,” Murchison said Friday, surrounded by half a dozen fellow soldiers.

Their compound has been mortared, rocketed and raked with nighttime gunfire by militiamen who operate from blown-out villas across the street.

Staff Sgt. Keith Morgan, who was with Murchison in the transport company ambush a week ago, agreed about the evil of the Somali warlord: “They gotta get Aidid and his people out. It’s like a cancer. It just seems like they gotta know where he is.”

“Hey, they know where Aidid’s at. I seen him on CNN,” added Army Specialist Mike Matthews, a transport worker in the battalion, referring to a clandestine interview that Aidid gave on the Cable News Network soon after Howe issued the warrant for his arrest.

“Imagine how that felt, watching Aidid on CNN right here in Mogadishu, when his people are attacking us and everyone’s supposed to be out looking for him,” Murchison added.

But for most of the 550 men and women stationed at the isolated transport battalion headquarters known as Hunter Base--a long-since blown-out former four-star hotel--it is the constant danger on the streets of the capital that has caused them to so question their role here.

The daily threat now, for most of the supply troops, contrasts all too starkly with the peaceful streets that greeted them when they arrived on May 24 from Ft. Jackson, S.C., Ft. Carson, Colo., and Ft. Stockton, Tex. That was just three weeks after U.S. Marine Lt. Gen. Robert B. Johnston turned over command of a tamed capital and a well-fed countryside to the United Nations.

“A lot of the problem is, it was safe when we got here. Now, it’s dangerous--too dangerous,” said Staff Sgt. Angelico Santana, a native of the Dominican Republic who now calls the U.S. Army home. “You go out on the road, and you expect anything. The soldiers are fed up, fed up with being shot at. We try to help them with water and food, and they return the favor with bullets. Let’s do the job or just get out of here.”

Santana paused for a moment, listening to several colleagues take the argument a step further, insisting that the United States just withdraw unilaterally. He shook his head.

“They can’t pull us out of here,” he said. “Because if they do, it’ll get back to the same situation it was in before. We have to do a job. So do the job and do the best we can. Definitely, though, we need to get it back under U.S. command.”

Finally, even Murchison nodded in agreement. In his two months here, his principal job, which has included driving fuel convoys to U.N. troops throughout the once-starving Somali countryside, has taught him there are two Somalias: One is the violent, angry land typified by what is going on inside Mogadishu; the other is the newly pacified, grateful area in the countryside.

“Once you get outside Mogadishu, you feel a little better about being here,” he said. “The women and children out there aren’t throwing rocks and shooting at us.

“We just can’t pull out, because you’ve got people outside Mogadishu who want help--need help--and are thankful for the help.”

He smiled and said that, in any case, his tour here ends in just over three weeks. Asked whether he will take home good memories along with the bitter ones--the latter being so dark that he politely refused to answer when asked whether he had killed any Somali attackers when ambushed last week--he replied: “No. Not really. Not too many. This is something I don’t ever want to do again.”