From the Publisher

By Elizabeth P. Valk

Getting a story out of Africa is never easy, but this week's cover package posed a special challenge for the veteran Africa hands in TIME's Nairobi bureau -- operations central for our correspondents in Somalia. Not only did the army of print and video journalists descending on Mogadishu fill every available hotel room and airplane seat, but they also emptied neighboring capitals of supplies. While our resourceful office manager, Grace Okeyo, scoured Nairobi for bottled water and U.S. currency (a commodity in increasingly short supply), Nairobi reporter Clive Mutiso pulled every string he knew to get TIME space on planes denied to other journalists. When former Nairobi bureau chief James Wilde flew in from Istanbul, Mutiso persuaded a charter pilot bound for Mogadishu to add one more passenger, even though there were no more seats on his airplane. In the end, says Mutiso, Wilde was stowed "like a big parcel" behind the pilot, and off they went.

Wilde, a seasoned war correspondent who has been dodging bullets since the French Indochina war, landed in time to witness the media circus that greeted the troops on the beach. "The Marines showed admirable restraint," says Wilde. He tells the story of one U.S. trooper, faced with a particularly irritating photographer who refused to obey orders to lie down and keep quiet, finally fingering the trigger of his M-16 and asking his gunnery sergeant in a whisper, "Shall I blow him away?" The answer was no. All journalists, even experienced ones like Wilde, have been bedeviled by kat-chewing thugs, pesky mosquitoes and static-stricken telephone lines. "Nearly every correspondent has his story of being robbed at gunpoint, usually by preteen kids," reports Wilde.

Acting Nairobi bureau chief Andrew Purvis, who inherited Wilde's mongrel dogs, Whiskey and Pee Wee, along with his old job, has been in Mogadishu long enough to watch the city go from outright anarchy to "a place that almost feels safe." Bringing peace to Somalia's interior, however, may take some doing. In Baidoa, Purvis saw a young Somali no more than eight years old waltz up to a relief worker who was carrying a bag of cheese-flavored chips. "The kid had an AK-47 draped over his shoulder, its muzzle almost dragging in the dust," says Purvis. While Purvis watched, the pint-size gunman reached up and snatched the bag of chips. A Somali man standing nearby yelled at him, but the child, who was much better armed and knew it, just stared and walked away.