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Rhetoric & Public Affairs 4.3 (2001) 568-571



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Book Review

Black Hawk Down:
A Story of Modern War


Black Hawk Down: A Story of Modern War. By Mark Bowden. New York: Penguin USA, 2000; pp. 392. $13.95.

Black Hawk Down is about as thrilling as nonfiction gets. Author Mark Bowden, a veteran reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer, reconstructs not only an event, but the dialogue, personalities, and thoughts of the participants as well. A motion-picture screenplay is in the works.

Bowden recounts an event that both the Bush and Clinton administrations might have preferred to see forgotten among the brutish not-quite-wars that have flared and smoldered during the last two decades in the Caribbean, the Balkans, the Middle East, and Africa. Black Hawk Down relives the infamous overnight Battle of the Black Sea, October 3, 1993, in Mogadishu, Somalia.

The action began as a helicopter-borne raid into Mogadishu's labyrinthine Black Sea neighborhood, the lair of warlord Mohammed Farah Adid and his Habr Gidr clan. Adid had become the major obstacle to the nation-building phase the United States and the UN Security Council wanted to follow their initial multinational famine-relief intervention of 1992. The objective of the October 3 assault was to snatch two of Adid's top lieutenants from a house. The attackers would swoop in from the sky, crash into the building, grab the Somalis, and then be picked up by a convoy of wheeled vehicles. They expected to be back in their barracks in an hour.

Things went wrong. Mistakes were made. Resistance was fiercer than expected. One Black Hawk helicopter was shot down over the Black Sea's tangle of nameless lanes, then another. Adid's aides were in custody, but their captors were soon pinned down as they struggled to secure the two downed aircraft. The original convoy was bloodied and forced back. A relief column hastily assembled and headed back into the fight.

Through a long, sleepless night, clusters of soldiers nursed wounded comrades and held their perimeters against Adid's gunmen. Water and ammunition ran low, and the men regretted having left behind their night-vision devices. After daybreak, a column of American, Malaysian, and Pakistani rescuers extricated the living and the dead. [End Page 568]

Eighteen Americans had been killed, dozens wounded. Downed pilot Mike Durant was captured and held for ten days by the Habr Gidr. Delta Team snipers Gary Gordon and Randy Shugart, killed trying to rescue Durant, were later awarded the Medal of Honor. Several hundred Somalis--militia and innocent civilians--are estimated to have died in the skirmishing. Still torn by clan rivalries, Somalia is today largely ignored by the rest of the world.

Three years later, when he began researching the newspaper series that would become this book, Bowden was astonished that no one had written a full account of the fight, even though almost every minute of the combat had been documented by recordings of tactical radio traffic and video footage shot from helicopters. The explanation was not hard to find.

For one thing, the main U.S. assault force was made up of special operations troops, including army rangers, navy SEALs, and members of Delta Force D, the clandestine "Mission Impossible" unit whose involvement military sources denied when Bowden began interviewing veterans. Further, Task Force Ranger's mission accomplishment was viewed as a Pyrrhic victory, and, as Bowden wrote, "in Washington, a whiff of failure is enough to induce widespread amnesia" (331).

A final, but not insignificant, factor is that all U.S. journalists had been evacuated from Mogadishu after a Somali mob killed four Western journalists in July, and Adid was threatening to kidnap those who remained. Paul Watson, photographer for the Toronto Star, was the only Western journalist in Mogadishu on October 4, when he took the gut-wrenching pictures of frenzied Somalis dragging naked, dead G.I.s through the streets. Somalis working for foreign news organizations provided video of these scenes. More than anything else, the shock of these images cast a pall...

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