Black Hawk Down: A Story of Modern War

Product Information

Award-winning literary journalist Mark Bowden’s dramatic narrative captures this harrowing ordeal through the eyes of the young men who fought that day. Mark Bowden’s Black Hawk Down is a minute-by-minute reconstruction of the climactic battle in the short, ill-fated American military campaign in Mogadishu. Set there along the coast, framed to the west by desert and the east by gleaming teal ocean, it might have been some sleepy Mediterranean resort. Other Delta Force members also consulted for the book, but did not allow the use of their real names. They were the cream, the most highly motivated young soldiers of their generation, selected to fit the army’s ideal—they were all male and, revealingly, nearly all white (there were only two blacks among the 140-man company).

The published online package contained videos, audio clips, graphics, maps, and links to external resources. When the unit was finally rescued the following morning, eighteen American soldiers were dead and dozens more badly injured.Bowden avoids sensationalism while still capturing the ugliness of an operation gone very wrong and the human costs associated on both sides. You can’t read about the agonizing deaths, the blood and viscera and brain matter, and then turn around and say: Gee, war seems great. Before him, jammed on both sides of the Black Hawk helicopter, was his “chalk,” twelve young men in flak vests over tan desert camouflage fatigues. The feeling was, after six weeks of diddling around they were finally going in to kick some serious Somali ass.

Their target was a three-story house of whitewashed stone with a flat roof, a modern modular home in one of the city’s few remaining clusters of intact large buildings, surrounded by blocks and blocks of tin-roofed dwellings of muddy stone. Bristling with grenades and ammo, gripping the steel of their automatic weapons, their hearts pounding under their flak vests, they waited with a heady mix of hope and dread. One sad note: He was killed when the Medivac helicopter taking him to his cancer checkup in Baghdad was shot down in November 2003. Late in the afternoon of Sunday, 3 October 1993, 140 elite US soldiers abseiled from helicopters into a teeming market neighbourhood in the heart of the city of Mogadishu, Somalia. They would be arrested and imprisoned with a growing number of the belligerent clan’s bosses on an island off the southern Somali coast city of Kismayo.It is a very difficult listen,it took me four days to listen to as I had to stop listening, process what was going on,. Nonetheless, it is difficult to think of a better book, before or since, on the near-incommunicable fact of battle.

In this ancient male hierarchy, the Rangers were a few steps up the ladder, but the D-boys owned the uppermost rung. United States forces included 3rd Battalion, 75th Ranger Regiment; 160th SOAR; Delta Force; 24th Special Tactics Squadron; DEVGRU Navy SEALs; 10th Mountain Division; as well as Malaysian and Pakistani United Nations peacekeeping forces. N.) operation to capture two main partners of General Aidid, leader of the Habr Gidr, the clan dominating Somalia at the time. Already winning acclaim as one of the best accounts of combat ever written, Black Hawk Down is a minute-by-minute, heart-stopping account of the 1993 raid on Mogadishu, Somalia. The descriptions match in print what the film Private Ryan showed on-screen re the bloodiness and horror of actual combat.Black Hawk Down: A Story of Modern War gives readers an impressively comprehensive look at the deplorably mismanaged U. After reading this I can understand why a bunch of people would want to turn this into a film, but it`s hard to cram all the action into 2 hrs, all the actors look alike in uniform, it`s difficult to show the trues scale of what happened, and more importantly it`s very hard to draw attention to the key factors. Bowden has used his journalistic skills to kind and interview key participants on both sides of the October 1993 raid into the heart of Mogadishu, Somalia, a raid that quickly became the most intensive close combat Americans have engaged in since Vietnam. Although American troops are well-equipped, the Somali gunmen are too, having paid for first-rate weapons through the black market.