Black Hawk Down: A Story of Modern War

Product Information

And the armada launched, lifting off from the shabby airport by the sea into an embracing blue vista of sky and Indian Ocean. When American soldiers were dropped by helicopter into the Bakara market right in the heart of Mogadishu, Somalia on October 3 1993 for a supposedly easy in and out abduction mission they had no idea that they were going to be part of one of the most terrible, long and sustained close-combat firefights since Vietnam war. Also, I was constantly scrambling to find the diagrams and sort out where the various convoys and soldiers were located.

Mark Bowden is the bestselling author of Black Hawk Down: A Story of Modern War, as well as The Best Game Ever, Bringing the Heat, Killing Pablo, and Guests of the Ayatollah. The feeling was, after six weeks of diddling around they were finally going in to kick some serious Somali ass. Bowden avoids sensationalism while still capturing the ugliness of an operation gone very wrong and the human costs associated on both sides.To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. In effective New Journalism style, Bowden projects the individual soldier’s thinking: his pride in his elite training, his surprise at the strangeness of combat, his determination to hold out until rescue, and in two instances, his pure self-sacrificial heroism. The older guys on this crew, like Eversmann, a staff sergeant with five years in at age twenty-six, had lived and trained together for years. Black Hawk Down, or the time Obi-Wan Kenobi, Jamie Lannister, Lucius Malfoy, Legolas, Bane, Hector of Troy, FBI agent Alexander Mahone, Phil Dunphy, Tig Trager, criminal profiler Will Graham, Ari Gold, Sam Shepard, and Michael Myers' nephew went to war together. Your account of the events in Mogadishu on October 3, 1993 is an inspirational and evocative retelling of one of the most significant military operations of the past 10 years.

In January 1991, militias overthrew the regime of President Siad Barre which led to the Somali Civil War.That is the very strong criticism on the leadership (although Bowden often uses the Delta Force participants to voice it) and the Somali side of the experience. The men had girded themselves with extra ammo, stuffing magazines and grenades into every available pocket and pouch of their load-bearing harnesses, leaving behind canteens, bayonets, night-vision goggles, and any other gear they felt would be deadweight on a fast daylight raid. It’s an intimate, minute-by-minute chronicle of suffering, futility and courage, infused with the Gen-X-speak of the 20-something soldiers, who talk about their profession as an extreme sport, way cool until the killing starts. It is a horribly fascinating bullet-by-bullet story, in which the purpose of Americans in Somalia fades to irrelevance amidst the immediate desperation of fighting.