Black Hawk Down: A Story of Modern War Review

 "It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, more vengeance, more desolation. War is hell."  - William Tecumseh Sherman

For all my interest in all things related to the military and especially military history, I have never lost sight of two very important concepts.

One, of course, is the obvious reality that war is never something to be undertaken lightly,  It doesn't matter, in the long run, whether we choose to go to war or it is forced upon us, but the whole endeavor is, by its very nature, messy, cruel and unpredictable.

The other concept I try to always remember is that we Americans, as a society, seem to have a tendency to not understand the military, its culture and its very important role in our Republic.  Right now, only those who serve (or have served) in the active duty and reserve units of the various armed services and their families know just what wearing the American uniform entails, especially in times of war.

The rest of us, however, haven't a clue.  Many of us only have what I call "book learning" knowledge about the military, its traditions and its history.  Some of us like the weapons and tools that Army, Marine, Air Force, Navy and Coast Guard units use.  Others maybe have had relatives or friends in the military at some point in their lives.  Still others simply like war movies because they have lots of action and explosions.

Still, considering how many fine books about American military history have been written since the nation came to be in the late 18th Century, it never ceases to amaze (and dismay) me just how little most of us know about the topic.  I'm sure there are many reasons for this, and some may be even noble ones, but I'm one of those who agrees with George Santayana's oft-quoted observation that those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it.

Black Hawk Down 

Mogadishu spread beneath them in ruins. Five years of civil war had reduced the once-picturesque African port to a post-apocalyptic nightmare. The few paved avenues were crumbling and littered with mountains of trash and debris. Those walls and buildings that still stood in the heaps of gray rubble were pockmarked with bullet scars and cannon shot.

Mark Bowden's 1999 non-fiction book Black Hawk Down is a magnificently-written and well-researched account of one of the most harrowing firefights in American military history, the Battle of Mogadishu, where a combined task force of about 160 U.S. Army Rangers and elite Delta Force commandos fought a pitched 18-hour battle against thousands of enraged Somali militiamen belonging to Mohammed Farrah Aidid's Habr Gidr clan, one of several warring factions fighting for political control of Somalia. When it was all over, two Black Hawk helicopters had been shot down and one of the pilots captured, a convoy of humvees and trucks had been forced to run a gauntlet of bullets and rocket-propelled grenades, 18 American soldiers were dead, many others were wounded, along with an unknown number of Somali militiamen and hapless civilians caught in the crossfire.

Bowden, a respected reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer and author of Bringing the Heat, Doctor Dealer, and Killing Pablo began working on this book in 1996, three years after the Army's biggest firefight (until Operation Iraqi Freedom) since Vietnam.

Drawn to the topic in part because "the Battle of the Black Sea" had resulted in the Clinton Administration's decision to withdraw all American forces from the "failed nation" of Somalia and the resignation of Secretary of Defense Les Aspin (who died a few months later), and in part because it had been almost forgotten by the American public, Bowden started interviewing veterans and requesting materials from various sources including the Pentagon, believing it would be very difficult to get information or cooperation from the Army or the Defense Department. At best, Bowden figured the book would receive a chilly reception, for, as he writes in the Afterword to the first edition of Black Hawk Down:

Black Hawk Down is hardly the version of this battle that would have been produced by some arm of military public relations. It tells of miscalculations and embarrassing inter-unit squabbling. It offers at least a glimpse of the Somali point of view during the fighting and of alarmingly ill-considered United Nations and U.S. actions that led up to this battle. It reveals simple blunders like failing to take sufficient water and night-vision devices on the raid, and soldiers leaving armored plates out of their bulletproof vests and wearing little plastic hockey helmets instead of the heavy Kevlar helmets that are standard issue. It deals unblinkingly with the horrors of combat, with death and dismemberment, with fear and indecision. There are plenty of instances of hesitation, second thoughts, and even callous actions by American soldiers. It reveals details of the battle that the army still considers classified, not least of which is the role played by its top secret Delta Force unit. If you had asked me before Black Hawk Down was published, I would have predicted an angry response from the military, even though I knew the book accurately reflected the experiences of the men who fought there.

Although Black Hawk Down provides contextual background on why Task Force Ranger went to fight against the Habr Gidr clan, Bowden's account focuses on the events of Sunday, October 3, 1993, when a combined force of U.S. Army Rangers, Delta Force commandos, and aircrews of the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment landed in Mogadishu's Bukara Market area, a stronghold of Aidid's dominant Habr Gidr clan. Their mission: to capture two of Aidid's top lieutenants and secure them until a convoy of armed Humvees and trucks could drive in and pick up the American troops and their captives. If all went according to plan, it would be a swift "snatch and grab" operation that would not last more than three hours.

But war is not a human endeavor where everything goes according to plan, and instead of making off with the prisoners without meeting much resistance from the "skinnies" (as the Americans nicknamed the Somalis), the Rangers and "D-boys" soon found themselves surrounded by thousands of hostile gunmen converging on their position near the Olympic Hotel. Without air support from anything more powerful than their helicopters, 99 soldiers were forced to fight a savage running battle without adequate water or night vision equipment, while Somali militiamen -- some made even more aggressive because they were "hopped up" on khat, a hashish-like chewable herb-based drug -- shot down two UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters.

Worse, the convoy under the command of Lt. Col Danny McKnight got lost while driving to rescue the first "Black Hawk Down," and the convoy itself lacked tanks and Bradleys, which Secretary of Defense Aspin had not even deployed to support Task Force Ranger. The result: a fierce 18-hour firefight in an ancient African city which resulted in the deaths of 18 Rangers, Delta force commandos, and air crew members, plus the capture of Chief Warrant Officer Mike Durant, who was freed after 11 days in captivity.

My Viewpoint; Although Bowden's book is well-written, it is a harrowing account of a true story that ended in disaster, not only for those in both sides who were killed or wounded, but for Western foreign policy in Africa.

The humanitarian mission in Somalia -- which had gotten off to a good start in December of 1992 when 20,000 U.S. Marines landed in Operation Restore Hope but quickly went sour when Aidid and his clan attempted to assert themselves as Somalia's rulers, was abandoned as a result of the stunning images of dead American soldiers being dragged and carried by cheering Somali mobs. Within weeks, President Clinton withdrew all American forces from Somalia and the country became a "failed state" where anarchy and death are the only constants, with Islam being the only force keeping the warring factions nominally unified.

Worse, when tribal rivalries broke out in Rwanda the following year, the Clinton Administration expressed regret and issued stern condemnations, but did nothing when the Hutu and Tutsi tribes went at each other's throat, resulting in civil war and genocide. Moreover, although the book and the 2001 film adaptation never hint at this, it marked the first armed confrontation between Al Qaeda and American forces; there have been various accounts that suggest that Habr Gidr's shootdown of the Black Hawks may have been made possible with the assistance or training by Osama Bin Laden and his Islamic terrorist network