Black Hawk Down: A Story of Modern War

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One highlight for me: When I finished reading the book, my son, who was in Iraq at the time, told me he had met one of the men who survived this incident. The book goes into a very detailed analysis of events which can be a little confusing to follow as it does get very "busy" and jumps around a lot between simultaneously occuring and historic events . One sad note: He was killed when the Medivac helicopter taking him to his cancer checkup in Baghdad was shot down in November 2003. Many wear black metal bracelets inscribed with the names of their friends who died, as if to remind themselves daily that it was real.

Bowden's narrative was generally praised, particularly his efforts at contextualizing the local and international politics and explaining how the peacekeeping mission devolved into armed conflict, later termed the " Mogadishu Line".Black Hawk Down may one day stand as one of the most realistic books ever written about soldiers under fire and, by extension, the role of the American military in a post-superpower, police-action world. But the dynamics of engagement changed right from the start of the mission as the fluidity and unpredictability of battlefield took over and blew away best-laid operational plans; resulting in a mission which was thought of as a cake-walk turn horribly wrong with two UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters shot down and the troops pinned down with heavy armed resistance from Somali militiamen loyal to Aidid. His platoon sergeant had been summoned home by an illness in his family, and then the guy who replaced him had keeled over with an epileptic seizure. Aidid, a former Somali general, was head of the formidable Habr Gidr clan, then in control of the city.

The fallout from this engagement was far reaching as this ' incident' forced the Clinton administration to totally withdraw American troops from Somalia.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. Based on the quality of what comes before, I shouldn’t have been surprised that he brings a deft touch to the controversial decisions to insert Task Force Ranger in the first place, and later to pull them out. The trapped raiding party finally had to be rescued by a relief convoy made up of elements from Task Force 2–14 Infantry and 10th Mountain Division, accompanied by Malaysian and Pakistani U. S. to pick that particular fight, and of their misjudgement of conflict in failed states in general: “In the end, the Battle of the Black Sea is another lesson in the limits of what force can accomplish.