Black Hawk Down: A Story of Modern War

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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. He has been a reporter at The Philadelphia Inquirer for eighteen years and has won many national awards for his writing. He discusses, in a methodical manner, the process of the decision-making, not simply whether the decisions were right in hindsight.

Bowden allows his subjects to have their say, which often involves them teeing off on the Clinton administration. The film Black Hawk Down is probably, in my opinion, one of the great modern war films and is based on this book.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. Others were self-improvers, young men who had found themselves adrift after high school, or in trouble with drugs, booze, the law, or all three. 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. s.a in particular,(as well as the united nations) as regards the use of miltary intervention as a way of influencing the outcome of other countries internal disputes. S. Rangers providing security, to drop into Aidid’s neighborhood in broad daylight, quickly detain their targets, and get out.

Counting the three surveillance birds and the spy plane high overhead, there were nineteen aircraft, twelve vehicles, and about 160 men. For long stretches of Black Hawk Down, the narrative is stripped to its essentials, barely acknowledging, much less answering, questions such as Why are we here? What I liked best was the inclusion of the Somali perspective, some insights into why the Americans were the enemy to so many Somalis, what was the aftermath of this mission. Also, I was constantly scrambling to find the diagrams and sort out where the various convoys and soldiers were located.He has mined the psyches of dozens of participants to create a chaotic mosaic of sounds, smells, and images, and to trace the reactions of men – many extremely young – pushed to the limits. He paints us a picture of the culture and mores of the military, especially these uber-special forces, with their hubris and swaggering bravado. They were bulky and had a mouthpiece and were connected by a long black cord to a plug on the ceiling. Over the course of the fighting, 18 American troops and an indeterminate number of Somali citizens were killed.