BLACK HAWK DOWN: A Story of Modern War
By Mark Bowden
Atlantic Monthly Press, 386 pages, $24
Late in the afternoon of Sunday, Oct. 3, 1993, 140 U.S. Army Rangers and members of the Delta Force slid down ropes lowered from Black Hawk helicopters into a busy marketplace in the heart of Mogadishu, the capital of Somalia. They were there to abduct two senior members of the Habr Gidr clan of warlord Mohamed Farrah Aidid in a U.N.-supported attempt to halt civil unrest. The team was supposed to be on the ground no longer than one hour. Instead, it was decimated by local gunmen and, by the time they were rescued the following morning, 18 of the best-trained soldiers in the world had been killed and more than 70 horribly wounded. The most enduring image–one that both infuriated and humiliated Americans–is that of the bodies of U.S. servicemen being dragged through the streets by Somali mobs.
In “Black Hawk Down: A Story of Modern War,” Mark Bowden’s minute-by-minute account of the battle, those dead and wounded, those bodies dragged through the streets, acquire names and families and backgrounds and individual stories. Told through the eyes of more than 20 of the American survivors and an almost equal number of Somalis, “Black Hawk Down” is riveting, authoritative and altogether fine. The forthrightness and honesty of the participants–whose cooperation Bowden secured far outside regular Pentagon channels–is astonishing, and, as a result, “Black Hawk Down” contains what might be some of the most vivid combat reporting ever put on paper. By letting the participants do almost all the talking, Bowden’s broader themes–that there is no such thing as “a little war,” especially to those who fight in it; that lofty and idealistic foreign-policy goals often lead to tragic, almost comical blunders; that arrogance bred of technological superiority and heavy military muscle can come apart in a dusty, filthy city at the hands of an enraged population willing to die (as more than 500 did)–lie gently and are never belabored. What does come across is that the people we send off to places like Somalia are, in many ways, the best of us, the bravest, the most committed.
The level of heroism is sometimes jaw-dropping. To tend to a group of wounded, a medic, Air Force Tech. Sgt. Tim Wilkinson, is forced to run across a wide main street, the incongruously named Freedom Road, that is a wall of gunfire. Wilkinson is in his mid-30s, one of the oldest men on the ground, and not especially fleet of foot. That he makes it across without being hit is considered something of a miracle. When a young Ranger needs additional IV fluid, Wilkinson decides to run back across the street to get it, then makes an incredible third trip to bring it to the wounded man. Even the Delta operators could not believe his bravery. Wilkinson’s buddies decided later that he had only survived because “he was so slow the (Somali gunners) had all miscalculated his speed and aimed too far in front of him.”
That Ranger survived, but others were not as fortunate. In one of the book’s most harrowing episodes, another young Ranger, Cpl. Jamie Smith, has been shot in the thigh, but the bullet has traveled up into his pelvis and severed the femoral artery. Delta medic Kurt Schmid knows he can save Smith’s life only by clamping the artery above the severed point. In order to find it, he must tear open the fully conscious Smith’s leg with his bare hands. Schmid labors feverishly while being showered with Smith’s gushing blood–it is hard to imagine anyone ever working harder to save a human life–but in the end he cannot locate the wound and is forced to sit by while the 21-year-old bleeds to death.
Bowden’s writing is not always fluid, and sometimes, in his drive for macho realism, he employs excessively muscular modifiers or overuses exclamation points. These lapses are few, however, and there is never the feeling that you are experiencing less (or more) than the real thing, or that those to whom Bowden gained access have told less (or more) than the truth.
“Black Hawk Down” is almost entirely devoted to the battle itself, with only small digressions to place the Somalia mission as a whole in a larger context. That’s too bad, because when Bowden does delve into the political sphere, he emerges with some startling insights. For example, an unnamed State Department official notes:
“The idea used to be that terrible countries were terrible because good, decent, innocent people were being oppressed by evil, thuggish leaders. Somalia changed that. Here you have a country where just about everybody is caught up in hatred and fighting. . . . People in these countries–Bosnia is a more recent example–don’t want peace. They want victory. They want power. . . . Somalia was the experience that taught us that people in these places bear much of the responsibility for things being the way they are. The hatred and the killing continues because they want it to. Or because they don’t want peace enough to stop it.”
If such sections had been taken a little further, “Black Hawk Down” might have been as penetrating a study of American foreign policy as it is of war. But that’s nit-picking. “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.
