"Black Hawk Down" by Mark Bowden (1999)

"From his position behind the car, peering down one of the streets at their intersection, Nelson saw a man with a weapon ride out into the road on a cow.  There were about eight other men around the cow, some with weapons, some without.  It was the strangest battle party he'd ever seen.  He didn't know whether to laugh or shoot at it.  He and the rest of the Rangers at once started shooting.  The man on the cow fell off, and the others ran.  The cow just stood there.

"And at that moment, a Black Hawk slid overhead and opened fire with a minigun.  The cow literally came apart.  Great chunks of flesh flew up in splashes of blood.  When the minigun stopped and the chopper's shadow passed, what had been the cow lay in steaming pieces on the road."

Mark Bowden began his writing career as a staff writer for The Philadelphia Inquirer, later contributing articles to The Atlantic, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker and other periodicals.  His first book, Bringing the Heat, was published in 1994.  Black Hawk Down remains his best known work.

Black Hawk Down is an account of a U.S.-led military action in Somalia during the early 90s, an incursion which led to widespread news coverage after the corpses of several U.S. military personnel were paraded through the streets of Mogadishu.

Bowden's version of events is very spare, free of the "introspective approach" so often seen in other modern accounts of warfare.  Rather than using the business of war to discuss himself and/or the foibles of humanity as a whole, he restricts his account to what happened and why, detailing for the reader troop movements, the dispositions of the "enemy," and the various other factors that led to what some called "the deadliest day in decades."

I liked it.  The acronyms grow a bit confusing, but aside from that it's a solid, visceral book that makes an impression.  I was glad the author did without the philosophizing that so often marks this type of book, even if I think the event itself could have used more context.  I wanted to know more about why the U.S. was in Somalia, and I wanted to know more about what effect the Battle of Mogadishu had on U.S. foreign policy.

I also felt that the author's attempt to present the Somali side of the conflict was insufficient.  Taken as a story, the Somalis seen in Black Hawk Down are very undeveloped characters, and in the absence of sufficient information about them the author probably should have removed them from the narrative altogether.  As it is their presence weakens the book to some extent, rather than balances it as he probably hoped it would.

I haven't seen Ridley Scott's cinematic version since it appeared in theaters, and my memory of is extremely fuzzy.  I'd like to watch it again soon.

Related Entries:

"The Silk Roads" by Peter Frankopan (2015)

"The Winter Fortress" by Neal Bascomb (2016)

"Chip War" by Chris Miller (2022)

"The Body" by Bill Bryson (2019)