They must have been half deaf like everybody else from all the explosions, and didn’t realize how loud they were talking…As three Somalis rounded the corner, one of the D-boys from across the street shone a white light on the first in line. Late in the afternoon of Sunday, 3 October 1993, 140 elite US soldiers abseiled from helicopters into a teeming market neighbourhood in the heart of the city of Mogadishu, Somalia. Warlords had so ravaged the nation battling among themselves that their people were starving to death. The book describes, from the ground up, a US attack on the part of Mogadishu controlled by Somali military commander Mohamed Aidid, after Aidid had attacked a UN peacekeeping force. There are men who are scared, and find it hard to function; there are men who, in the thick of the fighting, kill noncombatants; there are men who feel guilty; there are men who are cool and professional, dropping their enemies with brisk, emotionless efficiency; there are men like Specialist Nelson, who describe a kind of super-awareness, an intense experience of existing only in this single moment, a state he likened to being “inside the tube of a big wave” while surfing.

S. Rangers providing security, to drop into Aidid’s neighborhood in broad daylight, quickly detain their targets, and get out. The “peacekeeping” UN mission was in many ways anything but, and the Somalis resented the Rangers, with all of their arrogance and disrespect. When the unit was finally rescued the following morning, eighteen American soldiers were dead and dozens more badly injured. He informs us that the Italians were providing information to the locals re the American movements He also lets us know something of the complexity of the problem in Somalia, not a simple situation in which a freedom loving people is being subjugated by an evil warlord, but one in which there are many warring factions, each as nasty as the others.To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average.

The cinematic spin actually takes away from some of the heroism and deep personal dilemmas that the Rangers and Delta Force operatives fighting in Mogadishu faced that day. A new interim central administration, the Transitional National Government, was eventually formed in 2000, a year after Bowden's book was published. They passed around the dog-eared paperback memoirs of soldiers from past conflicts, many written by former Rangers, and savored the affectionate, comradely tone of their stories, feeling bad for the poor suckers who bought it or got crippled or maimed but identifying with the righteous men who survived the experience whole. Aidid, a former Somali general, was head of the formidable Habr Gidr clan, then in control of the city. The observation birds were equipped with video cameras and radio equipment that would relay the action live to General Garrison and the other senior officers in the Joint Operations Center (JOC) back at the beach.An intense and incredible story of a 1993 mission by the US Army Rangers and other forces in Somalia. It attempts, with great success, to get as close to the experience of battle that is possible with the mere written word. Award-winning literary journalist Mark Bowden’s dramatic narrative captures this harrowing ordeal through the eyes of the young men who fought that day. I read this immediately after watching the movie and was impressed how much the film followed the book.

The portrait of each of the main characters is solidly drawn, and you really care about what happens to each of these men. Gripping read and detailed account of the 1993 horrific operation in Mogadishu that resulted in American soldiers dead and wounded. S. Special Forces’and puts you in the middle of the most intense firefight American soldiers have fought since the Vietnam War. irregular opponents who adopt to asymmetrical warfare and counter Western technological superiority by using terrain, subterfuge, or hiding among the population. Authoritative, gripping, and insightful, Black Hawk Down is a heart-stopping, minute-by-minute account of modern war and is destined to become a classic of war reporting.Waiting for the code word for launch, which today was “Irene,” they were a formidable sum of men and machines. Then at the end, when the author is talking about how people quickly forgot what had happend there and brushed it under the carpet with a new and more exciting news cycle, "This book is written for them.