Black Hawk Down: Battle of Mogadishu

Black Hawk Down: Battle of Mogadishu

“War was ugly and evil, for sure, but it was still the way things got done on most of the planet.” (Bowden 1999) Mark Bowden’s book, Black Hawk Down, is a great novel. This book portrays the struggles and triumphs of the men who fought over in Mogadishu, Somalia in 1993. In this book, we are able to see firsthand experiences of the men of the U.S. Rangers and Delta Force. Their main objective is to capture a Somali drug lord, Mohamed Farrah Aidid. However, things take a turn for the worst throughout the book, and the reader gets to see what it’s like to fight a modern battle. I choose this book because I love learning about military events that have happened in our nation’s existence. Military novels allow me to get a feel for what it’s like to fight and defend our country. I feel like more military events need to be taught in school to help people understand the sacrifices that our armed forces take every day. Overall, Black Hawk Down is a great novel that gives great insight to the Battle of Mogadishu in 1993.

The book is broken up into five main parts. First, it starts out with the initial assault from the U.S. Rangers and Delta Force. In this chapter, we learn about the entire plot to go into the city of Mogadishu and retrieve someone of importance to the U.S. in regards to the drug cartel. Everything is going great until one of the Rangers falls out of the helicopter and get severely hurt. This mishap causes the entire mission to change, which leads them into worse problems. The city of Mogadishu is not a normal looking city. There is trash everywhere and streets that run in weird directions, so this causes numerous problems for the U.S. soldiers. With one of the soldiers being injured, the rest of the soldiers start thinking up another plan to evacuate the city in one piece, however, things take a turn for the worse pretty quickly. One of the Black Hawks that was helping transport and protect the soldiers on the ground gets shot down by a RPG rocket. The helicopter goes spiraling out of control and eventually crashes down a few blocks away from the bulk of the soldiers. Here is where things continue to get worse. The motto for these men is to never leave a man behind, and that is exactly what they plan on doing. So they head out with their convoy in search to find the crash site. In the mist of all the soldiers and helicopters trying to find the crash site, Mike Durant’s Black Hawk is also shot down and crashes in the city a few blocks away from the original crash. After his Black Hawk crashed, Durant was taken hostage by the Somalia Army. This is terrible news for the soldiers on the ground because they now know that their entire mission just got harder. The rest of the book is about how the men devise a plan to rescue the men that were in the Black Hawks, and we learn about the bloody and horrific situations the men get put in. “Soldiering