Review: Black Hawk Down - Mark Bowden

It is a book written by Mark Bowden –he also wrote another about the American-sponsored hunt for Medellin drug boss Pablo Escobar – and it details the events leading to a botched capture of some Somali clan elders in Mogadishu.

The capture of the elders did not go as planned, perhaps signaling a blood bath that would fill every crevice, nook and cranny in Mogadishu. A teenage ranger (who, by God, would be holed up in room exercising his free will to think of sexual fantasies and escapades) missed the rope while they were descending down a helicopter – which was way off-target – injuring himself. The Somalis seemed to have had prior intel about the impending American assault and were quite ready. Every single one of them was ready – men, women, lactating mothers, and children. All of them were ready to die. And die they did.

The unexpected ambush on the American soldiers precipitated a long fight in which they fought through a barrage of rocket propelled grenades, and bullets from the preferred Kalashnikov. Two American helicopters were downed. Efforts to reach the crash site were derailed by strict military protocol which effectively ensured that communication from surveillance helicopter reached the ground troops a little too late. The ground troops ended up getting lost, leading to the second down copter being overran by Somalis. They captured a pilot and killed the soldiers.  

In the end, a lot of Somalis were killed and eighteen American soldiers killed. More than seventy soldiers were wounded while thousand Somalis faced the same fate.

The capture of the pilot and the dragging of dead American soldiers across the streets were aired CNN. It sparked outrage, leading to questions from both the congress and the president himself; the main one being: what were American soldiers doing in Somalia? Somalia has no valuable natural resource if you don’t count piracy, and charcoal.

The president’s intervention led to the unconditional release of the captured piloted – of course accelerated by a threat to obliterate Mogadishu – and he withdrawal of US soldiers from Somalia.

Other than the fact that the targeted clan leaders having issued a threat to the US, there’s no other valid reason given in the book as to why the US soldiers were in Mogadishu. The only verdict was that the solders weren’t ever going to set foot in Somalia, at least without the approval of the president. That was 1993