Journalist Mark Bowden delivers a strikingly detailed account of the 1993 nightmare operation in Mogadishu that left 18 American soldiers dead and many more wounded. This early foreign-policy disaster for the Clinton administration led to the resignation of Secretary of Defense Les Aspin and a total troop withdrawal from Somalia. Bowden does not spend much time considering the context; instead he provides a moment-by-moment chronicle of what happened in the air and on the ground. His gritty narrative tells of how Rangers and elite Delta Force troops embarked on a mission to capture a pair of high-ranking deputies to warlord Mohamed Farrah Aidid only to find themselves surrounded in a hostile African city. Their high-tech MH-60 Black Hawk helicopters had been shot down and a number of other miscues left them trapped through the night. Bowden describes Mogadishu as a place of Mad Max-like anarchy--implying strongly that there was never any peace for the supposed peacekeepers to keep. He makes full use of the defense bureaucracy's extensive paper trail--which includes official reports, investigations, and even radio transcripts--to describe the combat with great accuracy, right down to the actual dialogue. He supplements this with hundreds of his own interviews, turning Black Hawk Down into a completely authentic nonfiction novel, a lively page-turner that will make readers feel like they're standing beside the embattled troops. This will quickly be realized as a modern military classic. --John J. Miller


From Publishers Weekly
This is military writing at its breathless best. Bowden (Bringing the Heat) has used his journalistic skills to find and interview key participants on both sides of the October 1993 raid into the heart of Mogadishu, Somalia, a raid that quickly became the most intensive close combat Americans have engaged in since the Vietnam War. But Bowden's gripping narrative of the fighting is only a framework for an examination of the internal dynamics of America's elite forces and a critique of the philosophy of sending such high-tech units into combat with minimal support. He sees the Mogadishu engagement as a portent of a disturbing future. The soldiers' mission was to seize two lieutenants of a powerful Somali warlord. Despite all their preparation and training, the mission unraveled and they found themselves fighting ad hoc battles in ad hoc groups. Eschewing the post facto rationalization that characterizes so much military journalism, Bowden presents snapshots of the chaos at the heart of combat. On page after page, in vignette after vignette, he reminds us that war is about breaking things and killing people. In Mogadishu that day, there was no room for elaborate rules of engagement. In the end, it was a task force of unglamorous "straight-leg" infantry that saved the trapped raiders. Did the U.S. err by creating elite forces that are too small to sustain the attrition of modern combat? That's one of the key questions Bowden raises in a gripping account of combat that merits thoughtful reading by anyone concerned with the future course of the country's military strategy and its relationship to foreign policy. Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
Based on a series that won the Hal Boyle Award for best foreign reporting from the Overseas Press Club after appearing in the Philadelphia Inquirer, this book details the American assault on Mogadishu, Somalia, in 1993. A 75,000-copy first printing.Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.


The New York Times Book Review, William Finnegan
What this demotic, you-are-there prose lacks in literary finesse ... it makes up in pure narrative drive.


From AudioFile
Listening to Joe Morton read Bowden's nonfiction study of war is a bit like sitting through Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan. Your reaction is so powerful that you tend to forget the quality of the work itself. It's a testament to Morton's abilities as a reader that he never makes himself more important than Bowden's story, never draws attention to himself, yet he still manages to leave a profound imprint on the finished work. In the midst of Bowden's story, a study of the brutal battle in Mogadishu, Somalia, which resulted in the downing of two Black Hawk helicopters and the deaths of a score of U.S. Army Rangers, Morton remains fully in control. Bowden's book portrays a situation that went from neutral to bad, then from bad to infinitely worse, in a matter of hours. Yet while taking us on a trip through the minds of individual men facing the horrors of modern combat, Morton stays on task. Some of those minds are nearly Zen-like in their calmness. Others are crazed in panic. All, in one way or another, exhibit the kind of turmoil that accompanies the imminent possibility of sudden death. Yet Morton never oversells the moment. He never overstates the danger. He doesn't have to. It's all in Bowden's words, which Morton delivers perfectly. D.A.W. An AudioFile Earphones Award winner. (c)AudioFile, Portland, Maine


From Booklist
Dramatically, graphically reconstructing the October 1993 gun battle in Mogadishu, Somalia, journalist Bowden leaves nothing about combat to the imagination. Thinking there must have been some official inquiry into the disaster that killed 18 American soldiers and upwards of 500 Somalis, Bowden discovered none was undertaken, and so conceived this account. It is a horribly fascinating bullet-by-bullet story, in which the purpose of Americans in Somalia fades to irrelevance amidst the immediate desperation of fighting. The battle ignited as the army's elite formations, the Delta units and the Rangers, were ambushed in the course of capturing clan leaders. In the ensuing day-and night-long snafu, helicopters were shot down, rescue convoys drove in wrong directions, men bled to death. In effective New Journalism style, Bowden projects the individual soldier's thinking: his pride in his elite training, his surprise at the strangeness of combat, his determination to hold out until rescue, and, in two instances, his pure self-sacrificial heroism. An account impossible to stop reading, especially for those with army associations. Gilbert Taylor


From Kirkus Reviews
Journalist Bowden (Bringing the Heat: A Pro Football Teams Quest for Glory, Fame, Immortality and a Bigger Piece of the Action, 1994, etc.) originally wrote this as a serialized account in the Phildalphia Inquirer; he has now crafted the pieces into a searing look at one specific incident during the US military action in Somalia. This is the story of a military action on October 3, 1993, when elite US Rangers and a Delta task force swooped down on a Mogadishu neighborhood to capture two top lieutenants of a Somali warlord. The action was to be a quick surgical strike into a crowded market district that was known to be very unfriendly. Rather than a quick success, the attack decayed into mayhem as the Somali crowdwhich Bowden depicts vividly as a mixture of armed mercenaries working for warlords and a general populace that runs confusedly toward gunfire rather than away from itdowns the high-tech helicopter with a simple grenade, and the American forces become pinned down in the city. Bowden captures the intensity of the situation with a brisk writing style reflecting the quick pace of action. Although he was not present in Somalia during the fighting, his account is well balanced with firsthand sources that cover the spectrum, from members of the Ranger forces stationed in Mogadishu to Somali citizens. As the Somali night unfolded, more than 500 civilians were killed, more than 1,000 injured, and 18 US soldiers died. Bowden covers these deaths with detail and passion. One element that is lacking from his account is a level of background that would offer more than a surface look at the actions as they unfolded; this is a work of reportage, rather than analysis. But as reportage, this account offers a look at modern war in the tradition of the great war correspondents. Gripping, passionate, and impossible to put down. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.


The New York Review of Books, Brian Urquhart
...Bowden's story has a vitality and freshness usually lacking in accounts of combat. He has written an extraordinary book. It is also a shocking one.


Review
The New York Observer Black Hawk Down ranks as one of the best books ever written about infantry combat.

FROM OUR EDITORS

Mark Bowden gives the reader an intense "You Are There" look at the October 1993 attempt by a U.S. Special Forces team to abduct two top lieutenants of a Somali warlord in Mogadishu, Somalia -- and shows how the mission turned into a bloodbath that would cost the lives of 18 American soldiers. Ultimately, the incident would lead to the infamous video footage of a soldier's body being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu. Bowden is careful to present both sides of the conflict, giving the reader all the information they need to fully understand the day's tragic events.

ANNOTATION

1999 National Book Award nominee for Nonfiction.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Black Hawk Down is Mark Bowden's account of the longest sustained firefight involving American troops since the Vietnam War. On October 3, 1993, about a hundred elite U.S. soldiers were dropped by helicopters into the teeming market in the heart of Mogadishu, Somalia. Their mission was to abduct two top lieutenants of a Somali warlord and return to base. It was supposed to take an hour. Instead they found themselves pinned down through a long and terrible night fighting against thousands of heavily armed Somalis. The following morning, eighteen Americans were dead and more than seventy badly injured.

SYNOPSIS

The behind-the-lines story of the U.S. Special Forces team dropped into the middle of Mogadishu, Somalia, in 1993 and the intense firefight for their lives they went through. A true-to-life thriller that gives the political story of what U.S. troops were doing there in the first place and the military details of what the streetfighting cost both sides.

FROM THE CRITICS

Bob Shacochis - New York Observer

...A descendent of books like The Killer Angels, a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about the battle of Gettysburg, and We Were Soldiers Once...and Young, a best-selling eyewitness account of the Vietnam-era battle of Ia Drang; like those two, Black Hawk Down ranks among the best books ever written about infantry combat.

Mark Schone - Salon

One reason movies about war are so hot right now is that few American males have had to face the real thing. For a man who's never braved enemy fire, who's never been "tested," The Thin Red Line and Saving Private Ryan can seem like parables of character. Would I, the ticket buyer wonders, be willing to die for a nameless hill or an unknown soldier?

But the blood in these filmed battles is spilled for a larger cause, by men of every station. In real time, long after the last Good War, the dying hasn't stopped; now, though, it's done by blue-collar volunteers in morally muddy police actions. Never has the murk been more obscure than it was in Somalia on Oct. 3, 1993, when, in the American military's nastiest firefight since Vietnam, 19 soldiers died in the name of little more than one another. An incident that began with two downed helicopters ended with American casualties being dragged through the streets and American policymakers scrambling for the exit.

Black Hawk Down re-creates, with exacting detail, the gory confusion of that day, when questions of heroism were far from cinematic. Mark Bowden's work ethic inspired him to track down 50 veterans of the conflict and bring back Mogadishu whole. He conveys the sound and the feel of killing — of what it's like to watch your bullets splash through a stranger and of the claustrophobic panic you feel when the strangers you are shooting at begin to close in. He established such trust with his subjects that they told him about everything from the banal ("It felt like a movie") to the brutal (trying to plug a spurting artery with an index finger) to the embarrassing (masturbation in combat). We're reminded that these are young men with excess animal energy that surfaces in both violence and sex, that the flip side of valor is an evil carnal thrill. "That was the secret core of all the hoo-ah ... esprit," Bowden writes. "Permission ... to break the biggest social taboo of all. You killed people."

Mogadishu has already inspired several books and documentaries, with another set for CNN in April. Spy planes and surveillance cameras made it one of history's best-documented battles. Bowden's rendering, however, is the most accurate and extensive, because in addition to first-person accounts he wrangled access to confidential Army action logs. He also moves beyond Soldier of Fortune-style bravado, interviewing dozens of enemy combatants so that we can learn why a thousand angry Somalis threw themselves into the high-tech maw of the Army Rangers, sacrificing their lives just to teach the U.S. government a lesson. Sometimes the book bogs down in this conscientious detail — Bowden wants us to know where every man was at every minute. So much data and so many different dramas and casts are braided into this one engagement that the account becomes confusing; more maps and recaps might've helped keep it straight.

This is the sort of crowded time line that Web sites were invented for. In fact, the Rangers have used Bowden's original Philadelphia Inquirer articles as the core of their own Mogadishu cyber-memorial, linking the text to maps and bios in a shorter, tighter version of events. But if Bowden had also opted for simplicity, imposing a dramatic arc on confusion and paring away supporting characters, he'd have left some men's last hours unremembered. In other words, if he'd made his peerless record of this forgotten war more like a Web site, he'd have been making it more like a war movie. And that will happen soon enough anyway, because Jerry Bruckheimer has already bought the rights to the book.

Steven Komarow

[Bowden's] details are amazing. Readers will swear he was there, everywhere, watching as bullets tore through flesh. In the novelistic style adopted by some journalists, Bowden weaves a seamless tale, acknowledging gaps and shortcomings only in his notes at the end.— USA Today

Jonathan Yardley - Washington Post

A vivid, immediate and unsparing narrative that is filled with blood and noise.... It bears comparison to S.L.A. Marshall's classic account of a battle in Korea, Pork Chop Hill.

Publishers Weekly

This is military writing at its breathless best. Bowden (Bringing the Heat) has used his journalistic skills to find and interview key participants on both sides of the October 1993 raid into the heart of Mogadishu, Somalia, a raid that quickly became the most intensive close combat Americans have engaged in since the Vietnam War. But Bowden's gripping narrative of the fighting is only a framework for an examination of the internal dynamics of America's elite forces and a critique of the philosophy of sending such high-tech units into combat with minimal support. He sees the Mogadishu engagement as a portent of a disturbing future. The soldiers' mission was to seize two lieutenants of a powerful Somali warlord. Despite all their preparation and training, the mission unraveled and they found themselves fighting ad hoc battles in ad hoc groups. Eschewing the post facto rationalization that characterizes so much military journalism, Bowden presents snapshots of the chaos at the heart of combat. On page after page, in vignette after vignette, he reminds us that war is about breaking things and killing people. In Mogadishu that day, there was no room for elaborate rules of engagement. In the end, it was a task force of unglamorous "straight-leg" infantry that saved the trapped raiders. Did the U.S. err by creating elite forces that are too small to sustain the attrition of modern combat? That's one of the key questions Bowden raises in a gripping account of combat that merits thoughtful reading by anyone concerned with the future course of the country's military strategy and its relationship to foreign policy.Read all 17 "From The Critics" >

WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING

Your account of the events in Mogadishu on October 3, 1993 is an inspirational and evocative retelling of one of the most significant military operations of the past 10 years. Though there is heroism and professionalism aplenty, you also bring out the errors and missed opportunities that contributed to the unfortunate outcome of the mission. Both senior leaders and young soldiers can learn much from this compelling story....Black Hawk Down will occupy an honored place in my personal library.  — (Henry H. Shelton, Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff).