Black Hawk Down: A Story of Modern War

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In this ancient male hierarchy, the Rangers were a few steps up the ladder, but the D-boys owned the uppermost rung. The ground convoy, which was lined up and idling out by the front gate, consisted of nine wide-body Humvees and three five-ton trucks. The soldiers fought off thousands of armed Somalis, confronted by one unanticipated snafu after another, including (but certainly not limited to) the well-coordinated RPG attacks that successfully took down multiple U. Bowden has used his journalistic skills to kind 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 Vietnam. Gripping read and detailed account of the 1993 horrific operation in Mogadishu that resulted in American soldiers dead and wounded.

Airborne now at last, Eversmann swelled with energy and pride as he looked out over the full armada. It would have helped to have a map of Somalia, of Mogadishu, particularly a street map to provide some bearings. Situations go from ridiculous (jacking escapades including parachute harnesses and walking the dawg) to introspective (how Delta Force soldiers felt about the situation, and how Howe hated everything, from Capt Steer to his armor-piercing ammunition to the casual attitude of the Rangers toward the general situations) to dreadful (the deaths of Smith and Pella and Joyce). They all wore desert camouflage fatigues, with Kevlar vests and helmets and about fifty pounds of equipment and ammo strapped to their load-bearing harnesses, which fit on over the vests. The only thing more phenomenal than the depth of reporting in Black Hawk Down is the quality of the writing.He gives voice to Jamie Smith’s father, whose white-hot anger brings to mind that of Cindy Sheehan who, a decade after Smith’s death, would turn the loss of her son in Sadr City into a sustained antiwar movement.

Bowden's narrative was generally praised, particularly his efforts at contextualizing the local and international politics and explaining how the peacekeeping mission devolved into armed conflict, later termed the " Mogadishu Line". This is an authoritative picture of the Rangers and the men of Delta Force who think of themselves as ‘faster, stronger, smarter, and more experienced than any soldier in the world. It is a very difficult listen,it took me four days to listen to as I had to stop listening, process what was going on,. Mark Bowden's gripping narrative is one of the most exciting accounts of modern war ever written--a riveting story that captures the heroism, courage and brutality of battle. At the time it served as one of the more innovative examples of multimedia storytelling by a news organization.A convoy of Humvees, rapidly filling with wounded, drove around in circles, unable to find the Black Hawk. The fallout from this engagement was far reaching as this ' incident' forced the Clinton administration to totally withdraw American troops from Somalia.

Ebenfalls empfehlenswert das Buch von Dan Schilling/Matt Eversman "The Battle of Mogadishu: Firsthand Accounts from the Men of Task Force Ranger" mit weiteren Schilderungen der Ereignisse von an dem Einsatz teilnehmenden Soldaten. Special SCRIPT distributed to members of the Hollywood Foreign press for Golden Globes consideration. He discusses, in a methodical manner, the process of the decision-making, not simply whether the decisions were right in hindsight.An intense and incredible story of a 1993 mission by the US Army Rangers and other forces in Somalia. Written like a gripping novel this book is startling in its telling and reveals both great bravery, arrogance and failings by the the US Forces in Somalia. Their target was a three-story house of whitewashed stone with a flat roof, a modern modular home in one of the city’s few remaining clusters of intact large buildings, surrounded by blocks and blocks of tin-roofed dwellings of muddy stone.

There were quite a few Somali factions and very powerful among them was the war lord, Mohamed Farrah Aidid, the head of the Habr Gidr clan. Counting the three surveillance birds and the spy plane high overhead, there were nineteen aircraft, twelve vehicles, and about 160 men. A tall, slender, gray-haired man in desert fatigues with half an unlit cigar jutting from the corner of his mouth, Garrison had walked from chopper to chopper and then stooped down by each Humvee.Based on the quality of what comes before, I shouldn’t have been surprised that he brings a deft touch to the controversial decisions to insert Task Force Ranger in the first place, and later to pull them out. In 1993, the world watched as cable news endlessly replayed the bodies of Americans being hauled through the streets by jubilant Somalis. One of the difficulties of conveying combat stems from the endlessly unique perceptions of those who experience it. Every open space was clotted with the dense makeshift villages of the disinherited, round stick huts covered with layers of rags and shacks made of scavenged scraps of wood and patches of rusted tin. Award-winning literary journalist Mark Bowden’s dramatic narrative captures this harrowing ordeal through the eyes of the young men who fought that day.