Black Hawk Down: A Story of Modern War

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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.

And in my reading of the book, the people in charge of the operation were paralysed by the unforeseen events and overwhelming information.But in doing so, he pays little attention to the elitist attitudes and actions of these "peacekeepers" that ultimately caused this conflict. on the human drama, producing one of the most gripping and authoritative accounts of combat ever written. I found I could not read it fast enough and was grateful for the snappy and easy to follow dialogue. S. soldiers were dropped by helicopter into a teeming market in the heart of Mogadishu, Somalia, to abduct two top lieutenants of a Somali warlord.

The battle began as a snatch-and-grab mission, meant to capture two top lieutenants of the Somali warlord Mohammed Farrah Aidid, who was disrupting United Nations efforts to end a famine caused by Somalia’s civil war.In a tight corner the elite troops are unwilling to take casualties to do what is necessary to fulfill their primary mission: protect civilians. About a fourth of those who volunteered washed out, enough so that those who emerged with their Ranger tab at the end were riding the headiest wave of accomplishment in their young lives.