africa

"Black Hawk Down" written by acclaimed author Mark Bauden is a riveting story of young men risking their lives on a mission that has gone wrong. The excitement and adventure starts from page one and will keep the reader flipping pages until the end.

Forced to take part in a UN peacekeeping mission, Task force Ranger and Elite Delta force members (America's anti-terrorist organization) fight side by side when they are deceived by there allies and discover that their mission, to capture several top lieutenants of a Somali warlord, was a setup. Allies turn into enemies, and all hell breaks loose in this haunting story of modern war.

Bullets fly, friends are lost, and tensions grow when the Somalis begin to destroy the Rangers and Delta force members "god like power" the helicopter. Based on a true story and on real life heroes such as Gary Gordon, the Delta force sniper, and Mike Durrent, the black hawk "super six four" pilot, "Black Hawk Down" will make you laugh, cry, and shake with fear, as no one knows who will live or die.

This book is suitable for people from the age of thirteen and up because of the graphic violence and language that is in the book. Many readers that" if this was fantasy we would rate it up there with some of the best war novels such as the naked and the dead by Norman Mailer, or "The Things They Carried" by Tim O'brian."

By Joey

Blackhawk Down is the first readable war story of my generation. I've followed the development of Mark Bowden's book since his first publication of the story in the Philadelphia newspaper. A few years prior to the battle of Mogadishu, I was myself a member of the 3rd Ranger Battalion. At the age of 19, I was a sent to invade Panama as a member of this unit and was fortunate to know several of the men in this book. As a former Ranger, I will tell you that Bowden left nothing out about how these elite units fight, survive, and think. Every moment of the book is the real, gut-wrenching, dirt filled, in your face brutal truth of what it's like to be of this generation and in combat. He accurately and vividly describes the failures of the US administration, the intelligence community, and the soldiers themselves. Bowden also recreates the success brought about in these units through preparation, tough training, discipline, and dedication to your fellow soldiers. Folks, if you ever wanted to know why your tax money goes to fund military training, then read this book. If you ever doubted the military and thought its harsh, disciplined lifestyle was unnecessarily brutal and unkind, then read this book. If you've ever thought about joining the military just for the college money, thinking that you'll never have to fight, then read this book. This one will slap you in the face with the reality of today's elite military units.

Mark Bowden has done an outstanding job of telling the story of the battle of Mogadishu. U.S. army rangers and delta forces were in Mogadishu trying to kill or capture Mohamed Farrah Aidid, a local warlord, leader of the Habr Gidr clan, who was preventing international relief agencies from properly distributing food in famine-decimated Somalia.

Trying to pluck one well-hidden person from the midst of a very sympathetic populace is not so easy, as we learned then and have re-learned in the case of Ossama bin Ladin. The U.S. began to settle for picking off top Aidid aids.

This battle bagan when U.S. forces learned that two Aidid lieutenants were meeting in a building near the center of the Aidid-controlled section of Mogadishu. The plan called for Delta forces to take the building and capture the men, for army rangers to secure the corners of the block containing the target building, and for black Hawk helicopters to provide overhead cover for the rangers.

It was a reasonably good plan, but it had one very serious weakness. It turned out that the Black Hawks were very vulnerable to fire from rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs), a cheap and reliable Soviet made weapons system. RPGs are as common as dirt in third world countries, and Aidid's forces had plenty of them. Two of the Black Hawks were shot down by RPG fire, and two more were damaged so badly that they had to crash land back at the U.S. base. In trying to retrieve the downed Black Hawk pilots and crews (or their bodies), the rangers and Delta forces got shot to hell by an extremely hostile city full of AK-47-toting Somalis.

It is an amazing story, well told by Mark Bowden. Part of the irony and horror of the situation is that we were only trying to help, we were only trying to do good. Yet we ended up getting 19 of our own boys killed and 70 others wounded, and killing perhaps (no one knows for sure) 500 Somalis. The moral to the story is that if you're trying to do good, send missionaries. The army is not a missionary force. The purpose of the army is to kill people, and it should never be deployed unless U.S. national security is implicated, which it was not in Somalia.