Black Hawk Down: A Story of Modern War

Abstract

You won’t be able to put Black Hawk Down aside. It is a true story that reads like fiction: 1 part military history, 1 part adventure narrative, and all adrenaline. Mark Bowden's work on the 2-day gun battle in Mogadishu, Somalia, in 1993 was praised by the soldiers, the US military, and critics alike. In fact, it was a National Book Award finalist. On October 3, 1993, Task Force Ranger along with a unit of Delta Force stormed the city of Mogadishu, Somalia, to capture 2 warlords responsible for widespread famine and genocide. What was to be a 1-hour mission became a 1-day gun battle. The soldiers found a city of militia that lay ready to fight back; it culminated with the downing of 2 Black Hawk helicopters (including a search and rescue unit), 18 dead US soldiers, 70 GIs wounded, and scenes of US soldiers being dragged through the streets the next morning, as shown on CNN. Now required reading by military academies, this text is a page turner; it's a must-read for wilderness medicine enthusiasts involved in any sort of military or similar mass casualty situation or readers looking for one of the finest pieces of military journalism available. The wilderness medicine lessons are plentiful and horrific. The Ranger unit was well prepared with a multidisciplinary search and rescue Black Hawk crew, complete with rangers, parajumpers, and physicians’ assistants. Then, when the search and rescue helicopter is shot down, the scenes become dire. The most dramatic is that of a physician's assistant performing a femoral artery cutdown in the field to stop the bleeding from a grenade wound. The gruesome tale culminates with the triage physician at the ranger base: he sends critical patients by air to a nearby NATO hospital, keeps the walking wounded at his field medical tent, and takes the mortally injured to a holding area to die. Politics of the war in general are minimized, as is the Somali point of view (conservative estimates of Somali death and injured were catastrophic, upwards of 1000). But Bowden gets inside the minds of the men of Task Force Ranger and highlights their patriotism, camaraderie, trust, faith, responsibility, and dedication.