No more Black Hawk Downs..Ever Again.
Review of Black Hawk Down by Mark Bowden
by P. Winkler.
It must have been devastating for the eighteen American families who had lost their sons in the battle of Mogadishu in 1998, but doubly so when top Army brass considered it a minor engagement, a defeat best forgotten. When Mark Bowden began unlocking the memory banks of stateside survivors, he was surprised to find out that the Department of Defense had not even written up a report about that fateful night of October 3 1993. So it is understandable that for the men of the Rangers, SEALS, Deltas and their families, Mark Bowden is a bit of a hero himself for painstakingly piecing together events from interviews and video and radio transcripts. But a closer examination of his book Black Hawk Down raises questions about exactly what kind of journalistic service he has provided.
Bowden asserts that “soldiers cannot concern themselves with the forces that bring them to a fight...they trust their leaders not to risk their lives for too little” (p 346). If soldiers are not to pose questions, Mr Bowden who is a journalist employed at the Philadelphia Inquirer, certainly can. But he does not. Would it be so strange, in a democracy, for a journalist to ask about the political, social and economic factors which led his interviewees into battle? And what prompted the order to send a small band of North American soldiers, to capture, to actually AIRLIFT, two Somali combatants from inside a
house situated in a crowded marketplace on a Sunday afternoon in Mogadishu? The American boys were so convinced of their abilities to capture two men dead or
alive in a couple of hours that they left without their night-vision goggles. Yet hundreds of thousands of their intended prisonersÂ’ followers lived in the streets surrounding the house. If this was hubris, Bowden isnÂ’t letting on. As he says, soldiers obey orders, not question them.
Looking through the index of Black Hawk Down, the words “Somali oil”, “Somali uranium” and, even, “resources” do not figure, although plenty of evidence exists indicating the hidden agenda of US policy towards Africa (see Michael Clare’s book The Resource Wars and other articles on this site, particularly the Los Angeles Times article of 1993) . A realist would say that wars fought by states have more to with the black (oil) and yellow (uranium) stuff than with “humanitarian supplies,” or “famine relief” , the make-good reasons given by the Clinton Administration for the US/UN operation which eventually claimed between 7,000 and 10,000 Somali lives. T he Battle of Mogadishu claimed 500 Somali lives alone. Bowden doesn’t blame ineptitude of the UN for the disaster that happened, as many have done since. He makes it clear it was the US’ show, but again, it is not context that grips the author. Where he excells is in the tension and exhilaration of the bloody battle itself -- the thoughts and feelings of US soldiers facing enemy fire, as if the reader were there, seeing, hearing and smelling it. Paradoxically, the American soldiers, once the shooting started, had trouble believing what they
were seeing: “They felt like they were in a movie, and had to remind themselves that this horror, the blood, the deaths, was real...It’s as though their firefight was a bizarre two-day adventure, like some extreme Outward Bound experience where things got out of hand and some of the guys got killed.” p 346.
Americans Special Operations soldiers are trained to defend each other, while attacking…well they are never exactly sure who, although evil warlords sounded about right to the Rangers aching to get into a real live war in 1993..As Bowden remarks, ‘nuff said’ about the causa belli. Bred on stories of cowboys and Indians, the guys saw Somalia as “pure Indian country” with, gosh darn, “no decent maps”. One pilot had even painted the end of his Black Hawk helicopter with a “ crude cartoon of a crooked nose Indian with a head feather”, and the words “Sitting Bull”. Was he looking for a Sitting Bull type of enemy to shoot at, or did he hope to get inspired by Native American courage in battle? But unlike Indians in Hollywood movies, those Somalis didn’t just fall to the ground lifeless, they got up, although the “skinnies” were apparently the “lousy shots” (p 154). “Then there was the woman in a blue turban...a powerful woman with thick arms and legs who came sprinting across the road carrying a heavy basket in both arms. She was wearing a bright blue and white dress that billowed behind her as she ran..Every Ranger at the intersection blasted her. Twombly, Nelson, Yurek, and Stebbins all opened up...First she stumbled, but kept on going. Then, as more rounds hit her, she fell and RPGs [grenades] spilled out of her basket onto the street. The shooting stopped.” After a lot of shooting, “her body came further apart. It was appalling, yet some of the Rangers laughed.” (p217). Then there was another woman, this some unarmed, of whom one of the Delta soldiers said “if that bitch comes back, I’m going to shoot her.” She did, and the D-boy shot her down on the street. (p 217).
But still the “skinnies” kept on fighting back, and more of them were coming in (well they just didn’t care about their own lives, which shows how irrational they were – the abject poverty they lived in demonstrated that). Why didn’t the skinnies just go home? Couldn’t they see they were facing the might of the American attack machine? It must have
been puzzling when events werenÂ’t unfolding like they were supposed to.
The first to go in were the Rangers armed with grenades and automatic weapons-- a self selected band trained for risky missions. Where had they come from? One Ranger has been given the choice by a judge, either the Army or probation. Others came from military families. Some were idealistic, some just wanted to be all they could be. Others just wanted to kill, because power comes out of the barrel of a gun. The youngest of the Rangers was Specialist Rob Phipps. Up in the air in a Black Hawk, he was on the high of his life. At age 22, the only thing he could compare it to was a drug. He’d been out of control as a “wild teenage” in Detroit and now he was given permission to break the biggest social taboo of all, to kill. Revealingly (as Mark Bowden puts it, although he doesn’t say why - another loose end) the Rangers were nearly all white -- there were only 2 African Americans in the 140-men company.
Understandably enraged at this attack on their homeland, ordinary Somali men and women surged into the streets to fight the American invadors (would not Americans defend their homeland if Somalis had arrived in helicopters for a shoot-out?). Men and women alike built barricades, made themselves invisible when needed, took incredible chances. Their tenacity in battle even earned the grudging admiration of some their US attackers, according to Bowden. For them this was no movie.
A narrative by turns full of pain, torture, bravery and battle fog, Black Hawk Down makes riveting reading, a real page turner, and that is disturbing in itself.. It’s like reading a war novel with the added titillation of real life drama. The book is constructed as a series of excrutiating cliff hangers. What would be the fate of little Private Stebbins (the guy who is now spending 30 years in prison for child sodomy) who received “ a golf ball-sized chunk of metal lodged in his foot”? How would the man with his groin blown off make it back to base? How awful was to put one’s hand into a man’s insides to stop the flow of blood? Paradoxically, Bowden is better at humanising a couple of the Somalis he interviewed who were engaged in the combat, especially the man who caringly looks after an American prisoner of war in the aftermath of the battle, here one gets a sense of a real person. But the young American men appear as action film characters, darting from place to place, finding cover, screaming in pain, exchanging brief words of encouragement to each other. It goes back to the inauthenticity of the mission, the pervasive feeling of unreality they were experiencing, not understanding how they got into that situation in the first place. But, isn’t every battle in history experienced that way? Or is the trauma of war different when moral purpose is involved? Perhaps the Somali citizens defending what is rightfully theirs know the answer to that. These are questions that Mr Bowden would have done well to explore more fully.
Mark BowdenÂ’s avowed intent is to make the book ,and the film, a battle
cry for more trained troops, for more support for those risking their lives on the behest of their commanders, especially in view of the September 9 attack. If this is a recruitment poster, it fails woefully. The scenes he so vividly describes will simply turn people off who are more used to MTV and would rather not get up out of their armchairs in order to participate in an ill-conceived, futile hand to hand combat in an impoverished African city. Even the idea of pouring tax dollars into such carnage is not appetising to most people.
What the book tells us is that street fighting is not an acceptable lifestyle for people living in the US, for whom driving to WalmartÂ’s in broad-beamed SUVs is the most arduous task of the day. We now know that ground troops, even without being engaged in combat, run incredible health risks: a third of Gulf War veterans are now on disability, felled by illnesses linked to the depleted uranium weapons and carcinogenic explosives. So, who wants to go to war? Conscription is out of the question. Battles like the one in Mogadishu prove that small numbers of men on the ground-- however well trained and hardy -- donÂ’t stand a chance against the determination of civilians defending their country. From talking to a US Somali veteran who worked in the State Department, it rather looks like that the battle of Mogadishu was a set-up by US Generals who didnÂ’t want to be there in the first place. I sincerely hope that is not the case.
The book will only reinforce the USÂ’ policies to rely on technological and economic superiority when it comes to killing civilians in Africa, Middle East, and anywhere else where oil and uranium are plentiful and the US deems part of its strategic interests. That means more aerial bombings, more unmanned aircraft and more blockades to strangle a countryÂ’s economy, as in Iraq where a million civilians have died since 1990 from the US/UN sanctions.
Bowden flails around for justification for such a ghastly battle scene. On the one hand, Bowden says he wrote the book “for the military to keep and train highly motivated, talented and experienced soldiers” (p 345). On the other hand, he says the lesson of the Battle of Mogadishu is “in the limits of what force can accomplish.”(p 342). Which of these contradictory lessons should we learn from? The reality is that the message is: No more American body bags,no more Black Hawk Downs..ever again…