Night Stalkers Don't Quit

I could, if I tried, probably think of a handful of books that I’ve read that have moved this old goat to go misty. Certainly, history is not a genre, that emotes the frustration and tears I felt after reading Mark Bowden’s “Black Hawk Down: A Story of Modern War”. This chronicle of two days during a simple “extrication” mission by US military elite in a third world waste hole in Somalia left me livid and enraged. This account of crossed signals, a lack of preparedness, hubris, and just damned bad luck, should have been called “How the Hell Could it Happen?”

The sad thing is, without this book I would not have even known about Mogadishu or what the US was dong there in Somalia during October of 1993. As I passed the stacked copies of the book in my local Border’s I vaguely remembered some sort of altercation or military intervention. As I was on a book-buying binge, I grabbed a copy. Today I finished one of the best pieces of military reporting I’ve ever read- it was also the most riveting and frustrating.

Somalia, Ethiopia and much of Northeast Africa was gripped in a famine that threatened to destroy another generation of Africans already cursed by AIDs, genocidal tyrants and political buffoonery. Warlords (really heavily armed gangs of khat-chewing thugs) in Somalia were advancing in the political vacuum of an absent government, and using the food sent to relieve the famine, for their personal gains and political control. And once again, there is my beloved country leading the charge of a UN peacekeeping force on a mission to stabilize the region. This book painfully, in graphic minute-by-minute detail, recounts the almost crushing onslaught of Somali civilians against a mission of Army Ranger and Delta forces set out to detain a handful of cretin warlords. How Americas elitist fighting units could be ravaged so viciously is the subject of Mark Bowden’s book.

The book is engrossing because it takes us upfront and into the lives and personalities of the soldiers involved in the mission. We meet the guys, learn what makes them tick and why they opted for training to become a part of the most demanding of military units. If I had one criticism of the book it would be the authors presumption that the reader has a background on the function and use of infantry tactics. For example, the author tells us who was carrying a SAW weapon or a CAB-15 but not the purpose of the weapon. It turns out that the SAW is a lightweight machine gun and is carried by one member of a squad for advancing infantry. Perhaps a minor detail, but it seems if they were important enough o mention, it was important enough to explain the role of the weapon in the mission.

There were many descriptions of the fighting and the devastating wounds to the men involved where I had to put the book down and get a breath of air. The author’s descriptions of modern combat should rouse any armchair generals from their heroic war fantasies and war-loving daydreams
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After reading of the deaths of eighteen American soldiers and dozens of casualties, after understanding that over 500 Somali men women and children were killed and thousands of civilians injured, after 400 pages of extensive research and interviews, the question still looms somewhere: How the hell could it happen? . That question drives the frustration and the tears.