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Black Hawk Down: A Story of Modern War (Paperback) (平装)
by Mark Bowden
| Category:
Warfare, Story |
| Market price: ¥ 158.00
MSL price:
¥ 148.00
[ Shop incentives ]
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| Stock:
Pre-order item, lead time 3-7 weeks upon payment [ COD term does not apply to pre-order items ] |
MSL rating:
 Good for Gifts |
| MSL Pointer Review:
Authoritative, gripping, and insightful, Black Hawk Down is a riveting look at the terror and exhilaration of combat, destined to become a classic of war reporting. |
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AllReviews |
  1 2 Total 2 pages 16 items |
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William Finnegan (The New York Times) (MSL quote) , USA
<2007-02-01 00:00>
What this demotic, you-are-there prose lacks in literary finesse ... it makes up in pure narrative drive. |
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Bob Shacochis (The New York Observer) (MSL quote), USA
<2007-02-01 00:00>
Black Hawk Down ranks among the best books ever written about infantry combat. . . . A descendent of books like The Killer Angels and We Were Soldiers Once . . . and Young. |
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Tom Walker (The Denver Post) (MSL quote), USA
<2007-02-01 00:00>
If Black Hawk Down were fiction we'd rank it up there with the best war novels: The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer, or The Things They Carried, by Tim O'Brien. |
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San Francisco Chronicle (MSL quote), USA
<2007-02-01 00:00>
The acclaimed New York Times bestseller Black Hawk Down is "a shocking account of modern warfare . . . gripping and horrifying" |
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Thomas Duff (MSL quote), USA
<2007-02-01 00:00>
The last "vacation novel" I took along with me was Mark Bowden's Black Hawk Down. If you want to see the reality of war, this will deliver the goods.
Bowden is a writer who decided to research out the story of America's involvement in Somalia, specifically the actions in Mogadishu in 1993. The mission started out as a UN-led humanitarian effort to feed the population after years of war and the total breakdown of any sort of government. It turned into a US action to remove a Somali warlord named Mohamed Aidid. The whole campaign came to a head when the US ran an operation to raid a house known to house some top officials in Aidid's clan. Due to mistakes and miscalculations, it ended with two Black Hawk helicopters being shot down, scores of dead and injured Rangers and Delta Force operators, the capture of a soldier, and images of dead US soldiers being paraded through the streets of Mogadishu. The US commitment to the Somalia mission was questionable before the episode, and it totally evaporated after it. Bowden takes great pains to tell the story of the soldiers who took part in the operation, and to voice their feelings and emotions of what they went through.
As a documentary of an ugly time in US military history, Bowden has done his job well. His research has sorted out fact from fiction, and he does a good job in telling the story without injecting personal bias until the epilogue and afterwords. The reception from various military sources after the book was published was very positive, and speaks well to his efforts. The book does seem to be a bit repetitive at times, as much of the action involves trying to fight their way out of tight confined quarters (or trying to navigate to a downed copter to support the downed crew). Still, what happened is what happened, and Bowden relates it well.
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David Read (MSL quote), USA
<2007-02-01 00:00>
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.
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1 2 Total 2 pages 16 items |
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