Latest Read: Black Hawk Down

Bowden, Mark.  Black Hawk Down.  New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1999.

Generally, I'm not a huge fan of this sort of war story - it's all on the ground action, profiles of the soldiers involved, blood, guts, gore and action.  The problem is usually that there isn't enough analysis and context to put it all in perspective.  Bowden, on the other hand, really makes it work - most of his book is still bloody and gutsy enough to be the basis of both a Hollywood movie and a 1st person shooter video game; but it's also got enough macro analysis to make it worth reading from a foreign policy perspective.

Black Hawk Down is the story of Somalia during the Clinton years.  That's the bigger context anyway, really it's about two days or so in Mogadishu when a US Army Delta force and Ranger operation went really, really wrong.  The book is meticulously researched; while most of it is from the perspective of the US forces, there are also some Somali perspectives included - this helps create that bigger picture, too.

The action itself is lucidly written - the gore is particularly gory.  At one point I thought I wouldn't be able to finish due to the queasiness that was induced by a particularly bloody scene: One of the US soldiers was wounded in the leg and his femoral artery (or whatever the major one is) is severed.  The medic on hand (who was a good friend of the soldier) had to reach into the soldier's wound to try to grab the artery and close it off and he can't find it, so he has to basically dig up into the dude's body looking for it and eventually makes another incision to make another fruitless search.  It was really disturbing.

Anyways, the book presents the soldiers honorably, but also shows their problems - over confidence, naivité, too much information at times, too little information at times, and missteps, sometimes literally.  The Somalis are presented mostly from the US soldiers perspective, so it tends to be somewhat less than charitable, but in the end certain positive characteristics are evident - courage, resilience, street-smarts and, perhaps above all, inventiveness.  The US figured that the Black Hawk helicopters would be the source of overwhelming force, but the Somalis figured out how to counterattack and were able to bring down 2 of them and seriously damage another.

The book raises issues about US foreign policy - the lesson isn't so much that the US shouldn't have gotten involved in Somalia, but rather the nature of US involvement is questioned.  The policy that led to the disaster was an attempt to take out the most powerful warlord - the one that most Somali's supported.  The US has had a history of pushing our agenda, regardless of political realities in other nations.  This simply doesn't work.  Unfortunately, the lesson seems to have been lost in two terrible ways - on the one hand, the US does not get involved in conflicts it should (see Rwanda, or Darfur) to prevent humanitarian crises, but does get involved in conflicts to impose our imperium (see Iraq).  One day, hopefully, we'll learn.