Volume 46, Number 18 · November 18, 1999
Mission Impossible
By Brian Urquhart
Black Hawk Down: A Story of Modern War
by Mark Bowden
Atlantic Monthly Press, 386 pp., $24.00
Late in the afternoon of Sunday, October 3, 1993, nearly one hundred elite American soldiers slid down on ropes from Black Hawk helicopters into a part of Mogadishu controlled by the warlord Mohammed Farrah Aidid. They were supposed to abduct two of Aidid's top lieutenants and return to base overland. The mission was intended to take one hour. Instead, the task force was pinned down and fought for their lives throughout the night. Two of the Black Hawks were shot down in Aidid's territory and two, badly damaged, had to crash-land at the base. When the force was finally extricated early the next morning by a multinational UN group led by Malaysians and Pakistanis, eighteen of its members were dead and seventy-five wounded. For every American killed or wounded there were at least a dozen Somali casualties; conservative estimates reckoned there were five hundred Somali dead and perhaps one thousand wounded. The figures were probably higher. It was the biggest firefight involving American soldiers since the war in Vietnam.
Review, 4449 words
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