BLACK HAWK DOWN.

• Author: Naylor, Sean D.
• Position: Review

BLACK HAWK DOWN By Mark Bowden Atlantic Monthly Press, $24.00

What the military missed in Somalia

MARK BOWDEN HAS PRODUCED A SUPERB account of the October 1993 battle of Mogadishu. His graphic description of the fiercest firefight involving U.S. troops since the Vietnam war will resonate well beyond the military history enthusiasts who typically lap up such fare. Indeed, the most grateful beneficiaries of Bowden's labor should be found in the U.S. Army, many segments of which appear to have tried long and hard to forget that the battle ever occurred.

The basic outline of the battle was already well-known when Bowden began his research in 1997. On Oct. 3, 1993, several helicopter-loads of Rangers and "Delta Force" commandos roped into the Somali capital's "Black Sea" neighborhood to seize two senior aides to warlord Mohamed Farrah Aidid. The United States, in the form of the 450-man Task Force Ranger, was engaged in an undeclared guerrilla war with Aidid's Habr Gidr clan, and this was the task force's seventh such raid. None had turned up Aidid himself, who had gone to ground when the United Nations placed a bounty on his head. But after some early missteps the task force had begun steadily to take down Aidid's organizational structure.

The Oct. 3 mission was proceeding well until Aidid's militia shot down first one, then a second of the task force's Black Hawk helicopters. Instead of heading straight back to their base with their detainees in a ground convoy, the 100-odd Rangers and Delta commandos were forced to hunker down around the first crash site, as Aidid's forces converged on them from across the city. A series of convoys were dispatched to relieve the cut-off troops, only to be driven back by withering fire. By the time U.S. commanders had linked up U.S. infantry forces with Malaysian and Pakistani armored vehicles to form a convoy with enough firepower to get to the stricken special operators and pull them out, 18 U.S. soldiers had been killed or mortally wounded, and the Clinton administration's nation-building strategy in Somalia lay in tatters.

Most of Bowden's book consists of a dramatic blow-by-blow account of the 16-hour drama played out in the labyrinthine alleyways and dusty boulevards near the Bakara Market, the center of Aidid's power base. Drawing on radio transcripts and interviews with dozens of participants, he painstakingly recreates each moment of the battle, lacing the vignettes together with biographical sketches...