Black Hawk Down

by Mark Bowden

  The soldiers wanted others to know and understand what had happened. Exactly what had happened. I noticed that soldiers, remarkably, far from trying to aggrandize themselves and their performance in the fight; often told me about moments where they failed, where they made mistakes, where they lost their nerve, where they doubted themselves terribly.

  There is a critical moment in the story when a Ranger named Brad Thomas lost heart. He had gone out into the battle as cocky as the rest of his buddies, but in the chaos that ensued he was riding in the back of a Humvee when one of his best friends, Dominic Pilla, was killed instantly, shot in the head. Pilla had collapsed from the turret of the vehicle into Thomas’s lap, and had bled all over him. On the race to get Pilla back to base, in the futile hope of saving his life, the little convoy in which Thomas was riding encountered blistering sunfire. They staggered back to the safety of their base, their vehicles riddled with bullet holes, intact but badly shaken. Try to imagine the relief you would feel after being immersed in a maelstrom of random death and terrible injury, and then to have finally fought your way back to safety, only to be immediately ordered to return to the fight. There were more than a hundred of their buddies trapped in the city who desperately needed help. Urgently.

  Brad Thomas faltered. He told his sergeant that he couldn’t do it. He was too afraid. Courage is not an easy concept. Yes, it took tremendous courage to remount those vehicles and steer back into the battle, but it also took another kind of courage to stand before your Ranger comrades in this critical moment, and confess your terror, that you were too frightened to do your duty.

  Brad ultimately remounted the Humvee and returned to the fight. To me it remains one of the most poignant moments in the book and in the movie. At first Brad was uncomfortable about my telling that part of his story. He never asked me not to tell it, but he did ask me why I felt it was important. He was embarrassed. I told him that moment in the story spoke more to me about the terror of that battle, and the real courage it demanded from him and the other soldiers caught up in it, than any other. It is one thing for a young and inexperienced soldier, fired up with fellowship and invincibility, to march into a fight, and quite another for one who has experienced the sheer random cruelty of it, who has held his dying friend in his lap, to march straight back into hell. Brad Thomas was embarrassed that his emotions momentarily got the better of him, but he had demonstrated an even higher strain of bravery. I persuaded him to let me tell it.

  For reasons like that, I was convinced that I did not belong in the story of Black Hawk Down. It was the soldiers’ story, not mine. I felt entrusted with it, something like the way they felt entrusted with it. I was not a character in the story, and I deliberately worked to remove myself as a filter for their telling of it. After hundreds of hours of listening to them I had internalized their vocabulary and their jargon, their sense of humor, their fatalism, and the rhythms of their speech. The voice of Black Hawk Down is my voice channeling theirs. As I said, this was a very deliberate decision on my part, and I think it was the right one. To this day, one of the most flattering reactions I have encountered to this book is the assumption, particularly by military people, that I am or was a soldier myself. The voice of the narrator sounds authentic to them. I am very proud of that and consider it a literary achievement.

  But where William Finnegan of The New Yorker was right, is that it is not what is most often thought of as literary prose, certainly not in the circles where finesse, black irony, and high style are most prized. And certainly not in the tradition of Michael Herr or A. J. Liebling. Both Herr and Liebling wrote something more akin to reportage, that is, they placed themselves among the soldiers they were writing about, and they wrote primarily about themselves, or about themselves observing the soldiers and the war. There’s nothing wrong with that. In the case of Liebling, in particular, it produced some of the finest war writing ever. He belongs in my club of best war reporters, which may be a little bit less exclusive than William Finnegan’s, but which would not include Herr.

  Herr is one hell of a writer, but an untrustworthy reporter. When he wasn’t making things up in Dispatches, like that Persian scholar/whore-loving/Beethoven-worshipping general officer he told his editor Harold Hayes was a “composite,” he was treating the entire Vietnam war as a metaphor for his own drug addiction. His prose was electrifying and original and occasionally powerful and moving, and his descriptions of the war zones in Vietnam so haunting and fine that he deserves to be carried into the halls of black irony and high style on a gilded rococo chair, but Herr was writing about himself as much as he was writing about Vietnam. It was prose that resonated with a disillusioned, anti-war, drug-entranced generation, and it stands today as a classic of some kind. I like the book a lot, but would argue that the choices Herr made exclude him from any club of best war reporting, or any reporting for that matter, if the first test of good reporting is that it tells the truth.

  As it happens, what Herr was doing forty years ago was solidly in the mainstream of war literature for his time. For most of the last half of the twentieth century, we as a country forgot about war and soldiers as a legitimate subject matter for serious writing. We didn’t completely forget about them, but the only acceptable way of treating war in literary circles was to decry it, or make fun of it. Beginning with the brilliantly satiric novel Catch-22, literary writers could no longer write about battles and soldiers straightforwardly, as, say Hemingway did, or Norman Mailer did in The Naked and the Dead, or as Stephen Crane or John Hersey did.

  Throughout the Cold War, when the world lived in the shadow of enormous nuclear arsenals, when we owed our very lives to a strategic doctrine known by the devilishly wicked acronym M.A.D., a black irony rich enough for Swift, the only acceptable way for an artist to view war was as madness. So it is no wonder that our literary perspective, and to some extent our journalistic perspective, became overwhelmingly antiwar. In Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, or in, say, Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Fire or Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, three of the most notable modern literary war novels, all satires, World War Two, the great triumph of democracy and freedom over totalitarianism, becomes a sensible enterprise only to malevolent, invisible, powerful interests behind the scenes. Soldiers were meaningless because modern war itself was so terrible and costly that no cause or victory could justify it.

  When war is madness, soldiers can only be stooges, sadists, victims, or lunatics. In Dispatches they are often at least three of the four at once, and stoned to boot. Think about the great war movies of the post-Vietnam period: Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket, Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter, Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, which was, of course, partly written by Herr himself, as well as the movie and TV show M.A.S.H. It became unacceptable in the circles of literary finesse, black irony, and high style to view war in any other way.

  This is, of course, only one way to look at war, which has been an important feature in the literature of every culture for all of human history, from Homer to the popular 1960s TV show Combat. There is an undeniable element of madness to warfare, to one group of people working feverishly to kill and wound another group of people, but that is not the whole story. Perfectly decent, honorable people are driven to war for very sane reasons. So long as one group of men on this planet would take what they want or impose their will by force, civilized people will organize to defend themselves and defeat them. Another way of saying that is, evil exists. So long as men are both good and evil, inside themselves and in their actions in the world, there will be conflict. And where there are evil forces at work in the world, or, to back away from such a stark characterization, where the peace and stability one society or tribe or nation is threatened by another, good men and women will step forward to fight. It is wonderful and much to be desired for nations and people with conflicting interests to resolve their differences peaceably, and there are many examples of that happening throughout history, but, sadly, nations and peoples conti
nue to come to blows. We can and ought to deplore war. We ought to do everything we can to avoid it. But if there is some utopian world waiting for us in the future, we have not yet glimpsed its shores. John Updike once said that he was confused by the very concept of “antiwar,” which he felt, and I’m paraphrasing him here, was like being “anti-food” or “anti-sex,” since war was such an essential element of human experience. I began Black Hawk Down with a quote from Cormac McCarthy’s novel Blood Meridian, that reads, in part: “War endures. As well ask men what they think of stone. War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting the ultimate practitioner.”

  As a writer and a journalist, someone with an ambition to tell true stories with the emotion and intimacy of good fiction, I had long felt that combat would make for great material. It was intensely dramatic, indeed, it was about matters of life and death. It is also important. Battle is nearly always significant, and not just in the lives of those who are directly involved. It nearly always brings consequences in both victory or defeat that reverberate widely and deeply. Most nonfiction accounts of war tend to be written in the more formal language of history and traditional journalism. I am thinking of Cornelius Ryan’s sweeping books The Longest Day and A Bridge Too Far. The best nonfiction accounts of battle through the eyes of soldiers tend to be in memoirs, which afford only the author’s perspective. What if, I thought, a reporter could tell the story of a battle from the inside out, through the eyes of its participants, but also with the broader overview and reach of an historian or novelist?

  The idea percolated, but my journalistic career afforded few opportunities. As a country, we had been relatively free of war in the decades after Vietnam, which probably contributed to the persistence of the strictly black ironic view of warfare. The United States invaded Kuwait to drive Saddam Hussein’s forces out in 1991, and did little to make writers and artists think differently about warfare. In the world of the arts the action was viewed mostly cynically—the superb film Three Kings comes to mind.

  Then came the Battle of Mogadishu. October, 1993.

  I found the soldiers and most of them talked to me. I made my way to Mogadishu and did my best to learn the story from Somalis’ perspective. Readers who picked up the book were not supposed to be struck by my cleverness, but by the extraordinary courage and humanity of those young soldiers. They made mistakes. They were terrified. Sometimes they shot at people they shouldn’t have shot it. Sometimes they shot at each other. They became tragically confused and some of them were killed and others horribly injured. The story raised all sorts of questions about the wisdom of their leaders, about whether and when it is appropriate to send young soldiers off to fight and die, and what that decision means in the real world. But along with all of these mistakes and questions, the story captured the undeniable nobility of military service, and was shot through with my respect for these young men who felt so entrusted with this story, and who shared it with me.

  So here for the first time in decades was a war story entirely free of literary finesse. It was most definitely free of black irony and high style. In other words, it was not a book about a writer writing about war, a la Herr or Liebling, for that matter, but a simpler book about soldiers at war. A book that showed how terrible war was, but that did not portray war as pure madness or soldiers as sadists, stooges, victims, or lunatics, or any combination of those things. It was a return to an age-old literary form, a story of brave men at war.

  Publishers and editors didn’t like it. Alfred A. Knopf, which had published my previous book and had right of first refusal to my next, rejected it. Initially, even my editors at The Philadelphia Inquirer did not want it. But I won them over, and the paper ran an early version of the story as a twenty-nine-part serial in 1997. Morgan got the book for a steal, offering me the smallest advance I had ever received, even for those first books that had been read only by members of my immediate family, but I was grateful to him.

  Readers liked it immediately. I believe they responded to it precisely because of the way I had chosen to write it. Soldiers loved it. The family members of soldiers read it and loved it. The friends of families who had soldiers listened to the recommendations of their military-minded friends. By doing something very old, as old as the Iliad and the Oddyssey, I had produced a book that readers perceived as new. The book sold and sold and sold, and then that great movie was made and the book sold some more. It still sells. It has a chance of becoming something that endures.

  No one knows for sure why one book sells and another does not. Morgan chalks it up to “the book gods.” My hunch about Black Hawk Down is that it sold precisely because the prose captured accurately the voices of the men in the battle. It was about them, not me. Readers responded to the exact opposite of the traits Finnegan found lacking in my prose, sincerity instead of black irony, and authenticity instead of stylistic finesse. I like to think that Black Hawk Down contributed to a sea change in America’s attitude about war and about soldiers. The attacks of September 11, however, were the most dramatic change. Suddenly Americans were reminded why they needed soldiers. In the years since we have seen a steady stream of literary books and movies and TV shows that no longer strictly portray soldiers as sadists, stooges, victims, or lunatics. Today, even those who oppose the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan take pains to emphasize their respect for our troops. I have seen young men and women in combat fatigues get spontaneous standing ovations as they move through their airports, and it never fails to bring a tear to my eye.

  In the ten years since Black Hawk Down was published, my stock has gone up in the literary and journalism worlds. Magazines that long rejected my story ideas now solicit me to write for them. Before I wrote Black Hawk Down, it would be accurate to say that in the eyes of most editors and publishers I never had a good idea—including Black Hawk Down. Now, it seems that I am no longer capable of having a bad idea. I think my present condition is far more dangerous.

  I have long since recovered from any of the discomfort I felt in being excluded from the club of best war reporters by William Finnegan of The New Yorker. That little stab healed promptly ten years ago when Morgan tracked me down in a hotel room in Portland, Oregon, to tell me that Black Hawk Down had been listed as a finalist for the National Book Award, a prize generally reserved for above-average writing. I was flabbergasted. I felt about it the way Abraham Lincoln probably felt, back in 1856, four years before he was elected president, when he learned that he had been nominated for vice-president at the Republican Convention back east. “There’s a famous Lincoln back in Massachusetts,” he said, “They must have thought they were voting for him.”

  I did not win the National Book Award, which is fine. Too much astonishment can knock a man down. But there is no undoing the sense of approval that comes from being honored in such a way. I have since served as a judge for the National Book Award myself, and while I still believe that the annual prize is worthy and a good thing, I have a much better idea how serendipitous such things are, how utterly subjective, and how real literary worth is something that goes beyond prizes, critical praise, and commercial success.

  Ultimately, I am proudest of having told these soldiers’ story well. I am proud that people remember them, remember their friends who died, and remember what they did. I am proud that the book has secured the battle its rightful place in American history.

  None of us knows what work from our own age will endure, what books and writers belong in the club of best war reporters. Such things fall into the category of things not to waste time worrying about. You meet your deadlines, you do your best work, you hope somebody buys it and reads it, and you hope they enjoy it and admire it, are maybe even a little bit dazzled by it ... and then you go out and mow the lawn.

  Mark Bowden

  January, 2010

  SOURCES

  So many of the men who fought in this battle agreed to tell me their stories that most of the incidents related in this book were describ
ed to me by several different soldiers. Where there were discrepancies, one man’s memory generally worked to improve the others’. In some cases, comparing stories was a useful check on embellishment. I found most of the men I interviewed to be extraordinarily candid. Having had this experience, they seemed to feel entrusted with it. Most were forthright to the point of revealing things about themselves they found deeply troubling or embarrassing. Once or twice, having been unable to corroborate a story, when I pressed the soldier who originally related it to me, he backed down and apologized for having repeated something he himself did not witness. I have stayed away from anecdotes told secondhand.

  With very few exceptions, the dialogue in the book is either from the radio tapes or from one or more of the men actually speaking. My goal throughout has been to re-create the experience of combat through the eyes of those involved; to attempt that without reporting dialogue would be impossible. Of course, no one’s recollection of what they said is ever perfect. My standard is the best memory of those involved. Where there were discrepancies in dialogue they were usually minor, and I was able to work out the differences by going back and forth between the men involved. In several cases I have reported dialogue or statements heard by others present, even though I was unable to locate the actual speakers. In these cases the words spoken were heard by more than one witness, or recorded in written accounts within days after the battle.

  For understandable reasons, very few of the Delta operators who played such an important role in this battle agreed to talk to me about it. Their policy and tradition is silent professionalism. Master Sergeant Paul Howe, who has left the unit, obtained official permission, but risked the opprobrium of his former colleagues for speaking so candidly with me. Several current members of the unit also found ways to communicate with me. I am grateful to them. I also obtained the written accounts of several key members of the Delta assault force. It enabled me to provide a rare picture of these consummate soldiers in action, from their own perspective. All told, this input represents a small fraction of the unit, so the Delta portion of this story is weighted more heavily from Howe’s and the others’ perspectives than I would have liked.