Black Hawk Down: A Story of Modern War

by Mark Bowden

The ordinary, vernacular prose in Black Hawk Down was a deliberate choice. I labored to remove myself completely from the narrative. In the newsrooms where I grew up as a journalist, we were taught to report the hell out of a good story, and then “get out of its way,” in the great tradition of George Orwell, who advised “good writing is like a windowpane.” But writing like this cuts against the stylistic grain of most modern “literary” journalism, which features the voice of the narrator front and center. The journalism of Tom Wolfe, Norman Mailer, Hunter S. Thompson, and Michael Herr has inspired generations of nonfiction writers, myself included. It placed the writer in the center of the action, if not as the main character then as its supercharged narrative voice. While this method was important for writers trying to break journalism free of the tiresome dictates of newspaperese a half century ago, it has since produced an ocean of self-absorbed, forgettable, derivative nonfiction. It spawned an orgy of confessional memoirs, where writers competing to be more and more outrageous slide carelessly between truth and fiction. All stories are, of course, filtered through the writer. To be perceived as literary in certain circles it became essential to actually write about yourself.