Black Hawk Down: A Story of Modern War

by Mark Bowden

So, for better or worse, the USS Harlan County was turned away from the dock at Port-au-Prince one week after the Mogadishu fight by an orchestrated “riot” of fewer than two hundred Haitians. The U.S. government (and the UN) looked on as genocidal spasms killed a million people in Rwanda and Zaire, and as atrocity was piled on atrocity in Bosnia. There was some cynical posturing in the White House and Congress after the Battle of the Black Sea about never again placing U.S. troops under UN command, when everyone involved understood perfectly well that Task Force Ranger and even the QRF were under direct U.S. command at all times. Even the decision to target Aidid and his clansmen was driven by the U.S. State Department. The single most forceful advocate for Task Force Ranger’s mission in Mogadishu was U.S. Admiral Jonathan Howe, a former deputy on the National Security Council during the Bush administration, who was the top UN official on site in Mogadishu. Task Force Ranger was wholly an American production.