Black Hawk Down: A Story of Modern War

by Mark Bowden

In the end, the Battle of the Black Sea is another lesson in the limits of what force can accomplish.

Any publisher will tell you that a review on the cover of The New York Times Book Review is about the best free advertisement for a book possible, with the exception of having your book turned into a hugely successful, award-winning movie by Jerry Bruckheimer and Ridley Scott.

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.

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 batt...

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.