Black Hawk, Down
Late in the afternoon of Sunday, 3 October 1993, 140 elite US soldiers abseiled from helicopters into a teeming market neighbourhood in the heart of the city of Mogadishu, Somalia. Their mission was to abduct two top lieutenants of a Somali warlord and return to base. It was supposed to take them about an hour. Instead, they were pinned down through a long and terrible night in a hostile city, fighting for their lives against thousands of heavily armed Somalis. When the unit was rescued the following morning, eighteen American soldiers were dead and more than seventy badly injured. The Somali toll was far worse – more than five hundred killed and over a thousand injured. Authoritative, gripping, and insightful, Black Hawk Down is a heart-stopping, minute-by-minute account of modern war and is destined to become a classic of war reporting.
Stats for nerds
6recommend
11mentions
9people
2008–2024years
55% recommend45% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- My reads this read, which I enjoyed:
- Dead Mountain by Donnie Eichar (an examination of the Dyatlov Expedition).
- Piranesi by Susanna Clarke (fantasy).
- Be Useful by Arnold Schwarzenegger.
- Black Hawk Down by Mark Bowden.
Hopefully the other responses here give me something good to read for Christmas break. :-)
- Because he was superb since before then, for four decades now. I read Liar's Poker and was hooked from the first sentence.
Look, Michael Lewis is like the Stephen Gaghan of (semi-fictionalized) socioeconomic zeitgeist: he chronicles concepts paradigmatic of an entire generation, people and personalities that affect or transform an entire decade or generation (usually in or about the US, and often Wall Street). And he nods towards the societal implications with a sense of urgency and inevitability but also dark theater. Sure he Hollywoodizes people and quotes, not dissimilar to how the screen adaptation of Mark Bowden's superb 'Black Hawk Down' merged characters and their story arcs, or how loosely 'War Dogs' (2016) was based on Guy Lawson's 2011 Rolling Stone article [0] and 2015 book [1]. [As to 'War Dogs' and Lawson's writings, there's an obvious similar moral fable to three potheads from Miami Beach becoming in 2007 one of the Pentagon’s largest weapons suppliers, by reselling Chinese bullets to US-occupied Afghanistan, and noone at the Pentagon actually wanted to know where private contractors were getting their supply, as the scale of the contracts became increasingly insane.] If you want to more accurately label Lewis' genre "semi-fictionalized socioeconomic zeitgeist", then do.
To be blunt, people have short attention spans, people in the US only read average 15.6 books/yr or median 4 books/yr [2], and moral ambiguity seems to sell worse than clean-cut tales casting characters as good guys and bad guys, certainly on the big screen. But these writers are still fulfilling an important service. Noone actually sits down and reads Inspector-General reports, CSPAN is occasionally great but usually dull to watch, and what now passes for US mainstream media is hopelessly coopted and long ago abandoned investigative reporting [3]. Writers like Lewis, Bowden, Lawson(, Crichton, Grisham [4]) fill a very real cultural void in interpreting what's going on.
[0]: https://www.rollingstone.com/feature/the-stoner-arms-dealers... [1]: https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/the-comple... [2]: https://katiecouric.com/culture/book-guide/how-many-books-do... [3]: https://www.fastcompany.com/90646413/why-breaking-points-wit... [4]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33391995
- Here's a list of some of my favorite books dealing with crisis:
- In Thin Air - About a mountaineering expedition that turned into disaster on Mount Everest.
- Black Hawk Down - The story of hundreds of US special forces trapped in Mogadishu overnight after a mission went completely sideways
- Leadership in Turbulent Times - About different US presidents leading through crisis and how there is no one singular type of leadership
- The Hard Thing about Hard Things - Leading a startup on the verge of failure to an eventual massive acquisition
- The Sledge Patrol - How a small group, outgunned and out manned fought back Nazi invaders in Greenland
- My favorite sequence of maps in a book was “Black Hawk Down”. The first chapter begins with a world map, showing Somalia, and it lays the geopolitical setting for the events. The second chapter has a map of Somalia, showing where Mogadishu is, and sets the scene there. It keeps zooming in, until the final chapter shows a map so tight it has individual people (who you have since met) and which side of the street they were on.
- You would probably enjoy “Six Frigates” by Ian Toll and “Black Hawk Down” by Mark Bowden.
- For the military side of that analogy I highly recommend reading Black Hawk Down. It's a moving account of real-life heroes, a remarkable story of of a modern army engagement, but besides that it's also a great analogy to the business world.
The actual 3-way split in the Army is special forces (Delta Force), paratroopers (Army Rangers) and infantry. The developers analogy would be "done, and gets things smart", "smart and gets things done", and the rest. In Somalia we had Rangers and Delta, and the book goes into much detail on the incredible difference in skill and capability between the two. The analogy to developers is uncanny.
The point of course is not that developers are like soldiers, they are not, but rather that there are fundamental reasons that different human activities are structured in similar ways.
BTW, while it reads like fiction, Black Hawk Down is a documentary, and even the dialogue has been reconstructed from recordings. The movie is very faithful to the book, but the distinction between special forces and Rangers, the political side of the conflict, and some other interesting detail is much more clear in the book.
