As I was in the process of reading Blackhawk Down, I gave a simple writing assignment to my immigrant students: “Describe the house you grew up in.”
The next day, with Blackhawk sitting on my shelf, a bookmark only 50 pages into it, I picked up the first of the essays. The young man described the orange trees, and the tan wall, and the bright dresses of the women who walked in front of his house, across the street from the Olympic Hotel in Mogadishu, before “all of it” happened.
For those who have not read Blackhawk Down, “all of it” refers to the killing of hundreds of Somali men, women, and children, during an ill-conceived attempt to remove a warlord from the Olympic Hotel neighborhood of Mogadishu.
There is no way I can describe how intensely that book moved me. Granted, I had a more personal link to the text than most of the readers, but most other readers I’ve met have liked it as well.
Out of respect for my students, I didn’t see the film, which they described as an attempt to make the deaths of hundreds of their friends and family into the story of a few white Americans who made some bad choices. The book, though, does an exceptional job of presenting all of the people as real—and Bowden did excellent work in capturing the point of view of many of the Somalis involved.
I’d love to read more of his books.
