A few months ago, I finished up Black Hawk Down, Mark Bowden’s 1999 account of the disastrous battle that brought about the end of the UN’s 1993 intervention in Somalia. It’s a fascinating in-depth look at modern warfare, both with respect to the men involved in operations on the ground (American and Somalian) and the political fallout of the situation as a whole.

The main narrative of the book follows the US Army Rangers, Delta Force operators, and Night Stalker helicopter crews and their mission to capture two advisers to Mohammed Farah Aidid’s Habr Gidr clan — one of several missions collectively known as Operation Gothic Serpent. After initial success and capture of the targets, the crash of the Black Hawk SuperSixOne forced the soldiers to mount a search-and-rescue mission to go after the downed crew.

What follows is a story about soldiers, the jobs they are assigned, and the “stuff” these soldiers need to achieve victory.

The initial battle plan called for Delta Force teams to capture the targets with ground protection from the Ranger “chalks.” A convoy was to arrive just as the captured men were brought outside for swift extraction before the local militia converged on their location. Speed was everything. The mission was supposed to take less than one hour. Things began to go awry even before SuperSixOne was rocketed out of the sky. The extraction convoy was held up by abnormally heavy resistance from the Somalis and was repeatedly given false direction and instruction from its airborne overseers, due in large part to the confusion of Mogadishu’s streets. By the time the Delta teams had linked up with the convoy, the first chopper had gone down, so the majority of the ground force immediately responded. Not long after the first of the Rangers had arrived at the crash site, Mike Durant’s SuperSixFour was shot down several blocks away. In response to the second crash, which the ground teams could not effectively reach in time, Delta snipers Gary Gordon and Randy Shughart roped in to defend the crash site. Not long after, they were overrun. Everyone was killed except Durant, who was held hostage and passed around between the feuding militia groups — and eventually released.

The confusion of the battle comes across appropriately through Bowden’s narrative style. Rapidly shifting among the perspectives of the Delta teams, convoy, Matt Eversmann’s Ranger chalk, the Black Hawk crews, and the commanders, the writing gives the sense that no party on the battlefield was privy to all the pertinent information. Command in the air didn’t know where the soldiers were, soldiers on the ground had no easy way to transmit their location to command without blowing their cover to the enemy. Prior raids run by the same men in the previous months went so swimmingly that no integrated communication was needed for them to get in and out without trouble, the missions were accomplished before anyone could think twice. They went in without enough water, no night-vision goggles, and most of the D-boys wore little plastic hockey helmets, instead of the safer — yet clunkier — kevlar standard issues. Ease of previous missions certainly contributed to a level of overconfidence that led to lack of preparation and communication issues (primarily between the raiding parties and the ground convoy, initially), snowballing into a situation leaving them massively outnumbered, surrounded, and with no effective contingency plans.

After reaching SuperSixOne’s crash site, the soldiers proceeded to disassemble the downed bird’s kevlar armor to create a makeshift shelter to hole up in and wait for extraction. Others took cover in nearby homes. They secured a perimeter and laid in wait while the Little Birds provided covering fire, keeping the crowds at bay throughout the night. In the early morning hours, a convoy of over 100 vehicles blasted its way to the pinned down soldiers, rescuing them just as the sun rose. With no food, no water, and almost no resupply throughout the night, they were able to keep most of the wounded in good shape until loading them into the APCs.

The unexpectedness of a lot of the ground force’s problems served to illustrate the gulf of difference in skill between the Rangers and Delta operators. How a soldier handles himself when faced with difficult scenarios sort of divides the “men from the boys,” as they say. Following the first crash, the Rangers and Delta were forced to work closer together than the original mission had intended. And the account of the D-boys’ response to the initial confusion shows the skill level of a so-called “professional soldier.” The Rangers, who are an impeccably trained, elite unit themselves, were still completely outclassed by the older, more experienced D-boys. Rangers were young, well-trimmed, stolidly beholden to Army tradition, while the older senior NCOs that comprised Delta wear beards and long hair, have heavily customized weaponry, and place less importance on rank and military courtesy.

One thing Bowden handles well that the more widely-known film version utterly fails at, is the capture of the events from the other side’s vantage point. He splices into the battle narrative miniature stories told by a number of different Somalian militia members and civilians he interviewed in the mid-90s, showing us America’s intervention from a native citizen’s perspective. Many Somalians saw the Rangers as nothing but violent intruders. Propaganda doled out by Aidid and his militias helped that sentiment along, of course, but so did a number of botched operations in the months leading up to the battle. Not to say that US and UN goals in Somalia weren’t well-intentioned, but it is true that our grandiose schemes to help save the bullied from the bullies are sometimes lost on the citizenry. They may be completely ignorant of their own subjugation. Bowden’s writing makes it clear that UNOSOM’s shift into a nation-building operation was a major factor in it’s failure to garner support from the Somali people.

The political situation surrounding the battle is as fascinating as the battle itself. Bowden does a good job framing the battle within the greater context of the events of 1992-93 in East Africa. Ostensibly, the mission was a benevolent one: a UN task force would provide protection for humanitarian aid missions into Somalia following the breakdown of civil order. The transition from UNOSOM I operations to the UNOSOM II mandate altered the mission of of the task force from one of “upholding the ceasefire and monitoring aid operations” to using “all necessary means to establish a secure environment for humanitarian relief.” This slight change in the M.O. permitted the use of more troops as well as extended operations into Mogadishu to flush out weapons caches and militia strongholds, since the militias were seizing and holding hostage the relief packages. As the months went by (and after Aidid’s forces ambushed a Pakistani force), the mission became more about capturing Aidid and his cronies at all cost than anything else.

President Clinton’s response to the battle’s unfortunate conclusion was a complete halt on operations against Aidid. Within six months, US forces had withdrawn from Somalia, save a small force of Marines stationed offshore to assist with emergency evacuation missions. No matter what your political persuasion, such rapid abandonment of an operation at the slightest roadblock should leave a sour taste in your mouth. And in the scope of military history, the battle was far from a failure. Actually, when all the factors are taken into account, it was one of the most decisive victories in American history. The soldiers were completely outnumbered, trapped in an unfamiliar urban environment, without supplies, and stranded for an exceptional length of time, yet were somehow able to make it out with (only) 19 killed. An estimated 1000 Somalis were killed in the battle. Any pill this difficult would have been too much for the Clinton administration to swallow. They couldn’t withdraw gently, and they couldn’t stick it out until the mission was accomplished. Saving political face seemed more important. Contemporary America has a tendency to lean this way when the going gets tough. We criticize decisions long before having a chance to act and give up on actions before we have results.

The political fallout from the Battle changed US foreign policy in ways still felt well into the 21st century.

The resultant shift has affected American response (or lack thereof) to a number of situations since the early 1990s. What would have happened to the million Tutsis slaughtered in Rwanda if our perception of what was worthy of sacrifice had remained unchanged? How about the thousands of Kosovar Albanians killed in Yugoslavia? Or the people of western Sudan?

Toward the end of the book, Bowden visits with several of the Rangers involved in the battle, years later. Most of them are busy with typical lives; kids, jobs, and the like. But the most affecting stories involve the typical response they get from everyday people when they talk about their experiences in Mogadishu. A typical response to the statement “I fought in Somalia in 1992″ might be something like “We fought in Somalia? What were we doing there?” This speaks, for one, to America’s general ignorance of what their country does internationally on a routine basis, and also raises a question — What were we doing half-way around the world in East Africa? Without the context of 1990s geopolitics and the knowledge of some East African history, that’s a difficult question to answer. Black Hawk Down, while primarlily a “story of modern war” like the cover indicates, also deftly handles the explanation of the wider context in which the battle took place. It’s a profound book, and leaves you with a better appreciation of both the burden of the modern soldier and the complexity of third-world politics.

The book was based on a series of articles that Bowden, then a staff writer for the Philadelphia Inquirer, had written for the paper in 1997, all of which are featured on their website for further reading.