Issue #24/79, December 12 - 26, 1999  

By John Dolan

Army Of Darkness: An Ode To Somali Warriors

Black Hawk Down Mark Bowden Atlantic Monthly Press 1999 $24.00

War is the oldest and greatest of stories. One of the classic motivations to go to war is, in the words of Husker Du, "saving up a million stories/to tell to all your friends." But so few battles come up to the Platonic form of war. So many war stories--like those brought back from Nam--require you to footnote your slobbering appreciation of carnage with the a mental tsk-tsk for the "thousands of innocent civilians caught up in a vicious cycle of vengeance...." How can you enjoy a good ambush story when you have that picture of the napalmed little girl superimposed on it?

That's why Black Hawk Down is so damn delicious: it's an account of a 24-hour streetfight between two groups who loved war, lived for it: 140 "crack" US troops--don't you love that boyish adjective "crack"?--and thousands of Kalashnikov-toting, RPG-launching Somalis in the slums of Mogadishu. No "innocent civilians" were injured in the making of this battle, because there are no innocent civilians in Somalia. Somalis are a warrior people and deeply proud of it. They are the proverbial lean, mean fighting machines: bug-eyed, filed-teeth skeletal mantises who spend the whole day chewing Khat, cleaning their AK-47s, and chatting about their last firefight.

In the short run, then, this book offers conscience-free carnage. Everybody at the streetfight in Mogadishu '93 was there willingly--the US troops to gain bragging rights to a "real battle" and the Somalis to take revenge on the cowardly first-worlders who massacred them from helicopters but, until this great day, had been too chickenshit to fight it out at street level. Of course, the US could not officially acknowledge that either side was there because they wanted to be. The US soldiers, whom Bowden describes as lusting deeply for a fight, were officially there to ensure that starving Somalis got the food hoarded by the "warlords" in Mogadishu. And the Somalis, in our outrageously condescending, ethnocentric official account, were a mass of trembling little sheep at the mercy of the "warlords" and their henchmen. Washington could only admit that this was nonsense after losing 18 men in the streetfighting. Then, all of a sudden, the State Department had its big revelation: hey, some people LIKE fighting! Bowden quotes a US official who realized this in a well-Duh! epiphany after the Mogadishu battle:

"The idea used to be that terrible countries were terrible because good, decent, innocent people were being oppressed by evil, thuggish leaders. Somalia changed that. Here you have a country where just about everybody is caught up in hatred and fighting....People in those countries...don't want peace. They want victory."

At one level, this Beigeocrat's words are sheer nonsense. Only the "terrible countries" want victory? The US doesn't? Britain doesn't? The only reason we aren't conscious of being "caught up in hatred and fighting" in our non-terrible countries is that we can afford to hire mercenaries like the Rangers to carry out our feuds for us, far away from home. It's a sort of Hatred Mutual Fund, in which we invest the money and leave its management--the actual revenge-killings--to specialists like the Rangers and the SEALs and all the other acronymic hit-teams attached to the various government departments.

The Somalis are too poor to farm out their violence like that. Poor, but by no means "innocent"--no more "innocent" than Achilles or the poets who sung him. In Somali culture, war is the means to glory and power. We like to pretend that this sort of thinking is alien to us. That, of course, is another lie. Ever read The Iliad? Ever read Beowulf? Ever spend hours looking over every bloody corpse in those great paintings of Gettysburg or Shiloh? Don't lie, you bastard--you know you did! And you still would, if you had the choice. You chose the office-world because they told you Homer's world was extinct.

But somebody forgot to tell it to the Somalis. The Somalis, like the Serbs or the Maasai, are a warrior tribe...and thus doomed to annihilation by the more advanced, peaceful tribes. We'll finish them off soon: kill the dangerous ones and put the rest in little offices. We have no choice; they won't become "innocent," so we must bomb them back to it. In the long run, it's a sickening story of hypocrisy and bigotry. But it does produce little moments of delight, when for a few hours the odds are somewhat less thoroughly tilted toward the high-tech Peacemakers...when their hired soldiers have to descend to the stinking alleys where the unpeaceful folk live. Then we see briefly war in its perfection: a battle as clean and innocent as the most puerile of imaginations (mine, that is) could desire: on one side the Rangers, professional, enthusiastic soldiers who like to use phrases like "kick ass" and now, after years of cost-free swaggering, are going to have to live up to their boasts--and on the other, the Somalis, for whom "unarmed man" is an oxymoron.

Speaking as a prototypical sick weapons-nerd, one of those doughy male virgins who spend their youth drooling over Armed Forces Journal and Aviation Week the way you healthy types drooled over Penthouse, I can recommend Somalia as the Riviera of war-dweeb vicarious excursions. The service is fantastic: everyone over the age of ten--and, by Bowden's account, many a male child of lesser age--is a combatant. There's no sexism, either: the Somali women do their part, bringing RPG rounds in their baskets and pointing out Ranger position for their male kin.

The battle begins when a US force goes into the slums of Mogadishu to bring back two lieutenants of the "warlord" clan leader Aidid. It's the sixth time the Rangers have pulled this sort of move, and they were successful the first five times. Not this time. A Ranger forgets to grab the rope and falls from a helicopter within seconds, and it's all downhill from there. One of the oddest things about this book is that many of the problems faced by the US forces are like bloodier versions of suburban slapstick: an officer forgets to take his headphones off before jumping from the chopper, a convoy gets its directions mixed up and drives around the city for hours, lost, with wounded soldiers in the back screaming at the driver like nightmare versions of backseat-driving mothers-in-law, while the higher-ups mangle the directions on radio: "Go left! Left at the donkey's corpse! No, wait, other way around: turn right when you pass the headless woman and child!"

Since they're only in Somalia to "enforce the peace", the Rangers are driving Humvees rather than APCs. A public-relations touch which turns bad on the streets of Mogadishu, because those lovable little buggies are extremely vulnerable to the RPG-7--a weapon the US military has always tried to pretend does not exist, and which slaughtered thousands of Russian soldiers in the same sort of slum-combat in Grozny a couple of years back.

So the Rangers, expecting to steam back to base in their cool military SUVs, get lost, can't exactly ask the dusky locals for directions...damn, it's worse than running out of gas in East St. Louis! Suddenly they're in the middle of a huge crowd of armed black people, and they have to slug it out alley to alley, tenement to tenement. Kind of like Oakland cops in the Huey Newton era. This is a race war: the author mentions nervously that only two of the 160 Rangers are black, and the Somalis look all the darker in the photos of mobs dragging the very pale bodies of dead Rangers around the city after the big fight.

Like the lies about race (Schwatzenegger and Norris always have lovable black sidekicks, who usually buy it in the first ten minutes), all the lies about US involvement in Somalia are stripped away in battle. The Rangers first try to follow their rules of engagement, shooting only at males carrying guns (or sticks or baguettes); but the men are all mixed up with women and kids, and once they see a few friends get their heads blown off the Rangers just shoot at anything that moves.

Two hundred pages of well-told carnage, without meaning or guilt. That's what comprises the middle of the book, and I have to say I loved it. I'd skip sleep to read something like this. The amazing wounds alone are worth the read: the Ranger who takes a dud RPG round right in the torso, so the fins are sticking out one side while the nose is poking out the other armpit, or the Somali banquet interrupted by the arrival of sixteen TOW missiles, which go quite a long way toward ruining the party by spraying molten metal at high velocity among the guests. No crummy action film could ever equal this.

Like any good porn, this one has a price. The comedown is rough. At the end of the book, the US is busy elsewhere, wiping out some other pockets of resistance to corporate life--bombing the Serbs into Dutch-ness or defanging the IRA--and doesn't even remember that one great day when its soldiers fought at street level with a different, darker-skinned warrior tribe. We only remember the Fuzzy-Wuzzies once a century, I guess...but at least Kipling had the decency to write them a note of appreciation for the great fight they gave. We don't do poems any more, this century; so Bowden's book is the only commemoration these noble, simple wolf-people will ever get. His story has the faults one would expect: his Americans act from sane causes, while the Somalis are utterly opaque to him--but something of their Homeric beauty comes through in his account--and as he reminds us several times, no one else, nobody at all, has shown any sign of remembering the courage of the Somalis, facing gunships and armored mercenaries with nothing more than they could hold in their hands. Long live the warriors!

Not long at all.