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.
Mark Robert Bowden (born July 17, 1951) is an American writer and author. He has been The Distinguished Writer in Residence at The University of Delaware since 2013. He is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair and also a National Correspondent for The Atlantic. From 1979 to 2003, Bowden was a staff writer for The Philadelphia Inquirer. Over the years, he has written for The New Yorker, Men's Journal, The Atlantic, Sports Illustrated, and Rolling Stone. He has won several awards for his writing. As a result of his book *Black Hawk Down: A Story of Modern War*, Bowden has received international recognition. The book was made into a 2001 movie directed by Ridley Scott. - Wikipedia
