Black Hawk Down

Released 2001
Reviewed February 24, 2002
Stars Josh Hartnett, Ewan McGregor, Tom Sizemore, Eric Bana, William Fichtner, Ewen Bremner, Sam Shepard
Directed by Ridley Scott

When I finish watching a movie, I always ask myself what overriding message or emotion am I taking away from this movie. In the case of Black Hawk Down, it's astonishment at what an amazing force the U.S. military is. There has never been a fighting force as dominating as our military is today. Unfortunately, there are times when we get too big for our britches, and we forget that any force can be beaten. There are many factors that go into winning a battle, but this battle came down to two: firepower and numbers. Since we have the best equipped military ever assembled, we tend to rely on firepower, but that can get us into trouble. In Somalia, we had established peace for over a year with 20,000 troops in 1992, but in 1993 those troops were replaced with a small number of U.N. peacekeeping forces. It was at this point that the young Clinton administration started making mistakes, and those mistakes culminated in a desperate FUBAR that left 18 American soldiers dead on October 3, 1993.

If we let the military do their job without restrictions, they will succeed. Period. When you start telling them they have to use certain helicopters and personnel armor instead of gunships and tanks because the latter "send the wrong message," you're in trouble. To be fair, you can't just let the military have free reign to do whatever they want, because they may achieve the immediate objective through sheer intimidation, but they may lose the propaganda war. It's a sad fact that overwhelming strong-arm tactics generate terrorists. It's pathetic, but it's even true in our own country. Look at what Ruby Ridge and Waco did for the whacked-out militant nutcases like that P.O.S. McVeigh. In this case, however, an overpowering military force was required. After all, the objective was to fly directly into a warlord's stronghold and "arrest" his lieutenants.

One thing that confuses me is why we were playing cop again. We were part of a peacekeeping mission, which is a police action. I understand that, but why did we pull a John Wayne and decide to go in to extract Aidid on our own? We shouldn't have taken it upon ourselves to do that. We should have received U.N. permission first, and then used overwhelming U.N. strike forces to capture his lieutenants and eventually Aidid himself. You just can't play cop when you're surrounded by thousands of untrained idiots with machineguns and RPG's, who apparently have no problem with dying. Apparently life is so bad in Somalia that both men and women are willing to stand on a rooftop and shoot at Americans for fun, with little regard for their own lives. The number of casualties taken by Aidid's forces is staggering. Of course, he doesn't care. He doesn't have to train them, and he seizes U.N. food to feed them. As long as he controls the food, he has an unlimited number of "soldiers" to use as cannon fodder. It's mindboggling watching them standing somewhere shooting until they get blown away, or rushing the American soldiers despite watching everyone before them getting killed. If this were not based on fact, it would look like a Rambo movie.

Despite achieving the objective of capturing the prisoners, this mission was a devastating failure. It was supposed to be a quick in-and-out, but it degenerated into 15 hours of hell for those soldiers. I think it's a tribute to the U.S. military that a mission that achieved its objectives with such lopsided casualty figures is considered a failure. I'm not sure there's another military in the world that would feel that way, but I don't think there's any other military that would be ordered to do something so impossible. Being this good raises the bar of expectations, which can lead to catastrophe.

Besides the loss of the 18 soldiers, the bigger tragedy was the effect this mission had on the Clinton administration. From that point forward, they were afraid to place American soldiers in harm's way. This one mission was a very large factor in what happened on September 11. Bin dipshit saw how easily the American people are frightened when our military takes casualties, and he became emboldened. He launched attacks on two U.S. embassies in Africa and an attack on the USS Cole. I'm a Clinton supporter, but this is where he dropped the ball. He was afraid to commit troops, so he launched a few Tomahawk cruise missiles after each terrorist attack. They were token gestures that were ineffective, and it only gave Bin dipshit and his al-qaida assholes more confidence that they could do whatever they wanted without reprisal. Of course, Bin dipshit misread the situation in many ways. One was exactly when Americans lose resolve in the face of American casualties. If those casualties are in Somalia while trying to maintain a peace that few Americans cared about, we would lose resolve quickly. Iraq would have been another situation that fit the bill, but attacking us on our own soil and killing close to 5,000 American civilians was something different entirely. There was no way this nation would have been pacified short of the total annihilation of Afghanistan regardless of the number of casualties to U.S. troops. The fact that we did it with zero battle casualties (we had a few from accidents) is a testament to the U.S. military when it's allowed to do what it does best, but I hope this overwhelming victory doesn't lead to overconfidence which will cause other incidents like that on October 3, 1993 in Somalia. [Editor's note: sadly, we have lost troops in combat as of March, 2002]

I see I really haven't talked about the movie yet, and I should probably do that now. If you take the Normandy beach footage from Saving Private Ryan and stretch it to over two hours, you'll have a good idea of what Black Hawk Down is like. It makes you feel like you're there, and it's frightening and exhilarating. This movie is like an Army commercial--even when our boys are taking casualties, they are one bad-ass bunch. The second thing I will take from this movie is the camaraderie amongst the soldiers. No one gets left behind. While that credo may not seem to make sense at times, it's one of the reasons our military is dominant. Each and every soldier knows his teammates will fight and possibly die for him. In the small picture, this means you may take more casualties than you had to, and this mission is a case in point. If they had written off the first downed helicopter, they would have had four casualties. By committing everyone to go in and retrieve them despite believing they may all have been dead anyway, they quadrupled their dead. There are times when the brass will see the big picture and cut their losses, but it's this sense of commitment to each other that glues this volunteer army together. This was not the case in Vietnam, which consisted of an army of soldiers who were drafted and given 1-year tours of duty. There was camaraderie and commitment to each other, but the most important thing was finishing your year.

Unfortunately, not all of the soldiers were retrieved from Somalia. There was a pilot who was captured and later released, but there was also horrifying footage of Somalis dragging at least one dead U.S. soldier through the streets. That footage wasn't included in this movie. Maybe because it would have interfered with the sappy ending, which leads me to the one thing I didn't like in this movie. There were a few different moments when the music swelled in the background, and we were given sappy speeches. They broke the mood and screamed MANIPULATION. I loved the fact that this movie tried to break the war movie conventions by having no character development and extraneous stories. It tried to document the events and guide a movie audience through this battle, and in those respects it was completely successful. Where it broke down a bit was with the sentimental quiet moments, but they were minor. Overall this is an experience that will give all of us greater appreciation of our armed forces. My brother is in the army, and he's had Ranger training. He went through Iraq but missed Somalia. I hate to think of him in situations like this, but it's comforting to know about the amount of training they receive. You can see it in this film. These soldiers have everything thrown at them, but they adapt and overcome.

Reviewed by Bill Alward
February 24, 2002
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