Black Hawk Down Book Review

Mark Bowden was born in St. Louis, Missouri on July 17, 1951, and graduated from Loyola University of Maryland in 1973 with a B.A. in English literature. He then went on to write for The Philadelphia Inquirer from 1979 to 2003, and has also written for The New Yorker, Men's Journal, The Atlantic, Sports Illustrated, and Rolling Stone. He has written about a wide variety of topics and subjects from football, to war, to someone finding one million dollars cash, to drug lords; however he has written the most about war with his books Black Hawk Down: A Story of Modern War, Our Finest Day: D-Day, Guests of the Ayatollah: The First Battle in America's War with Militant Islam, and The Finish: The Killing of Osama Bin Laden. Many people enjoy his style of writing with these books because they are very accurate on the accounts and he tells the story in the point of view of one soldier and makes it seem like you are in the battle and are fighting along with the soldier. In black hawk down the main soldier that you follow through the book is Staff Sergeant Matt Eversmann. The entire book you reading through his mind and hear his thoughts about everything that is going on, from the basic training drills, to the point where all hell breaks loose and everything goes wrong. The novel starts off with the U.S. Army Rangers and Delta force going out on a practice mission over the town of Mogadishu in Somalia, North Africa. Sgt. Eversmann describes what it is like to fly in a Black Hawk up the coast of North Africa. Something that stood out to me was the fact that many of the soldiers during this time seemed to be overly confident to the point of being cocky, and I think that this played a big part in the downfall. They described themselves as being unstoppable, invincible, and indestructible. After going through the test run they go back to base they get a call from an informant telling them that there is a meeting between some of the top men on their radar that they want to either