Carsten Smith
Choice reading book experience

My overall opinion of this book is very good. Some of the things that I like about this book are the fact that it always keeps you in the fight and never releases its grip on you. After I had watched the movie, reading the book was just like watching the movie all over again because they both seemed to be almost identical. This book was easy to read because I already knew much of what had happened there, from watching T.V. shows and doing some of my own research on the side. He does a masterful job of portraying the strife and challenges that each and every soldier faced and still does today. His extreme detail of the horror that erupted in the streets of Mogadishu (MOG) was so vivid that when I tried to visualize the battle I can almost see into the eyes of the soldiers and see everything is happening right before my. Because of this, I pictured the multiple crashes of the Black Hawks and could almost feel the spinning of the helicopter and the sudden stop which would fling me back to reality. I also like the fact that he wrote about the other side, instead of just from the viewpoint of the American Soldiers. He does a great job of capturing the hatred that fuelled many of the militia that the U.S. was fighting against. Sometimes I think that he goes into to-much detail and it gets quite gruesome, for example when the Black Hawk opened fire with its “Minnie-Gun” and obliterated several people and cow only leaving a spray of blood and chunks of flesh on the ground. One thing that I don’t like about this book is the fact that it jumps around from point to point and sometimes even goes back in time to an event that had already occurred. Another thing that I don’t like about this book is the fact that it is so graphic and gory that even I feel that I have to put it down, but this also pins you into reading farther and farther into the book. I also feel that there is too much going on at the same time and it often gets confusing, although this is actually how wars are fought. Overall my impression of the book is that it is very good and that I think people should read it or at least watch the movie. I personally thought that the movie was better because it gave you a better sense of what was going on in the battle and gave you a “first person” perspective instead of a “bird’s eye view” of the carnage.