No. 14 - The Battle of Mogadishu

edited by Matt Eversmann and Dan Schilling

Started: February 20
Finished: February 26

Notes: I ran across this book just yesterday at a store, and it seemed almost as if someone were telling me something. See, I was winding up reading Black Hawk Down. And this book concerns the same events, a U.S. military operation in Mogadishu in 1993, though this book contains stories told by six of the military personnel actually involved. This is their personal accounts. I'm especially interested because this book is more modern, only about 5 years old, whereas Black Hawk Down was published in the late 1990s.

Mini review: The writing was nowhere near as good as in "Black Hawk Down," but that's to be expected. These men are, or were, soldiers, not writers. That being said, it was still interesting to read these men's tales of the events of that Oct. 3 and Oct. 4 mission, each man with a different perspective from a different area of the events. My favorite story was the last one, "On Friendship and Firefights," by Dan Schilling, who was a combat controller with the Air Force Special Ops Command involved in the operation. Dan's recollections were a bit tough at times on the other men involved, but he was just as quick to point out his own mistakes in Somalia.