The Day of the Rangers

October 3, 1993
Mogadishu, Somalia


October 3 is the Day of the Rangers in Somalia, where official ceremonies are held to celebrate the day in 1993 when Somalis fought off a military assault by the United States in its capital, Mogadishu. As far as Somalis are concerned, Operation Task Force Rangers was actually an exercise in clan warfare, pitting the U.S. military against the controlling Habr Gidr Clan, headed by Mohammad Farrah Aidid. That conflict ended after Somali militia downed two Blackhawk helicopters and forced the Rangers and the Delta Force to retreat. “They underestimated our power and overestimated their own,” declares Abdi Oueybdid, Aidid’s Defense Minister.[1]

Indeed, US military officials would soon concede that the Somali militia was expertly adept at combat and radically unrelenting in ways that they could not have anticipated. Nor could they have fully comprehended the motivation behind that power. The Somalis had been fighting for autonomy for years, divided by European powers and through the politics of the Cold War. They perceived Americans in uniform as occupiers, not liberators. They showed gratitude for humanitarian efforts that brought food during a far-reaching famine, but military might was, certainly, a threat. “From our point of view,” notes Abdi Oueybdid, “we were provoked to fight. We had no choice but to defend ourselves.”[2]

Unfortunately, this aspect of the events of October 3, 1993, is lost in director Ridley Scott’s Black Hawk Down. Instead of portraying the Somalis as defenders of their homeland, the film depicts them as animals callously cutting down with savage vengeance the dedicated heroes of the American military who were only trying to bring peace and order to an impoverished country beleaguered by Civil War. Released ahead of schedule on the heels of September 11, 2001, the movie is essentially a propaganda piece about superficial red-white-and-blue bravery suited mostly for the eyes of Americans who really didn’t need any inklings of Somalia’s history, including U.S. businesses (with Washington’s backing) prospecting for oil there. As Ronald L. Spiller notes in his review, “Scott's Black Hawk is an MTV version of history.”[3] Reviewer David Perry agrees, writing that the film is the “MTV-generation version – a boy’s game of war, just with the grim results made clear.”[4]

Both Scott and producer Jerry Bruckheimer take credit for this Hollywood version of history. True to form, Black Hawk Down tells the story of the U.S. raid on Mogadishu with glorious cinematography and relentlessly gory battle scenes which Scott and Bruckheimer, no doubt, imagined being representative of the real thing. Truly, the images of the sparkling beaches along the Indian Ocean (“Beautiful beach, beautiful sun. It’d almost be a good place to visit,” Sergeant Matthew Eversman – played by Josh Harnett – tells a fellow soldier) juxtaposed with the smoky blue images of starving Somalis are breathtaking, as are the blown up bodies and shots of bloody, adrenaline-filled battle scenes that ultimately occupy most of the film. We are told in no uncertain terms by the myriad of characters that the soldiers are there to do a job, not to think. “You know what I think,” says Hoot – played by Eric Bana – “Don’t really matter what I think. Once that first bullet goes past your head, politics, and all that shit goes right out the window.” “Look out, everybody,” Paul Tatara begins his review, “Two of the most pandering, tactless filmmakers in Hollywood history are now teaching us about honor among soldiers.” He continues: “Producer Jerry Bruckheimer and director Ridley Scott have pooled their always-questionable cinematic tastes to bring us…a war movie that, pound for pound, is one of the most violent films ever released by a major studio.”[5] Yet, what the film doesn’t tell us is that while American troops suffered 18 fatalities and some 73 wounded, somewhere between 300 and 1,000 Somalis were killed, including women and children, and untold wounded. “The worse thing I saw was seven children brought in on a wheel barrow,” says Abukar Cali, a Somali medic. “Many legs and arms were amputated. People were screaming on the floor. It was like Doomsday. I thought all of Mogadishu had died.”[6]

Instead, as Larry Chin notes, we see “brave and innocent young American boys getting shot at and killed for no reason by crazy black Islamists that the Americans are just trying to help.”[7] On the other hand, the Somali militiamen were ready to fight to the death that day, with an intelligence system seemingly so primitive, but in reality so effective. The film shows young boys on hill tops using phones circa 1980 to alert militia that a band of Blackhawk helicopters and Humvees were driving toward Mogadishu. Tires burn in the streets as signals for all Somalis to join the fight in downtown Mogadishu. The Americans are coming, expecting a swift in-and-out operation, in which capturing Omar Salad and Abdi Hassan Awale, two of Aidid’s officials, and any other enemy in the vicinity, while securing the perimeter of two building targets in the Bakara Market and delivering the captured back to base, would only take 30 minutes. It ends up taking more than 15 hours to achieve the mission and escape from Mogadishu, even though, as commanding General Garrison testified to the U.S. Senate, if his men had put any more ammunition into the city, “we would have sunk it.”[8]

This point is not lost on Scott and Bruckheimer as ammunition does, indeed, fly in abundance in the film, which depicts in two action-packed hours the events that took place from 3 p.m. Sunday, October 3, until Monday morning, October 4, with relative accuracy according to Mike Bowden’s account in his newspaper articles and book, Black Hawk Down. The first Blackhawk downed by Somali rocket-propelled grenade brings the American mission to its knees, at which point, Garrison declares, “We just lost the initiative.” The second helicopter crash seals the deal for the Somalis, and the American’s task changes from an assault to a rescue mission. “No man is left behind” is all that is left of the fight.

Black Hawk Down served its purpose in the aftermath of September 11 to conjure that recurring image of “American soldiers as …‘heroes’ fighting for liberty and human dignity, the lofty principles invariably cited as the justification for every military adventure abroad since the Cold War,” as Karamatullah K. Ghori notes.[9] In its aftermath, this battle changed the course of U.S. foreign policy for years to come, and its rhetoric, as reflected by the film, serves to perpetuate the language now so common in the politics of the Iraqi War. Not only in recent history, but in today’s light, the U.S. populace and Congress are unable to stomach such brutally televised images of our boys’ mutilations. In a post-Vietnam America, the slaughter of our children is not tolerated well, especially when it appears on film. Perhaps this intolerance is what has made Black Hawk Down a commercial success.

Even though Somalis, by far, suffered the greatest loss of human life, they still consider the Day of the Rangers a victory for their people. For the United States, “the biggest casualty in Somalia was U.S. credibility,” writes James Kidd in The Bulletin.[10] Still, in a country where decimated helicopters become playgrounds for children who carry AK47s, one ponders the need for determining winners and losers in a war. Somehow this relevant point is missing in Black Hawk Down.

References

1993: US forces killed in Somali gun battle, BBC On This Day, 4 October, http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/october/4/newsid_2486000/2486909.stm

Arlington National Cemetery Website, in memory of James Casey Joyce, sergeant U.S. Army, http://www.arlingtoncemetary.net/jcjoyce.htm

Black Hawk Down: A story of modern war, 2002, CNN Programs - Presents, www.cnn.com/CNN/Programs/presents/index.blackhawk.html

Bowden, Mark, Blackhawk Down, The Inquirer, philly.com, November 16, 1997, http://inquirer.philly.com/packages/somalia/nov16/rang16.asp

Chin, Larry, Black Hawk Down: Hollywood drags bloody corpse of truth across movie screens, January 3, 2002

Fineman, Mark, The Oil Factor in Somalia, The Times Mirror Company, Los Angeles Times, 1993

Ghori, Karamatullah, K., The Name of the Game in Somalia is Oil, The Milli Gazette

Jones, Jeff, Somalia: A brief history, Contemporary World: the World since 1945, http://www.uncg.edu/~jwjones/world/

Sanei, Jabril, Somalia: The long struggle for national unity, The Green Left Weekly, March 3, 2004

Shepard, Alicia, C., Appointment in Somalia, American Journal Review, March 2002, http://www.ajr.org/Article.asp?id=2449

Somalia, Modern Rangers, SuaSponte.Com, http://www.suaponte.com/m_somalia.htm

Spiller, Ronald L., Film Review: Black Hawk Down, Headquarters Gazette, Society for Military History,
http://www.smh-hq.org/gazettes/features/blackhawkdown.html

Tatara, Paul, “Black Hawk” a letdown, CNN.com/Entertainment, December 28, 2001, http://archives.cnn.com/2001/SHOWBIZ/Movies/12/28/hol.review.blackhawk.down/

The True Story of Black Hawk Down, 2003, The History Channel, Free Movies and Documentaries, www.moviesfoundonline.com/true_story_of_black_hawk_down.php
[1] The True Story of Black Hawk Down, 2003, The History Channel, Free Movies and Documentaries, http://www.moviesfoundonline.com/true_story_of_black_hawk_down.php
[2] Ibid.
[3] Spiller, Ronald L., Film Review: Black Hawk Down, Headquarters Gazette, Society for Military History, http://www.smh-hq.org/gazette/features/blackhawkdown.html
[4] Perry, David, Black Hawk Down, Movie Review by David Perry, Cinema-Scene.com, Volume 4, Number 3, http://xiibaro.hypermart.net/archive/04/03.html
[5] Tatara, Paul, “Black Hawk” a letdown, CNN.com/Entertainment, December 28, 2001, http://archives.cnn.com/2001/SHOWBIZ/Movies/12/28/hol.review.blackhawk.down/
[6] The True Story of Black Hawk Down, 2003, The History Channel, Free Movies and Documentaries, http://www.moviesfoundonline.com/true_story_of_black_hawk_down.php
[7] Chin, Larry, Black Hawk Down: Hollywood drags bloody corpse of truth across movie screens, January 3, 2002
[8] Ibid
[9] Ghori, Karamatullah, K. The Name of the Game in Somalia is Oil, The Milli Gazette
[10] Kidd, James, Somalia: A glimpse into Clinton’s Iraq, The Bulletin, December 3, 2007, www.somaliview.com/Opinion/JamedKidd.htm