When Ray pressed a worn copy of Black Hawk Down into my hands and insisted I read it, I kind of wanted to laugh in his face. I'm pretty immovable on my stance of not reading anything upsetting/violent/unhappy. After 10 years of friendship, doesn't he know that? Instead, I smiled politely and accepted the book with no intention of reading it.
But our school does SSR time (sustained silent reading) twice a week, and last week, I needed something to read. Something school-appropriate; I didn't want to have to explain the plot of Cops and Cowboys. So I grabbed Black Hawk Down and was immediately hooked.
It's intense. I feel like I'm watching a movie; there's so much excitement. It's not the kind of nonfiction I'm used to reading.
I like how it's telling the story from so many points of view. I'm not very far into it, but in addition to the American soldiers, they've also shared a Somali point of view. And it's so sad, because you see that in war, you're killing actual people with stories and families and that you may have things in common with them.
But at the same time, it's fascinating to see what motivates these soldiers to fight. I especially liked this quote:
"That's why Howe and the rest of the D-boys loved it... War was ugly and evil, for sure, but it was still the way things got done on most of the planet. Civilized states had nonviolent ways of resolving disputes, but that depended on the willingness of everyone involved to back down. Here in the raw Third World, people hadn't learned to back down, at least not until after a lot of blood flowed... Intellectuals could theorize until they sucked their thumbs right off their hands but in the real world, power still flowed from the barrel of a gun. If you wanted the starving masses in Somalia to eat, then you had to outmuscle men like this Aidid, for whom starvation worked. You could send in your bleeding heart do-gooders, you could hold hands and pray and sing hootenanny songs and invoke the great gods CNN and BBC, but the only way to finally open the roads to the big-eyed babies was to show up with more guns. And in this real world, nobody had more or better guns than America. If the good-hearted ideals of humankind were to prevail, then they needed men who could make it happen."
I'm really looking forward to doing more reading during SSR time today. And I can't wait to rent the movie when I'm done!
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