Veteran’s Day: One Hero’s Story
Black Hawk Down Comes to Custer
“We saw the movie, we met the man”
by Fred Hernandez, SDC Sentinel
Twenty-five years ago, future American foreign policy was substantially impacted as a result of an international incident. It was a relatively simple mission that should have taken about an hour. Instead it stretched out to about fifteen hours and resulted in the deaths of eighteen service personnel and the wounding of another seventy-three. In the bestselling book authored by Mark Bowden and later made into a block busting movie, that incident became widely known as “Black Hawk Down”. In fact, it was the Battle of Mogadishu, the first in what would be nine such engagements. It all started as a humanitarian effort on the part of the U.S.A., the U.N. and other countries.
As a result of turf wars that became a raging civil war, the innocent bystanders, the poor people of Somalia, were the collateral damage. Wide spread famine, artificially created by controlling warlords, had turned into a veritable death sentence by starvation for the population in general. To prevent widespread deaths, U.S. troops had to be deployed to insure the equitable and comprehensive distribution of the food supplies earmarked to help the people which were otherwise being high jacked by the warring factions. As happens many times in complex missions such as these, plans do not always turn out the way originally designed. In this case unplanned combat erupted.
Charlie even responded saying “Okay Lord, but can I have some more ammo?”