Just a minor point about something that caught my attention: you note that there were no female soldiers on screen in this movie made in 2002 about events occurring in 1994. But some two decades after the movie and almost three after the actual event, there were women in Iraq and Afghanistan in Female Engagement Teams.
At the height of the FET program between 2010 and 2012, all-female counterinsurgency teams were attached to Ranger, Green Beret, SEAL, Force Recon and MARSOC Marine Raider units and, in violation of the military combat exclusion policy that still banned women, participated in combat-intensive special operations missions. All these women were volunteers, but often they were, shall we say, "encouraged" volunteers.
It was not till after the female combat exclusion policy was revoked in 2013 that these women received the CARs, CIBs, Purple Hearts and valor awards due them.
I recommend this discussion/interview with guys who were there in 1993 (I believe Col. (ret) Lee VanArsdale was also involved in Operation Acid Gambit , Panama 1989 )
Forgot to mention that Norway had troops there also. When the first group who arrived in Mogadishu and unpacked the equipment, they found skis and winter camo .
A longish-brewing, late-breaking comment re. Black Hawk Down:
It’s pleasantly affirming to read this aappreciation of a film of mine and one that still isn’t getting its due. Ridley Scott’s Black Hawk Down is convincingly observed, unusually composed, and cut down to to the milimeter. And the helicopter drop at the beginning compares interestingly to the raid in Apocalypse Now, a monument of editing and then state-of-the-art -- but BHD shows clearly the huge differences that digital filming opened up to action scenes.
Surprisingly, the Chinese director Hu Guan evidently picked up on Scott’s device of shifting the color balance of almost every scene to a strong and pervasive olive green, and used the same pallate (minus a dab of yellow) to unify my vote for the best war film since BHD, his monstrous and magnificent 2020 film, The Eight Hundred (name in characters), The Eight Hundred, a no-main-characters narrative of Colonel Xie Jinyuan’s 1st Battalion ‘s last stand against the IJA in the middle of Shanghai. Thanks to the cruel gag of some mocking god, the Battle of Sihang Warehouse played out just across the Suzhou Creek (English speakers would have called it a river, but it isn’t wide) from Shanghai’s equivalent of Times Square, which, enjoyng its protected status as a British-dominated International Settlement, kept up its 24-7-365 neon-Yue-opera carnival on full roar through all seven days of the Gaza-grade blood storm 350 feet away. Naturally the film’s closest (but way nothing like) relative is Steven Spielberg’s 1987 adaptation of JG Ballard’s semi-autobiographical Empire of the Sun. But unlike that film (and despite its ranking as the years highest grossing film worldwide, and although TEH featured roughly nothing to do with Communism, its US release drew thin houses and a half-handful or so of grudging murmurs from professional critics, almost making you wonder whether our regime’s hostility to Sino-patriotism had something to do with it.
Steve sailer is dead-spot-on that Black Hawk Down “recounts with nearly scrupulous accuracy the 1993 battle in which elite but inadequately armed U.S. troops saw 18 men killed in an enormous ambush by Somali clansmen loyal to warlord Mohammed Farrah Aidid.” But even so a few things bother me:
#1: Of course it’s hard to distinguish civilians from the (usually un-uniformed¬¬¬) combatants in this kind of street fighting. But it seems certain that the general Somali population suffered huge losses during the Battle of Mogadishu. If it’s not unforgiveably lazy to just grab the first two respectable sources in Wikipedia, Ambassador Robert B. Oakley, a U.S. special representative to Somalia, says that 1,500 to 2,000 Somalis were killed or wounded, and Scott Peterson, an American war correspondent, figures that a third of them were women and children. We don’t see even a single non-male receiving even a single minor injury. It may be that the film couldn’t have gotten any sort of wide distribution if it did -- and likely it wouldn’t today either -- but I wouldn’t want to be the studio PR flack who has to explain that to grieving families on the other side.
#2: We see soldiers staying awake and fractious for well over twenty-four hours, but, as in all but a few, mostly European war movies, we don’t see them being issued “go pills” (in those days usually dextroamphetamines) or even the less-sinful “no go pills” like Zolpidem, which are still the only bits of gear that make sleeping under fire a viable option.
#3: Like #2, this may feel like a quibble compared to cuttingroomfloorholeing a large human death toll. But it bugs me because it’s another squeamy puritanical whitewash, and because it’s a willful and nearly-universal blind spot in our cinematographic eye, and -- and -- andandand… alright, let me put it this way:
One does understand that no matter how strong a commitment a filmmaker has to realism, there are things soldiers have to do that no audience will stay in their seats to watch. And admittedly this is a more glaring ommission (or howler, rather, although I haven’t yet noticed any other viewers or theatergoers howling at it along with me) in the currently dominant sub-genre of war movies -- the two or three releases per week that embed us with a team of grizzled ace commandos as they execute a cunning and successfully undetected stealth raid on a deep-jungle guerilla encampment, a rogue ISI cell’s so-far-inaccessible mountaintop-cavern redoubt, or this year’s Mother of All Terrorists’ walled, moated, thug-patrolled, laser-fence-encircled, thermal-imaging-drone-swarm-orbited, and generally unwelcoming Mughal-Deco retirement pallazzo. Even so, when I’m rewatching BHD in company, and one of the scenes comes up where our boys move in quick and quiet and take another skulking of hostiles entirely by surprise, I still have to clench my teeth to keep from shouting it out: WHERE ARE ALL THE DOGS?
Just a minor point about something that caught my attention: you note that there were no female soldiers on screen in this movie made in 2002 about events occurring in 1994. But some two decades after the movie and almost three after the actual event, there were women in Iraq and Afghanistan in Female Engagement Teams.
At the height of the FET program between 2010 and 2012, all-female counterinsurgency teams were attached to Ranger, Green Beret, SEAL, Force Recon and MARSOC Marine Raider units and, in violation of the military combat exclusion policy that still banned women, participated in combat-intensive special operations missions. All these women were volunteers, but often they were, shall we say, "encouraged" volunteers.
It was not till after the female combat exclusion policy was revoked in 2013 that these women received the CARs, CIBs, Purple Hearts and valor awards due them.
I recommend this discussion/interview with guys who were there in 1993 (I believe Col. (ret) Lee VanArsdale was also involved in Operation Acid Gambit , Panama 1989 )
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yFwivrpFHE0
Forgot to mention that Norway had troops there also. When the first group who arrived in Mogadishu and unpacked the equipment, they found skis and winter camo .
A longish-brewing, late-breaking comment re. Black Hawk Down:
It’s pleasantly affirming to read this aappreciation of a film of mine and one that still isn’t getting its due. Ridley Scott’s Black Hawk Down is convincingly observed, unusually composed, and cut down to to the milimeter. And the helicopter drop at the beginning compares interestingly to the raid in Apocalypse Now, a monument of editing and then state-of-the-art -- but BHD shows clearly the huge differences that digital filming opened up to action scenes.
Surprisingly, the Chinese director Hu Guan evidently picked up on Scott’s device of shifting the color balance of almost every scene to a strong and pervasive olive green, and used the same pallate (minus a dab of yellow) to unify my vote for the best war film since BHD, his monstrous and magnificent 2020 film, The Eight Hundred (name in characters), The Eight Hundred, a no-main-characters narrative of Colonel Xie Jinyuan’s 1st Battalion ‘s last stand against the IJA in the middle of Shanghai. Thanks to the cruel gag of some mocking god, the Battle of Sihang Warehouse played out just across the Suzhou Creek (English speakers would have called it a river, but it isn’t wide) from Shanghai’s equivalent of Times Square, which, enjoyng its protected status as a British-dominated International Settlement, kept up its 24-7-365 neon-Yue-opera carnival on full roar through all seven days of the Gaza-grade blood storm 350 feet away. Naturally the film’s closest (but way nothing like) relative is Steven Spielberg’s 1987 adaptation of JG Ballard’s semi-autobiographical Empire of the Sun. But unlike that film (and despite its ranking as the years highest grossing film worldwide, and although TEH featured roughly nothing to do with Communism, its US release drew thin houses and a half-handful or so of grudging murmurs from professional critics, almost making you wonder whether our regime’s hostility to Sino-patriotism had something to do with it.
Steve sailer is dead-spot-on that Black Hawk Down “recounts with nearly scrupulous accuracy the 1993 battle in which elite but inadequately armed U.S. troops saw 18 men killed in an enormous ambush by Somali clansmen loyal to warlord Mohammed Farrah Aidid.” But even so a few things bother me:
#1: Of course it’s hard to distinguish civilians from the (usually un-uniformed¬¬¬) combatants in this kind of street fighting. But it seems certain that the general Somali population suffered huge losses during the Battle of Mogadishu. If it’s not unforgiveably lazy to just grab the first two respectable sources in Wikipedia, Ambassador Robert B. Oakley, a U.S. special representative to Somalia, says that 1,500 to 2,000 Somalis were killed or wounded, and Scott Peterson, an American war correspondent, figures that a third of them were women and children. We don’t see even a single non-male receiving even a single minor injury. It may be that the film couldn’t have gotten any sort of wide distribution if it did -- and likely it wouldn’t today either -- but I wouldn’t want to be the studio PR flack who has to explain that to grieving families on the other side.
#2: We see soldiers staying awake and fractious for well over twenty-four hours, but, as in all but a few, mostly European war movies, we don’t see them being issued “go pills” (in those days usually dextroamphetamines) or even the less-sinful “no go pills” like Zolpidem, which are still the only bits of gear that make sleeping under fire a viable option.
#3: Like #2, this may feel like a quibble compared to cuttingroomfloorholeing a large human death toll. But it bugs me because it’s another squeamy puritanical whitewash, and because it’s a willful and nearly-universal blind spot in our cinematographic eye, and -- and -- andandand… alright, let me put it this way:
One does understand that no matter how strong a commitment a filmmaker has to realism, there are things soldiers have to do that no audience will stay in their seats to watch. And admittedly this is a more glaring ommission (or howler, rather, although I haven’t yet noticed any other viewers or theatergoers howling at it along with me) in the currently dominant sub-genre of war movies -- the two or three releases per week that embed us with a team of grizzled ace commandos as they execute a cunning and successfully undetected stealth raid on a deep-jungle guerilla encampment, a rogue ISI cell’s so-far-inaccessible mountaintop-cavern redoubt, or this year’s Mother of All Terrorists’ walled, moated, thug-patrolled, laser-fence-encircled, thermal-imaging-drone-swarm-orbited, and generally unwelcoming Mughal-Deco retirement pallazzo. Even so, when I’m rewatching BHD in company, and one of the scenes comes up where our boys move in quick and quiet and take another skulking of hostiles entirely by surprise, I still have to clench my teeth to keep from shouting it out: WHERE ARE ALL THE DOGS?
Oops. I mean "a FAVORITE film of mine."
Credit must go where credit is due.