"Black Hawk Down: A Story of Modern War," by Mark Bowden. Atlantic Monthly Press. 386 pages. $24.

The Sikorsky UH-60 Black Hawk is arguably the most advanced military attack helicopter ever built. Studded with rockets, cannons and a multiplicity of sighting devices, it can hover above a patch of ground and shred everything within a hundred yards of its shadow at the push of a button.

The Clinton administration and congressional Republicans want to boost the Pentagon budget by more than $12 billion next year alone to buy swarms of them, and new jet fighters and submarines and other up-linked technological marvels to ensure Pax Americana into the 21st century.

They should read "Black Hawk Down" first.

Here is the harrowing account of one day and one night of brutal hand-to-hand combat in which 100 of the most elite U.S. combat soldiers -- backed by a squadron of death-dealing Black Hawks --confronted a rag-tag army of amphetamine-fueled mercenaries in the ancient African city of Mogadishu, Somalia, in 1993.

Now all-but-forgotten, the single bloodiest U.S. military engagement since the Vietnam War was brought to the world's attention by a few seconds of jolting video on CNN of a U.S. soldier's naked corpse being dragged through the dusty streets by his victorious assailants.

"Black Hawk Down" is the story behind that image: how a multinational aid mission to feed a starving Third World population went badly awry, costing 18 young Americans and 500 civilians their lives in a maelstrom of bullets and rocketry.

Among the dead and more than 1,000 wounded were the crews of two of the vaunted super choppers -- swatted from the sky by primitive weapons in the hands of largely untrained militia fighters who, quite simply, were not afraid to die trying.

It is one of the more remarkable feats of the book that author Mark Bowden tells their side of the story too, capturing minute-by-minute accounts of the firefight from both the American and Somalian perspectives in one of the finest combat reconstructions in the annals of warfare.

Having said that, it should be noted that Bowden has been a friend of this reviewer for nearly a decade. A Baltimore native and former staff writer at the News-American before moving to the Philadelphia Inquirer, he has relationships with others at The Sun that go back even farther than that.

So it was with some trepidation that I began reading "Black Hawk Down." For one thing, Bowden has never served in the armed forces. And there are few things more irritating than a soft-bellied civilian sounding off about military affairs.

But Mark Bowden is no Bill Clinton.

A veteran journalist well-known for totally immersing himself in a subject, he conducted scores of interviews with the troops who fought in the battle and with the families of their fallen comrades. And he stuck out his own neck more than a little by traveling to Mogadishu to see with his own eyes the places where they fell.

In Somalia today, he reports, the battle is known as the "Day of The Rangers" -- after the U.S. Army special forces troops who fought and died trying to capture the leaders of a rogue clan that had been bushwhacking aid workers and sniping at peace-keeping units

The result of Bowden's efforts is a detailed after-action report that stands in a league with Shelby Foote's stirring Civil War diary "Shiloh" -- rare in its completeness, compassion and reverence for the valor of young men cast into extraordinary circumstances.

Ultimately, however, "Black Hawk Down" is a story about American hubris and the inability of our technology to protect us in a world increasingly divided into "haves" and "have-nots," Christians and Muslims, one-world capitalists and ethnic nationalists.

The difference between us and them, as one half-starved mercenary put it, is that: "Americans are afraid to die." And they are not.

Jim Haner is a U.S. Navy veteran and student of military history. Before coming to The Sun, he worked for the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Miami Herald.

Pub Date: 03/07/99