 The biggest lesson I learned from this book is that an over-reliance on technology will lead you feeling helpless when the going gets tough. Hey everyone, Dylan Schumacher, Civil Health Defense, and today we're back with another edition of Tactical Book Review. Today's book is Black Hawk Down by Mr. Mark Bowden. This book came out in 1999 and so that places it in this very unique place in American foreign policy thought and American war fighting and things like that because it's before the global war on terror, which my entire adult life, that's all I've known, right? If you've been in the military of course you serve it to or somewhere because we've been at war my entire adult life. And so it's before all of that and then it's after and it's far enough after the last significant American conflict, which in this case would probably be Vietnam, you know, soldiers didn't really go to war. We kind of had this weird time in there where yeah we had some things we did like I went down to Nicaragua to get Noriega and yeah we went into Granada and yeah we did these other things. We went into Kuwait but we really didn't experience that much fighting really. You know they weren't these long drawn out conflicts. People weren't dying by the thousands, right? But here all of a sudden you just have this like flash in a pan of brutal intense conflict by a bunch of guys who were in the army who didn't actually expect to have to do any shooting. And so it really is this just unique snapshot of this time in history. So for that alone I think it's worth reading. Additionally this event here this happened in 1993 when they went into Mogadishu and the Battle of Somalia if you're not familiar with that at all you've probably seen the movie which is based off the book. But it's also interesting to look back about 30-ish years ago like I said and just look at how we do things differently. You know this was a time before Picatinny rail on rifles. They didn't really have lights worth a damn. Night vision did exist but obviously it wasn't as good as today. None of the guys had night vision anyway because they all left it back at base because they thought it was going to be a one hour mission and you know ten hours later they find themselves with the sun setting and out their nods, there's a lesson there. People don't carry tourniquets. You know they maybe carry a field dressing at best but you know your standard guy isn't carrying an IFAC. He's not carrying a tourniquet. That's not something part of his repertoire. A lot of the guys had like they had a flak vest right which made it like Kevlar to like stop a pistol round then they'd usually put like a rifle plate in them. A lot of the guys dumped their rifle plates that day because you know they didn't think they'd need it right. So again there was just a myriad of interesting lessons and just things to read about how we do stuff different now that today is just like normal. Just like standard operating procedure. Like if you have a kit you probably have a set of knee pads that go with that. That's just like duh right. Didn't do that. Didn't have the knee pads. That was a cool fast trick they learned from the Delta boys and the Rangers didn't normally wear knee pads right. But of course nowadays everybody wears knee pads because you've got this kit on and it's a lot more comfortable and whatever. So I like reading historical accounts of battles and I like reading history a lot because there are lessons to be learned. Those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it or something like that right. So I really think that there's some stuff we can learn here because usually in all of history what happens is countries, nations, cities whatever will fight wars. By the end of that war you have veterans who have learned things and are good at it and know how to be efficient. And then the war ends you know armies disband whatever people go home and then the next conflict happens and often times you have to relearn all those same lessons again. Because people forget it passes out of folk knowledge it didn't get incorporated you know whatever. So the more you now can learn from history and the more you can read books like Black Hawk Down which I would recommend I think it does a really good job the better off you're going to be. I think where this book really does excel is the author intentionally wrote it this way but he writes it like a novel right and he jumps between characters and he jumps in from the Somali perspective and he jumps in from the American perspective. He did a ton of interviews in order to compile this book and looked at official radio transmissions and I mean the author really does do a good job of trying to sew together all the events that are happening while giving you different individual character perspectives. I say character but I mean these are real people right. So again I would recommend this book it's an easy read I mean it's longer it's like three three hundred and forty pages something like that but it's it reads like a novel so it's not like detailed heavy slogging it's pretty easy. The reason we as American citizens who want to embrace our martial American heritage want to read books like Black Hawk Down is because we want to learn from them right we want to look and say what do they do or not do well and how can I incorporate that into my setup or my thought process or my mindset or whatever and and what can I learn from this so again I would encourage you to read this one it's gonna be an easy read if you're new to reading historical battle fight stuff this is a good one to start with hope that was helpful keep learning out there do brave deeds and endure.