13/02/2025
The ‘barbaric’ true story of Black Hawk Down In 1992, 18 US peacekeepers were killed by Somalia militiamen in flip-flops. What went wrong – and did it..
"Surviving Black Hawk Down" is now available on Netflix
Sergeant Kenneth Thomas remembers the moment the Black Hawk Down incident in Mogadishu began to feel like a movie script. It was October 3, 1993, and after a raid on a warlord’s hideout in downtown Mogadishu, he and around 100 other US troops were surrounded by thousands of Somali militiamen.
“We used to call that the Hollywood moment, because we’d never seen anything like it other than in the movies,” recalls Thomas, 59, who had joined the US military just two years before, following in the footsteps of his Vietnam veteran father. “There was just so much gunfire in every direction, rounds coming in, rounds going out. I don’t remember feeling overwhelmed – but then people started getting hit and going down.”
That was when the Hollywood script went awry, when the “bad guys” came close to winning. In the 18-hour gun battle that ensued, 18 US troops died and 73 were wounded, making it America’s deadliest single episode of combat since Vietnam. To add to the horror, soldiers’ corpses were dragged through the streets by cheering militiamen. Four days later, President Bill Clinton announced a US withdrawal – taking home an abject lesson in the perils of foreign intervention.
The whole story is already well-chronicled, first by author Mark Bowden’s bestseller 1999 Black Hawk Down, and then by Ridley Scott’s 2001 blockbuster movie of the same name. It is testimony to its enduring power that it has now received the Netflix documentary treatment, courtesy of a new three-part series airing now.
