Watching Americans on the battlefield. (Now Playing).(Black Hawk Down)(Review)(Excerpt)

Rival warlords presiding over outbursts of feudal violence. Destitute civilians struggling to build a meager life in the midst of a war zone. United States Special Forces watching over the mess like a nervous cook eyeing a pot that's about to boil over.

Sound familiar? It's not present-day Afghanistan but Somalia circa 1993, as chronicled in Black Hawk Down, a nonfiction book by Mark Bowden that has been adapted into a scorching new film. A testament to military bravery but hardly a rah-rah celebration of violence, a piercing consideration of U.S. foreign policy but not an anti-American rant, Black Hawk Down takes an unflinching look at modern warfare at a time when it makes headlines every day.

In 1993, Bill Clinton sent U.S. Special Forces to Somalia as part of a United Nations humanitarian mission to aid civilians ravaged by that country's civil war. After one of the ruthless local warlords--Mohammed Farrah Aidid--was charged with the murder of 24 U.N. peacekeepers, a team of elite American soldiers staged an operation to pluck two of Aidid's top men out of the battle-torn city of Mogadishu. The mission was a disaster. Two Black Hawk helicopters were shot down and U.S. soldiers were trapped for 18 hours in Mogadishu's hellish streets. When all was said and done, 18 Americans (and hundreds of Somalis) had lost their lives.

Black Hawk Down is unrelenting in its focus. We're immediately immersed in the community of Rangers and Delta Force soldiers who have been sent to Somalia with no clear mission (in one scene, the restrictions placed on them by their political superiors prevent them from firing on militiamen who kill civilians and steal supplies during a food drop). When the troops are finally called to action, we go right into Mogadishu with them and rarely leave their side. As the operation disintegrates and the soldiers are scattered--hiding from armed mobs of militiamen like rats in the city's crumbling buildings --their desperation becomes palpable. Black Hawk Down has such a claustrophobic, realistic atmosphere that the grimy dust of Mogadishu's streets seems to blow down the theater aisles.

There's gruesome violence here--I can't remember a war film that depicts the trauma ...