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Music One of the most consequential battles fought by American forces since Vietnam.

This is the true story of Black Hawk Down.

Well, welcome to the rest is classified.

I'm Gordon Carrera.

And I'm David McClorski. And today, David, we're beginning a full-part series on what is one of the most consequential, I guess, disasters in American military history, which is the Battle of Mogadishu, as it's properly known, October 3rd and 4th, 1993, but everyone really knows it as Black Hawkdown,

don't they? Well, that's right. And I guess we'll come back throughout this series to the

question of whether this really was a disaster or not and how we should think about it. But of course,

this is a military confrontation of battle that is memorialized in the very

well-known Ridley Scott film, Black Hawk Down, which is actually itself based on an absolutely

exceptional book written by the journalist Mark Bowden, by the same name, and from which we

will be drawing extensively throughout this series.

Now, interestingly, Gordon, nobody in Mogadishu that day would have called it Black Hawk Down.

The Americans who were there, and we'll come to them in a moment, would have called it simply being in Mogadishu or the Battle of the Black Sea.

Again, we'll come back to what that

means. Somalis called it Ma'Alinti Rangers, the day of the Rangers. So nobody there, of course,

there are going to be several Black Hawk helicopters shot down, but the incident has kind of

come to be known Black Hawk down because of the book and the film of that same name.

Now, it is one of the most consequential battles fought by American forces since Vietnam.

It's 18 Americans are killed.

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