Personal Blog- Buddy Powers

I just watched the movie Black Hawk Down for the first time, great movie. At first I did not think it was applicable to our discussions of the holy, tremendum, and mysterium but upon further conversation with my friends I concluded that there is significant correlation. Any war movie is going to deal with the aspect of mysterium and tremendum, not necessarily in a directly religion sense but certainly in the terrifying and unpredictable pretense of war. The premise for the movie is that a team of Delta Force and Army Rangers are sent into part of Mogadishu to extract two of Mohammed Farah Aidid's senior subordinates that have been responsible for mass genocide in Somalia. The mission was supposed to only take an hour but two Black Hawk helicopters are shot down during the mission extending its overall time to 15 hours, and from there the chaos ensues. I think an important theme in this movie is the view that the ground units have on the battle and the airborne commanders that orchestrate the offensive. After Lt. Col. McKnight vents about the inherent danger of this mission compared to past ones his comment to Colonel Harrell is telling, “Yeah, for you two, circling above it at five hundred feet, it's imperfect. Down in the street... it's unforgiving.” There is almost a God to man relationship between the two as the men in these helicopters with the ‘omniscient’ birds-eye view of the battle and the subjection to authority that all the soldiers on the ground have to relate to. But their relationship is broken because the men in the air can not commiserate with the men on the ground, and when two of these helicopters go down like fallen angels, the reality of the war is brought up to their level.