I�m having my second glass of my Porter this evening and I must say it is very good. It is MUCH better than it was when I first tried it NYE. I�m beginning to think I was a bit foolish now for trying it so soon. It�s pretty damn good stuff, If I can say so myself.

I saw �Black Hawk Down� Sat. night with Jon and Anneke. I was prepared to write a big long piece on the social-political ramifications and my reaction in that light to the topic of the movie. I put off writing this until today when I realized I really didn�t want to do that. Let me just say, if you don�t walk out of the theater pondering the meaning of it all, it has been lost on you and you�ve wasted your money.

It is an incredibly intense film. I absolutely don�t want to make any comparisons to �Saving Private Ryan� but I will in saying that this movie made more of an impact than any other since SPR. In case you�ve been hiding in a cave, you know the movie is about a special forces operation in Somalia back in �93, when �we� (AKA out military) had a presence there as part of a UN mission to provide humanitarian aid to the war-torn and hunger-stricken country. It turned out, of course, that it was the various �clans� involved in the ongoing civil war there that were using food supplies as a sort of weapon, limiting, if not halting altogether, it�s distribution. It quickly became clear, to those personnel �in the field� that the most powerful warlord, and his �clan� who controlled the capital city of Mogadishu, had to be eliminated to stabilize the relief efforts, as well as the civil war in general.

So, �we� got involved in a war we were never going fight in the first place, all as part of a well-intended and high-minded relief effort, in a place where armed �militiamen� (including women and children) were essentially heavily-armed loose mobs in the street. After the events depicted in the movie, �we� ended up pulling out altogether, making �us� look like a bunch of wusses. But are you a wuss if you pull out of a fight you never wanted to be in?

The point of it all comes down to the fact that the incredible bravery and effort put forth by a relatively small group of our best and most highly-trained soldiers, at a high causality rate, ended up all being for naught. The unfortunate post-script doesn�t make what happened any less significant, and it is a story that needs to be told.