Theme Analysis
The book called the Black Hawk Down is divided into five acts.  The act that my group chose to write about was act three.  This was called Overrun.  The title does a very good job of describing the theme.  As the book describes, this act shows how the best American fighters were “overrun” by the people of Somalia.  No their task force wasn’t that good but as just about every man who lived there were after the Americans it made no difference. There were just to many Somali’s. 
            The Overrun is a series of chapters that describes part of the story.  This section shows how the American men were quickly acquainted with just how much respect and supports the Somali’s actually had for their warlords.  It was an overwhelming thought to read about how our country had sent out men to save these needy hungry Somali’s when all they could do was fight, injure, and eventually kill some and most of the American soldiers. It was as if all of the problems in this mission had happened at the same time.  “Too many things were happening at the same time, all of them bad.”
            Another idea that came up was the idea of the Somali’s just trying to protect their families and their lives.  Throughout the story it has been portrayed that the Somali’s were people who needed help and discipline because they were bad people or something of the sort.  In this section it begins to describe the Somali’s point of view for one of the first few times.  Abdiaziz Ali Aden was a Somali teenager who had actually worked for an American corporation and had been out at his job when the attacks from the Americans began.  He was one of the lucky Somali’s who was able to go and find his family and get them to safety before the Americans saw them and thought they were enemies.  “He had helped his family to safety and then returned and then returned to protect the house from looters, only to find himself in the middle of a gunfight.
            The chapter that ends this act sort of closes the deal, you might say.  It kind of makes the reader feel like there will be no winning for the Americans in this mission.  It tells how the Somali’s end up taking Mike Durant captive and how he just keeps his eyes on the sky and lets his mind take him away.  It gives off a sense of closure as if he is willing to just accept it instead of trying to fight it. “And in this agony of fright suddenly Durant left his body.  He was no longer at the center of the crowd, he was in it, or above it, perhaps.  He was observing the crowd attacking him.  Apart somehow.  And he felt no pain and the fear lessened and then he passed out.”  As you read farther into the book you can see that this probably saved his life in the long run.
            In reading this book knowledge of the world and it’s agony came to me.  Just this act alone showed how much we could wish for unimaginable fairytale lives, but how we can never know the real pain that some go through.  Our men were sent in to this mission with a ratio of practically 1 to 10, and they still made it out with less dead than the Somali men but they were bombarded.  This act shows how the Americans were truly “Overrun”.
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Name: Travis LaValley, Logan Aguilar
Email: Buddytl@yahoo.com ,loganrm121@yahoo.com
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