The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Thinking About Mogadishu

Posted on | March 29, 2026 | No Comments

Last night, I was inspired to watch Black Hawk Down again, although I’ve seen it many times before, including during its original 2001 release. Perhaps you’ve forgotten this from 2022:

Staff Sgt. Robert McCain wanted to be in the Army for as long as his mother can remember. But McCain remembers exactly when he knew he’d be a soldier someday: The first time he watched “Black Hawk Down.”
“I was like nine and I saw that movie — which you should not show a nine-year-old that movie — and I wanted to join the Army from then on,” he told Task & Purpose on Sunday.
Not only did McCain go on to be an infantryman in the Army like he’d dreamed, but over the weekend he competed in the 2022 Best Ranger Competition, a brutal battle of grit and skill among elite Airborne Ranger-qualified service members. . . .

That story still makes me smile. The intensity of that movie, which I took Bob and his twin brother Jim to see when it first came out, sort of caught me by surprise at the time. I grew up watching war movies like The Longest Day, and the TV series Combat, and playing with G.I. Joes, and so the thought of taking my kids to see a war movie seemed like a great idea. The graphic realism of Black Hawk Down was, as Bob later told that reporter, maybe too much for a 9-year-old, even if it did inspire his future career ambitions. In case you haven’t subscribed to my Substack newsletter yet, you may not understand why I bring that up now, given that I start today by talking about the war in Ukraine:

How closely have you followed the war in Ukraine lately? There was as a time, in 2022 and 2023, when I regularly kept track of developments in that war, but then it settled down into a de facto stalemate — trench warfare, with little change in the front lines — and I lost interest. Most Americans were even less interested in the war than I was, except perhaps as a partisan talking point for the kind of people with Ukrainian flags in their social-media profiles. After the dramatic events of early 2022, when Ukraine defeated the initial Russian effort to capture Kyiv, there just wasn’t enough battlefield news to maintain public interest. Incidentally, nobody has any idea how many casualties there have been in the Russia-Ukraine war. Propaganda by both sides has made it impossible to ascertain how many troops have been killed and wounded, although it seems certain that the death toll is in the tens of thousands.
Just this past week, however, I happened to see a report that Ukraine has driven the Russians out of Kupyansk, a city straddling the Oskil River, nearly 400 miles east of Kyiv. . . .

You can read the whole thing at Substack, and if you haven’t subscribed yet, please do so now. Also, please pray for peace.



 

Category: Donald Trump, Iran, Military, Somalia, Ukraine

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