¶ … sensory senses and stressors encountered by soldiers in the firefight from the book Blackhawk Down. The special forces that took part in this mission certainly had plenty of sensory and stressor inputs. It was on the night of October 3, 1993 that an assault force of 75 U.S. Rangers and 40 Delta Force commandos rappelled from 17 helicopters into a meeting of Habr Gidr clan leaders in the middle of Mogadishu, Somalia. The mission was intended to capture two top chiefs of the warlord Mohamed Farrah Aideed, rescue any hostages and return everyone back to base about 3 miles away in a convoy of 12 U.S. military vehicles. According to Edwards, "What was supposed to be a hostage snatch mission turned into an 18-hour firefight over two Blackhawk helicopter crash sites. Eighteen Americans were killed in the fighting" (2000, p. 47). Although Mogadishu is the largest city and capital of Somalia, it was also a harsh and unwelcoming place, especially for Americans...

The urban warfare that was required of these troops was in sharp contrast to the jungle warfare fought in Vietnam, but the stressors were essentially the same. Try to imagine unseen snipers firing at the American troops from every window and being surrounded by hostile forces that are bent on destroying every American in sight. These were truly strangers in a strange land, and it is a miracle that any of them survived. The American special forces were only equipped with small arms and the convoys that were supposed to relieve them had only 50-caliber machine guns and automatic grenade launchers. By contrast, the Somali rebels were equipped with Russian assault rifles and rocket propelled grenades (Edwards, 2000).
Because the streets of Mogadishu were very narrow, the Somalis recognized that the American special forces would require a relief convoy and quickly set up roadblocks across the city to prevent…