The exhausted soldiers shouted and waved but the Malaysian driver paid them no mind until the D-boys stepped out and leveled a CAR-15 at him. He stopped.

The D-boys are an elite team of American commandos known as Delta Force. The CAR-15 is a heavy-support machine-gun commonly mounted on armoured vehicles. The Malaysian soldier was driving a UN Peacekeeping Force armoured personnel carrier (APC) laden with injured American soldiers. He refused to stop for the remaining soldiers as there was no space left in the APC.

The movie and the book, Black Hawk Down , recounts how the Americans got whacked big time on a mission in Mogadishu, in civil-war torn Somalia.

In the mid-afternoon of Oct 3, 1993 the US Army Rangers and Delta Force operators embarked on a mission to extricate clan leader and warlord Mohamed Farah Aidid's two lieutenants from Bakara Market in the heart of Mogadishu.

The market is teeming with people. The mission is highly dangerous and it goes bloodcurdlingly bad. What is meant to take a half an hour lasts through the night. The American soldiers suffer heavy casualties as four high-tech Black Hawk helicopters are gunned down by Aidid's militiamen. The American soldiers numbering about a hundred need bailing out. They summon Malaysians and the Pakistanis who are part of the UN Peacekeeping Force in Mogadishu.

In Ridley Scott's movie Black Hawk Down , Task Force Ranger commander Major General Willian F Garrison who masterminds the whole shebang says he wants the "Pack-is-tan-ees and May-lays" to put their forces together on the double. Movie-wise the motion picture is credible to say the least. The score by Hans Zimmer uses both traditional African-Muslim leitmotifs and as well as Matrix-ish techno tunes - well done.

Soldiers slaughtered

Watch for the Black Hawk crash scene as the rotors come zipping so close to the screen making audiences push back against their seats.

In Mark Bowden's book Black Hawk Down on which the motion picture is based, the Malaysians and Pakistanis peacekeepers are said to want no part of the goings-on in Bakara Market despite having the necessary armour. There is good reason for their reluctance. On June 5 the same year, following the pulling out of US Marines from Somalia, a troop of Pakistani soldiers had been slaughtered there.

The UN peacekeeper forces however, agree to add four tanks and 28 armoured personnel carriers to the fight and go in and rescue the stranded Americans. There are no Malays or Malaysians in the movie, but it does show a Pakistani soldier driving the armoured personnel carrier through the narrow lanes in Bakara Market where a gun-fight takes place. If the writer's memory is correct, the Pakistani soldier is shown frantically screaming " Chalo ... Chalo " a Hindi word meaning "Let's go ... Let's go".

Prior to this, Lieutenant Colonel Bill David of the US Army who is given the task of assembling reinforcements is said to have been left wondering what to do with the Malaysians and Pakistanis, though their tanks come in handy. The Americans then decide that to replace the Malaysians in the APC with American troops. The books quotes David as saying, "Thank you very much, we'll take your vehicles and drivers, but we don't want your men.

"Do these guys speak English?" he asks further. The response to this question was that most officers spoke some and that there would be liaison officers to smoothen the process.

Language barrier

More than merely a language barrier, the rescue mission by the peacekeeping forces turns out to be a bit of a farce in itself with the distraught Americans turning their guns on the Malaysians.

Page 416 of the book says that after 14 hours of fighting, the Rangers and Delta soldiers are said to shocked that there is not enough room in the APCs for them - the reason behind the Malaysian driver not stopping for them.

The books says, "... the anxious Malaysian drivers just took off, leaving the rest of the force behind. They (the Americans) were going to have to run ...".

On page 428 - ranger commander Mike Steel is described as beating frantically on the shoulders of the APC driver, screaming at him, "I've got guys still out there!". The book says, "... but the Malay driver had a tanker helmet on and acted like he didn't hear Steele and just kept on driving".

The movie shows American soldiers running along side the APCs shielded against machine-gun fire. They run all the way to the safety of a stadium nearby, a mile or so from the scene of the gun battle with Aidid's militiamen and the Somalis.

In the book, the Malaysian drivers manouvering the APCs are said to have refused to "roll through" a big road block on Hawlwadiq Road in Bakara Market. In the past, such road blocks had been heavily mined.

The Malaysian troops are said to have bungled again when their machine gun operator opened fire on the roof of nearby buildings endangering some American soldiers there.

Somali catastrophe

Eighteen American soldiers lost their lives in that battle. And hundreds of Somali men, women and children were killed. If the movie was grotesque, the book is even more so.

It describes how a Somali man is killed by the American soldiers .... 'a tall skinny man wearing a bright yellow shirt and carrying an AK-47, came apart as the big rounds tore through him. Deep red blotches appeared on the yellow shirt. First an arm came-off. Then the man's head and chest exploded.'

The books also describes the killing of a Somali woman by the American soldiers. 'She had been hit by many rounds and lay in a heap in the dirt ... breathing heavily. Then she pulled herself up on all fours, grabbed a RPG (rocket propelled grenade) round and crawled. This time the massive Ranger volley literally tore her apart . A fat 203 round blew off one of her legs. She fell in a bloody lump for a few moments, then moved again.

'Another massive burst of rounds rained on her and her body came further apart. It was appalling yet some of the Rangers laughed.'

There was, unsurprisingly, none of this in the movie. Or maybe it had been censored by the local watchdogs.

Somali ingratitude

In the book's epilogue, the author says, "... rightly or wrongly, they (the Somalis) stand as an enduring symbol of Third World ingratitude and intractability, of the futility of trying to resolve local animosity with international muscle. They've effectively written themselves off the map".

The Somali death toll at Bakara Market was catastrophic. Conservative counts numbered five hundred dead among more than a thousand casualties.

But Aidid claimed that his clan - Habr Gidr - had driven off the world's mightiest military machine. The clan now celebrates Oct 3 as a national holiday.

The number of Americans killed in the fight was 18 - all of them elite force soldiers.

The American assault armoury on Bakara Market included the Delta C Squadron which is part of the army's top secret commando unit, the Task Force Rangers, a crack CSAR (combat search and rescue team) four bubble-front attack helicopters loaded with rockets, eight Black Hawk helicopters, a ground convoy of nine humvees and three five-ton trucks.

The ground convoy included Rangers, Delta operators, and the navy Seals (Sea, Air, Land commandos). There were three surveillance birds and a spy plane high overhead. There were altogether 19 aircraft, 12 vehicles and about 160 men involved in the fracas.

The movie

Black Hawk Down , the movie, may not win credibility for factual accuracy. This is a Hollywood production. It's an American production. Hence, it's not surprising that the story is sympathetic to the Americans and the American cause in Mogadishu.

The soldiers are portrayed as people first, who have families and are loved at home. They are not shown to be the ruthless killers that they are.

As for PAS' call to ban the movie, and the hullabaloo over the movie neglecting the Malaysian aspect, this writer says - get a grip.

The movie, to put it bluntly, is about the Americans getting whacked big time in the Bakara Market incident despite their sophisticated technology. The Somalis - 'skinnies' or 'sammies' as the soldiers refer to them - waged war on them with only RPGs and a couple of dud grenades.

The movie is not about the rescue mission mounted by the multinational force of UN peacekeepers that included the Pakistanis and Malaysians.

If Malaysians want to tell our story then we'll have to make our own movie.