Author Mark Bowden speaks at The Haverford School
‘Black Hawk Down’ author talks about life, writing & his new book, ‘Hue 1968’
HAVERFORD » Writer Mark Bowden radiates a folksy friendliness like a modern day Mark Twain. Perhaps, that’s because he hailed from the Midwest before he moved to New York with his family for 7th grade.
The author, most famous for “Black Hawk Down,” which was made into an Academy Award-winning movie, spoke to Upper School students at The Haverford School recently and also gave the 20th Annual Edward R. Hallowell Literary Lecture. Tom Stambaugh, head of the English department, asked Bowden about his life and career, and then Bowden fielded questions from students.
“I was always a reader,” Bowden said. “That prefaces most writing careers.”
When he was in high school, the note author said he was a “serious reader,” but he also loved to draw and was known for his caricatures of his teachers “that got me into a little bit of trouble.”
“But I became more serious about writing in college because I had a terrific teacher who encouraged me to focus on the mechanics of writing, what makes a piece of writing compelling and interesting,” Bowden said. He was also the editor of his college newspaper, which “gave me an opportunity to make trouble on campus…I think I published the worst college newspaper in the history of America. Much of it was completely ridiculous but I was always having a good time.”
That led to his first job at the reporting
where he first wrote features of interest to young people, then moved on to general reporting.
“I fell in love with it because reporting took me out of the building, out to the city, into the community and I learned how much fun it was to investigate a story,” he said. He covered crime, politics, local government and “just found it addictive.” He grew up fairly sheltered in the suburbs.
“So working in a big city and going into every neighborhood and meeting all kinds of people I wouldn’t have otherwise met with a good excuse to ask questions and listen, it was just a fascinating thing,” Bowden said. “And then to come back and sit down and figure out how to write about what I’d just learned. I never looked back. There’s never been anything else that I wanted to do.”
He described going through the police blotter to look for stories and developing relationships with sources.
“One of the things I learned is you had to begin a story with something compelling…What is the story really about? At heart those are good exercises to help you craft a story someone will read,” he said. “The most interesting thing about any story is the people in it.”
Bowden also talked about his days at
where he spent a few years reporting about the Eagles. His editor, Dave Tucker, told him not to cover the team the way the other reporters did. So in the offseason, he visited the players at their homes and got to know them and their families. When the season started, Bowden had an edge because he’d developed relationships with the athletes.
Jim McMahon, a quarterback for the Bears who came to the Eagles as a backup, had “draped his locker with pornography,” Bowden said. And he mentioned that colorful fact in a story about life in the Eagles locker room. The PR guy for the Eagles was very unhappy with Bowden, told him that McMahon had gotten in trouble with his wife and that he was not supposed to write about stuff like that and threatened to close the locker room.
He’d also interview players after games for a followup story and during the game he’d focus intently on the one player he planned to write about. One time his subject was Andre Waters.
“Andre was a real character,” Bowden related. “He was extremely superstitious. So I was watching an Eagles game and Andre was the guy I was going to focus on. So I noticed he was a strong safety and covering the tight end midway through the first quarter, the tight end had scored twice. So Andre comes running off the field takes off his jersey, his shoulder pads, rips off his Tshirt, balls it up and throws it and he is going to jump on it with his cleats when Eric Allen, the quarterback, runs over and grabs it and stops him from trashing the T-shirt.”
When he interviewed Waters the next day, Waters told him that he had forgotten his lucky T-shirt and Allen offered to let him wear his. So Andre wore Eric’s T-shirt and got burned …These are the kind of stories you find if you scratch below the normal coverage.”
Asked about how “Black Hawk Down” came about, Bowden said that he knew that conflict was “one of the great ways to structure a story” and had been thinking about writing about combat for some time. When he read about the firefight in Somalia he thought it would be an interesting story and he knew that many of the Americans had survived.
“I could not convince anyone at the Philadelphia Inquirer that it was a great story so I just started working on it on my own,” he said. But he ran into a brick wall with the Pentagon. Officials told him that he needed to give them the names of the soldiers who he wanted to interview and he had no easy way to find them. But he read that President Clinton was going to meet with the families of those killed and found out their names and talked with some of them, including Jim Smith, the father of Jamie Smith, an Army colonel who died in that battle.
“I told him what I wanted to do and he thought it was great,” said Bowden. “A month or two later I get an invitation to a ceremony of the dedication of a building in northern New Jersey where they were dedicating a building to Jamie Smith and I debated whether I wanted to go,” he said. But he did go and there he met Jamie Smith’s comrades and later interviewed them about the battle of Mogadishu. Those interviews became the basis for a 26-part series of articles in the newspaper and later the book, “Black Hawk Down.”
New York publishers turned the book down at first but a small publisher, Grove Atlantic, took it on and, “It just went nuts.”
Bowden’s most recent book, “Hue 1968,” is another war story. One of the subjects he interviewed is William Ehrhart, an English and history teacher at The Haverford School, who is also a poet and writer and has written about those days when he was a young Marine serving in Vietnam.
He called Ehrhart, “a wonderful storyteller and a very honest storyteller.”
Responding to a question from a student, Bowden said going to Catholic school had good points and bad questions but overall the nuns taught him to think about moral questions, which has served him well. Bowden said that because he moved he was put into the class for “dumb kids,” something that these days with the emphasis on self-esteem is not done. But that served him well, he said, because he learned to fend off bullies and also strove to prove that he was a smart kid.
“I had a cracked tooth in the front, which made me look really tough,” he said. “The fact that I was underestimated actually made me more ambitious.”
Asked about “fake news” and people tending to prefer news that reinforces their beliefs, Bowden told the students that he thinks this is a dangerous trend.
“I think in the long run the value of serious journalism is so strong, that it’s not going to go away,” he said. “I think what you have to is become savvier about where you get your information, how to access creditably.”
Stop listening and start reading, he suggested. Bowden avoids various groups of “so-called experts sitting around jawing” on television. It is easier now than ever before to verify information on the internet, he said. “It takes a little bit of effort to be informed citizens,” he said.
“A lot of it is fake,” he said. “More and more, it’s weaponized. You’re being targeted by people who want to sell you things They want to sell you ideas or candidates or products and you need to become, and already are, savvy about this. If you want to know the truth you need to look past the stuff that’s bombarding you.”
The author of 13 books, Bowden is the national correspondent for “The Atlantic,” a contributing editor for “Vanity Fair,” and has written for numerous other magazines, including “The New Yorker.” Bowden and his wife, Gail, have five grown children and two granddaughters. The Bowdens live in Kennett Square where Bowden serves on the board of the Kennett Consolidated School District School Board.