Mogadishu in 1993 had a UN mission in it that began as famine relief — food convoys, feeding centres, a city that had been starving. The raid that afternoon was planned to take about an hour; the fighting ran through the night and into the next morning. Eighteen American soldiers were killed, two UN peacekeepers, and several hundred Somalis, many of them civilians. Within weeks Washington had set a date to withdraw, and the mission in New York was being rewritten.
The convoys were there because of a famine that killed something like a quarter of a million people in the year or so before. A ration delivery was mostly sacks of maize or sorghum, pulses, a tin of vegetable oil, and at the feeding centres a fortified corn-soy porridge cooked in big pots for people too weak for whole grain.
Both sides of the city were burying people that week, and in Mogadishu that meant graves dug quickly, before sunset where it could be managed, the washing and the prayer done by neighbours. The American families waited rather longer for their sons to come home.