Character Analysis
(Avoiding Spoilers)
Grew Up… believing the commercials. Grimes joined the Rangers so that he could be a part of the action, not just sit around and fetch people food and drinks. As he puts it, “I made coffee through Desert Storm. I made coffee through Panama while everyone else got to fight, got to be a Ranger. Now it’s ‘Grimesey, black, one sugar,’ or ‘Grimesey, got a powdered anywhere?’”
Living… through his first battle. Grimes picked one hell of a day to make his battlefield debut. What started as a routine mission in war-torn Somalia turned out to be an overnight stand-off.
Visiting… the war-torn city of Mogadishu, Somalia. Grimes is part of a team sent to capture two of the warlord Mohamed Farrah Aidid’s top men from the city.
Profession… U.S. Army Ranger, one of the “elites” as Staff Sergeant Eversmann likes to say. Though Grimes is well-trained, he’s not as experienced as the other men on the mission. His fellow soldiers poke fun of him. Eversmann tells him, “Grimes, the most important thing – whenever everyone else is shooting, shoot in the same direction.”
Challenge… surviving his first real day on the battlefield. Grimes and the rest of his fellow Rangers are in a difficult spot: they’re trapped in a dilapidated city, surrounded by hostile militants who want nothing more than to kill them. He’s up for the fight of his life.
Personality… bumbling and funny. Grimes is the object of much derision – but that doesn’t mean that he’s not a worthy, loyal soldier. Soldiers like to rib each other, and Grimes takes the abuse good-naturedly.
Get to Know him in...
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When U.S. Rangers and an elite Delta Force team attempt to kidnap two underlings of a Somali warlord, their Black Hawk helicopters are shot down, and the Americans suffer heavy casualties, facing intense fighting from the militia on the ground.
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Already a classic of war reporting and now reissued as a Grove Press paperback, Black Hawk Down is Mark Bowden’s brilliant account of the longest sustained firefight involving American troops since the Vietnam War. On October 3, 1993, about a hundred elite U.S. soldiers were dropped by helicopter into the teeming market in the heart of Mogadishu, Somalia. Their mission was to abduct two top lieutenants of a Somali warlord and return to base. It was supposed to take an hour. Instead, they found themselves pinned down through a long and terrible night fighting against thousands of heavily armed Somalis. The following morning, eighteen Americans were dead and more than seventy had been badly wounded. Drawing on interviews from both sides, army records, audiotapes, and videos (some of the material is still classified), Bowden’s minute-by-minute narrative is one of the most exciting accounts of modern combat ever written—a riveting story that captures the heroism, courage, and brutality of battle.
