But by the end of the 16-hour battle in which commandos tried to seize several of Aidid's top lieutenants, 18 elite Army Rangers and hundreds of Somalis lay dead in the streets of Mogadishu.
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O'Brien's play is a story of war and war reporting that was inspired by the experiences of Paul Watson, who won a Pulitzer for a 1993 photo of a dead U.S. Army Ranger dragged through the streets of Somalia's capital.
The original also spawned sequels: Evil Dead 2 and Army of Darkness.
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The dead were all members of the Army's Task Force Lightning and comprised four Black Hawk crew members and 10 passengers.
Gnanawathie, a migrant to Colombo from central Sri Lanka, where the army has recruited heavily, laments the mounting number of dead youths from her village.
The Israeli army still regularly escorts Jewish pilgrims here in the dead of night.
Systems developed by the Army frequently have hit dead-ends as a result of technical, cost or other factors.
In January, 23-year-old Sapper Richard Walker was shot dead by a member of the Afghan National Army as he undertook construction work in Helmand.
In 1975, Ross McWhirter, co-editor and compiler of the Guinness Book of World Records, was shot dead by Irish Republican Army gunmen at his home.
The Saville Inquiry is examining the events of 30 January 1972 when 13 civilians were shot dead by British Army soldiers during a civil rights march in Londonderry.
On 25 June, citizen journalist Ghias Khaled Al-Hmouria was shot dead in Douma while filming an operation of the rebel Free Syrian Army.
The president of the Shia Conference, Syed Dawood Agha, told the BBC that his community would not bury its dead till the army had given an assurance it would take administrative control of the city.
"They were shot dead during an ambush in the Idlib region and the army found them with maps of military positions, " Rami Abdel Rahman, director of the monitoring group, told the AFP news agency.
Udaya Nanayakkara, the army's spokesman, said 1, 057 civilians had later made it out with the bodies of the dead.
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