Mark Bowden: Reluctant journalist rises to national fame

Mark Bowden, nationally recognized author of "Black Hawk Down," "Killing Pablo" and "The Best Game Ever," recently talked about his first major test as a reporter.

Thirty-five years ago, he was a kid, fresh out of Loyola College in Baltimore. He was working for the now-defunct Baltimore News-American, where his duties included checking police reports at the Anne Arundel County Police Department.

One day, Bowden was asked by Capt. William S. Lindsey to go on a raid of all the major drug dealers in Anne Arundel County. When Bowden showed up, he found the cops in the parking lot drinking beer and having a good time.

“I’m 21 years old; I’d never been on a police raid before. I thought, ‘Well, this is how they do it,’” he said.

The police went into a housing project and rounded up everyone and confiscated whatever drugs they had. The next day, police held a news conference, announcing a major drug sweep resulted in seizure of an estimated $800,000 worth of drugs.

As a recent college graduate, Bowden quipped, “This was like 1974, ’75, I’d had more experience than anyone in that room with the drug culture. I was looking at the drugs on the table and looking at maybe $5,000 or $6,000; people’s petty stashes from their bedroom bureaus.”

He knew the story the police were telling was not true.

“I really didn’t know how to write that story, so I just decided to write exactly what happened. So my story started with a bunch of cops drinking beer in the parking lot,” Bowden said. “I wrote it exactly as I’d seen it. The paper loved it. Capt. Lindsey not so much.”

Becoming a reporter

Bowden, now an adjunct professor at University of Delaware, told this and other tales of his life as an investigative journalist to members of the Rehoboth Beach Writer's Guild, who packed Dogfish Head Brewpub's upstairs dining room.

He said after college, he did not want to be a reporter.

“I was going to write novels and short stories and plays. And I found out that people were not going to give me big contracts to do that. So when I got offered to work at the newspaper, I figured it probably beats running the cash register at the supermarket. It was the best move I ever made. I learned how to be a writer,” Bowden said.

Bowden went to college in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when people such as Tom Wolfe were developing “new journalism,” a style of using fictional storytelling techniques to tell true stories.

“My goal became just to understand what was happening. And then to tell it in such a way that the reader would arrive at the same place,” Bowden said.

Referring to the interviews he did for “Black Hawk Down,” Bowden’s account of the 1993 Battle of Mogadishu in Somalia, he said, “Often times, people ask me as a reporter, how did you get somebody to talk about this? And the answer usually is, I showed up.”

Tricks of the trade

Of course, ingenuity also plays a role.

Bowden told a story of going to cover a space shuttle launch in Florida in 1981 as the science writer for the Philadelphia Inquirer. On the way to the launch, Bowden got stuck in traffic. Not wanting to miss one of the biggest stories of his career, Bowden got out of his car and ran to the grandstand, lugging with him an early, heavier version of a laptop computer called a TeleRam.

Naturally, as soon as he got there and set up the TeleRam, the launch was scrapped. Disappointed, he went back to his car, noticing lots of other disappointed people also going to their cars. Bowden got out his notebook and started talking to people.

“They loved it at the Philadelphia Inquirer. They put it on Page 1. And I remember my editor calling and saying, ‘What a great idea. Whatever possessed you to leave the grounds and go out on the highway?’" Bowden said. “I told her it was just instinct.”

Inspiration for Bowden’s stories can come from all kinds of places.

His 2003 book “Killing Pablo" documents the manhunt for Columbian drug kingpin Pablo Escobar by U.S. Special Forces, the Drug Enforcement Administration and Columbian national police.

Bowden got interested in the story after interviewing a general for “Black Hawk Down” who had a picture of a bloody fat man surrounded by men with rifles on his wall.

“Like one of those 19th century big game hunters, only this was a human being,” Bowden said.

“I stopped in the middle of this interview, and I said, ‘Excuse me general, you have to tell me what that is.’ He takes the cigar out of his mouth, he says, ‘That, my friend, is Pablo Escobar. I keep that picture on my wall to remind me that no matter how rich you get in this life, you can still be too big for your britches!'” Bowden said.

The author of stories about the Battle of Mogadishu, the 1979 Iranian Hostage Crisis and the 1958 NFL Championship Game, Bowden said he enjoys moving between subjects. As a newspaper reporter, Bowden often moved around between beats, with his longest stint on anything being his three years covering the Philadelphia Eagles for the Inquirer. He said one way he keeps his work fresh is by coming into subjects with no prior knowledge and then gradually immersing himself.

“Ignorance is an excellent starting point for a journalist. I think that if you don’t know anything about what you are going to write about, the whole thing is a voyage to discovery,” Bowden said. “It is to my way of thinking, an advantage not knowing anything.”