In those early meetings at Fort Benning, those original eight interviews, the Rangers all told me these fantastic stories, but what I didn’t know at the time was that the raid that is the center of the story of “Black Hawk Down” was a Delta Force raid, a special ops raid — a unit that the Army would not even acknowledge existed. It was totally a black ops unit, and so the Rangers whose job it was to set up a perimeter around the block where the Delta guys were doing their work were not allowed to mention the name of Delta Force. So they would try and tell me their stories, and they kept getting stuck. They would go out in the hall, and there would be a representative there from public affairs, and they’d huddle and confer. The soldier would come back in and say, “And then a soldier from another unit would did thus and so.” And I would say, “What other unit?” “I’m not at liberty to discuss that, sir,” he’d say.
(…)
When I interview people for a story, the last question I always ask is “Who else should I talk to?” And of course each of these Rangers that day had lists of their buddies who had fought with them, and many of them had, in the years since this battle, left the Army. You would be amazed at how much more a guy will tell you with a beer in his hand in his basement in Cleveland, than a Ranger sitting next to a public affairs officer at Fort Benning.
