Photo credit: Janet Donovan
“I was a ranger – one of the assault guys,” Keni Thomas told Hollywood on the Potomac at the world premiere of National Geographic’s series “No Man Left Behind” and the premiere screening of “The Real Black Hawk Down” at the US Navy Memorial. Synopsis: Somalia, 1993 – Famine, drought, and violence grip Somalia after a bloody revolution has left the country in disarray. Since the fall of the Somalian government in 1991, clan leader Mohamed Aidid has been waging a civil war and is hampering the United Nations efforts to deliver relief supplies to a civilian population facing starvation. But for US troops, what begins as a peacekeeping mission to provide relief will soon descend into chaos.
Thomas was both a part of that real mission and a narrator in the movie. “Basically, if you break that mission down into three elements there was the air element – the pilots and the crew – there was the ground reaction which would have been guys on vehicles, and then there was the assault element,” Thomas explained. “Initially we hit a target building so it was a raid. When we were still at the target building that’s when the first helicopter got shot down, and so then the mission changed. Then we were going to move from the target to go to that crash site and it became a rescue mission, although we weren’t part of a rescue unit.”
Keni Thomas
We asked Keni what it felt like to be in that situation: “I guess I can equate to the same feeling that you might get if you’re ever been in a car wreck, – it’s the same thing, you’ve felt the same feeling of ‘this can’t be happening.’ It’s no different. Or just turn on the news now a days. Fifty people got killed in a club in Orlando …murder in an airport in Brussels, a club in Paris, a college campus in Virginia, it’s all the same thing – ‘I can’t believe it’s happening.’ That’s what we were all thinking, I think the difference between us and a special operations unit is that it only lasts for a second. Like, ‘I can’t believe it’s happening, but we’ve got to do something because we’ve been trained for it.’ Or you’ve rehearsed that. Honestly, your whole mentality from day one, you’re just taught this isn’t about you anymore. This is about her and him and you’re here to take care of each other. As soon as something happens it’s like, I’ve got to help. Then it immediately becomes a response. Fortunately then the response has to be somewhat planned out and somewhat rehearsed or otherwise it’s going to be chaotic. That’s how it changed.”
We asked him to talk about the scare factor: “For me, most of the whole battle I probably would tell you I was scared until the next day when we were running out and then the support group was gone. There were only 25 guys left and then I got inside a vehicle – there’s an armored car that came to help pick some of us up – and at first we thought that would be a safe place to be. Then you realized once you got inside of it you could just hear, ‘ping, ping, ping,’ on the side. That’s when I was scared because I was completely helpless. I couldn’t do anything; all I could do was hope that the driver drove fast and the guy up on the gun tour hit whoever was shooting at us before they hit us and I was scared.”
Keni seemed the most emotional about the experience as seen through his body language and expression during the Q and A; although it is always hard to tell what feelings the others may have contained.
Randy Ramaglia (center front)
Randy Ramaglia is a career fire fighter and one of the three soldiers united for the film. “There were three of us that interviewed for the show and we narrated it,” he told Hollywood on the Potomac. “I was one of two rangers that were interviewed. Keni is the other ranger and the third gentleman in the show is Mike Duran. He was the pilot of the black hawk that was shot down. He was captured and held captive for eleven days. In a nutshell, the episode in forty-two minutes without commercials really tries to show the brotherhood and the bond the exists between all of us.”
There were lots of supportive organizations there for veterans. We chatted with Dustin Shryock who is the Director of Community Engagement and Partnership at the Headstrong Project. “It’s an interesting story. Our founder was a Marine in Fallujah and he was commanding Marines there. He came home and realized he was going to be quickly on pace to lose more veterans to suicide than they had lost in combat. He’s also the founder of Higher Purpose so he used his entrepreneurial spirit to get a stigma-free, cost-free and bureaucracy-free health care program together. We recruit clinicians and, in partnership with Weill Cornell Medical in New York City, in about 2012 they set up a pilot program to start treating people anonymously. No set limit on treatment. No cost for the veteran. You could walk in the door and be seen basically that day after having submitted a very informal online entrance waiver. Within 12 to 48 hours, usually 12 hours, one of our clinicians would get back to that veteran and screen them and begin treatment.”
Guests enjoyed a lengthy cocktail hour where they swapped stories and enjoyed a luxurious buffet with the omnipresence of the military.
