Back Inside Delta Force
by Dan Fazio

Eric Haney was immersed in two very different sides of the special operations community. During his 20-year military career Haney served as an Army infantryman, Ranger and Delta Force operator. After a post-military career as a security consultant and bodyguard, Haney wrote “Inside Delta Force,” a book about the secretive counterterrorism unit that led to the creation of the CBS television series “The Unit.” The action-drama about a fictional elite military unit was based on Haney’s experiences with Delta Force.

Haney was co-executive producer of “The Unit” when G.I. Jobs first talked to him in 2006 during production of the second season. After four seasons and 69 episodes, “The Unit” went into syndication and Haney moved from writing TV scripts to novels.

We recently revisited Haney to talk about his first in a series of novels, “No Man’s Land,” which was published in February. The novel introduces us to Kennesaw Tanner, a soldier of fortune with a background in the shadowy world of special ops.

“If you ask Tanner what he does, he’d probably say, well, I’m sort of a human salvage expert,” Haney said from his home in northern Georgia, where he grew up. “He recovers people and things of value that have gone missing, been stolen, kidnapped, that sort of thing. And in many ways he’s working some bad karma out of his soul.”

So how much of Kennesaw Tanner is based on Haney?

“A fair amount. A lot of it has some basis in some things I’ve done – my experiences. Although he’s young and handsome – there’s a big difference,” he joked.

Haney also talked about his Delta Force days, including his seat-of-the-pants escape from a fiery death during the ill-fated attempt to rescue American hostages in Iran. A sharp critic of Operation Iraqi Freedom, Haney expounded on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the future of the U.S. military, and the other projects he is currently working on.

Delta Force

GIJ: For someone who excelled as you did in special operations, you had to have known early on that you were cut out for this life. How early did you realize this was your destiny?

Haney: It always did have an appeal to me as a youngster growing up. And I realized I enjoyed it while I was in basic training – it seems to be something for me.

GIJ: As a member of Delta Force, you conducted operations in Beirut, Honduras and Grenada. One of the most famous operations you were involved with, however, was Operation Eagle Claw. In a word, what went wrong?

Haney: We just weren’t capable, nor were the helicopters capable. And then throw in some bad luck.

GIJ: Did you think you were going to make it out?

Haney: For a bit, no, I didn’t think I was going to make it. In fact when we exploded, I didn’t think I was going to get out. And I said, ‘Well, hell, I got to give it a try. I’m not going to sit here on my ass and burn to death.

Military-to-civilian transition

GIJ: After your retirement from the military in 1990, you worked as a bodyguard, security trainer and consultant. What was your most memorable assignment during this period?

Haney: Most memorable? Taking Aristide back into Haiti, as leader in his protective detail. Haiti is a very unusual place, and to be responsible for a foreign president is also a rather unusual task. And that was one that did a fair amount of good – helped stabilize Haiti, got rid of the early junta that had ousted him previously in a coup.

‘Inside Delta Force’

GIJ: “Inside Delta Force” was published in 2002. When and why did you decide to write the book?

Haney: The primary reason was my disgust for the portrayal of the first Gulf war. I had recently retired, I was back in the states at that time, and I was finishing up a college degree. And I watched the news, as everyone did, and (Gen. Norman) Schwarzkopf’s daily news conferences and what the American public was seeing. And I’m sure you recall these, time after time every day, was aircraft video of the smart bombings that were being conducted. And it was like it was a video game. And everybody’s cheering, you know, and again, that was propaganda because 90 percent of the drops were dumb bombs and most of those were missing.

But I’m watching this and looking at people around me and they’re out there cheering like it’s a damn game of some kind. And my thought is there are human beings on the end of those bombs – 18- and 19-year-old Iraqi draftees who have no idea what’s going on, and we’re making sport of it. There’s a horrible disconnect here.

And I remember also there was a magazine cover, and it was either Time or Newsweek, one of the national magazines – and the cover, you remember after the whole Road of Death, what when the retreating of Iraqi forces out of Kuwait the Air Force had a turkey shoot, just obliterated this convoy of fleeing Iraqis. And on the cover of that magazine was a close-up photo of a burnt corpse of a truck driver, an Iraqi Army truck driver; shattered truck, glass is gone; that burnt corpse hanging over the steering wheel as though he’s some sort of monster. As though was some noble thing we’ve had done.

And I was just absolutely disgusted with all of this. For those of us who had been on the ground and on the receiving end of that, and have been in close combat with other human beings, there’s nothing game-like or video-like or any of that. And it’s wretched. And I will tell you I’ve never hated anyone I ever fought in combat. Yeah. I have never hated them. And once I came out of my teens and was able to think about it, and think, uh, no one we ever fought was in our country. It’s just the opposite – we are there. And I’d ask, ‘What are the reasons? What are the real reasons?’ And why do we celebrate this?

So my disgust with that portrayal as though it’s all a video game exercise, it’s just a sanitized, fun little jaunt to kill and obliterate others – I wanted to show the other side of that sort of portrayal. And also part of it too was, I don’t like the way Special Forces have always been portrayed in film and television, particularly in film – think of the Rambo movies and the Sylvester Stallone movies – as these Soldiers are portrayed as these one-dimensional Neanderthals who just go around the world executing mayhem and kill and slaughter. And it means no more than cleaning their fingernails. And I wanted to demonstrate, to a degree, what these men are actually like.

GIJ: The book did lead to criticism – some of it leveled by former comrades in Delta Force. How did you respond to that criticism?

Haney: Oh, I knew what was going to come. And I have to tell you this. If you look at it there were a couple of things that were at play here. One is that in the military it seems that books are reserved for the general officer corps, or the senior officers. And they don’t even write their own – they hire someone to write for them. So I knew that was going to come, and that intrinsically is where that criticism came from: (Lt.) Gen. Jerry Boykin, who was in a position to grouch about it, and another guy by the name of Burress, who had been one of our deputies at Delta who thinks of himself as a writer. So there’s a great deal of jealousy there.

‘The Unit’

GIJ: How did you get involved with Hollywood?

Haney: My book had been out, and I was fending off movie offers for it – I was trying to get a better grip on what to do with that. And I had received a call from David Mamet, the playwright and film director and writer, about a movie that he had written that he was getting ready to direct. It was called “Spartan,” and he had read the book “Inside Delta” and called to tell me how much he thought of it and asked if I could come work with him on the film.

So I came and worked with him on the rewrites of the script and then stayed on to train Val Kilmer, and as a technical adviser on the movie, and out of that, as we were finishing that, he asked me, ‘What are you gonna do with your book?’ And I told him, ‘David, I’d like to do a television series.’ In fact I’d gone to meetings while I was in LA with production companies that wanted to make a film. And I said, ‘I don’t want to do a film. I want to do a television series.’ And anyways, I told David ‘I want to do a television series,’ and he said ‘I’ll help you all I can.’ And he called his agent. We set up some meetings and over the course of a year finally were able to walk that through the morass of the television production world and bring that into being.”

GIJ: How many of the plots of “The Unit” were based on your experiences with Delta Force?

Haney: About 90 percent.

GIJ: Did you get any flak from the military about that?

Haney: No, I got none on it. You know, first thing, I’m not gonna portray anything that’s actually sensitive (laughs). And this harks back to the question I would get asked often: How accurate is this? And my response was, ‘It’s as accurate as I want it to be consistent with making dramatic television.’

Now, what I did here was – this is almost laughable – the part of the plot that was the affair Col. Ryan was having with Tiffy Gerhardt, the wife of one of the Soldiers, which was based on something that actually took place back in Delta. It wasn’t the commander (laughing), I got to tell you up front, it wasn’t Col. Beckwith or none of the others. But there was an officer and a wife who fell into it, into an affair. And the officer … well, that’s an ugly story. But it’s also so very human. I mean, heck, it’s biblical. It’s David and Bathsheba – there’s nothing new there. This takes place over and over and over in the Army. So it’s drama. And so I wanted to make sure that’s an ongoing situation because of the danger that’s involved here. And when the show came out, I had a number of colonels – retired colonels, actually – contact me, e-mail me or write me, ‘Oh, that’s horrible. That would never happen … blah, blah, blah, blah.’

GIJ: What is the role of an executive producer?

Haney: It means I’m one of the executives of the show. There are three of us – myself, David Mamet and Shawn Ryan. We run the show. Television is a different world than film in that the writers are the producers of it because you’re producing these episodes. But in my case I was writing my own episodes, worked with other writing staff to develop the overall episodes for the year. Worked closely with other writers to assist them in writing their episodes.

And then I worked with all the departments in the preparation and production of episodes. And then I design stunts, design special effects and work with our department heads on those. Same thing – approve wardrobe, work with our makeup on, how do we do wounds and various things. Work with just all the department heads – art, construction, set design, work with the directors in the preparation of their episodes as we do our location scouts, technical scouts. And then, for the action scenes I would always be on set for those for the director and help the assistant directors in setting those up. And then also work with the editors as we edit the productions.

Television is, once you start a season, it’s a train. And it’s not a runaway train, but it moves very rapidly. And it’s like this: You convene your writers, let’s say network television you’ll start filming in July, right after the Fourth of July holiday. And the networks would tell you in middle May if you’re gonna work that year – if you’re picked up.

So we convened the writers in the middle of May and start working on our story ideas for the year, and start writing. And it takes longer to write an episode than to film it. We on ‘The Unit’ would shoot an episode every eight days – it was an eight-day shoot. Altogether it takes, oh, almost a month to write an episode and run it through the approval process with the networks and the studios. Because in essence you’re writing a novel. You want to keep it down to 55, 58 pages at the most. But a script of that size is a novel – the whole story idea of it; the whole storyline. So it’s hard work coming up with these stories, writing these stories in a fashion that you can produce them.

So we would try to get about six or eight scripts ahead before we start shooting because as we get towards the end of the year you’re having a script finished and approved maybe 10 days before you begin work on it.

And the preparation for an episode – while one episode is shooting the next one is being prepped. That means that the eight days that the shoot is going on the next one is going to start the day after this episode finishes filming. During that period of time the new director is on board for that episode, we’re scouting the locations, we have our meetings with all the department heads where everyone breaks down their portion of the script. We had to find locations – what do we have to build at that location, what do we have to modify, how do we dress the set, what vehicles do we need, what kind of extras – all of this stuff. You know, it’s very, very extensive preparation, which reminds me a lot of military operations.

And so, that prep week is long, hard work. And it’s every week. It’s unrelenting for the course of that year’s production schedule. Everybody works just tremendously long, hard days on the production side of it. On the film side, they’re shooting minimum of 12-hour days. That’s a day in the television business: 12 hours, and no overtime. And that’s if you have no problems and you have a good director who can get his day’s work done in 12 hours. And often you can’t, so it goes several hours over that, which has an impact on everyone.

Operation Iraqi Freedom

“We have fomented civil war in Iraq. We have probably fomented internecine war in the Muslim world between the Shias and the Sunnis, and I think Bush may well have started the third world war, all for their own personal policies.” – Eric Haney

GIJ: You’ve been famously critical of the invasion of Iraq. In fact, you said, “…I think Bush may well have started the third world war, all for their own personal policies.” Now that violence in Iraq has settled down a bit, and I don’t use that term lightly, do you still believe the future of Iraq is that grim?

Haney: I don’t think that I portrayed the future of Iraq being one that is so grim. Look, we destroyed that society. And we can say, ‘Oh, look, it was this dictatorship run by this madman.’ Well, we’ve killed a hell of a lot more Iraqis than Saddam Hussein ever did. We’ve wrecked that society. And we did it with the casual disregard of a high school bully. And then we’ve looked at is as, ‘Oh, well you have a problem, you have a civil war.’ They have a civil war, they certainly have – we brought it about. And all based on deception and lies, for a reason that there was no threat to the United States, no threat to anyone else. And the government that did that, the Bush government, knew it all along. It was self-delusional on their part. No one’s been held accountable.

Also the moral degradation that our country slipped into and the rationalizations of these torturing prisoners when we had been the world’s advocate that that sort of action doesn’t take place. But we slipped into the tribalism of it based on fear, and hyped fear, with Dick Cheney being the cheerleader for that.

So that now, actually, I do believe the American people think we are at war with Islam. I think otherwise. We are not at war with Islam. The real physical threats of Islamic militants in the world – it’s a handful of people, a relative handful. Al-Qaeda – maybe a thousand, at best. But you know one of the objectives of any insurgency is to get the government of your opponent to overreact. And our government fell for it. They actually wanted it. You know, when we started torturing prisoners, the Al-Qaeda publicists were able to say to their potential constituents – the people they’re trying to influence – ‘See, everything we ever told you about the Americans is true. They say one thing but look what they actually do. And they take glee in it.’ And that was a policy coming right out of the Department of Defense and the White House. No one’s been held accountable except for some low-level enlisted troops, and only then if there was photographic evidence.

Operation Enduring Freedom

GIJ: President Obama last fall ordered an expansion of the war in Afghanistan. What is your opinion about his strategy?

Haney: We’ll see. We’ll see. We may be past the ability to have a policy of influence there. And the (Hamid) Karzai government is utterly corrupt. It’s not so much that we recognize this corruption but the fact that the Afghan people see that corruption. And you cannot prop up a corrupt regime. You can’t prop up a regime that the populace has no confidence in.

So, who is going to be the side that the Afghani people put their confidence in? That’s going to be the answer there. Warfare is a contest that boils down to initiative. Who holds the initiative? Who’s making the other side dance to the tune? And I think…well first thing, the U.S. military is incapable of nation building. The only thing it can do is kill people and destroy things. And that, as the military side, might be enough to sustain life of the government in Afghanistan. But if the government of Afghanistan cannot implement programs, and protect their own people and gain the confidence of the Afghan people, it’s all for naught. It will collapse.

GIJ: What is the future of the American military?

Haney: Here’s one thing I do believe. It is now becoming so expensive. Our military eats such a huge portion of the national budget, and now with this extreme financial situation the nation has been in, with so much money having to go towards that, it’s going to come down to some severe choices made by any administration over where you put those financial resources. I don’t believe we’ll be able to sustain these huge military expenditures as we have in the past. And really, as I look at these, these are just vestiges of the Second World War.

I think, this is where I think we’re going to go, if I’m polishing off my crystal ball. I think we’re going to go to a much, even a smaller core military, you know, the core forces. And when I say that – ground forces. I mean, we’ll reduce the number of … you know though it’s now configured in brigades, but actually I believe the number of divisions will be reduced in the coming years.

I think we’ll reduce the size of the Navy and the Air Force. The Air Force will continue to get a large piece of the budget, probably an outsized piece of the budget. I think we will come to put, ship larger number over into the National Guard. But when that happens, and as that happens, that’s going to mean that Congress reasserts itself and takes a larger hand when it comes to deploying forces overseas.

And I don’t see the perfect storm arising again, though it may well, that allowed the last administration to put us into Iraq. You know, they were able to do that because the American people were afraid. They’d been frightened. And that fear was taken advantage of, horribly, cynically, in my view. But if we’re deploying National Guard units at a larger tempo that almost puts us in the position again as we were when we had a draft Army in that the body of the American people have a much larger stake in what’s happening. And if they detect that this is not for a good reason, then they become vocal about it. And they become vocal with Congress and Congress owns the purse strings.

So we’ll see. We will see what happens. I kind of think that’s where we’re going. I can’t see us ever going back to a draft Army, though that’s something I would like to see. Oh, yeah, because it causes a greater participation of the American people. They just take a greater sense of participation. They have to. I believe this. A professional military is good for the military, but it’s not good for the Republic.

GIJ: What are you working on now?

Haney: I have a series of novels coming out. The first book will be out next month – it’ll be out in February. The title of it is “No Man’s Land.” It’s a novel series about a character I’ve created named Kennesaw Tanner. Has a background, we sort of infer that somehow or other he came out of the Black Ops of the military; no longer in. And he’s out in the wide world plying his trade. And if you ask Tanner what he does, he’d probably say, well, I’m sort of a human salvage expert. He recovers people and things of value that have gone missing, been stolen, kidnapped, that sort of thing. And in many ways he’s working some bad karma out of his soul.

GIJ: How much of this character comes from you?

A fair amount. A lot it has some basis in some things I’ve done – my experiences. Though he’s young and handsome. There’s a big difference.