Interviewed by Corey Mesler, a bookseller at Burke's Book Store, Inc. in Memphis, TN, and a reviewer for The Commercial Appeal (Memphis)

At the end of Black Hawk Down you explain a little bit about what led you to this story. Can you begin with that, starting from square one-you were writing for The Philadelphia Inquirer, right?

Yes. My original motivation to write was the New Journalism of the sixties. I was excited by their approach-dramatic reporting, intensive interviewing. I saw war as a topic ripe for that kind of treatment; war is powerful, dramatic, an important aspect of life, and the New Journalism seemed a way to document the reality of combat. I had finished up my last book-this was 1993, when the battle in Mogadishu happened-and I was fishing around, wondering, what am I going to do next? I became fascinated with the reports coming out of Somalia, especially the recounting of the first day's combat, when ninety-nine men were trapped overnight in that ancient city, pinned down and embattled. And I thought, ninety-nine was a doable number-one could interview ninety-nine people. The project began to take shape in my mind, although initially the book I had in mind seemed so ambitious I didn't do anything.

Then, in 1996, two and a half years after the event, I was asked to profile Bill Clinton for the Inquirer. It turned out to be one of the most difficult assignments I had ever been given, he's so written about already and, I figured, I'm never going to get close to him. Then I read an account of a meeting Clinton had had with the families of the soldiers who were killed in Mogadishu and I saw an angle there. I wanted to pursue these families' impressions of the president and so I met with the father of Jamie Smith, who was killed in the battle. When I left Jim's house I said, "This is it." Here was my opportunity to write about war.

Black Hawk Down is the dramatic and painful reconstruction of one day's fighting in the city of Mogadishu, Somalia. Your approach, which is inspired, is to begin the narration at the start of the battle and end it twenty-four hours later with the cessation of the fighting. Any background information is seamlessly woven in. From how the story unfolds it appears that you believe this one day may have reverberating effects on all future wars for America.

This battle has already had tremendous implications for the United States and the world. Except for the much belated intervention in Yugoslavia and the recent bombings in Iraq, the Clinton administration has been stubbornly gun shy. I'm not saying this is wrong. The U.S. is the one military force left in the world. It's expected that we should get involved all over the place. The question is, how do we decide as a nation when to intervene? We're beset by all these tragic images because of the capabilities of global communication and we're inclined to step in. But there are consequences.

My nineteen-year-old son is a Marine. Do I want to see my son killed in a little African village? These are difficult questions, as a parent, as a nation-if it's not my son, it's someone else's. I don't pretend to have answers, but Black Hawk Down does, I hope, what good books do: it frames the question.

The most compelling element of your very compelling account is the immediacy of it, the you-are-there breathlessness of the telling-how you let the soldiers tell it, actually-and you leave the "I" out until the end. I felt the panic and horror of that day-it literally gave me nightmares. Yet the book was assembled years after the fact. Can you talk a little bit about your method?

Well, obviously that's the goal. My goal was to write vividly and powerfully, like a novelist would. I had a tremendous amount of luck in getting to the men who were there. On the one hand I have an obligation as a truth-teller, to relate their stories, and, on the other hand, as a storyteller I want the story to resonate with detail-by-detail accuracy.

The ideal situation occurred. Everyone I wanted to talk to I did. So I had all these different perspectives and it wasn't hard to decide how to tell the story. I lived with these accounts for about three years. With every new story, with every new interview, I'd add another layer of understanding. I was able to move beyond just quoting soldiers and offer something better, a seemingly omniscient narrative voice. I'm the only one who saw the battle from every perspective, from one hundred different vantage points.

Traveling to Somalia and talking to the people there also improved my understanding. Originally I had the same mental images as the rest of America-the bodies of American soldiers being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu. We went on this strictly humanitarian mission, remarkable in the history of U.S. interventions, and the end result were these horrendous pictures on CNN of American soldiers' corpses being dragged triumphantly through the streets. The central question became: What happened? Why did the Somalis turn on us?

When I was a kid, I remember reading a war book called Samurai by Martin Caidin. On the cover there was a picture of an American plane going down in flames. It was so odd to me to have this perspective-to see us being defeated, and to learn about the passionate logic of our enemy. Ever since, I've felt no war story is complete without both sides' perspective.

To further that thought about your selfless style, you also leave out any philosophizing while you're letting the narrative have its head. This dispassionate voice, though it's obvious you have great respect for your subjects, is very effective. Was this approach difficult?

Any opinion I would have seems so unimportant. The first step, the way I see it, is to understand-that was my role. If I could get to new information and make the reader understand it, that was more important. Incidentally, I gave the manuscript to my son before he left to join the Marines. I wanted him to see what it could really be like.

I was intrigued, in the book, by the secretive Delta force guys, how mysterious they are-the "operators," "the dreaded D." They seem straight out of some Hollywood spy film. Even the Rangers seemed frightened of them.

They are frightening. Also dedicated and extremely professional. These guys are constantly out on missions.

And there are some serious questions raised here. There are secretive actions going on all the time, which are important, historically, politically, without the knowledge of the general public.

Wasn't it difficult to get them to talk? Were there security issues?

Well, these D guys lead such incredibly exciting lives, which they are forbidden to talk about. I sensed they were dying to talk but they're not allowed to. Still, I managed to get some information from them.

You've titled your book Black Hawk Down, indicating perhaps that the unexpected downing of one of these elite fighting machine helicopters is what makes the story a story, what makes it unique. You say, "Most of the soldiers who rode in the birds regarded the downing of a Black Hawk as a one-in-a-million event." I saw the helicopter as a sort of symbol of the American military cockiness, which disintegrated into such a mess.

The truth is, the thing that differentiates American soldiers from any other soldiers is their technology. The lesson we must learn is that even though we have superior technology we are vulnerable. Basically this high-tech helicopter was brought down by a homemade grenade launcher. The Somalis were just lobbing them up there so that the sky was full of hand grenades and it was inevitable that some would hit.

The downing of the chopper is what precipitated this battle. It was the critical event of this story, and, yes, it resonates symbolically. If the chopper hadn't gone down, the assault force would have returned to base with its prisoners and we probably never would have heard about the mission. The thing about storytelling is that you have to arrive at a mental understanding of what the story is about-regardless of whether you're working in nonfiction or fiction-and I've written a little fiction. You have to give it structure and, if you've done it right, it's magical. Themes emerge.

One of the soldiers, Nelson, says at one point, "It was hard to describe how he felt . . . it was like an epiphany. Close to death, he had never felt so completely alive." This seems an extraordinary reaction-it sounds Kierkegaardian. Is his take on combat common?

Not all of these guys were as articulate as Sean. All were good at telling what happened but relatively few were articulate enough to step back and talk about that moment and how they felt. It's not easy for them to do. My approach was to get each individual soldier to say what happened to him, not get into what his buddy said, or what happened over there. That forced them to focus on their own actions, minute by minute. Often this prompted them to reflect on how they felt, or what they were thinking. Curiously, in Somalia I ran into a cultural problem. Somalis are not as individualistic as Americans. We talk about ourselves readily. What happened to their family or their neighborhood or their clan is more important to them. It was difficult to get them to talk about their personal, individual observations.

There seems a sad and poignant irony between the cockiness of the soldiers at the beginning of the day and the later horror (which God knows they faced with exceptional bravery). Early in the book there is this description: "They held themselves to a higher standard than normal soldiers. With their buff bodies, distinct crewcuts . . . and their grunted 'hoo-ah' greeting, they saw themselves as the army at its gung-ho best." And then what follows is increasing confusion and terror. Was this an intended incongruity and do you see the book as moving from a fantasy of good intentions through hell into a new reality?

Absolutely. That's just simply the truth.

That's what happened to these guys and what happened to America. Clausewitz writes about how easy it is to get a group of men to charge an enemy, but after they've been shot at it becomes very very hard to motivate them. The reality of war is its terrible randomness. Unlike in Hollywood, the bravest and smartest and most decent get killed right alongside the cowardly and inept. There's nothing fair about it. Those who survive come through feeling lucky and guilty. That's the nature of war. There was just this stark difference between how eager they were at first and the horrible scene that closes the book.

And, finally, personally, I took the book as a strong anti-war statement. My own feeling was "never my son." Am I just projecting my own admittedly peacenik philosophy onto your book, and how do you see Black Hawk Down next to, say, Johnny Got His Gun, or in film, Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket?

Traditionally, writing about war falls into one of two camps: beat-the-drum military prettifying of battle or a pacifist approach that tends to do the opposite. I hope this book falls right down the middle.

Everyone hates war but war is a fact. We will not do away with war. Until we live in a world where everyone is born kind and agreeable, there will occasionally be a need for the use of force.

It's very important to study episodes like what happened in Somalia, to look at them philosophically and practically. The fact that this battle has never been studied shocks me. We have to look at this and figure out what went wrong and what to do differently. Lives are at stake. As long as war exists we have to study it, and that's what Black Hawk Down attempts to do.