The conversation keeps drifting back to Black Hawk Down.

As an author, journalist and screenwriter Mark Bowden has written on myriad topics. His latest book, The Best Game Ever, is about football; it tells the tale of one of the most famous games ever played – the 1958 NFL championship between the New York Giants and the Baltimore Colts. He’s also well-known for penning Killing Pablo, which details the hunt for the Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar. He’s written about D-Day (Our Finest Day), and about the largest cocaine ring in America (Dr. Dealer); and he even told the true story of a down-and-out longshoreman who finds 1.2 million dollars in the street (Finder’s Keepers). But, of course, Black Hawk Down: A Story of Modern War is the Bowden book most on everybody’s mind this week at Old Dominion University’s 32nd Literary Festival, which is themed “Writers in Peace and War.” The book, an international bestseller, spent over a year on the New York Times bestseller list, was a finalist for the National Book Award, and quickly became a modern, military classic.

Despite his success with the military theme, Bowden likes moving from one subject matter to the next.

“Journalism is one of the last refuges of the generalists,” he says. “But one of the pitfalls of writing nonfiction is that readers who read a book about football or a book about a drug dealer or a book about Columbia assume this is my area of expertise and expect all my books to be about that.” Thus, conversations with fans are often limited to Black Hawk Down. Although it’s a misunderstanding, Bowden is flattered when he’s managed to speak with enough understanding in a book so that he appears to be an expert.

“It’s always amusing to me when I’m mistaken for a military historian or a former military person myself – none of which is true,” he says. “I’m just a journalist.”

Just a journalist? Hmmm. Perhaps it’s that deft deflection of the spotlight away from his skill and onto the story that makes Mark Bowden just the consummate journalist.

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Mark Bowden

The community is so excited to have you at ODU for the Literary Festival. Tell me – what do you think the function of literary festivals is?

Well they certainly do a lot to boost the egos of writers! (Laughs.)

Really, I see them as a celebration of what remains. The most valuable piece of our intellectual culture is the written word. I don’t think anything is about to replace the written word as the most valuable tool for communicating ideas, for educating people, for exploring seriously ideas and stories, and I think that it’s right that we should celebrate people who are good at it, and whose works inspire other writers and entertains and informs readers.

Speaking of the written word: The brochure for this year’s festival incorporates two quotes: “Perhaps Einstein was right when he said that ‘as long as there are sovereign nations possessing great power, war is inevitable.’ But Buckminster Fuller may also have been right when he remarked that ‘either man is obsolete or war is.’” What are your thoughts on those words?

That brings us back to Blackhawk Down.  As a front piece to that book, I quoted Cormac McCarthy from Blood Meridian – and what McCarthy says is, I think, unhappily true: “It makes no difference what men think of war. War endures. As well ask men what they think of stone. War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting the ultimate practitioner.”

Even in a world where vast numbers of people are desperate to avoid war there will always be people who will try to get what they desire with violence, and so even those of us who would prefer to live in peace find it necessary to defend civil society, to defend the rule of law, and I think as long as there is evil in the world and evil in the hearts of men – there will be conflict.

The writing of Black Hawk Down was garnered from extensive research and hundreds of interviews with the people who were there. How did you get the soldiers involved to talk to you?

For the most part I find, in almost everything I write about, that the vast majority of people are very eager to tell their stories.  So the answer to the question “How did I get them to talk?” is: I showed up. In some cases it is a little harder, and in those instances the decision is obviously always up to the individual. I don’t have subpoena powers. But I try to understand what it is that is holding them back and if I can identify the problem, most of the time, I can solve it. In military units, guys are very reluctant to break whatever the culture or the code of that unit is . . .  In the case of the Delta Force unit, I had a lot of frustration dealing with guys who refused to talk. First it was hard to find them, and then they didn’t want to talk, but then there was the exception. That was Paul Howe, who was no longer in the unit and went to great lengths to secure authorization and followed the rules very carefully . . .

It seems both the book and movie captured what truly happened.  It seems even people who were there feel that the story was well told in both formats.

I don’t think I’ve ever encountered anyone, including all the participants, who was unhappy with either the book or the movie.  As far as the book is concerned, it speaks very well of the military and of the units involved that they so warmly embraced my account – because it’s not a whitewashed account. It portrays the mistakes, and the confusion, and errors in judgment, and small acts of cowardice here and there; and nevertheless, I don’t think anyone questions that it’s accurate. In fact, it was the accuracy of it that these guys wanted. I think that they would’ve objected just as readily to a romanticized version of events as they would to something that was distorted or inaccurate. They have a kind of reverence about an event or a traumatic episode like that battle where so many of their friends were killed, and they want it remembered, and they feel like it needs to be remembered truthfully.

Black Hawk Down starts off in the action, establishing the brotherhood that these people feel. Why did you feel it was important to have that be the first item presented to your reader?

These people are very proud of their service, and their professionalism; and they’re very proud of their units and of each other, and they want people to understand who they are and what they do and the decisions that they have to make, and the difficulty of what they accomplish and the heroism involved.  I had this interesting conversation with one of the rangers – Brad Thomas – who at one point in the middle of the Battle of Mogadishu was so frightened that he refused to go back out into the battle, but then changed his mind and jumped on the humvee and went back.  He was embarrassed by that moment of fear  . . .  But I told him that was probably the most important moment in the story to enable people to understand how terrifying it was. Real courage is not marching off into a battle before you know what you’re getting yourself into.  It’s going out there when you know . . .  The fact that it would give a brave man pause is very powerful.  I just wanted to capture who these guys were, what motivated them and what they did.

By capturing that story, you broaden a conversation. Here at ODU many have military affiliations and yet there’s been a suspicion about public conversations about war. Just exploring this theme at the literary festival represents progress.

It’s a very important cultural shift that’s taking place.  The academy was dominated for a long time by a certain element of American culture – an elitist liberal enclave. As universities have opened up and people from very different walks of life go to the very best institutions what you’ve seen is that the culture of universities has broadened as well and it’s not as predictable as it once was.

It also seems to me that . . . the view of reporting and story telling about war changed in the United States, and right at that moment the book that you had worked so thoroughly on, Blackhawk Down, came on the scene . . .  Or is that a misimpression?

[Black Hawk Down] really did strike at a propitious moment . . . War stories have been a part of literature in every culture in every society throughout history.  But our experience with Vietnam for a time eclipsed the war story and it was only fashionable to write about war as madness so that the participants were either victims or insane, and the only stories that you read about the military were atrocities and scandal. Black Hawk Down was the return to a more traditional and respectful approach to telling war stories and in that sense it was a return to the classic roots of the war story. It was bound to happen. Right about the same time Saving Private Ryan the movie came out and it took the same approach – a respectful one – recognizing soldiers doing a very difficult job, ordinary people doing extraordinary things. And then, of course, we were attacked and that changed everybody’s attitude toward the military. That was a reminder of why we need soldiers.

Mark Bowden will be reading tonight @ 7:30 pm tonight in the North Cafeteria of the Webb Center @ ODU. For a complete Lit Fest schedule, click here.