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Real Black Hawk Down

“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.”