By Cathy Applefeld Olson
On April 4, 2004, a U.S. 1st Cavalry Division platoon was ambushed in Sadr City, Iraq—an incident that resulted in the deaths of eight soldiers and injury of 50. ABC News reporter Martha Raddatz’s best-selling account of what came to be known as “Black Sunday” is the foundation of eight-part miniseries The Long Road Home, which debuts November 7 on National Geographic. Here, Raddatz shares why she was compelled to document the story of these soldiers and their families, and actors Michael Kelly (who portrays Lt. Col. Gary Volesky) and EJ Bonilla (who portrays Lt. Shane Aguero) discuss what drew them to the project.
Cynopsis: You’ve described your coverage of this battle as your most important work. How did you get so deeply involved?
Martha Raddatz: I was not there in the battle, but I was in Iraq all the time. It was a period when we were all covering policy over there. We thought that the invasion was over. We thought, just as they did, that it was peaceful. I was with a bunch of generals one night in Baghdad, and one had just been briefed on this battle. And he said, “You have to hear this story, it’s incredible.” And he started telling us about it. And I said, “I have to stay and tell that story.” They arranged to fly me out the day after, and they had all these guys lined up to tell their stories. It was profound because none of them wanted to talk about it at first, especially [Staff Sgt. Robert] Miltenberger, who Johnny Sisto plays. I remember I’m looking at him out of the corner of my eye and thinking, “Man, this is going to be a terrible interview, this guy doesn’t want to do this.” And then he just breaks down in tears. To me it was that moment where I knew, Oh my God, Americans don’t understand. We are still in the fight, we are losing people. It was the largest loss if life for the 1st Calvary since Vietnam.
Cynopsis: So it was different for you right from the start…
Raddatz: I covered the Pentagon. Right when I started with the Pentagon, Black Hawk Down had just happened and I remember interviewing a few of those guys and that movie was amazing, but this was the first time that I’d ever seen or heard about real combat. And then there was no way I was leaving Iraq, no way I would stop covering it. There was one thing we did on Nightline. I was interviewing this guy Col. Abrams, who’s in the book, and I’m asking him a simple question – How is everybody? And he’s like, “It’s always about our family.” And this colonel, who comes from this hard military family, is sobbing, just sobbing. And he got embarrassed, and he walked out with me and said, “It’s terrible, please don’t run it.” And Col. Abrams wrote an email that night to his commanding general, a guy named Gen. Corelli, and Gen. Corelli shared the email with me. It said, “Gen Correlli, Martha Raddatz interviewed me today I am so sorry but I broke down and I let the division down and I just wanted to let you know.” And, you’ll love this, Gen. Correlli writes back, “If you had done anything else, you would have been remiss.” It’s the most beautiful exchange.
Cynopsis: What made you want your telling of the story to be serialized television vs. a film?
Raddatz: Mike Medavoy, who’s a legend, optioned the book in 2007, immediately. He promised we would get the story out some day, and it sort of languished some places, and then National Geo took it and they are the perfect place to do it. It’s an eight-hour battle – and an eight-hour miniseries. To me what this story does… these guys went straight from their minivans and their kids to that. It doesn’t look like every war movie. It’s not like they look like action heroes; they’re just regular guys. I’ve read about all the wars, and it’s just so different than anything you could ever imagine. So to me, it was a natural.
Kelly: Once I read the script I became interested in this character, Gary Volesky and then I YouTubed whatever everything I could find on him. Jadnit was him that really drew me in. I’d just finished House of Cards and I was like, I don’t want to leave the family again, and it conflicted with my spring break with the family I had already booked, and I said to my wife, just read this and watch this one video and she watched the video and said, “You’ve got to do this. You’ve got to do that guy the justice he deserves.” Gary is one of the kindest, most genuine individuals I’ve ever come across. Everything he does is from the heart where as [laughs] you can’t really say the same thing about [his House of Cards character] Doug Stamper.
Raddatz: All these actors have had such incredible respect for the families, the soldiers. [Actor] Jon Beavers and [Sgt.] Eric Bourquin might as well be brothers at this point. They are now all a band of brothers, and to me that’s the most fulfilling thing, the respect of the cast. All you have to do is meet the real guys and read the story, and you have profound respect for what they did. That’s why I feel so strongly about this.
Bonilla: I would’ve loved to spend more time with Shane, but he was still on active duty. The amount of heart that’s in this project is rarely encountered. It’s really easy to get lost in the machine that is the U.S. military -The Army, The Navy, The Marines. The only way to knock the legs out from under that idea is to get extremely personal. You have to get to the individuals, which is what Martha did by interviewing al those amazing people and what she did by writing her book and what we do in our own way by attempting to embody those people. It gets really fucking personal. And hopefully when you do that, people go, “Oh, that death toll that said 120 that I saw between bites of my breakfast cereal? That means something.” That’s 120 individuals that have families that are being torn apart.
