Eric Haney grew up in rural Lindale, Georgia, and joined the Army straight out of high school in 1970. By twenty-two he was a platoon sergeant; he spent his early years as an infantryman in the 75th Ranger Regiment and was on his way to becoming an instructor when, in 1978, the Army went looking for volunteers for something new.
The something new was the counter-terrorist unit that Colonel Charlie Beckwith was building on the model of the British SAS: 1st Special Forces Operational Detachment–Delta. Of the 163 soldiers who tried out in Haney's selection, twelve made it. He was one of them, and after a further year and a half of training he became a full operator in B Squadron.
In April 1980 he was part of Operation Eagle Claw, the attempt to rescue the American hostages in Tehran. The mission was aborted at the desert strip known as Desert One, and while the force was pulling out a Navy RH-53D helicopter collided with the C-130 Haney was sitting in. The aircraft caught fire and exploded; eight servicemen died that night.
He stayed with Delta until 1986 — training Honduran special forces, hunting snipers who were firing on US Marines in Beirut, and flying into heavy fire over Grenada in 1983 to raid Richmond Hill Prison, which turned out to be empty. As Command Sergeant Major of the 193rd Infantry Brigade he was in the fighting in Panama in 1989, and he retired the following year.
In 2002 he published Inside Delta Force, one of the first insider accounts of the unit. It is also the most argued-over. Several former Delta members have said he embellished his part and invented episodes — above all his account of killing an American-born guerrilla adviser in Honduras in 1981, which his old squadron commander calls a fabrication, although the dead man's family later described a death much like the one in the book. They also object to the phrase 'founding member': Delta, they say, had one founder, and his name was Beckwith. Haney stands by every word.
The book became the CBS series The Unit, created by David Mamet, on which Haney was co-executive producer and technical adviser; he had already advised Mamet on the film Spartan. Since leaving the Army he has worked as a bodyguard, kidnap negotiator and trainer of foreign special forces, as a television commentator on terrorism — sharply critical of the planning of the Iraq War — and, for a few seconds in Iron Man 2, as an Air Force general.
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