Just months before the eighth anniversary of the Battle of Mogadishu and the release of the soon-to-be-classic feature film immortalizing it, survivor and war hero Norm Hooten retired from the Army as a master sergeant.
It was August 2001, and his wife Bonnie, a pharmacist, ‘was not down for another 10 years in the Army,’ Hooten said in a podcast interview earlier this month.
‘It had a lot to do with my family,’ Hooten told Ryan Manion on The Resilient Life. ‘I had young kids at the time, and … a lot of times, what the families go through is as difficult or more so than what the actual soldiers on the ground go through – and it really, really scared her to death … she said something to me one time that really resonated with me. It was really kind of a driving factor in me leaving the army.
‘She said, “You know, when we first started together here in the unit … when we would go to team parties … it was fun.”‘
They’d all been young couples with young families, she recalled, ‘living as normal a life as we could.’
‘But now when I go,’ she told Hooten, ‘ I’m one of the few people out of our group that isn’t a widow, and I’m just not ready to continue doing that. I don’t want the kids to do it.’
So he enrolled in pharmacy school, intending to join his wife’s industry – only for the 9/11 attacks to strike America one month letter.
Hooten was recalled back to the Army, rejoining its ranks as Eric Bana played a character based on – and named for – him on movie screens across the world.
Black Hawk Down was nominated for four Academy Awards and won two; according to podcast host Manion, it’s required training viewing for some US soldiers.
Hooten then transitioned to supervisory coordinator for the Federal Air Marshal Service and Deputy General Director of the King Abdullah II Special Operations Training Centre in Jordan, which specializes in counter-terrorism and special ops.
‘I saw a lot of special operations guys that were coming through there who had substance use issues, serious substance use issues, primarily with prescription opioids – and a lot of them had evolved into illicit drug use … many times because they couldn’t get access to the prescription drugs.
‘It really, really troubled me, and [I] ended up going back to pharmacy school,’ he said.
He’d be 57 by the time he graduated in 2016, focusing on ‘PTSD, chronic pain management and substance use disorder and the nexus of those three – because oftentimes they’re joined at the hip,’ he said.
Norm Hooten (far right) is a legendary Delta Force Operator who survived the Battle of Mogadishu in Somalia in October 1993
He completed two residencies, he said, and had hoped that his experience on the pharmaceutical side would give him insights into how to best tackle rampant veteran opioid and substance abuse and mental health problems.
‘I don’t know … I’m any closer to the answer today than I was when I started, but I know I had to try,’ Hooten said on the podcast. ‘I didn’t want to get towards the end of my life and think there was something that I could have done, because many of the guys that I saw with these issues were close friends of mine – guys that I would never have suspected of it.’
He’s still confounded, he said, and ‘it’s one of the things that keeps me up at night, trying to figure it out.’
Hooten said that, while he was supported by an invaluable network of friends and family after returning from Mogadishu, ‘you can’t come through something like that and not be changed by it.’
He’s sent one son to West Point and another child to the United States Naval Academy, and Hooten still believes that films like Black Hawk Down can shine a ‘nice, good light’ on the armed forces.
‘I’ve had people tell me … “Hey, I saw that movie when I was in middle school and I joined the Army and went in the Ranger Battalion, or I went in the Marine Corps, because I saw that movie.
‘So I thought it was good for the military,’ he said.
Eric Bana played Hooten in Ridley Scott’s Academy Award-winning drama about the ferocious battle Black Hawk Down
Hooten (pictured right with Bana in 2001) said he’s concerned about the consistently high suicide rates among veterans and other health challenges and continued to study it further
Hooten (left) told The Resilient Life podcast that part of the reason he went back to pharmacy school was because of the high rate of substance abuse by veterans and active service members
At the same time, he said he couldn’t imagine losing one of his serving children.
‘I think the greatest sacrifice that you can do is offer up a child onto the altar of freedom,’ he said. ‘And I don’t know that I would be able to survive something like that.’
Again emphasizing the importance of family, Hooten said that the ‘second-hardest day … of my life was going into Mogadishu and losing all my … friends.
‘When you’re in the Marine Corps or in the Army or any of the services … the people that you work with become more than friends,’ he said. ‘They’re your extended family. You know their families. You know their moms, their dads, their kids, their wives.
A group of U.S. army Rangers sit in the door of a U.S. Black Hawk helicopter at Mogadishu airport 28 August 1993
The hellish 18-hour battle after a Black Hawk Down went down in Mogadishu in October 1993 led to the deaths of 18 American troops and hundreds of Somali soldiers
And they become very, very close to you … so Mogadishu was a very, very difficult, difficult day for me personally. Because we didn’t just lose soldiers. We lost close, close friends and colleagues.
‘The hardest day of my life … was coming home and facing their families and seeing what it did to them, not just in that moment but for generations to follow.’
A combination of family focus and brotherhood with Mogadishu warriors led Hooten to another new pursuit, he said: He began a cigar company after a smoke with his son ‘led to several hours in just deep philosophical conversation with a kid that I’d been around his whole life.
‘But I’d never really connected with him on that personal level before,’ Hooten said. ‘I was too busy bein a dad, and he’s too busy being a son, and it really brought us together.
‘And then we started a tradition of doing it.
He and another West Point parent, Tim young, ‘started hanging out on the back porch enjoying a good smoke and a whiskey every once in a while, and then, on the 25th anniversary of the Battle of Mogadishu, I wanted to share that experience with my buddies.
‘So we had another friend of ours hand roll 300 cigars,’ he said on the podcast. ‘We made up a label, stuck them on there ourselves, and then took them up to the event, never thinking we were going to sell them.
‘We were just giving them as gifts. ‘And then we started getting a lot of requests for boxes of those cigars … we just started it kind of by accident.’
‘We started making them and using some of the proceeds to help veterans’ causes, and … shortly afterward, we did the same thing with whiskey.
Hooten ‘really did not start out thinking, we’re going into the whiskey/cigar business,’ he said. ‘We just thought, we’re going to take some stuff up to some buddies at a reunion and have a good time.’
Now Hooten’s the president and co-founder of Hooten & Young Premium Cigars and Whiskey, which states on its website is ‘proud to support our troops,’ committing to ‘give 10% of our profits to foundations that directly aid veterans and their families.’
He’s also an associate chief of pharmacy at the US Department of Veteran Affairs and said he hopes he lives ‘as honorably as I can’ knowing that ‘there were many, many people that I served with that would love to just spend one more day with their families, one more day with their friends … I do not take that for granted.’
Hooten said he’s concerned about the consistently high suicide rates among veterans and other health challenges and continued to study it further.
‘It’s a very, very difficult and multi-faceted problem,’ he said.
