On Saturday at a campaign event in Madison, U.S. Senate hopeful Mike Durant took a question that challenged his claim to running as a conservative for the GOP senatorial nomination for this year's election.
While offering a defense and insisting he was not "liberal," Durant referenced his 2004 book, "In The Company Of Heroes: The Personal Story Behind Black Hawk Down," and cited a passage about how he rejected an invitation to the White House from then-President Bill Clinton.
According to Durant, he declined Clinton's invitation, which he laid out in his 2004 memoir.
Passage as follows:
I was still in the hospital when the Night Stalkers returned from Somalia, and they brought me out to the airfield for the welcome home. Once again the band played, the troops stood in formation, and the families were all there. Lee Greenwood made an appearance and sang “Proud to Be an American.” By that time I had begun to hear bits and pieces about the events that had occurred in Mogadishu during and after I was shot down. I now knew a little more about the two Delta men who had given their lives for me and my crew. And I had begun to really understand how much my comrades resented the actions of the Clinton administration and their anger and bitterness over the refusal to provide us with the armor and air support we needed. So I was very surprised when Anthony Lake showed up and told me that President Clinton wanted me to come up to Washington as soon as I was released from Blanchfield. I did not respond. I wasn’t going to stand on the White House lawn and make it appear that all was forgotten and forgiven, while my comrades were barely cold in their graves.
Durant offered a similar account in a CNN interview from 2016, in which he blamed the "civilian leadership at the time."
"We didn’t have the resources we needed to do that mission. We had asked for them, they were denied, and the results speak for themselves,” Durant said. “We took what was a very successful operation that had gone on for 10 months and turned it into what, unfortunately, history will always look at, overall, as a failure."
Durant did speak highly of one politician, 1992 independent presidential candidate Ross Perot, who secured 19% of the vote in the 1992 presidential election.
Passage as follows:
It was also then that I began to realize the role that Ross Perot had played in all of this. When my parents had first told me how the billionaire businessman was personally involved in the events of my captivity and release, it sounded too strange to be true. But it was all true. A man named Brian Ages, who had worked for Mr. Perot’s presidential campaign, had seen the CNN clip of my interrogation and had gone right into action. He somehow tracked down my uncle Wayne through the police department in Berlin, New Hampshire, and put him in touch with Ross Perot’s office.
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