It was indeed a strangly contrived story...
we were going to go talk to some people
but the driver misunderstood us and took us
to a different place where some other people were
and so we figured, oh what the hell,
since we're here already,
lets just write a story about these guys ...
I know what you mean. I didn't suspect the writer of making anything up but they sure sounded naive to me. I can't imagine being so non-chalant about ending up in the wrong "armed camp" (they sure used that phrase a lot) in that part of the world. How many armed camps in the ME can you stumble into and leave alive? With a nice lunch under your belt? My thought is that they're two very lucky and naive Yanks who, by a twist of fate, fell into an attention starved village of Kurdish/Iranian Marxists.