Oppose Any Foe by Mark Moyar

Author:Mark Moyar
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2017-04-25T04:00:00+00:00

THE FOUR RANGER chalks that landed near the Bakara Market on October 3 had been ordered to secure the intersections outside the four corners of the target compound. The Rangers formed L-shaped perimeters at the intersections, guarding against any hostile forces in the surrounding area that might entertain the idea of interfering with Delta’s raid. Looking toward the chalk to his east, Sergeant Thomas saw Rangers already firing their weapons. He could not see any Somalis yet.

A short time later, bullets whizzed toward Thomas’s squad, accompanied by the distinctive metallic bang of a Kalashnikov assault rifle.

“He’s in the tree!” yelled Private David Floyd.

“Floyd!” Sergeant Watson responded. “Do you see him?”

“Roger, S’rgnt. He’s in the tree. He’s in the tree!”

“Well, Floyd, if you see him, why don’t you shoot him!”

Many of the Rangers had wondered how Floyd, a nineteen-year-old from South Carolina, had ever made it through Ranger selection. He was far from an imposing physical specimen, weighing in at just 130 pounds. Nor did he have a natural affinity for soldiering. He was one of those Rangers who never seemed to get things right the first time and routinely required extra attention from his superiors. Rangers jokingly compared him to Barney Fife, the ham-fisted deputy sheriff on The Andy Griffith Show.

Recent operations had given Thomas and Watson reason to believe that their extra attention to Floyd had made a real fighter out of the young man. But Floyd had not faced a test as stern as this one before, and he was on the verge of flunking. Armed with a gas-operated M249 squad automatic weapon, Floyd had been entrusted with enough firepower to protect the entire squad, yet he appeared oblivious to his obligations.

Then, all of a sudden, something switched on inside Floyd’s brain. Aiming the M249 at the tree with a newfound inspiration that perhaps even he found surprising, Floyd squeezed off half a belt of ammunition. The bullets sawed the tree in half, bringing the sniper to his end.

The compound that the Rangers had surrounded was enclosed by a high stone wall. Inside was a small courtyard and a three-story stone house with a flat roof, its facade strangely unblemished in a city where most of the buildings had been riddled with holes or reduced to rubble in the preceding two years of civil war. While the Rangers had been fast-roping onto the streets, a helicopter had inserted four Delta operators into the courtyard, and three other helicopters had offloaded Delta passengers on the adjacent streets. The Somalis inside the building caught sight of the American helicopters and scrambled for the exits, but the Americans were too quick for them. Storming the building with their gun barrels sweeping every crevice, the raiding force cut off all possible avenues of escape.

The Delta operators, or D-boys, as the admiring Rangers liked to call them, handcuffed twenty-four suspects and herded them together with rifle butts. The take included one of the high-value targets whom the CIA expected to be there, and another man who was Aidid’s spokesman.

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