As Towers talked, he kept food moving toward his mouth. “Gonna put you in charge of Fire Team Indigo Eight. What I read says you got some experience doing that.” “I have.” Bekah had made lance corporal in Afghanistan on her second tour and had been in charge of a fire team. The unit was a four-man operation that worked with the two other fire teams to make up a squad. There were three squads in a rifle platoon, nine fire teams in all. The responsibility to coordinate efforts was demanding. “Good. Then you should be comfortable there. You’ve done MOUT?” MOUT was Military Operations on Urban Terrain—basically urban warfare, fought building to building instead of in the open. More and more of the training concentrated on urban warfare because that was where the wars were being fought. “We’ve worked a lot with MOUT scenarios, and I spent some time door-to-door in Afghanistan.” “That’s outstanding. Here in Mogadishu, though, you’re gonna get a mix. When the Islamic Courts Union split up—that’s the Islamist group that took over a bunch of the southern parts of this country, including Mogadishu—the al-Shabaab started stirring up trouble in the city.
