With My Shield — An Army Ranger in Somalia

By James Lechner
Hardcover, 288 pp., 2023

This is the inside story of an Army Ranger, surrounded and outnumbered, fighting a desperate action on the ground during the Black Hawk Down raid in Somalia in 1993.

In 1993 Lieutenant James Lechner, a member of the 3rd Ranger Battalion, was selected for a top secret special operations task force being sent to Mogadishu, Somalia, to capture the insurgent leader Mohamed Farah Aideed. In early October, after weeks on the ground and conducting a number of raids in the city, the Task Force is called upon to conduct a daring daylight mission into the heart of Aideed's territory. During the raid, following the initial dangerous fast rope insertion and subsequent capture of a group of Aideed's lieutenants, one of the Task Force Black Hawk helicopters is shot down and Lechner and his comrades are soon caught up in the fiercest combat involving US forces since the Vietnam War. In the middle of the hostile city, deep in the enemy's stronghold, the small group of Rangers and special operators now find themselves fighting not only to rescue the downed helicopter's crewmen, but also to save their own lives.

This first-hand account tells the story of how these elite warriors were able to stand together and prevail against incredible odds. It gives the reader the perspective of an Army Ranger fighting on the ground, combined with professional military analysis, in a groundbreaking book that tells the complete story with never-before-revealed details.