Word: 1st
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Handling the heaviest fighting would be the soldiers of the battle-hardened 1st Battalion of the 14th Infantry Regiment. Stationed in Kirkuk to the north, the 1/14 battalion knows something about the feints and vanishing acts of the insurgents, having faced them in Najaf, Tall 'Afar and elsewhere. The 1/14 would follow the 1st Battalion of the 26th Infantry Regiment, which would hit Samarra first, crossing a long bridge leading into the city to secure a staging area for the troops that would pour in afterward. Just past midnight on Friday morning, the 1/26 moved. The 1/14, not far behind...
...military has been here before: caught in a conflict where the thing it does best--fighting--can't win the war. In Iraq today, brute force is a wasting asset, as Major General Peter Chiarelli, commander of the 1st Cavalry Division, knows firsthand. On a hot late-summer day, his soldiers entered Baghdad's Sadr City slum to quell attacks from militiamen loyal to rebel cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. Chiarelli's troops came under fierce fire as dozens of rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs) pounded their vehicles, and roadside bombs blew the tracks off a tank. For four hours...
...year-old pebble found among raw ochre lumps on Sai Island in the Nile appears to be smeared with yellow and red pigment. If the color was consciously applied, the stone is one of the earliest indications of artistic expression ever found. Sandstone lions from the mid-1st century B.C. symbolize the Kushite state, and a gilded representation of a Kushite King is the largest copper-alloy statue yet found in Sudan. The Nubian settlement of Kerma was home to the earliest major urban centers in sub-Saharan Africa and produced, says curator Derek A. Welsby, "superb pottery, among...
...desperate for security will offer native forces the kind of support they have withheld from the occupiers. Yet even U.S. generals agree there is no military solution to the violence. "We're really good at combat operations, killing and breaking things," says Major General Pete Chiarelli, commander of the 1st Cavalry, the Army division responsible for policing Baghdad. "But if all I am doing is this, I will make more enemies than I kill." It's a vicious circle, he says, and the worst-case scenario, if inconclusive battles like Najaf repeat themselves, is a nationwide popular uprising. The only...
Like other frontline soldiers in Iraq, the men of Task Force 1/9--of which Charlie Company, of the National Guard's 1st Battalion, 153rd Infantry Regiment, is a part--face the risk of almost perpetual combat. Among the company's 119 men, dozens of Purple Hearts have been awarded for injuries suffered in battle. "Exceptional things are happening out there, bits and pieces of extraordinary bravery," says Foley. At the same time, Foley sees these streets stripping his young charges of their youth. "People outside have no idea of the overall effect of this. Eighteen-year-old kids are having...