Word: ambusher
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Halberstam is currently working on a new book—a chronicle of the Chinese entrance into the Korean War and the ambush of American troops at the Chongchong River...
...military convoy--two humvees, an ambulance and three five-ton trucks full of civilian evacuees--is bumping its way along a snow-swept high-plains dirt road. Suddenly a shout comes down the line: "Contact front!" It's an ambush, with gunmen on both sides of the road. Soldiers on top of the five-tons return fire with mounted machine guns. The clatter is deafening. The truck beds fill up with hot, bouncing, jingling brass shell casings...
This isn't a real ambush, and the convoy isn't in Iraq or Afghanistan. It's in Guernsey, Wyo., about 90 miles north of Cheyenne. The attack was staged by the U.S. Army for the benefit of about 35 computer programmers--the civilian evacuees--who work on a government-sponsored video game called America's Army. It'sa handy training tool for soldiers, but the game's primary mission is to recruit: to persuade the millions of young people who play it on their home computers to go from virtual soldiers to real ones. The programmers are in Guernsey...
...reflected in the next version of the game. They drink $1.75 Coors at the All-Ranks Club and climb in and out of the backs of trucks ("It took four people to hoist me in, and I still pulled a muscle," said one ruefully). Then there's that mock ambush. "I wanted them to be shocked," says Major Randy Zeegers, a tall, poster-perfect Green Beret who functions as a liaison between the Army and the designers. "They'll take that and put it in the game...
...There are two versions of how the hostilities began. The military says 14 of its troops were ambushed and killed on Feb. 7 in the town of Panamao. The rebels say that the ambush was provoked by a military offensive the day before in which a local ustadz, or religious mentor, his wife and two children died. (The military is silent on that story.) The rebels include members of Abu Sayyaf, an al-Qaeda linked kidnap-for-ransom group, and renegades of the Moro National Liberation Front (M.N.L.F.), a Muslim group that once fought for a separate state. The military...