Word: armorer
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...place explosive charges against a thin wooden apartment door. Two booms in quick succession echo in the concrete stairwell. The doors shatter inward in a storm of wooden splinters, and the Iraqi and American troops, identically outfitted with US-made M4 carbines, night-vision goggles, boots, uniforms and body armor, burst...
...have to stand a ways back, but from a certain angle these look like the lucky ones. In any other war, they would be dead, having bled to death on the battlefield or died in a hospital from wounds so grievous that their armor could not protect them and the doctors could not save them. In World War II, 1 in 3 wounded soldiers died; in Vietnam, 1 in 4. In the Iraq war, the rate is 1 in 8. As of last week, just over 1,500 U.S. military personnel had died in Iraq and 11,285 had been...
...Kevlar and ceramic plates are the great lifesavers of modern warfare along with quick-clotting powders and ultrasound units that fit in backpacks, how many more lives and limbs might have been saved if the humvees that were meant for transport in noncombat zones had been equipped with the armor necessary for a guerrilla war that has no front lines, no safe havens...
...marks. In this war, unlike battles past, only 16% of injuries were caused by gunshots, according to a study; 69% were from explosions--the roadside booby traps, the car bombs, the rocket-propelled grenades. The vast majority of injuries are to arms and legs left vulnerable even as body armor is protecting vital organs. The amputation rate of 6% of wounded soldiers is twice that of earlier wars. But in addition, doctors are seeing new injuries, some of them inconspicuous compared with the shredded flesh of bombing victims. Traumatic brain injury occurs when the shock from an explosion damages neurological...
...disjunction Palace aims to explore. Against inserted radio clips of Donald Rumsfeld’s pronouncements of progress in Iraq, the sequences of the soldiers’ assignments reveal that their duties and equipment remain unchanged. Days are spent patrolling the streets of Baghdad in scrap-metal-sided Humvees (armor deftly satirized by one soldier as guaranteed to “slow the shrapnel down so that it stays in your body instead of going clean through it?...