Word: combatant
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...country in 2004. For missions outside the wire, the Tomb Raiders borrow soldiers from other platoons, but they have to carry out their routine duties--monitoring the radio, maintaining vehicles, staffing the battalion's Internet cafe, manning guard positions on the roof--with fewer soldiers, straining their combat effectiveness. "Maybe we don't have enough personnel," Van Engelen says. "Maybe if we had more, they'd get more rest. Maybe they'd be more alert and energized when they went...
...Army's big guns can hit their targets. That was the job this platoon, based in Giessen, Germany, pictured for itself when it received deployment orders in March, before the start of the war with Iraq. The group, now nicknamed the "Tomb Raiders," was told to prepare for combat in the event of a prolonged siege of Baghdad. That battle never came. The platoon reached the capital in late May, nearly a month after President Bush declared the end of major combat operations. But the demands of the occupation of Iraq forced the Tomb Raiders to assume the duties...
...military's online college program. Beverly describes himself as "the opposite of the typical Army recruit." He loves the soft rock of Sting and devours fantasy novels in his free time. When he joined the Army in 2002, two days after his 18th birthday, he wasn't looking for combat. "I asked the Army recruiter what he could do for me in terms of college. He said it would be free," he says. "But I didn't know I'd be paying for it in this way." Beverly's fresh-faced innocence makes him the target of barracks humor...
Colgan was determined to transform the platoon into a combat unit that could handle street patrols and raids on enemy safe houses, neither of which the Tomb Raiders had ever conducted. And so the hooch became a training center. Every afternoon the platoon practiced close-quarters combat and house-clearing techniques in the basement. Colgan rearranged the furniture to simulate different settings and ordered three $300 battering rams for kicking in doors. "Get in loud, fast and violent," he told them, while insisting that they treat those they found inside with respect. "They're young, they're new," Colgan wrote...
...They asked Colgan his name. "Ben," he said. "What happened?" The medics performed a tracheotomy to help him breathe. Colgan's face was covered in blood, and his eye was protruding out of its socket, but his pulse was stable. A medevac helicopter took Colgan to the 28th Combat Support Hospital in central Baghdad. When Lieutenant Ilardi returned from his patrol, he rushed to talk to Grimes. She told him Colgan was responsive and that his eye had been damaged but it might be salvageable. "I've seen crazier things," she said...