Word: combatative
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...area on Wednesday. The following day Najaf had the feel of a liberated city. Smiling citizens crowded every street around the American positions. There was a constant stream of people willing to give information and loudly condemn Saddam. American soldiers who a day before had been in close combat were now basking in the cheers and applause, their arms tired from returning friendly waves...
Before the conflict started, combat trainers stressed the priority of avoiding civilian casualties. But that changed with the first guerrilla-style attacks. On Day 2, the order came to assume all Iraqis were hostile unless proved otherwise--an assumption that many of these young soldiers had made anyway. Since receiving their new instructions, the soldiers have dropped their message of liberation for one of mistrust and irresistible force. Checkpoint squads have arrested hundreds of Iraqis who are unable to communicate their reasons for traveling, while detaining others carrying AK-47s as "terrorists," even though Iraqis carry AKs the way Texans...
...artery into Baghdad. Though the details of that night and the following days remain hazy, at least five of the soldiers were taken captive and later shown on Iraqi TV. But Lynch was not among them. According to the Washington Post, Lynch, an Army supply clerk with only minimal combat training, shot several advancing Iraqi soldiers, emptying her weapon of ammunition and possibly incurring a series of gunshot wounds...
...whether a vaccine will ever be available. Infectious-disease specialists are haunted by the great Spanish Influenza pandemic of 1918-19; it killed fewer than 3% of its victims but infected so many that at least 20 million people died in just 18 months--more than were killed in combat in World War I. And until health officials know for sure what they're dealing with, they tend to be overcautious. "When you confront new diseases and they begin to travel widely," says WHO spokesman Dick Thompson, "you have to do everything you can to try to stop the transmission...
...most remarkable things about covering the war with the U.S. Army," says Perry, who is embedded with a combat unit of the 3rd Infantry Division, "is how close to home we are on the other side of the world." There are nightly showings of Hollywood movies on DVD and "enough peanut butter and jelly for, well, an army." What disturbs him, however, is just how little he and the troops know of the people around them and the ancient land they inhabit. "I see others--Bedouins camping in the desert, families turning their cars around as they spot our approaching...