Word: combatative
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...snow-patched ground. Perez knew that he had to let go of the baby. "I had to zone him out," he says. "The mission became the only thing on my mind." That's Perez--plainspoken and shaven-headed, a fireplug who wanted so badly to lead troops in combat that he had bailed out of the Army supply corps two years earlier and joined the frontline infantry. Before this day was over, he'd lead more troops through more combat than he'd ever dreamed possible...
...valley while its Afghan allies tracked down the enemy and destroyed what was thought to be the last al-Qaeda and Taliban stronghold in Afghanistan. But this time, unlike the fight nearly three months before in Tora Bora, Americans would not rely on Afghans to supply the combat troops. Perez and most of the other members of Task Force Rakkasan had flown in from the Soviet-era air base at Bagram, an hour away. Intelligence reports at the base, just outside Kabul, had hinted that Osama bin Laden and Taliban leader Mullah Omar might even be holed...
...Operation Anaconda "an unqualified and absolute success," despite claims by some Afghan allies that most of the enemy got away during the 11 days of fighting. Perez and his men dismiss the charge. After the initial fire fight, they returned to the Shah-i-Kot for another week of combat--hunting down al-Qaeda in their most secure redoubt and, they say, killing hundreds of the enemy while losing just eight Americans during the campaign. The al-Qaeda survivors--no one knows how many--fled across the porous border into the tribal zone of Pakistan...
...long as Perez was in combat, his wife La Donia knew to regard the telephone as a potential wrecking ball. Her voice quivers as she recalls a friend's warning: any call from the Army chaplain "means your husband is hurt, or worse." As long as the chaplain didn't call, Randy was safe. "Those days were the worst I ever felt," she says. "I couldn't believe what he was going through...
Perez's time in combat, he says, made him a better man. "It changed me. It made me more attentive to everything," he says. "It made me more serious about life and family, more patient. Combat makes you value your family more; you think about them a lot when you're there. They may not be in the trenches ducking the bullets with you, but they're always there...