Word: desertion
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...under cover of darkness. Then, protected by Kevlar body armor, they will fast-rope to the ground, bending under the weight of night-sighted M-4 carbines and grenade launchers, carrying radios and handheld global-positioning gear. Some of the teams will feature snipers; others will race across the desert in specially equipped dune buggies; yet others will practice their mountaineering skills, crawling over Afghanistan's rugged mountains. For many search-and-destroy missions, the aim will be to get in and out so fast that forces stay on the ground in Afghanistan for less than an hour...
...under cover of darkness. Then, protected by Kevlar body armor, they will fast-rope to the ground, bending under the weight of night-sighted M-4 carbines and grenade launchers, carrying radios and handheld global-positioning gear. Some of the teams will feature snipers; others will race across the desert in specially equipped dune buggies; yet others will practice their mountaineering skills, crawling over Afghanistan's rugged mountains. For many search-and-destroy missions, the aim will be to get in and out so fast that forces stay on the ground in Afghanistan for less than an hour...
Termez is a frontier town, rough and desolate. It exists for no other reason than it is the end of the road, a former Soviet military outpost on the southern edge of Uzbekistan with a few cotton farms scattered over the surrounding dust-blown desert. When Soviet troops left Afghanistan in 1989 after a demoralizing 10-year war, the last convoy crossed the Friendship Bridge over the Amu Darya river less than a kilometer to the south. In a surreal end to a ghastly invasion and failed occupation that cost 15,000 Soviet lives, the bedraggled column left behind...
...fight and everyone else braces for something terrible. This war turned last Thursday night. Throughout the day, combat helicopters had carried U.S. special-operations troops ashore from the U.S.S. Kitty Hawk, anchored in the Arabian Sea off the southern coast of Pakistan. The forces choppered over miles of desert terrain to an airstrip at Dalbandin, close to Pakistan's secret underground nuclear-test site and just south of the Afghan border. There they prepared to be delivered into Taliban-controlled territory in Afghanistan to begin a furtive ground war in which no one knew exactly what came next...
...surprisingly, the Taliban has a different story. A Taliban soldier, Abdu Rahman, 30, told TIME that two combat helicopters arrived before dawn Saturday in the desert 10 miles east of Kandahar. As one hovered overhead, a few commandos poured out of the second gunship. Hundreds of Taliban fighters, who had responded to the earsplitting whir of the choppers, were crouching in the darkness. "We were ordered to wait until the Americans came closer. But nobody listened. We were all firing," Rahman says. The American forces "flew off like sparrows...