Word: firefight
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Once again, Nehme Yafet Street in West Beirut was a battleground. Gunmen from rival Shi'ite Muslim and Druze militias crouched in doorways and fired bursts from automatic weapons and rocket-propelled grenades into the darkness. Four floors above the fierce firefight, Terry Waite, the special envoy of the Archbishop of Canterbury, was trapped with staff members of the Associated Press. A giant of a man, who stands 6 ft. 7 in. and weighs 258 lbs., the bearded Waite, 46, was in Beirut to seek the release of four of the American hostages held by Muslim extremists. As bullets chipped...
...patrolmen were on their own. As the firefight blazed on, one of the attackers fell dead, hit by the SAS sniper from about 80 m away. The sniper himself had a lucky escape. As he crouched beside a small tree, a .50-caliber bullet ripped through the trunk about 10 cm from his head. The Afghans kept on shooting. Soon the men noticed bullets landing in the dust behind them: a machine gun on a distant mountaintop was taking pot shots at their rear. Some of the tribesmen tried repeatedly to scale a nearby peak from where they could rain...
...every bill, including: nightmares and flashbacks; estrangement and emotional numbness; irritability and difficulty sleeping. Every night he fights sleep, knowing it will bring a replay of the day his unit was sent to rescue a patrol that had been ambushed in Sadr City, Baghdad, and fell into a ferocious firefight. "It was like the entire city was shooting at us," Batchelor says, pacing around the room. "I saw the guy shooting at me. He was on a rooftop, and I saw the muzzle flash. It sounds weird, but I saw the bullet. Then it hit me in the head...
...Meanwhile, bloody clashes, usually unreported in the media, occur daily in Chechnya. Last week, seven guerrillas were killed in a gunfight in Nalchik, capital of the once sleepy republic of Kabardino-Balkaria. A standoff in a city apartment block lasting almost two days concluded in a deadly six-hour firefight; two police were also reported injured. The rebels included four women and were part of the radical Islamist...
Sergeant Harding agrees. "You can't dwell on it, or you can't do what you need to do," he said shortly after his unit returned from another firefight in town. Troops say the thing that most helps the traumatized is their commitment to one another. Their unit is the only thing they can trust, and helping one another get home safely is the most compelling motivation they have. A twice-wounded Whiskey Company Marine suffered two concussions in successive bombings and was told that a third could lead to severe, lasting damage. But when given the option of going...