Word: forte
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Military officials say the Pentagon may put off an all-out ground assault on Baghdad until the Army can deploy 20,000 more troops from the 4th Infantry Division--who left Fort Hood, Texas, for Kuwait this week--to the front lines to reinforce the two forces already in place. As it regroups on the ground, the U.S. plans to ratchet up the pressure from the air. Apache helicopters from the Army's 101st Airborne Division have begun attacking the Republican Guard's Medina division southwest of Baghdad. Warplanes and gunships will try to smash the three Republican Guard divisions...
...saying. One of the POWs was an African-American female, 30 years old, named Shana--Shoshana's nickname. Not quite ready to believe the worst, he called Telemundo, which confirmed that his daughter had been spotted on Iraqi TV. It would be six long hours, however, before officials at Fort Bliss called Johnson and his wife Eunice to confirm what the couple had already surmised from surfing TV channels and the Internet. Their gentle daughter--a single mom who, when she was a child, "wouldn't fuss, wouldn't fight"--had become a prisoner...
...Fort Bliss, the 507th's home base, shock came first, then silence. No one on the post could tell the families of the dead and missing what had gone wrong, what a cook and a computer specialist, a mechanic and an aspiring elementary school teacher were doing in a convoy so close to battle, so unprotected. The 507th's usual job is to keep diesel tankers rolling, fix generators and service Patriot missile batteries. But it was attacked on March 23, at night, somewhere on or near Highway 1, one of the main north-south roads in Iraq...
Reconstructing the attack has not been easy. Even the survivors are confused. Initial reports from the battlefield said the 507th had taken a wrong turn while passing near the town of Nasiriyah, but U.S. Congressman Silvestre Reyes, whose El Paso district encompasses Fort Bliss, says he was told by a senior officer that the convoy was ambushed on a bridge and had not taken a wrong turn. The lightly armed unit didn't have a chance. It had no combat escort, he says. If that's true, the fault for the convoy's vulnerability would lie not with its leader...
...Safely back at Fort Rucker the following year, Cornum had little patience with those who use her as an example of the horrible things that can happen to women in war. "Every 15 seconds in America, some woman is assaulted. Why are they worried about a woman getting assaulted once every 10 years in a war overseas? It's ridiculous," she said. "It's clearly it's an emotional argument they use (to argue that women should be kept away from the frontlines) because they can't think of a rational...