Word: gunners
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Blackhawk gunner Sergeant Cory McFadden knows the border with Pakistan as a place where you are likely to get shot at. Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters are hidden in the mountains below, often armed with armor-piercing rounds that can penetrate the skin of his helicopter. But last Monday night, McFadden and his crew joined a small aerial armada of U.S. choppers heading towards this dangerous borderland-without guns...
...couldn't help but look down, searching for bad guys," says McFadden. "I mean, every day we're getting shot at." The gunner knows a thing or two about that. Over the past three years, he and his crew have done back-to-back combat duty tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. But this was different. McFadden and his crew were sent on a humanitarian mission, and that's why the Blackhawk was stripped of its two machine guns...
...least another day. A bearlike Afghan guide named Siddiq is asked if he thinks the Taliban are gone. "They'll come back for their dead," he says. Several hours later, a soldier spies an insurgent observing the U.S. position from a ridge about 1,500 yds. away. A gunner opens up with a Mark-19, which fires grenades that tattoo the far ridge with puffs of smoke but fail to kill the insurgent. Meanwhile, the special forces alert the company by radio that three Taliban fighters are moving through the canyon so the soldiers should be ready to shoot...
...posts photographs of himself posing with a confiscated rocket-propelled grenade launcher, and he named his blog after his M2 heavy machine gun. Between glory shots with guns and photos of the Jungle Falls Suite in Idaho, where he stayed with his wife while on leave, Ma Deuce Gunner (who never reveals his name) gives detailed descriptions of the new Iraqi army he patrols with around Kirkuk. Despite their flimsy body armor, mismatched uniforms and the yellow-papered Gauloises cigarettes constantly dangling from their lips, their resourcefulness and enthusiasm give him hope. --By Brian Bennett
...Elsewhere, an improvised explosive device detonates under a Bradley fighting vehicle, blowing off its lid and killing a young medic who, though based in the rear, had volunteered to enter the fighting fray. A few feet forward, the toll would have been worse, killing the Bradley commander and his gunner. "This is a war of inches," says a shaken U.S. officer...