Word: gunness
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...Search for the Smoking Gun...
...debate now has a natural geography. Washington is on a war footing, unless you call machine-gun squads near the Mall normal. Lower Manhattan has become hallowed ground, like Omaha Beach or Gettysburg. But elsewhere most people say the fear has largely passed or congealed into superstitions. A Chicago mom still won't take her kids to visit Dad in his Sears Tower office. People stay awake when they fly. Some Florida school districts have lifted the ban on cell phones, under pressure from parents who want to be able to reach their kids at any time. We have banned...
...there were other sounds to contend with. No sooner had Perez's Chinook wheeled out of sight than the skies filled with the thunks, thuds and whistles of rocket-propelled grenades, 82-mm mortar rounds and heavy machine-gun bursts. "All hell broke loose," remembers Command Sergeant Major Frank Grippe, who was overseeing the action from a command post some 100 yards away. The U.S. troops returned fire with their short-barreled M-4 assault carbines and M-240 machine guns, but the enemy wasn't giving them much in the way of targets...
...followed his example. "About five of the guys from Charlie Company, they stayed up on the ridge line, and they were receiving sniper fire and machine-gun fire--rounds were bouncing all around them--but they stayed there to cover our movement," says Sergeant First Class Robert Healy, who was wounded in the fighting. "None of them faltered...
Perez couldn't worry about the lousy intelligence that had got them into this mess. His job was to keep his men focused on their mission and to avoid using up all their ammunition. Mortar shells and machine-gun rounds were running short, but the roar of air strikes and the concussions of 2,000-lb. bombs in the mountains were good for morale. B-52 bombers, F-16 and F-18 fighter-bombers, and AC-130 and AH-64 gunships were pulverizing caves and crags. Perez's men set their M-4s to fire single shots instead of three...