Word: infantryman
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...children is impossible to forget. When the fire fight in Karbala first broke out, all they could think of was their first casualty, Brown--his side open, his eyes lulling--being carried out past them. But Specialist Larry Brown was a man of 20, and he was a professional infantryman. The kids, boys, were maybe 7 or 8 and had no place there. Bravo Company wasted them. Had to. Right when the fire fight was at its hottest, when maybe 100 guys were popping up across the rooftops firing AK-47s and rocket-propelled grenades, the boys bounced into...
...left vulnerable. "The terrorists are still here," says World War II veteran Thomas Murphy. "I really do worry about our troops' being sent overseas and depleting our homeland security." Or at V.F.W. Post 5255 in Lawrenceville, Ga., where Irvin Dougherty reflects on what it was like to be an infantryman in Vietnam and hopes there is still time for Iraq "to come to its senses...
...midpoint the novel moves forward five years to the ragged British retreat from Dunkirk, in which Robbie is a weary infantryman, then to London, where Briony, now a nurse trainee, is struggling to find some remedy for the damage she has done. Her solution is not plain until the surprising final pages, when you grasp that if storytelling can be an occasion for sin, it can also be an act of contrition. It's McEwan's subtle game to show fiction working its worst kind of curse, then leading us unawares to give it our blessing...
...heroes of Lanshan is Liang Bangming, who was elected three years ago to the county's People's Congress. Liang served as an infantryman during China's disastrous 1979 border war with Vietnam and carries two badges from his time there: a medal for valor and puckered scars where a bullet ripped through his abdomen. That war produced a mini-Vietnam complex: soldiers returned from fighting dismayed that their government had sent them unprepared to a conflict they could not win. Liang was a little different: he came back to his native Hunan province more patriotic than ever and took...
Mukhtar is an infantryman in Afghanistan's rebel army. He can shoot a man in the beard from a standing position at 200 m or point out camouflaged Taliban bunkers through miles of dust. His platoon leader says the green-eyed soldier is the finest he has ever commanded, and Mukhtar takes the compliment with a shrug of his skinny shoulders. "I have been in the army for a long time," he says. "So I should be good at my job." Indeed, Mukhtar is a four-year veteran of Afghanistan's draining desert war. But he is only 15 years...