Word: kevlar
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...much easier, of course, to call the U.S. wounded unlucky, the double and triple amputees maimed in a war that has not always gone as planned. If Kevlar and ceramic plates are the great lifesavers of modern warfare along with quick-clotting powders and ultrasound units that fit in backpacks, how many more lives and limbs might have been saved if the humvees that were meant for transport in noncombat zones had been equipped with the armor necessary for a guerrilla war that has no front lines, no safe havens...
...says. "It's just the culture to get pissed, I guess." Outside, two young men square off drunkenly but stop when a police van glides by. Between midnight and 4 a.m., casualties stream into the Queen's Medical Center emergency department: a motionless clubber on a stretcher whom the Kevlar-clad ambulance crew wheels straight to a treatment room; a youth whose injuries - a lacerated hand and a bite on his arm - were sustained in a brawl outside a pub; and a tipsy woman in high-heeled boots who hurt her ankle on a cobblestone walkway. It's a typical...
...insurgency intensified, soldiers in Iraq began replacing the humvees' canvas doors with metal plates, draping Kevlar fabric over the seats and lining the floors with sandbags. Slowly but surely, the Pentagon began outfitting soft-skinned humvees with 1,000-lb. Armor Survivability Kits--which protect passengers from ground-level attacks but don't harden the humvee's floor, a major vulnerability when dealing with roadside bombs. The Pentagon has also scoured the globe for heavily armored humvees, sending to Iraq hundreds that had been based in the Balkans, Germany and South Korea. Even a few earmarked to protect the Pentagon...
...trucks for Kellogg Brown & Root (KBR), hoping to score the ultimate jackpot--$80,000 tax-free for a year's work. Most were desperate to pay bills, to fix up houses, to send kids to college. For some, it was a patriotic duty. But in Iraq, wearing just a Kevlar jacket and helmet for safety, they found themselves in trucks with no armor, ferrying fuel to U.S. troops. They wielded hammers and cans of ravioli to defend themselves. And they came home with nightmares...
...could the Allies rely on superior technology to win the day, though being able to listen in on coded German communications certainly helped. There was no Kevlar; there were no nightscopes, no cruise missiles or stealth fighters. Instead, Allied engineers invented artificial harbors to tow across the channel and moor once the beaches were won; sawtooth steel tusks were attached to the front of tanks to cut through the Normandy hedgerows; paratroopers used the little clickers that sound like crickets to find one another in the dark. Most of their radios and 60% of their supplies didn't survive...