Word: maroyka
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...Qaeda's early mortar volleys missed by hundreds of yards and then began closing in. Soldiers call it "walking in rounds"--staring in pained fascination as the enemy drops "steel rain" closer and closer to where you're hugging the ground. A shell landed 50 yards from Maroyka and nearly a dozen of his men. Maroyka felt blood and realized that a piece of shrapnel from the blast had nicked his face...
...wonder, he saw the smoke clear and all of his soldiers seem to rise from the dead. Their new ceramic-plate vests had kept them alive, but shrapnel had shredded many arms and legs. Eight of the 10 soldiers closest to the blast were wounded. "I've been hit!" Maroyka radioed Kraft...
...Maroyka responded. "And some other guys are hit too. We're pretty messed...
...safety without making a bad situation worse. "I'm the quarterback now," Perez thought. "Whatever I decide, I'm going to have to live with it, right or wrong." His wounded comrades knew they had to move. "We just needed to get the hell away from where we were," Maroyka says. "Even those of us with leg injuries had a simple choice...
Shortly after nightfall, a pair of Black Hawk helicopters extricated Maroyka and the other seriously wounded men. As midnight approached, three CH-47s returned to the valley's southern tip. Perez wearily climbed up the ramp, where he ran into Grippe. "Are you sure we've got everybody?" Grippe yelled at him over the roar of the turbines. For the first time that day, Perez had his doubts. He scampered into the darkness and surveyed the area with his night-vision goggles one more time. Finding no Americans, he ran back to the chopper just before it lifted off. Maroyka...