Word: mcfaddens
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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...
...Helicopters offer the only means of reaching mountain villages and hamlets stranded by rockslides and the ultra-maneuverable Blackhawk is ideal for threading up the winding river courses at the bottom of narrow and steep valleys. McFadden and the others carried out as many missions as they could between daybreak to sundown. They were grounded temporarily on Tuesday afternoon when thunder and hail lashed the region. Otherwise, they have constantly ferried foreign rescue workers up into the mountains to dig for survivors in villages that melted away like sand castles when the earthquake hit. McFadden and his colleagues dumped...
...demands that U.S. troops come home now, and she insists on telling that to Bush personally. She speaks without caveat. "I'm not afraid of anything since my son was killed," she says. But she has never been one to move quietly through life. Father Michael McFadden, a priest she once worked for, calls her "very defiant, very stubborn, very strong willed" when dealing with authority. When a soldier from the local base comes by to argue with her, she asks him to go for a walk. She puts her arm around him. Soon they are hugging. Her friends call...
Rain or Shine should change all that. This funny, affecting memoir achieves a series of satisfying reconciliations. Author McFadden, 48, not only portrays and then patches up the quarrels and estrangements that raged between her and her father, she captures the tawdry colors of the Old West and mourns their fading. She looks back on her parents' tempestuous marriage and divorce, both of which baffled them and her as a child, with tolerance and wisdom. And her storytelling skills give Cy Taillon the posthumous gift that he would have most appreciated: the chance to appear in front...