Word: mortar
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...Brien wrote that what G.I.'s carried into battle was determined by necessity, specialty and rank, and "to some extent by superstition." Three decades later, the 145,000 Americans serving in Iraq rely on their own talismans to protect them from the barrage of sniper bullets, mortar fire and roadside bombs that have claimed the lives of more than 2,700 of their comrades. The Marines of Kilo Company, 3rd Battalion, 8th Marine Regiment spent much of this year deployed in Ramadi, the heart of the Sunni Triangle and one of the most dangerous outposts in Iraq. The things they...
...that attitude seems churlish, remember that the lockdown is just the latest in a long line of setbacks they have endured this year. Just this summer alone, Karrada witnessed several car-bomb and mortar attacks, most of them blamed on Sunni insurgents and jihadi groups. Each time, the district has shaken off the debris and gotten back to business. But the damage to their business is crippling, say shopkeepers...
...into the road where they would sit for a second and then burst open with a cracking bang. No light, no pretty stream of sparks, just an explosion. The noises from across the city reminded me of my time in Baghdad. There were big resonating whumps that sounded like mortar fire, and the regular chatter of strings of tiny crackers that sounded like a bucking machine gun. A familiar fear flooded back: that strange sense of dislocation you have in war, unsure of where the next explosion will come from but aware that it is never far away. I thought...
Those glimpses of hell have been almost entirely drained of color--just a few yellow flames of mortar and machine-gun fire to guide your unwilling eye to the next fatality. But even in the Stateside scenes, the movie's colors are desaturated, like 60-year-old photos in a memory book...
...when the economy changed, and more and more Americans started doing their business online, the bricks-and mortar merchants seemed not to have learned their lesson. Sexton, for example, could get around the stores in town, but he couldn't easily navigate a computer screen, a tough predicament for a Bay Area teenager headed to U.C. Berkeley...