Word: mortar
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...brush-covered hills along the border. Armored humvees with gunners inside are parked on the ridges, while the infantrymen below stalk through the wadis, or dry streambeds. One soldier thinks his buddy is playing a joke, hitting him in the back with a rock. But it's shrapnel. Suddenly mortar rounds are screaming in, landing all around the Americans. Sergeant David Gilstrap is bleeding; he has been hit in the face. A jagged dart of shrapnel protrudes from Specialist Robert Heiber's arm. It hurts like fire, but Heiber mostly feels anger. He uses his Leatherman pliers to yank...
...between Tamil guerrillas and Sri Lanka's predominantly Sinhalese army. After the Tamil fighters retreated, the army drove into Mankulam. Singham knew what was coming next. Pulling down the shutters of his shop, he ran out the back door with his wife and four children, just before bullets and mortar shells burst into every store in the Tamil-dominated village. For the next 13 years, Singham, now a 56-year-old with a clenched jaw, gleaming eyes and a look of reptilian toughness, took refuge with his family in the nearby village of Mallavi while Mankulam was repeatedly ravaged...
...amid a shooting war that will not end. For soldiers and citizens alike, there are still many ways to die in Iraq, and the coroners who tidy away the dead have seen them all. Rifle fire. Roadside bombs, or improvised explosive devices, as the U.S. military calls them. RPGs. Mortar fire. Suicide car bombs. Some days it feels as if Iraqis opposing the U.S. presence are throwing everything they can at the young soldiers and the locals helping them rebuild the country. Some weeks are better than others, but the drumbeat of attacks persists, and the drip-drip of casualties...
...Staff claims that Israel’s attack “ended the 30-year truce” between Israel and Syria. Funny that the “truce” was not ended by the Hezbollah mortar and rocket attacks on northern Israel that have persisted over that 30-year period. Hezbollah has always been based in Syria and in fact receives funding from the Syrian government. But despite this 30-year history of deadly terrorist incursions into northern Israel by a group supported by Syria, the Staff identifies Israel as violating the supposed truce that only...
...pencil, a compass and a screwdriver. My suitemate, Charles, screamed down instructions as I wrestled our satellite dish into place, adjusted it to compensate for the somewhat ‘untraditional’ orientation of Currier House with respect to the cardinal directions and fastened it to the mortar of the courtyard’s retaining wall with some ad-hoc combination of wood chips, nails and twist-e-ties. Incidentally, due to some quirk of 1970s architecture, Currier House carries its own magnetic charge, rendering a compass useless (though still cool-looking) and further complicating my project...