Word: mortaring
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Worst hit was Seattle, where seven people died in the quake's only fatalities, four from heart attacks. One man was killed by flying bricks and mortar; two others died after parts of a shattered 50,000-gal. water tank fell on them. Elsewhere in the state, chimneys toppled, power lines snapped, roads buckled and bridges swayed. At the capitol in Olympia, the 37-year-old dome cracked, pillars shifted, and fragments of glass skylights crashed down on the legislators' empty chairs...
Suddenly the rice came alive with bursting, 4.2-in. mortar shells. "It was the biggest pile of junk I've ever seen," said Associated Press Correspondent John T. Wheeler, an ex-Air Force officer now covering the war. When a chunk of the junk slapped through the throat of a U.S. adviser, Wheeler picked the wounded man up and began searching for a medic. But the South Vietnamese were already on the run, and armored trucks went bumping wildly across the hills in retreat without regard for the fleeing troops on foot. None would stop for Wheeler...
...north of Saigon, the government scored its second big kill of the week. Pushing north from Bongson, the pivotal hamlet on north-south Route 1, which almost fell to the Communists early last month (TIME, March 12), a battalion of South Vietnamese marines was hit by mortar fire and three battalions of Viet Cong shock troops. Falling back on a tenuous perimeter, the marines fought off ten "human wave" attacks over an eight-hour period before they were reinforced by a heavy-weapons company and air support. When it was all over, 137 Viet Cong were dead, v. five...
...that riflemen's foxholes were dug and mortar positions neatly sand bagged, the 800 U.S. Marines on Hill 327 overlooking Danang airbase were chafing under guard duty and itching for action. Thus it was with considerable relief that the Marines got word that one company could move out to probe the nearby ridges and ravines. Cautiously the company fanned out in separate platoons to begin a 2½ day search for nesting Viet Cong. The first flush was not long in coming: that night one platoon startled some seven V.C.s, who took off running as the Marines fired after...
...gentle hillock near the midfield stripe of South Viet Nam, balanced like a football waiting for the kickoff. From the Kannack compound and its adjacent dirt airstrip, some 400 American and montagnard defenders oversee dense jungle, slippery slopes and the crumpled folds of ravines ideally suited for enemy mortar attack. A single ribbon of road leads south toward embattled Route 19, the east-west highway where government convoys are frequent prey for Viet Cong ambushes. Last week the Communists hit Kannack...