Word: mortaring
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...three days Cao feinted and jabbed, using U.S. Navy landing craft on the canals that crisscross the plain. Viet Cong Battalion 514 was backed into a corner 20 miles square. Then Cao struck. Mortar and howitzer shells pounded the square while sturdy AD6 Skyraiders swooped down, strafing and dropping napalm bombs. Some 100 soldiers of the 450-man battalion were killed, many more wounded. Colonel Cao's men captured 22 prisoners, including two nurses and two 15-year-old boys who claimed that their job was to sing and dance to entertain the guerrillas...
...courtyards, hastily covered with sacking or blankets, lie hundreds of corpses. Some died in the first day's fighting and had sprawled in the blazing sun for four days. The stench was overpowering. Everywhere on the fringes of the casbah and inside it were houses wrecked by mortar and artillery fire. Swarms of large black flies buzzed over pools of blood in the streets. For 24 hours after the ceasefire, ambulances, lorries and mule carts brought out the dead and dying. In Bizerte hospital, the wounded lay shoulder to shoulder on mattresses in the corridors. From a personal count...
...bulk of the death toll came in two waves: 1) on Thursday, July 20, when French planes blasted Bizerte for hours, 2) two days later when French paratroopers rained grenades and mortar shells on the close-packed houses of the casbah. In. Bizerte, the myth of the poor quality of the Tunisian fighting men finally died. Dirty and stubble-chinned, they clung to their positions. Four Tunisians held up an entire French company for four hours, killing five paratroopers and wounding 15, and battled on even after two medium tanks had blown to smithereens the houses in which they were...
Taylor eventually was wounded in the rump by a mortar fragment while making a tour of a forward area against the angry advice of a sergeant, who warned of the alert enemy. When Taylor was hit, the sergeant stormed up to his rescue with an attitude that was anything but solicitous: "Goddammit. General, now do you believe me?" Taylor spent ten days in the hospital, but made his staff keep his name off the wounded list for fear he would lose his command...
...could find it: in Italy he often sketched on the backs of the Mussolini portraits that hung in most Italian homes. "I was no hero," says Mauldin. "I wasn't leading a perilous life." But he got close enough to the shooting to be superficially injured by a mortar shell fragment in fighting near Cassino in 1943. Applying for a fresh Band-Aid, he was handed a Purple Heart to go with it-and turned the incident into an incisive cartoon. "Just gimme a coupla aspirin," says Willie to the Medical Corpsman offering him a medal. "I already...