Word: mortaring
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Despite initial fears, the attackers turned out to be not Iraqi-sponsored terrorists but an older British adversary: the Irish Republican Army. The would-be assassins had parked a van 200 yds. from the Prime Minister's offices, then used a delayed-timing device to launch three mortar shells from the vehicle while they escaped. One landed in a garden at the back of Major's official residence; two more fell behind the Foreign Office. A total of three people were injured...
...Saturday afternoon sun of a somber January, the black granite walls of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial were warm, almost animate to the touch. A blond teenage girl with a paper dove in her hair from an antiwar rally stood near two fortyish men talking softly about a bungled mortar attack a generation and half a world away. Two helicopters whirred overhead, the sound both jarring and fitting. Odd how certain names leaped to the eye and touched the heart. Irvin W. Prosser Jr., Zygmunt Kowalewski, Sherl K. Bonnett. Strangers all, so there were no images of them as soldiers...
...dispatch, Murphy described the Iraqi attack on the Emir's palace as seen from her hotel window. "Throughout the day," she wrote, "the sound of machine-gun and mortar fire echoed through the city as a dull percussion accompaniment" to the siege. A few days later, she described the captured city as being like "the eye of a storm" as the main highways "give off a low hum from the washboard-like ruts caused by the tread of heavy tanks...
...soldier appears out of the darkness and tells the machine gunners that their platoon has ended up in the wrong place. It is too close to the road. In fact, it turns out that the platoon would be in the fire zone if the 82nd were to launch a mortar attack...
...world. Children as young as eight fight enemies they do not know for causes they barely understand. War does not rob a child of youth so much as it reveals his innocence: ignorance of death and a nervy imperviousness to danger, revealed in a boy's grin when a mortar shell falls close or in his eagerness to fire when instinct should tell him to duck...