Word: mortaring
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...Saigon. The windows of Freedom Palace were open, and Premier Ngo Dinh Diem, in grey striped pajamas, was pacing his third-floor bedroom. Suddenly, through the sultry night, Diem heard the clatter of machine-gun fire, the cries of wounded men. In the next instant, half a dozen mortar shells exploded beneath Ngo Dinh Diem's open window. "We never believed they would dare attack us!" said one of Diem's aides, aghast. But on Diem's shabby desk in Freedom Palace lay the confirmation: "All South Viet Nam will be put to blood and fire...
...past-feudal warlords, religious fanatics and big-city hoodlums, with French colonials hovering indistinctly in the background. About 30,000 well-armed troops of the Cao Dai, Hoa Hao and Binh Xuyen sects (long subsidized by the French) were out in coalition against Diem's national government, lobbing mortar shells into peasant villages to demonstrate their lethal potentialities. Hostile Vietnamese politicians in Europe were trying to persuade Riviera-loving Bao Dai, the absentee chief of state, to go home, fire Diem and make a few changes. French politicians were frankly telling Britons and Americans that they considered Diem unworthy...
...Forces, Marshal of the Soviet Union, and finally a full member of the Politburo. Medals jangling, he reviews Red Square parades, sometimes on horseback, but more recently, as his weight has increased, in a ZIS limousine. Soviet officers still joke that he does not know the difference between a mortar and a howitzer...
...command of an infantry rifle squad and stood in exposed position, directing fire. Several times he made one-man attacks on enemy bunkers, once with only a pistol and hand grenades. When his unit was relieved, he volunteered to stay on and continue fighting. He was killed by a mortar shell 48 hours after the battle started, but not before he had "personally accounted for hundreds of enemy casualties...
...voice has an ordinary sound, but high-pitched for the big frame that produces it. For all his years away from his rootland, he speaks with an unmistakable Midwestern twang. Absentmindedly he rubs a star-shaped scar near his right foot, one of the scars left by the mortar shell which gravely wounded him at Fossalta, Italy, in 1918 when he was a volunteer ambulance driver. Nick Adams, hero of many of Hemingway's short stories, was wounded at approximately the same place in much the same way. So was Lieut. Henry of A Farewell to Arms...