Word: mortaring
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...Qaeda's early mortar volleys missed by hundreds of yards and then began closing in. Soldiers call it "walking in rounds"--staring in pained fascination as the enemy drops "steel rain" closer and closer to where you're hugging the ground. A shell landed 50 yards from Maroyka and nearly a dozen of his men. Maroyka felt blood and realized that a piece of shrapnel from the blast had nicked his face...
...Everybody up!" Abbott bellowed. "Get the hell up! We're moving!" The soldiers were scrambling for safer ground when another 15-lb. mortar round exploded amid them. The air filled with dirt, smoke, blood and screams. "Damn," thought Grippe, as he watched from his post. "I've got four or five dead guys now." But in wonder, he saw the smoke clear and all of his soldiers seem to rise from the dead. Their new ceramic-plate vests had kept them alive, but shrapnel had shredded many arms and legs. Eight of the 10 soldiers closest to the blast were...
Barely two months later, following the mortar blast in the Shah-i-Kot, Perez found himself in charge of his platoon. With nine of his 26 men wounded, his immediate concern was getting them to safety without making a bad situation worse. "I'm the quarterback now," Perez thought. "Whatever I decide, I'm going to have to live with it, right or wrong." His wounded comrades knew they had to move. "We just needed to get the hell away from where we were," Maroyka says. "Even those of us with leg injuries had a simple choice...
Thirty minutes after the devastating mortar blast, with the sun rising overhead, 1st Platoon's wounded had taken cover in what some called Hell's Half Pipe, a natural trench, already protecting the command post, that shielded them from al-Qaeda's eyes. By chance, the enemy fire kept them where they wanted to be, guarding the escape paths from the southern end of the valley that al-Qaeda might want to use. But the Afghans, repelled by rocket and mortar attacks elsewhere in the valley, never showed. All the searching and destroying would have to be done...
Perez couldn't worry about the lousy intelligence that had got them into this mess. His job was to keep his men focused on their mission and to avoid using up all their ammunition. Mortar shells and machine-gun rounds were running short, but the roar of air strikes and the concussions of 2,000-lb. bombs in the mountains were good for morale. B-52 bombers, F-16 and F-18 fighter-bombers, and AC-130 and AH-64 gunships were pulverizing caves and crags. Perez's men set their M-4s to fire single shots instead of three...