Word: mortarman
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...himself as an eager young recruit looking to become an infantryman. Evans talked with Scherry for a long time that first night, assuring him he was embarking on a noble calling. And Evans stayed in touch with Scherry as he went through training, offering congratulations when Scherry became a mortarman, the same job Evans held when he first joined the Marine Corps...
...fired into the area around the embassy and the hotel opposite; the insurgents who launched them clearly didn't care what building they hit. On the afternoon of Oct. 17, a line of 120-mm mortars marched across Jadriyah, falling closer and closer to the embassy, as if the mortarman were fine-tuning his coordinates. The final mortar sailed over the Australians' heads and onto the garage of a house opposite the embassy; nobody was injured. A few hours later, lights in the houses near the embassy blacked out when a car bomb exploded at a roundabout 400 m down...
...Kids, the professor could say, it was touch and go. The devils in black pajamas had damn near overrun the LZ at Cholon when we landed. I popped some Willie Peter from the AK, and my mortarman, Joe Biden, let 'em have it with a few bursts of an old Neil Kinnoch speech about his granddad the coal miner going to college. That knocked 'em dead. Victor Charles melted back into the triple-canopy forest, and he took Jane Fonda with...
Most of the noncoms and privates were reservists and glad to be done with war. "We may have to come back," said an Iraqi-born elevator technician from Jaffa who had been serving as a mortarman, "but in the meantime I want to live a little." Added a Tel Aviv housepainter: "We can manage out here at the front all right, but we have problems at home. My business has gone to hell, I've got debts up to my neck, and the pay they give you for reserve service ($190 a month) doesn't cover everything when...
...Deterrent. The troops carried on. "The cold is no real bother," claimed Pfc. Timmy Sasser, 17, a mortarman from Dallas who was striving to erect a tent in -40°. Two companies of "aggressors," dropped by parachute, endured the equivalent of -175° F. as they hit the icy prop wash of their aircraft. But the cold was no deterrent to the paratroopers. Mushing ten miles on skis through deep powder snow at 53 below zero, dragging their survival kits on Ahkio sleds, 16 troopers pulled off a brilliant nighttime surprise attack on the headquarters of Brigadier General John...