Word: mortars
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Only Basics. An instructor leads the recruits in bayonet practice with padded protective clothing. Teams of six men on each side lunge back and forth at each other shouting, red-faced and sweating. Another group practices taking apart and setting up an 82-mm. mortar. Another instructor conducts a discussion with a small group on how to destroy an M-47 American tank, using a scale model and shouting his lesson in clear, hard tones...
...Cambodian-born Frenchman who had tried to carry on his restoration work under the occupation, and jailed some 40 local villagers who had been helping him. According to Viet Cong defectors-some of whom brought out snapshots of themselves taken in the temple area-several stray Communist and government mortar rounds had also fallen on historical buildings. A former V.C. captain, Tran Van Ky, has conceded that "we were given orders not to touch the statues and temples, but that order was often ignored...
...workers build up each others' enthusiasm with such lines as "Ivan you lay the bricks and I'll carry the mortar. We'll work twice as fast that way." Like almost all the dialogue in the film this line is admirably a direct translation from Solzhenitsyn's novel. But it is spoken by a wide eyed young man with all the fresh enthusiasm of a high school quarterback preparing for the next play. Solzhenitsyn can tone down the sense of imminent death in his novel because his Russian audience was well aware of the destitution of the prisoners' lives...
...Quiet. Equally thorough preparations were being made inside the prison by other Tupamaros, who were confined in cells on the third floor. These cells had already been clandestinely connected by chipping away the mortar so that bricks could be removed and replaced with ease. Holes had also been drilled in the end cells on each floor, allowing the Tupamaros to move from their third-floor cells to the second and first floors on makeshift ladders of blankets and wood. By the time the break took place, a tunnel had already been dug leading from a ground-floor cell and under...
...three months after arriving in Viet Nam, just after the Tet offensive, Calley's company suffered heavy losses chasing an unseen enemy through mined rice paddies. Calley developed "a mild panic" that grew into hatred of the Vietnamese as Calley's patrols took repeated sniper and mortar fire from villages. The My Lai massacre followed at the height of this confusion and frustration, a sad confluence of bad training, bad leadership, bad intelligence and worse judgment...