Word: mortars
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...there were other sounds to contend with. No sooner had Perez's Chinook wheeled out of sight than the skies filled with the thunks, thuds and whistles of rocket-propelled grenades, 82-mm mortar rounds and heavy machine-gun bursts. "All hell broke loose," remembers Command Sergeant Major Frank Grippe, who was overseeing the action from a command post some 100 yards away. The U.S. troops returned fire with their short-barreled M-4 assault carbines and M-240 machine guns, but the enemy wasn't giving them much in the way of targets...
...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...
...confectionary businesses, including part of Kraft Foods' candy division for which they paid $200 million in 1995. The candy investment was bankrupt by 1999 because they failed to anticipate a flood of cheap competing products from Mexico. Their attempt to turn catalog clothier J. Crew into a bricks-and-mortar retailer resulted in an identity crisis that has alienated loyal customers...