Word: mortars
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...minutes later the Soviets and their Afghan Communist allies strike back with 120-mm mortar shells that fall on a ridge to the north, sending up great plumes of smoke and dust. Soon, the well-concealed guerrillas begin to lash Barikot with heavy machine-gun fire. Barrage, counterbarrage -- a typical day in the long and ongoing siege...
...another day dawns in Barikot, the mujahedin resume their attacks, firing at Soviet observation posts and mortar positions across the valley. Soon the enemy is sending a counterbarrage. The mortar rounds fall with an ugly, twisted whistle, and their explosions rattle the whole ridgeline. As one or two rounds land dangerously close, the rebels hurry to take cover...
...takes perhaps an hour to descend the mountainside. The mortar barrage goes on and on, hitting where the rebels have been, or off to one side, or on the trail ahead, but never quite where they are. Finally, as the guerrillas reach the valley floor, the barrage subsides. The men stop to pray in the shade of a grove of trees, by the thistle-covered graves of two slain comrades...
Still, a long mythic fiesta between two explosions may not be a bad way to have a life. The first explosion came in Fossalta di Piave in northeastern Italy at midnight on July 8, 1918. A shell from an Austrian trench mortar punctured Hemingway with 200-odd pieces of shrapnel. The wounds validated his manhood, which they had very nearly destroyed. The second explosion came 25 years ago this summer. Early one morning in Ketchum, Idaho, Hemingway (suffering from diabetes, nephritis, alcoholism, severe depression, & hepatitis, hypertension, impotence and paranoid delusions, his memory all but ruined by electroshock treatments) slid...
Whatever it is called, the Wall appears to Berliners on both sides as a palpable presence that divides friends, families and neighborhoods. A quarter- century ago, East German soldiers and laborers worked through the night to lay down a crude barrier of cinder blocks, mortar and barbed wire. The resulting barricade gave graphic meaning to the political division of Berlin that had been imposed by Moscow in 1948, sundering the local population and leaving occupying U.S., French and British troops on the western side while the Soviets controlled the east. "In August 1961 the curtain was drawn aside to show...