Word: mortars
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...visit 20 miles from Caracas. Arriving at the site carved out of a hillside, he was shown around a one-story building and cautioned to follow his guides closely: the area was infested with booby traps. The place was a well-equipped munitions plant turning out everything from mortar shells to land mines for Castroite F.A.L.N. terror ists-thus proving once again Fidel Castro's determination to rip the hemisphere with Communist "wars of national liberation...
...supplies and a Russian flag in the building. A heavy, hydraulically operated concrete door led to a cavern in the hillside behind the house. There, in a vault-shaped room, was an impressive arsenal of weapons: a 20-mm. cannon, a 3.5-in. bazooka, stacks of rifles, pistols, homemade mortar tubes and hundreds of shells, grenades and shaped demolition charges. With lathes, presses and other tools-and a gasoline generator to power them-terrorists had been turning out enough arms to supply a small army...
Between the flat, metallic blasts of occasional mortar shells, the only sound in the camp was the rustle of rats shuffling over sleeping men. In the rifle pits behind the sandbagged perimeter of Plei Me, weary defenders sniffed the sour stench of cordite and unwashed clothes and grumbled about the duty. "Shut up," said a grizzled major. "This is what we're getting paid for." An enlisted man chuckled in the darkness. "Yeah, anybody who don't like the cooking can go right out the gate...
...eloquently as the gunfire or casualty lists, the G.I. gallows humor vented at the low point of Plei Me's siege last week, expressed the professionalism and grim resolve of the U.S. fighting man in Viet Nam. In the beleaguered camp, American soldiers weathered 178 hours of constant mortar and recoilless rifle barrage, fanatical assaults by wave on wave of mustard-uniformed North Vietnamese regulars, the endless thrum and thunder of close air support ("The Skyraiders looked like they were wired nose to tail," marveled one survivor), night after night in which land flares and blazing napalm turned...
...kill ratio over the enemy, have spread their original beachhead until now they control 400 sq. mi. of territory. When a bad bit of intelligence unloaded the 101st Screaming Eagles from their helicopters right into a battalion of Viet Cong near An Khe, the Eagles fought hand-to-mortar until the field was theirs. Soon the increasing aggressiveness of American ground troops everywhere was adding yet another dimension of fear and uncertainty for the V.C., already long harassed by U.S. air and sea power...