Word: mortars
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...dead city, a battlefield where vultures circle overhead and the smell of panic is stronger than the stench of the unswept, palm-fringed boulevards. The shops are barred, the restaurants deserted. Hour after hour, day and night, the tomblike hush is broken only by the distant crump of exploding mortar shells, the whoom of bazookas, the crack of anti-aircraft cannon, and the short, chattering bursts of machine guns...
...heard the gun-carriages turn, saw them vomit and drool; the firmament sagged and all the stars turned black. Black ocean bleeding and the brooding stars breeding chunks of fresh-swelled flesh while overhead the birds wheeled and out of the hallucinated sky fell the balance with mortar and pestle and the bandaged eyes of justice. All that is here related moves with imaginary feet along the parallels of dead orbs; all that is seen with the empty sockets bursts like flowering grass. Out of the nothingness arises the sign of infinity; beneath the ever-rising spiral slowly sinks...
...Nidever and his men stumbled toward the scene of the ambush, tracers from automatic rifles laced the darkness, and the finger snap of small-arms fire was punctuated by the sledging blow of mortar explosions. Even under the wavering light of flare shells it was impossible to tell friend from foe. There was a movement, a silhouette running along the road. Was it a Viet Cong guerrilla or a Vietnamese Ranger? Even as the man passed it was impossible to tell...
...three days Cao feinted and jabbed, using U.S. Navy landing craft on the canals that crisscross the plain. Viet Cong Battalion 514 was backed into a corner 20 miles square. Then Cao struck. Mortar and howitzer shells pounded the square while sturdy AD6 Skyraiders swooped down, strafing and dropping napalm bombs. Some 100 soldiers of the 450-man battalion were killed, many more wounded. Colonel Cao's men captured 22 prisoners, including two nurses and two 15-year-old boys who claimed that their job was to sing and dance to entertain the guerrillas...
...bulk of the death toll came in two waves: 1) on Thursday, July 20, when French planes blasted Bizerte for hours, 2) two days later when French paratroopers rained grenades and mortar shells on the close-packed houses of the casbah. In. Bizerte, the myth of the poor quality of the Tunisian fighting men finally died. Dirty and stubble-chinned, they clung to their positions. Four Tunisians held up an entire French company for four hours, killing five paratroopers and wounding 15, and battled on even after two medium tanks had blown to smithereens the houses in which they were...