Word: platooner
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...planted itself for a long run on the best-seller list, it emerged that Ellis, who spent the Vietnam War years doing graduate work at Yale and teaching history at West Point, had been offering his students at Mount Holyoke College wholly invented accounts of his days as a platoon leader in Vietnam. After his tall tales were exposed in the Boston Globe, Ellis was suspended without pay for a year and compelled to relinquish his endowed chair...
So far U.S. officials in Iraq are steering clear of the M word, referring instead to a platoon's refusal to take part in a supply convoy as "a temporary breakdown in discipline." Some of the 19 reservists who declined to obey orders to transport fuel through frequently ambushed territory on Wednesday phoned their parents and begged them to tell members of Congress that this was a "suicide mission" because of the miserable condition of their unarmored vehicles. "Mom, I need you to raise pure hell," Specialist Amber McClenny said in a message on her family's answering machine...
...quiet. "That's not good. That means they're planning," says a Marine who asks not to be identified because he has told his wife he is in Kuwait. Indeed, the response comes at night. Shortly after 9 p.m., another company encounters resistance in the town. The Whiskey platoon, tasked as that night's Quick Reaction Force, gears up, led by company commander Captain Patrick Rapicault. "We'll probably get hit tonight," says his driver, Corporal Marc Ryan, who gazes at a picture of his sweetheart back home before speeding into town...
...cover in firing positions littered with flesh from insurgents blown apart by U.S. cannon fire from an armored vehicle. Pinned down by snipers, the men were trapped alongside the corpses, battling a stench that grew stronger as the morning wore on and the temperature climbed. When at last the platoon could move, it could do so only under the cover of chattering guns and multicolored smoke grenades. By then, the rebels that the platoon was fighting had simply melted away. "This enemy wants to erode our forces while preserving his own," a frustrated Purdy said...
...Some insurgents may have already been nabbed making their getaway--like six men who were captured in a boat crossing a river on Saturday--but it's hard to tell because once they put down their weapons, they could just as easily be seen as civilians. When a platoon was ambushed on a residential street late on Friday--triggering a blazing exchange between two U.S. units--four unarmed men emerged an hour later claiming they had merely been out shopping. "I say we just kill 'em anyway," a rifleman who had been part of the friendly-fire incident darkly joked...