Word: platooner
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...they encounter nothing. So now the convoy is heading back to base, a mile away. The platoon rolls into Adhamiya's main marketplace. The atmosphere is festive. Patrons of the teahouses and restaurants overflow onto the one-lane street. Traffic is running in both directions, and the convoy slows to a crawl. Just across Imam Street, the district's main thoroughfare, sits the Abu Hanifa mosque, where Saddam Hussein was last seen in public before his arrest by U.S. forces. A large crowd of Iraqis mills outside it. Private First Class Jim Beverly, 19, and Private Orion Jenks, 22, stand...
...walls of the humvee, hitting Beverly, Jenks and TIME photographer James Nachtwey. Smoke rises from the high-back. Blood pours from Weisskopf's right arm; when he holds it up, he realizes the grenade has blown off his hand. Specialist Billie Grimes, a medic attached to the platoon, sprints out of the third humvee and hoists herself onto the high-back. She uses a Velcro strap tied to her pant leg as a tourniquet to stop Weisskopf's bleeding and applies a field dressing to the wound while loudly asking the three other passengers if they are injured. Nachtwey...
...initial shock of Colgan's death has abated, but the soldiers still have to remind themselves that he is gone. His name remains on the satellite-phone bill the platoon updates on a wall of the hooch. "Sometimes I think that I'll wake up," Whiteside says, "and that he's going to walk through the door and get his coffee and watch SportsCenter. And he'll say good morning, and I'll ask him how he's doing. And then I realize, that's never going to happen again...
...Since early November, intelligence gained from informants and detainees has yielded a list of 20 individuals in the area who the battalion's commanders believe are involved in financing and coordinating roadside bombings. The effort to hunt them down is dubbed Colgan's Revenge. But few members of the platoon are confident they will find Colgan's killers. "To know you got the guy who planted that IED--that piece will never be available to us," says Buxton...
...difference of experience." Buxton has become a more active, though neurotic leader. Tonight he spends half an hour drawing up different seating arrangements in the three humvees. As the Tomb Raiders grease their guns and pack flashlights and zip-ties (for cuffing hands) into their flak vests, Winston, the platoon's weathered senior sergeant, briefs them on Abu Taha, a middle-aged, overweight man who may be a "major supplier" of weapons to the insurgents. The room falls silent as Winston outlines evacuation procedures in the event that the troops encounter resistance at the house. Since Colgan's death, Winston...