Word: platoons
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Front Lines A TIME reporter follows one platoon as it wages house-to-house, room-to-room combat to root out insurgents in Fallujah...
...going to die!" yells Staff Sergeant David Bellavia as his rattled platoon of soldiers takes cover from machine-gun fire in the streets of Fallujah. The platoon has been ordered to hunt down and kill a group of insurgents hiding somewhere in a block of 12 darkened houses. It is 1:45 a.m., and the soldiers have been running from fire fight to fire fight for 48 hours straight with no sleep, fueled only by the modest pickings from their ration packs. As they searched through nine of the houses on the block, the soldiers turned up nothing. When they...
...seized an alien aircraft and made my escape. I sailed up into the darkening sky with light snow sifting down around me. Moody music, like something from Carmina Burana, swelled in the background. The sounds of battle faded beneath me in the dusk. It was like the end of Platoon, and I was Charlie Sheen. Then the waterworks started...
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...