Word: platoons
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Mukhtar is an infantryman in Afghanistan's rebel army. He can shoot a man in the beard from a standing position at 200 m or point out camouflaged Taliban bunkers through miles of dust. His platoon leader says the green-eyed soldier is the finest he has ever commanded, and Mukhtar takes the compliment with a shrug of his skinny shoulders. "I have been in the army for a long time," he says. "So I should be good at my job." Indeed, Mukhtar is a four-year veteran of Afghanistan's draining desert war. But he is only 15 years...
...hopes to fire a rocket-propelled grenade. "I am small now," he says, squaring his tiny shoulders. "But I will be big when I shoot the Taliban who killed my aunt and uncle." By avenging their deaths, Najibullah is carrying on family custom. His father tracked down the Soviet platoon that killed relatives in the 1980s and lobbed fatal grenades at their encampment. "If I am murdered by the Taliban, then my sons will honor my name by killing the enemy," says the prepubescent Najibullah. Despite hopes for peace, some Afghan traditions may be impossible to break...
...Stalingrad, circa 1942. Beyond the gates there's scarcely a building intact?just broken walls, smashed stonework, and ground littered with spent shell casings and twisted metal. Allah Mahmad exaggerates a bit when he says his men are holding the 40th Division base. For the past two years his platoon has been hanging on to about 100 sq m of ground inside the gate. Two small buildings still have roofs and their dark, fetid rooms serve as living quarters. There are a couple of underground bunkers. And through the shredded remains of some trees is what was once the base...
Shirley Lauro’s A Piece of My Heart, the first entry in the 2001-02 regular season at the Loeb Experimental Theater, is a show about Vietnam that features neither male-driven bravado, nor war-torn freedom fighters in dirty fatigues; Platoon, it isn’t. All conventional expectations of a play dealing with war are thrown out in the opening scene, when the lights come up on six women. These six characters, whose Vietnam experiences and post-war struggles give the play its focus, represent perspectives of the war different from each other, and different from...
...Supplies are a major problem. Sitting in a shell-pocked command post with a panoramic view of the Kapisa front lines, Mahmad Zahir, a platoon commander with 21 years of combat experience, pulls out three Kalashnikov rifle magazines from the webbing under his jacket and lays them on the floor for inspection. Two of the three are empty. "We're short of ammunition?for tanks, artillery, machine guns, rifles. It's already cold, but we don't have enough blankets, and we have no winter uniforms," says the bearded, sunken-cheeked veteran. "If the Americans hit the Taliban...