Word: shell
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...cartridge boxes and C-ration cans. Deep, viscous red mud sucks at his boots and oozes up to his knees as he struggles down the slope. Suddenly, from high above, comes a familiar, chilling whine. "Incoming!" someone yells, and the leatherneck flattens himself in the mud. The artillery shell bursts 50 yards from him, gouging out a small crater through the slime. A breeze wafts away the cloud of smoke and detritus, the rifleman listens for a moment and then stands up. "Man!" he exclaims, scraping mud from his caked body. "This just must be the worst place...
Remarkable Transformation. Two of the passports, both Uruguayan, show a jowly, balding man with heavy tortoise-shell glasses and a fringe of grey around his temples-not at all like the dashing, bearded Che of old. Then from the film came pictures of the same man in the guerrilla jungle camps. Gradually, in sequential frames of the film, a transformation occurs. He abandons the glasses, dons a rakish cap, sprouts a beard. Over a period of weeks he begins to look remarkably like Che when he came out of Cuba's Sierra Maestra with Castro...
...artillery. "We usually get a few rounds in the early morning as a sort of reveille," says Gio Linh Camp Commander Major Richard Froncek. "Then we will get a few rounds at noon and then more at sunset." The North Vietnamese seldom shell at night, presumably because they do not want to give away their positions with muzzle flashes. Much of the life of the 480 men manning Gio Linh is lived below ground in heavily sandbagged bunkers supported by thick wooden beams that can take all but a direct hit. In summer, when the temperature reaches...
...time-so that there will never be too many men in the same place in the event of a direct hit. No one ventures above ground without his flak jacket and helmet, although most Marines carry their helmets and go bareheaded in order to hear incoming shells better. The first warning is the boom of the gun across the Ben Hai River separating the two Viet Nams. Then comes the quavering whistle of the shell tearing through the air, followed quickly by the final sharp bang of its explosion on impact. The whole process takes about eight seconds, giving...
Balconies Too. The idea was to make the whole thing look like a South Sea archipelago. In February 1965, a consortium of oil companies (Texaco, Humble, Union, Mobil and Shell) went to work hauling in rock and sand fill to build four ten-acre islands. Palm trees as tall as 60 feet were transplanted from Santa Barbara and San Diego, and architects were put to work sketching terra-cotta and steel shells for the oil rigs, designed to look like handsome balconied apartment buildings and soundproofed to keep the drilling noise from echoing across...