Word: shrapnel
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Davis was a brilliant descriptive reporter with a breezy, intimate flow of language and a sensual precision of phrase. Bullets whirred past him like "rustling silk," shrapnel made "the jarring sound of telephone wires when someone strikes the pole." Politically he was naive and jingoistic. Personally he was humane and brave. Some regarded him as an unconscionable prig-"a robust flower of American muscular Christianity . . . the artistic boy scout," William Rothenstein called...
...wallpaper salesman in Buffalo, Spahn was just ripening in the minors when he went into the Army in 1942. A combat engineer, Spahn won a battlefield commission and was wounded by shrapnel in the action to repair the Remagen bridge for the first troops to cross the Rhine. Spahn shrugs off both the wound ("It was only a scratch in the foot'') and the promotion ("I got it only because all our officers were killed...
Suddenly, the Oldsmobile disintegrated into a thousand shreds of shrapnel, a blinding ball of flame, and a column of smoke 1,000 feet tall. Betancourt's car was hurled onto the center grass strip, and burst into flames. The President and his Minister managed to push open the left rear door and pull Mrs. Henriquez to safety. Badly burned, Chauffeur Valero and a presidential aide, Colonel Ramón Armas Peréz, tumbled out of the front seat...
...doctor friend who rushed him to the fourth floor, treated him for first-degree burns on his hands and face. The President's hair and eyebrows were singed, but otherwise he was unhurt. Henriquez, too, had first-degree burns. But Colonel Armas, his face completely smashed by flying shrapnel, died almost immediately upon arrival at a first-aid station. A bystander was killed by shrapnel from the explosion...
...firing at us," he shouted into the intercom. Lieut. Commander Donald Mayer, 35, barked a fireback order. But cross-conversation blocked the intercom, and the command came too late. Communist armor-piercing bullets ripped up the Mercator's two 20-mm. tail guns, riddled Corder with 40 shrapnel wounds, set his flight suit ablaze...