Word: trappings
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...down on the beach, with a German division in front of us and only water behind us. We had 7 yds. of beachhead with no cover; the highest thing around was a shale rock. The only way to get off the beach was to blow up a big tank trap that was blocking our way. Finally one of our guys took the trap out with a bangalore torpedo ((a metal tube packed with high explosives)). They sent me to find our commander, Colonel George Taylor, and tell him we'd opened a breach. I stood up and tried...
...passing youth and shouts, "Hey! That's Anthony!" The van slows obligingly, and Krajeski calls out, "Come over here, Anthony." The startled kid climbs aboard. Soon after, two high school sweethearts, draped over each other and oblivious to the world, walk right up to the van -- and into the trap. "We got Romeo and Juliet here," says Krajeski...
...week of Lewis B. Puller Jr. seemed particularly haunting. Puller, the son of the most decorated member of the Marine Corps in its history, served in Vietnam as a Marine combat leader. Both his legs and part of his hands were blown off when he stepped on a booby trap. He lived, and he became an attorney at the Pentagon and a respected veterans activist. Then, in 1992, he won a Pulitzer Prize for his autobiography, Fortunate Son. Yet his life had recently come to seem barren. His marriage of 26 years was dissolving, and he suffered a serious relapse...
Suicide was hardly a concern of Puller's in the summer of 1968. Back then he was trying his hardest to stay alive. Booby traps tormented him and the other soldiers deployed in the coastal region near Danang known as the Riviera. The devices were the spoor, primitive and deadly, of a mostly invisible enemy. Some were as simple as nails slathered with excrement pushed through the bottoms of discarded C-ration cans. But the booby trap Puller stepped on, while in full flight from a squad of advancing North Vietnamese regulars, was made with a howitzer shell. Puller described...
...from the rare. "We're looking for needles in haystacks," observes University of Michigan physicist Myron Campbell, "and to find them, we have to process a haystack every second." During the last experimental run, for instance, a trillion collisions between protons and antiprotons occurred inside CDF's big particle trap. Yet of these, only 16 million were deemed promising enough by the detector's electronic gate-keepers to be worth more detailed analysis. Further winnowing occurred as banks of computers examined myriad measurements associated with each collision, flagging only the most interesting. Out of all this, a dozen candidates...