Word: valleyful
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With 40 other soldiers and their 80-lb. rucksacks crammed into the rear of a Chinook helicopter--a space designed for 33--Randel Perez barely had room to breathe. As they thundered through the darkness toward the Shah-i-Kot Valley in eastern Afghanistan, the dim cabin lights cast pink and purple shadows on Perez and his fellow infantrymen from the U.S. Army's 10th Mountain Division. Some chattered about the fight to come, while others managed to catch a last-minute nap. Perez was far away, hugging a baby he had never met. It was early March...
...helicopter dropped into the southern end of the steep-sided valley, its rear ramp opening as it drew closer to the snow-patched ground. Perez knew that he had to let go of the baby. "I had to zone him out," he says. "The mission became the only thing on my mind." That's Perez--plainspoken and shaven-headed, a fireplug who wanted so badly to lead troops in combat that he had bailed out of the Army supply corps two years earlier and joined the frontline infantry. Before this day was over, he'd lead more troops through more...
...Army, in its biggest assignment of the war, was sending in 1,411 men to seal off the valley while its Afghan allies tracked down the enemy and destroyed what was thought to be the last al-Qaeda and Taliban stronghold in Afghanistan. But this time, unlike the fight nearly three months before in Tora Bora, Americans would not rely on Afghans to supply the combat troops. Perez and most of the other members of Task Force Rakkasan had flown in from the Soviet-era air base at Bagram, an hour away. Intelligence reports at the base, just outside Kabul...
Perez's army career wasn't supposed to turn out like this. A child of Texas' Rio Grande Valley and the grandson of four Mexican immigrants, Perez had seen a stint in the Army--safely in the rear--as his ticket to college. When he enlisted in 1991, his father Ramiro had a warning for the recruiter: "If he ends up in the infantry," he said, only half-joking, "I'll break your legs." So Perez became a supply soldier, responsible for making sure the men on the front lines got their beans, bullets and boots...
...Nuti, 38, recently left the networking giant to become president of Symbol Technologies, the world's largest maker of bar-code scanners, based on Long Island, New York. Nuti likes Symbol's growth potential and will no longer have to commute from his Long Island home to Silicon Valley...