Word: valleyful
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RIDGEWOOD, N.J.—My grandfather built things. In a backyard somewhere in a low California valley, his treehouse subsumes a wimpy oak. The trunk seems to buckle underneath the weight of a wide staircase leading up to the habitable structure. But I imagine that this immemorial fixture of my childhood is now littered with alien toys, the once fresh carpet dank with spilled juice and the glass-paned windows smeared by the hands of gum-smacking children...
...would you define success? What we are trying to do is change the dynamics in the area where we are operating. The current operations that you are hearing about in the Helmand River valley are aimed at areas that are major population centers. They were also areas under Taliban control. They are also a nexus of the poppy trade. So if you describe the Helmand River valley as the breadbasket of the poppy trade and where the Taliban gets a lot of resources and support, what we are trying to do is take the area away from...
...more casualties. Our effort is going to be harder and potentially unsuccessful. So what I am asking them to do is just step back and take a more strategic look and try to put themselves in the position of the Afghan people. (See pictures of Afghanistan's dangerous Korengal valley...
...ages to address Iraq and its satellite wars, and then tended to point fingers at the military. Documentaries said that soldiers were bred to be mindless killers (The Ground Truth) and then discarded when they lost their limbs or their minds (Body of War). Dramatic films like In the Valley of Elah and Redacted said that Iraq was a communicable disease that turned decent guys into psycho killers...
...good in the first major offensive of President Barack Obama's war in Afghanistan. For the past four days, 4,000 U.S. Marines and 650 Afghan soldiers have been fighting their way into the southern reaches of Afghanistan's Helmand River valley, hoping to clear out insurgents there. But other than in one limited area of fierce resistance, the fighting has generally been restricted to small-scale skirmishes in which few Taliban have been killed because most of the insurgents appear to have slipped away - as guerrillas tend to do when confronted by overwhelming firepower. More important to U.S. goals...