Word: infantrymen
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...might be--bases for terrorists or suppliers of unconventional arms, and then sticks around until certain they aren't. Even without new missions, the armed services are straining to handle the ones they have. The U.S. military proved in its 21-day march to Baghdad that its infantrymen, tankers and artillerymen can be brilliantly efficient when called upon to conquer a country. But America lacks the cleanup crews--the military police, the civil-affairs experts, the engineering units and all the other street-by-street peacekeepers--needed to occupy whole countries for months if not years, particularly if gratitude...
...five-ton truck rattles to a stop on a dirt road just before dawn, Lieut. Jason Lojka snaps his squad to attention. "Dirty!" he barks to the men loaded in the back of the vehicle. "Boots!" they reply. Again. "Dirty!" "Boots!" The infantrymen barrel out of the truck toward a two-story home perched on the edge of a sandy bluff overlooking the Tigris, some 10 miles north of the city of Tikrit. They reach the compound's metal gate, M-16s locked and loaded. A translator bangs on the door. When an old woman opens up, the troops sweep...
...samba in McCoy's head is overtaken by a different beat--the whump of an artillery round. Suddenly, the courtyard where the infantrymen have assembled to make the charge across the bridge is black with raining oil and shrapnel and smoke. Marines are shouting, hitting the ground, running for cover. The round has slammed into an amphibious assault vehicle just five feet away from me, landing between the gunner's turret and the driver's hatch. Marines pull injured buddies away from the smoking wreck. Blood mixes with oil on the vehicle's metal ramp. They cover bodies...
...Americans' flanks with guerrilla strikes on convoys or suicide bomb attacks. In this atmosphere every civilian is suspect, and the longer the conflict lasts and the more innocents that are sacrificed, the less welcome the Americans may be. The recent suicide bombing, in which four 3rd Infantrymen were killed, swiftly followed by the 3rd Infantry Division's killing of seven women and children at a checkpoint, was the perfect one-two for Saddam Hussein's desperate endgame...
...have been the most unusual directive of Gulf War II. "Soldiers of 2nd Battalion," ordered Lieut. Colonel Chris Hughes. "Smile!" With that, infantrymen of the 101st Airborne Division, armed to the teeth, began flashing their choppers at a crowd that had grown restless as the soldiers approached the mosque at the Tomb of Ali in Najaf, one of Shi'ite Islam's holiest sites. The tactic helped win over a crowd that had more questions than answers. Were the soldiers going to storm the mosque, as some agitators were shouting? Were they liberators? Or conquerors? Were they really going...