Word: point-blank
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...they built tower dwellings resembling the Italian campanile, and the status symbol of the day was to have the highest tower. It was also a key vantage point from which to rain down rocks on an enemy neighbor's marble roof. As soon as one member of a family was killed, clan warfare was declared, with the towers as citadels. When gunpowder was introduced, cannon fired away at point-blank range across the narrow streets, and not a move could be made by day without a fusillade of gunshots. Food and ammunition were smuggled into the towers by night...
...troops were almost constantly exposed. Cannon and shells were hauled by hand to summits where only the native goats were at home, and since the Montenegrin army had no stretcher bearers, the casualties often simply crawled off to die. The troops were spectacularly brave, attacking with gusto at point-blank range and accepting decimation with stoicism bordering on indifference. Before one attack, volunteers rushed forward to blow the Turkish wire with bombs. Gary saw them advance, old men who had volunteered because they felt that it did not matter if they were killed. Half of them were, but the survivors...
Mounting a photographer's chair to get closer to the Prime Minister, the stranger spoke, and Verwoerd turned to shake the hand of a presumed greeter. Instead he stared at the point-blank muzzle of a .32 automatic. Pratt fired twice, and South Africa's Prime Minister lay on the concrete aisle, blood spurting from two holes in his cheek and ear. His wife flung her arms around him, crying "What's happened? What's happened?" Then she fainted. Verwoerd's personal bodyguard, Major Carl Richter. was a few feet away when, belatedly, he realized...
...only the Private Eyes themselves are dry-cleaned. In a TV production, violence becomes strangely stylized; the corpse may have been plugged by a .45 at point-blank range, but there is only a neat hole in the otherwise unsullied forehead. The back of the skull is intact; there are no brains on the rug. In some of these spruced-up shooting matches, the Eyes carry .38s, each with a short sleeve welded inside the barrel so that real bullets cannot be fired. The blanks the pistols accommodate cost only a dime apiece. For scenes when the audience actually sees...
...Safety. As the Dalai Lama and his escort fled by night and hid by day in lamaseries, villages and Khamba encampments, the furious Red Chinese boasted that they had put down the three-day revolt in Lhasa that had served to cover the God-King's escape. Point-blank artillery fire drove diehard lamas from the Norbulingka, summer palace on the city's outskirts. Red infantrymen surged into the vast warrens of the Potala winter palace, rounded up defiant monks in narrow passages and dark rooms where flickering butter lamps made Tibet's grotesque gods and demons...