The latest wave of 14, announced by U.S. Central Command on Thursday morning, struck 19 buildings, two command posts, three fighting positions, three sniper positions, one staging location and one heavy machine gun, U.S. military officials said.
And only the one heavy machine gun.
Once committed, the Australians realised that they had struck at least a company from D445 Battalion with elements of a heavy weapons company, possibly supported by North Vietnamese reinforcements and at least five machine-guns, one heavy machine-gun and two recoilless rifles.
One heavy-duty machine stamped sheet steel into hollow driver heads; on either side of a different machine, two men used tweezers to insert and remove driver faces into which the machine pressed horizontal grooves.
One DVD showed heavy machine guns, pistols, grenades, satellite phones, walkie-talkies, video-rental cards, an airline itinerary printed from a Hotmail account, and plane tickets — all spread out on the carpet of someone's diwan, or guest room.
Among the most troublesome recent tactics by insurgents is firing on helicopters with heavy machine guns from more than one direction at once, General Simmons said.
"It was a heavy machine gun, one that was designed to be mounted on a vehicle," he says, smiling.
On June 23, an Indonesian naval craft was pushed out of waters claimed by Indonesia after a ship from the Chinese fishery administration -- one of the former warships -- trained a heavy machine gun on the Indonesian boat.
After the bombing of the truck in the Ramadi area in Iraq, an American tank dispatched to the scene sprayed a field of tall grass with heavy machine gunfire, killing no one, for there was no one there to kill.
Soldiers used heavy machine guns and one shoulder-fired rocket, and eventually "precision-guided munitions," which damaged buildings, he said.
He complained about one raid where American soldiers confiscated heavy machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades from a government police station.
