Topic: Scary Stuff
I was sitting in a friend's house watching High Fidelity when we heard a loud thud. My buddy said, "Wow, that seemed pretty close." About thirty seconds later we heard a much, much louder thud that shook the windows of his house. A rocket had landed perhaps 100 yards from where we were sitting.

Everyone in the house quickly jumped up and made a dash for the bathroom, which is considered to be the safest room in the house. As we sat there huddled around the radio waiting for instructions explaining what we should do next, we listened to the security officers try to figure out what had happened. Information was coming in from lots of different sources, but it took perhaps five minutes for someone to finally make an accurate assessment of what had happened.

Late fall, rocket and mortar attacks against the Green Zone were a daily occurrence. Now they happen perhaps one time per week. The attacks are very ineffective, largely because the bad guys have to take quick shots and then run away before the Americans arrive with their heavy firepower. The bad guys even have to hide their rocket launchers in trash cans, donkey carts, and other unsuspecting locations in an effort to get the launchers close enough that the rockets and mortars are within effective range of the Green Zone.