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heel was stinging from the close round—I looked at my boot heel and saw the groove where the round had hit. The Marines in my platoon had identified where the shots were coming from—the outcropping in the rice paddy a few hundred yards away. I called in an artillery strike on the coordinates of that outcropping while the sniper was still taking pot shots at my platoon and keeping us pinned down—I gave our coordinates and the coordinates of the sniper location and asked for a ‘time on target— air burst’ and our artillery support complied—big time. within a couple of minutes we heard the big guns fire in the distance the shells exploded over the target and when the smoke cleared there was no sniper and there was no ‘outcropping’ in the rice paddy! The ‘time on target’ meant that our artillery support battery would fire multiple guns at the same time—the air burst meant that the shells would explode in the air above the target raining shrapnel down on the enemy position like machine gun fire —over the entire area of the target zone—it was a beautiful thing to behold!
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