Word: airport
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...blackened with camouflage paint, their bodies braced for confrontation, they were met and blinded by the glare of television lights. But the farcical aspect of the first live military landing soon faded as the troops fanned out from their beachhead into the anarchic city of Mogadishu. By daylight, the airport was secured, the city port occupied, and for the first time in two years, most of the firepower belonged to friendlies. Though it had barely begun, the U.S. operation had already raised great expectations among Somalis that peace might actually come to a starving land that had been ruled...
...troops face logistic difficulties as well. Given Somalia's / primitive airports, shallow ports and unpaved roads, troops will have to improvise as they go. "This is a classic bring-your-own operation," says one four-star Army logistician. That means supplying their own night lights at the airport, radar systems for air-traffic control, generators -- and then fuel to run them. Logistics managers are sending three times the normal spare parts, worried that sand could be a constant problem...
Case in point: Monrovia, Liberia, where Purvis arrived a month ago on a chartered flight just after rebels started shelling the airport runway to impede Nigerian troops. He spent a scary night holed up in a dilapidated beachfront hotel, he says, "listening to artillery fire mingled with the sound of crashing waves as I filed a story on a laptop computer." On his way out the next day, three Liberian "security" officials detained Purvis in a small room at the airport and shook him down for a $60 bribe. It was pay or stay. "They each got $20, which...
...amphibious task force that was diverted to the Somali coast two weeks ago. They are equipped for action and backed by two dozen Cobra attack helicopters. Somalia has no planes or helicopters in flying condition, so the U.S. will control the air. Once those units take over the airport in the capital of Mogadishu, they will be joined by 16,000 more Marines, 10,000 Army infantry troops and at least 5,000 soldiers from France, Canada and other countries...
Bush could have opted for something less dramatic. The day before Thanksgiving, his advisers gave him three possibilities: expand the U.N. peacekeeping force by adding 3,500 troops to the 500 Pakistanis hunkered down at the Mogadishu airport; provide air and sea support for a U.N. intervention force; or send in a U.S. division under U.N. auspices -- the Pentagon's surprising proposal. Bush went straight for option three, so quickly that the meeting lasted only an hour. "The number of deaths was going up," explains a senior official in Washington, "and the number of people we were reaching was going...