Word: ambushed
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...weeks before Christmas 1967, and some of the guys in Charlie Company were thinking about getting home for the holidays. We had been humping through the woods and the paddies all day, looking for North Vietnamese troops but not finding them. Then, just before dark, we walked into an ambush-a North Vietnamese battalion dug in in an arc around us. By nightfall a fourth of the company was dead or wounded, and we were pinned down, taking mortars and automatic-weapons fire...
Consider the appeal of the events. The grenade throw. The chop, rip and thump. The high dive (out of a 727). The .32-cal. ambush. The hostage relay. The knife in the backstroke. The decapithlon. The duel meet. The cemetery vault...
...Hussein appeared on Amman television to offer condolences in Arabic and English to bereaved Israeli families. The murders, the King declared, were "an abhorrent crime" conceived by "sick minds." Egypt, on the other hand, blamed Bonn for everything. "The commandos and the Israeli hostages were killed in a German ambush, by German bullets and in a U.S. base in Germany," said a government spokesman, ignoring the fact that Fürstenfeldbruck is a German airbase and that the hostages, according to all evidence, died from fire or automatic weapons like the fedayeen Kalashnikovs, rather than the sharpshooters' rifles...
...final decision to stage an ambush was based on the West German conviction that if the terrorists were allowed to fly out with the hostages, they would shoot their prisoners elsewhere. The Arabs had told them that they would shoot them next morning if Israel had not released its prisoners. That was probably indeed the Black September gang's intent-but there is still room for a nagging doubt. The Arabs, after all, had ignored their own ultimatums and let their deadlines go by before -and the hostages were worth more to them alive than dead. Presumably, the terrorists...
...real fault was in the bungled execution of the basic decision. The police operation was badly mismanaged, and that failure was compounded by a lack of zeal in the task. Bavarian police were seemingly determined to carry off the ambush without loss of German life, though they were unsuccessful even in that. "If you want to know what I reproach myself for," Schreiber told a press conference afterward, "it is that I had to sacrifice one of my officers." He added quickly, "And that innocent Israeli athletes died." Such an attitude made a bold operation impossible. There was also...