Word: ambusher
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...cool in the police car, and the cops, although jittery, relax when they see that their passenger is unarmed. They have their own stories to tell, of new ambush attacks, and of strong desires for shotguns to repel something they call the Black Liberation Army. But after they listen to their passenger's story, there is a quiet in the car, and there is no further attempt to educate the new Rip Van Winkle. There is no attempt to go to the station. Rip is, suddenly, a free man all over again, and stuttering, he tries to find praise...
...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...
...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...