Word: antiaircraft
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Hurtling along near the speed of sound in dead of night, at times under intense antiaircraft fire, how could pilots of the F-111 fighter bombers plant so many of their bombs on or near targets as small and discrete as a single building or a row of planes? By high-tech wizardry that makes a real-life bombing run seem almost as simple as a video game...
They saw the graceful parabolas of orange tracer bullets against the blackness of the sky. They heard the scream of jet fighters and the thunder of antiaircraft fire. They felt their hotel shiver in response to the bombs' pounding. But many of the U.S. reporters clustered in Al Kabir Hotel in downtown Tripoli were not quite sure what was actually going on. Like the people in Plato's parable of the cave who can discern reality only from the shadows that a fire throws on the wall, the correspondents could only make informed guesses as to what was happening...
...strike that leaped live right out of the nightly news. At the precise moment that the three networks began airing their evening newscasts last Monday, U.S. attack planes were roaring toward their five Libyan targets. Out of the black Mediterranean night they came, racing through orange cones of frantic antiaircraft fire to punish the man Ronald Reagan calls the "mad dog of the Middle East." As Americans, transfixed at their television sets, listened to the muffled rattle and thump of the assault filtering over the phone lines of network correspondents holed up in a Tripoli hotel, the U.S. attackers delivered...
Reporters also saw heavy damage to the academy's indoor swimming pool. There was no visible evidence of any permanent artillery or antiaircraft defenses around the academy, which covered an area the size of about three football fields near the beach...
Even a clash with Gaddafi's Soviet allies, though it seems highly unlikely, cannot be ruled out. Soviet technicians prudently managed to be elsewhere when American missiles hit antiaircraft radars three weeks ago, but there is a possibility that some might be killed in a new strike. The Soviets, however, appeared to be as perplexed as everyone else about what might happen and what, if anything, they ought to do. "There have been no guarantees concerning action or nonaction on the part of the Soviet Union," said Valery Sukhin, a Foreign Ministry spokesman, at week's end. Georgi Arbatov...