Word: attu
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...Insistently)) Suppose that Mrs. Bush has been kidnapped by a band of Aleut separatist terrorists who are demanding that the island of Attu be towed by a reclamation team under the auspices of the United Nations southward to the San Diego harbor, where the climate is warmer and where the islanders can paddle onshore to catch a movie or a meal at McDonald's. Furthermore, these international criminals say that if their ultimatums are not met within three days, Mrs. Bush, your wife of 47 years, will be set adrift on the Bering Strait in a rubber dinghy with nothing...
Birders have a rough rule of thumb for distinguishing between normal and obsessed watchers: the obsessives dream of going to Attu, a bleak Aleutian island 100 miles from Soviet waters and about 1,500 miles from Anchorage. Attu vaguely resembles a penal colony, but it is paradise to birders pining for a flyby of the Siberian rubythroat or other Asian rarities. "We have people who go without any hope of seeing new birds," says Larry Balch, the ABA's president and head of Attour, a service that brings about 65 birders to the island each spring for three weeks. "There...
...birders," as the devotees call themselves, asking them to call him collect with news of rare species in their regions ("Ask for Birdman"). He hired planes and boats and bushwacked through the woods of northern Minnesota. He flew to Alaska four times and spent 14 days on Attu, a bleak island in the Aleutians, where he saw the green sandpiper. On July 27 he surpassed the previous one-year record by spotting bird No. 658, an American woodcock, near a ditch in Chicago. In early December he flew to Texas in successful pursuit of the white-collared seedeater. That brought...
ELMENDORF Air Force Base, which stretches across 13,400 frosty acres of tundra on the outskirts of Anchorage, is a carryover from the days when Alaska had not yet become an American state and Japanese soldiers were swarming through the fog and cold of Attu and Kiska. Constructed 16 months before Pearl Harbor, Elmendorf was designed to blunt a Japanese thrust at the Aleutians. This week the base was to play a far different role in Japanese-American relations. According to the prepared script, a gleaming Japan Air Lines DC-8 jet swoops down at night for a refueling stop...
World War II changed the pattern. With the construction of big military bases at Dutch Harbor, Kodiak, Fairbanks and Anchorage, Alaska became more than a massive map sprinkled with names full of harsh ks and ts. Americans actually had to stay there. On Attu, they fought the second bloodiest battle of the Pacific war (549 American, 2,350 Japanese dead), and the only one on U.S. soil. Nor did peace close the bases. Because Alaska lay close to Russia, the Arctic shore soon sprouted heavily instrumented DEW line stations...