Word: battalion
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Less publicized was the Kfar Kassen massacre in 1956, which was carried out by regular army troops. The commander of a battalion along the Israeli-Jordanian border ordered the commander of a Frontier Guard unit to impose a strict curfew from 5 p.m. to 6 a.m. on several villages. Anyone leaving his home or trying to enter the village during that time was to be shot. The curfew was announced at 4:30, leaving little time to warn the populace. In particular, many villagers worked outside the village, and there was no way to inform them of the new security...
Spiritual Center. No one is more outspoken on the subject than Joseba Elosegi, a former captain in the Basque army. His machine-gun company from the Saseta Battalion was recuperating in Guernica when the bombers came. "Guernica's significance does not lie in its stones," he says. "You can change those. What you cannot change is its legend, its face as a spiritual center for the Basques...
...paymaster's office at Mechernich Airbase near Bonn, Air Force Master Sergeant Siegfried Schmidt, 33, kept track of fiscal affairs for a Luftwaffe supply battalion. A bright, conscientious bookkeeper, he logged the pay for the unit's 125 soldiers, noting promotions, with their commensurate pay increases, Christmas bonuses and, when the recruits' 15-month tours were up, their release pay. Each week Schmidt went to the bank to draw the pay for all the soldiers on the base and duly disbursed the cash...
...from his vacations in Austria and Italy. One day, after a routine check uncovered a $125 error in one of his books, a tense Schmidt tooled off to the nearest police station. There he told an incredible story: he had invented thousands of phony troops, put them on the battalion's books, and then drawn their very real pay-some $500,000. Since he had logged in his first "recruits," many of whose names Schmidt picked out of the phone book, he had processed roughly 5,000 imaginary "soldiers," scattering them through several outfits so as to avoid detection...
...patrol of the crack "General Somoza" battalion surrounded the village of Varilla in Nicaragua's Zelaya province. With the troops were several jueces de mesta (police magistrates). The official charge that brought them there: five of Varilla's campesino families had aided antigovernment guerrillas. The soldiers shot, bayoneted or strangled four men, eleven women and 29 children. After dumping the bodies in an unmarked pit, the magistrates divided the villagers' land among themselves...