Word: bitter
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...closed doors. After six years with a born-again evangelical in the White House and the G.O.P. dominant on Capitol Hill and spreading through the judiciary, the religious voters who believed they exalted these leaders for a purpose had reason to believe they'd been betrayed. It was a bitter irony to see the bookstores filling with accounts of the rise of a new American Theocracy: what many conservative Christians saw was that the boardroom, not the sanctuary, was Republican hallowed ground. When their interests clashed with the G.O.P. business wing, the money talked: concerns about persecution of Christians...
...call came in the middle of the night: Captains, lieutenants, the camp chaplain, all the senior officers were summoned to a meeting with Colonel Mike Howard, commander of forward operating base Naray, in Kunar Province, eastern Afghanistan. Captain Todd Polk, stumbling from his tent in the bitter mountain cold, knew it was going to be bad news. "I thought it was going to be a major problem," he says. "Maybe another 9/11." While the subject of the meeting was nothing like the 2001 terrorist attacks, for the soldiers of the 3rd Squadron, 71st Calvary unit of the 10th Mountain Division...
...final days of May 8 and 9 are marked as a moment of time of remembrance and reconciliation, as proclaimed by the U.N. General Assembly in November 2004. For Russia, May 9 remains the Victory Day - this country's only meaningful national holiday, its most sacred and bitter anniversary and the one most cynically abused by the authorities in pursuit of their own aims...
...most bitter because Soviet policies had strengthened Hitler in the first place, allowing him to grab lands that were liberated only after four years of desperate combat, which cost the lives of some 27 million Soviet citizens. Historians still argue why the first months of war proved so disastrous to Soviet forces and how they recovered to strike back. The answer is that not many were all that eager to fight for the Stalin dictatorship, as the Germans invaded. But the horror and terror of Nazism, unleashed on the conquered territories, forced the people to fight back for survival...
...because Stalin and Hitler had carved up that country in 1939. A real tragedy of the war was that Soviet soldiers "boldly entered foreign capitals and came back to their own one in fear," to quote the Nobel Prize Winner poet Josef Brodsky. They destroyed Nazism, but, in a bitter twist of history, their heroism in defense of the Motherland also shored up another despicable tyranny. And having liberated the countries of Eastern Europe, they installed a new occupation...