Word: boote
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After two months of basic training that is similar to U.S. boot camp, the draftees join their assigned active units. They have already received extensive paramilitary preparation. Before draft age, all Soviet males are given 140 hours of military training at school or work. The armed services, moreover, sponsor voluntary organizations whose activities have military application. Among them are sports clubs that specialize in marksmanship, grenade throwing, navigating and parachuting...
Readers inclined toward traveling heroes may recall the passage in Evelyn Waugh's Scoop where Correspondent William Boot outfits himself for assignment in barbarous Ishmaelia: his kit included a "rather overfurnished tent, three months' rations, a collapsible canoe, a jointed flagstaff and Union Jack, a hand pump and sterilizing plant, an astrolabe, six suits of tropical linen and a sou'wester, a camp operating table and set of surgical instruments, a portable humidor, guaranteed to preserve cigars in condition in the Red Sea, and a Christmas hamper complete with Santa Claus costume and a tripod mistletoe stand...
...reduce them to pathetic, easy-to-manage shells, weak, rattling bags of bones, soft, flabby masses of obedient matter. An the care always amounted to total fear and control. One of the guards explains that "Fear kept them in line...Keep them looking over their shoulder for that boot and they don't think of much mischief. That was treatment...
...commanding officer who enjoys walking upright in the steel rain. Mowat is lucky: a burst aimed at his back is deflected by a knapsack full of canned bully beef; shells land where he has just been or where he has been delayed in going; a searing fragment cuts his boot in half but leaves him barely scratched...
Three of the seven screws installed to repair the ankle have been removed, but the rest conduct cold, and he must use a heated boot. Nonetheless, he is now skiing as well as ever. Says Marolt: "Even I didn't think it was really, truly possible, but he's done it." Mahre fought back to peak form by the painful expedient of refusing to limp. "If you let yourself limp, it gets to be a habit. If you don't limp, then you won't favor your leg. So I just told myself that no matter how much...