Word: camped
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Lipton, had written a poem in the spirit of Ogden Nash; Yarrow set it to music, and a few years later the trio recorded "Puff the Magic Dragon." This children's song, with its fanciful friendship and lilting chorus, would dominate the Top 40 and be sung in summer camp forever after. To the cognoscenti, this was a drug song in pop-music code: Puff, drag-on, "little Jackie Paper." Hipsters began referring to the group as Peyote, Pot & Maryjuana - though Yarrow consistently denied the hallucinogenic connection. He was even more adamant in condemning Paul Shanklin's 2007 anti-Obama...
When Hermogenes Marrero was in Marine boot camp, he recalls being the only recruit who didn't panic during simulated-chemical-warfare drills. "I'd sit there calmly with my gas mask on," Marrero says, "while a lot of other guys got scared and ran away." It was 1969, and Marrero, a New Yorker born in Puerto Rico, was fresh out of high school at the age of 17. But his composure caught the eyes of Marine instructors - and the next year, he says, he was at Camp Garcia on the Puerto Rican island of Vieques, helping guard...
...Marrero says his job at Camp Garcia from 1970 to 1972 often entailed helping Navy officers test hazardous airborne chemicals on animals like goats. Many of the canisters he handled, he says, were labeled "112" for Project 112, a top-secret Cold War U.S. military program conducted between 1962 and 1973 that involved experiments with chemical and biological weapons. Project 112's records were finally declassified at the start of this decade, but the Pentagon as yet does not acknowledge a link between the chemical tests and the spate of illnesses suffered since then by servicemen like Marrero...
...Navy's half-century on Vieques was a controversial chapter in U.S. military history. Protests erupted after a stray bomb fired during a Navy training exercise killed a local security guard in 1999; a few years later, the Navy closed Camp Garcia and left for good in 2003. By then it was already conceding things it had long denied - such as its use of toxic materials like Agent Orange and depleted uranium. It also admitted that on at least one occasion, during a chemical-warfare drill in 1969 for a project called SHAD - for Shipboard Hazard & Defense, which was part...
...Marrero, meanwhile, says he spends much of his time today volunteering to help Iraq war veterans apply for their own benefits. "One of my jobs at Camp Garcia was to gauge the wind direction during those tests," he says. "If the wind ever shifted toward the population, I'd shout, 'Cease fire!' " See pictures of the effects of global warming...