Word: chinook
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...impressive show of force. Under the cloak of darkness last week, Chinook and Black Hawk choppers dropped an entire battalion of 520 U.S. paratroopers into a remote valley in Afghanistan, just across the border from the rugged mountains of Pakistan, where al-Qaeda has re-established training camps. With dogs barking, cows chewing and a watchful camel resting, the heavily armed U.S. force trudged through irrigated fields and muddy Pashtun villages--cordoning off a 3.5-mile-long area and searching each of 150 residential compounds that dangle off the nosebleed hillsides by the Kakh and Khardala rivers...
With 40 other soldiers and their 80-lb. rucksacks crammed into the rear of a Chinook helicopter--a space designed for 33--Randel Perez barely had room to breathe. As they thundered through the darkness toward the Shah-i-Kot Valley in eastern Afghanistan, the dim cabin lights cast pink and purple shadows on Perez and his fellow infantrymen from the U.S. Army's 10th Mountain Division. Some chattered about the fight to come, while others managed to catch a last-minute nap. Perez was far away, hugging a baby he had never met. It was early March...
...there were other sounds to contend with. No sooner had Perez's Chinook wheeled out of sight than the skies filled with the thunks, thuds and whistles of rocket-propelled grenades, 82-mm mortar rounds and heavy machine-gun bursts. "All hell broke loose," remembers Command Sergeant Major Frank Grippe, who was overseeing the action from a command post some 100 yards away. The U.S. troops returned fire with their short-barreled M-4 assault carbines and M-240 machine guns, but the enemy wasn't giving them much in the way of targets...
...politics could complicate the Lewis and Clark commemoration. In April when 130 tribal delegates gathered in Lewiston, Idaho, under the auspices of the Lewis and Clark council, the tone veered sharply off the official "reconciliation" trail. The group called on the Federal Government to extend legal recognition to the Chinook, Clatsop and Monacan tribes, noting "their pivotal role in the success of the expedition." Recognition brings federal aid as well as sovereignty--and the right to build casinos. Another resolution decried vandalism of sacred sites and plundering of Indian graves as "acts of terrorism," adding that the increase in Lewis...
...would upset you. They were also concerned about the law, in terms of eating animals like grizzly bear, beaver, horse and whale. Worst of all, they certainly weren't going to let me eat dog. The Corps of Discovery reached the Upper Columbia during the run of the fall Chinook and coho salmon. But instead of eating the fish, they bought the local tribes' dogs for butchering. Bill Yallup Jr., a descendant of Lewis and Clark's West Coast host Chief Yellept, says of the explorers' eating habits, "All this wonderful salmon everywhere, and along come Lewis and Clark...