Word: combatting
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Marine Captain Erik Swenson, speaking here, is the pilot of an F/A-18 Hornet (call sign: "Lumpy"), and he could hardly be more different from a Sarajevo shopkeeper. But he and Ferid Durakovic are intimately linked. Starting last Wednesday morning, Captain Swenson-in his first taste of combat-and dozens of other nato pilots began bombing the Serbs in retaliation for the massacre Durakovic had witnessed. "I saw explosions 30 or 40 miles away," said Swenson. "They seemed to be everywhere, like popcorn going off." What no one thought would ever happen finally...
Last week was one of the most remarkable in the 41-month-old Bosnian struggle. On Monday the Serbs committed their atrocity. Then from Wednesday through Fri day, NATO conducted the largest combat operation in its history, finally pounding the Serbs after endless bluffing. By Friday, a diplomatic breakthrough had occurred, with all parties agreeing to meet in Geneva this week for preliminary peace talks. After years of war and "ethnic cleansing," the brutal dialectic of aggression, retaliation and reconciliation seemed to have been telescoped into a matter of days. There is still a long...
...first battles of a war are fought over territory; the final ones are waged over memory. The lack of recognition of the black Americans who first struggled for the right to train as pilots, then for the right to fly in combat, is one of the saddest lapses in U.S. military history--an important saga missing from most textbooks. Now after decades of struggle, the story of the Tuskegee airmen, and the vicious racism they overcame to become war heroes, will finally reach a wide audience. Starting on Aug. 26, with additional play dates over the following few weeks...
...instructors. Former Detroit Mayor Coleman Young and prominent New York City businessman Percy Sutton were among the 992 African Americans who eventually passed through Tuskegee--only to discover that they were still second-class citizens in the eyes of the military. The Tuskegee units were continually passed over for combat assignments. According to Charles ("Chief") Anderson, who headed the group of African-American civilian flight instructors training the Tuskegee pilots, there were several suicides and daredevil fatalities among the intensely frustrated young flyers. Things began to change when First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt visited Tuskegee in 1941 and, against the advice...
...froze to death in a training exercise in Florida this year. His instructors told him to continue to string a rope in 52-degree water, and he did so until he died. Pentagon statistics show that since 1989 seven soldiers have died in training for every one killed in combat...