Word: commandant
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Hannifin was granted access to the North American Air Defense Command in Colorado Springs, Colo., where he monitored NORAD'S worldwide and deep-space observation systems. Another major stop for him was "Pentagon-South," the Army Materiel Command in Arlington, Va., where Army engineers develop and test new hardware...
...heart of the Pentagon, a heavy oaken door leads to the supersecret National Military Command Center. No one gets through the door without presenting a color-coded Joint Chiefs of Staff identification badge, which armed guards scrutinize under ultraviolet light. In one section of the two-story center, shifts of officers and men from all four of the armed services maintain a round-the-clock vigil. A red telephone links them directly to the White House; a beige phone can instantly reach any U.S. military commander anywhere in the world. Mounted on one wall are half a dozen computer...
...stories was no different from stitching leather to make shoes. His real career, he maintained, was in the post office, where he worked for 33 years, rising from clerk to executive. (It was Trollope who introduced the street-corner mailbox.) Indeed, his failure finally to become the second in command, the highest post he could hope to achieve, was more galling to him than the barbs of all the literary critics in London...
When the German settlement rebuffs the French attack and threatens retaliation, this fragile social fabric disintegrates amid bluster, cowardice, hoarding and panic. Only one man keeps his head: a quiet, boyish geographer (Jacques Spiesser) who reveals an unsuspected flair for command. He supersedes the decent but feckless resident sergeant (Jean Carmet) and brilliantly mobilizes the local garrison...
...leader of this party is a gentle spirit, dignified and impractical. To him there is nothing ridiculous in the sight of his men toiling along treacherous trails, weighted down by armor, struggling to transport an entirely useless cannon. He has brought his wife with him and his second in command's daughter. What begins as an obviously dangerous journey soon turns into a manifestly self-destructive one. The rafts built to navigate the river are inadequate to its currents. And then, of course, there are the Indians, always in the shadows, picking off stragglers. But the worst danger derives...