Word: commandant
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...first to step on the moon. He had returned to civilian life, and the Nixon Administration, mired in the Vietnam War, did not want a commissioned officer "militarizing" space. Second, his reticent manner was considered ideal for coping with the demands of celebrityhood. Third, and most practical, as mission commander he was physically closer to the hatch of the Eagle and had to be the first out. Since Armstrong was assigned to handle the camera, most of the pictures from that famous mission are of Aldrin, with Armstrong seen only as a reflection on the colonel's helmet. With Michael...
...Order you to shoot?" As a crowd of 20,000 of his countrymen implored him to "Open the gate!" on that chaotic Thursday evening, Harald Jager, head of passport control at the Berlin Wall's Bornholmer Strasse checkpoint, kept shouting that rhetorical question at the guards under his command. It was nearly 11 p.m., four hours since Jager heard the stunning news on TV: the East German Politburo, responding to weeks of peaceful demonstrations and a flood of refugees fleeing through Hungary and Czechoslovakia, had announced that all citizens could leave East Germany at any crossing "immediately." Suddenly Jager...
...officials to go over the final preparations for the opening phase of Operation Iraqi Freedom. The next morning, hours before the deadline for Saddam's departure ran out, Bush held a videoconference in the White House Situation Room with members of his war council, as well as U.S. Central Command Chief Army General Tommy Franks and the top commanders in the region...
...forces, which were gearing up to begin their invasion on Friday. With each missile alert, frontline soldiers were forced to retreat to their bunkers and don full-protection biochem suits, only to hear minutes later that the bombs had landed in the desert or the gulf. Even commanders in Kuwait held videoconferences with Franks while wearing their gas masks. The haphazard nature of Iraq's response convinced Pentagon officials that the U.S. strike had succeeded in creating a power vacuum inside the Iraqi military command, cutting links between Baghdad and its forces in the field. But the possibility that those...
...assault was stunning as much for its apparent precision as for its violence. Military experts say the Pentagon is concentrating on effects-based bombings. In previous wars, the U.S. military has tried to take out command-and-control facilities by destroying every power station in a given area, but precision-guided technology allows U.S. warplanes to pinpoint the power plants that serve Saddam and his aides and spare the rest. Indeed, even while Saddam's palaces came under a ferocious barrage, the lights stayed on in Baghdad...