Word: commands
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...boots popped to attention, McKeon gazed coldly around and snapped: "Fall out in two minutes." The men-mostly 17-and 18-year-olds-grabbed for their caps and fatigue jackets, scrambled for the door, formed outside the barracks. Lean, usually soft-spoken Matt McKeon, 31, rapped out a crisp command and, using a broomstick for support on his lame side, hobbled off briskly into the moonless South Carolina night. The 74 boots of Platoon 71 followed him toward the salt tidal marshes of Parris Island, where death was waiting...
...rest of the battalion withdraws. In the fluid state of the front, this means only one thing, that the hapless platoon will soon be a cork abob in a sea of Russians. The platoon has small faith in its chances, but believes mesmerically in Corporal Steiner, who has assumed command from his wounded sergeant. Steiner is one of those incurably homeless men to whom gunpowder is oxygen, and war is a kind of inner peace. A maverick with a tongue like barbed wire, he is sloppy, insolent and broody, but a soldier's soldier when it counts...
Steiner's platoon is a batch of human putty. Among them are: trusty, pipe-smoking Schnurrbart, a born second-in-command; Dietz, a mamma's boy with the puppy-dog look; Dorn, an overage misclassified philosophy professor; Kern, a blowhard rookie; and Zoll, a pornography-minded tub of lard. "Anyone who gives out is going to be left behind," Steiner warns them. When their rations give out, Steiner tells them to eat tree bark, but he also shares the last of his own rations. When Dietz is critically wounded in a night skirmish, it is Steiner who holds...
...automatic controls were shut off, and the reactor was made to surge without them. A technician stood ready at the manually operated controls, waiting for a command from the scientist in charge. Deep under its shield the core grew hotter and hotter, its temperature rising toward the danger point. The scientist, watching the instruments, told the technician to shut the reactor off instantly, but his order was misunderstood; the technician used control devices that were too slow. Before they could take effect the core had partially melted. Instruments warned of radiation danger, the alarm was given, and the building...
...came up with an interesting suggestion--lectures given as a dialectic between two professors with a student question period. Through this balance of opposite views a social science, or possibly, a humanities course could present all the facts necessary for an "objective" approach, yet in a form which would command more than stenographic attention, compelling students to become fully aware of the issues at hand...