Word: concertinaing
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...people who want him now were not there when he needed them. Born in Puerto Rico, the second of eight brothers, he was raised in a Manhattan slum after his father gave up farming to find a job in New York City. Jose learned to play the concertina at six and the guitar at nine. The advent of rock 'n' roll in the 1950s inspired him to try singing, too. At 17, he began plying the coffee-house circuit from Greenwich Village to Chicago's Old Town, combining folk music with rock, standards and novelties...
...home was a palm-frond shack in Ba The, a tiny Mekong Delta village 25 miles from the nearest U.S. settlement. Carrying all his worldly possessions in a wheat sack, Gitelson traveled the back canals of the Delta in sandals and faded Levi's, entertaining peasants with his concertina and instructing them in the modern farming methods he had picked up as an honor student at the University of California at Davis. The peasants called him My Ngheo-the poor American...
...shoulder to shoulder in their trenches, bunkers and fighting holes all around the half-mile-wide perimeter. Everything in Khe Sanh is dug in, even the trucks: when not rolling they are parked radiator-deep in inclines bulldozed into the red clay. A morning inspection of the rolls of concertina wire circling the camp is mandatory: one night a squad of North Vietnamese crept up, neatly cut a passage through for future use, and replaced it to look as though nothing had been disturbed. Each day, as they wait, the Marines dig in deeper, filling shiny grey sandbags and adding...
...helicopters and jets taking off and landing at Ton San Nhut, only a ten-minute walk from the International Voluntary Services house. During the day I tried to get to know Saigon and imagine what it might look like without its oppressive cocoon of sandbags, barricades, rolls of concertina wire and black exhaust soot (military traffic has created so much air pollution that I wonder why the VC don't wrap their weapons in oil cloth and sit tight for two or three years while emphysema kills off all the city people in Vietnam--a new aspect...
...wartime present in Loc Ninh was embodied in four understrength Vietnamese irregular force companies and an American Special Forces unit, both of which were assigned to guard the town's airstrip and the district sub-sector headquarters, a rambling set of old French buildings and bunkers ringed by concertina wire and crowned by an improbable, rickety observation tower. Down the airstrip from the headquarters (see map) was an only slightly more substantial, diamond-shaped Special Forces camp, its walls made of logs and earthworks like something out of the old American West. To the Viet Cong's main...