Word: cu
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During the war, Colonel Thanh commanded four film-projection squads charged with showing movies to guerrillas living in the underground tunnels that crisscrossed the Cu Chi district of Vietnam. The motion-picture units were considered indispensable to the liberation effort, apparently because all war and no play made Charlie a very crabby combatant. Indeed, troops would sometimes demand to see a movie before they would consent to fight. Had the U.S. command known this, of course, it could have significantly altered the course of the war by buying up all the projectors carried by Saigon electronics stores, which was where...
Showtime in the Cu Chi tunnelplex was usually around 7 p.m. Thanh's projection crew would wrap up their daytime activities (foraging, digging, shooting at helicopters, etc.), descend underground and prepare for the evening's unspooling. Shortly thereafter, the audience, bubbling with anticipation, would arrive through the various connecting tunnels. On movie night, the entire population of a small hamlet would simply vanish underground. Up to 100 guerrillas and their families would cram into the dank screening chamber, taking pains not to sit on any poisonous vipers. (The moviegoers would try to ignore the rats, which were tolerated...
Meanwhile, on nearby American fire bases, the night shift was usually cranking up for another round of mayhem. Since Cu Chi was a "free strike" zone, local U.S. commanders didn't really feel they were doing their job if they weren't chewing up the countryside more or less nonstop. Consequently, as the sun dipped below the horizon, artillery shells would whistle down through the jungle canopy and throw up enormous red sprays of laterite-clay clods...
Literature and Arts C-20, "The Hero of Irish Myth and Saga," is where to go for all the juicy details about the lives of Lug, Medb, Cu Chulainn and the rest of the kings, queens, conquerors and gods in the Celtic oral tradition...
...love the whole tall tale aspect," says Haig. "I mean, the homework is reading about Cu Chulainn taking on all of Irish civilization while his fellow Ulstermen are asleep. It's never a hardship...