Word: defect
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...kill 100,000 people and to feel no pain at having done so may be dangerous to those who did the killing. It hints at an impaired humanity, a defect like a gate through which other deaths may enter, deaths no one had counted on. The unquiet dead have many ways of haunting -- particularly in the Middle East, which has been accumulating the grievances of the dead for thousands of years...
...regard holding on to Kuwait as a cause worth dying for. They were starved, thirsty, often sick -- medical care was atrocious to nonexistent -- and some had been terrorized by their own commanders, who employed roving execution squads to shoot or hang troopers who had attempted to desert or defect. That barbaric method of keeping discipline backfired: soldiers gave themselves up as soon as the guns pointing at them were American, British or Arab...
...EPWs have told interrogators that their company commanders were held directly accountable for desertions and that all troops were forced to sign an oath promising not to defect. Some EPWs told of seeing fellow soldiers hanged by loyalist execution squads and left suspended as a warning to would-be runaways...
...some U.S. school districts are trying a businesslike solution: warranties. For periods of one to three years, 68 schools in Prince George's County, Md.; Plymouth-Carver, Mass.; St. Joseph, Mo.; Montrose County, Colo.; Harlem, Ill.; and dozens of other districts guarantee defect-free graduates to prospective employers. These small districts may soon be joined by the nation's largest, New York City, where schools chancellor Joseph Fernandez has proposed a pilot program starting as early as this fall...
...Iraqi frontline troops, those in Khafji fought tenaciously, prolonging the battle for hours after the Saudis announced they had retaken the town. One column of tanks approached the Saudi border with their guns pointing backward, which allied forces took as a sign that the troops manning them wanted to defect; instead the Iraqis swiveled their turrets around rapidly and opened fire. There was a bitter possibility that the very first Americans known to have died in combat in the gulf, the 11 Marines, were killed by misguided missiles from U.S. warplanes rather than by Iraqi fire. An investigative team...