Word: desertic
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...SHELTERING SKY. Bernardo Bertolucci has made a swank, sexy, bleak and very beautiful film from Paul Bowles' novel of a married couple on an existential quest for romantic catastrophe in North Africa. Debra Winger and John Malkovich powerfully portray the forlorn souls who languish under the desert's pitiless grandeur...
...between Iran and Iraq. Geographically, though, the two places are worlds apart. Senior correspondent James Wilde observed combat scenes for six years in Vietnam, "spending hours floundering around in swamps, up to the waist in water." Says Wilde, who is based in Rome: "Give me the desert anytime." The jungle terrain and guerrilla nature of the war in Southeast Asia made for unconventional fighting, recalls correspondent James Willwerth. During his 14 months in Vietnam, he witnessed ground won in bitter campaigns at great human cost changing hands again and again. By contrast, he says, a war in the gulf area...
That difference would have vital implications for journalists. Chicago bureau chief Gavin Scott, who was based in Saigon in the early 1970s, believes the freedom that reporters had to "go up the road in search of action" will disappear in the sands of the desert. Nor, reporters foresee, will their job be made easier. TIME's bureau chief in Washington, Stanley Cloud, was Saigon bureau chief for more than a year. The Pentagon, he says, learned at least one lesson in Vietnam: "Don't ever again let the press have free rein to cover a war pretty much...
...imponderables range from the nitty and literally gritty (how badly will the fine desert sand foul the gears of tanks and the breeches of rifles?) to the conceptual (could U.S. troops bypass the dug-in Iraqi forces in Kuwait with a flanking attack?). They include questions of psychology: Is the Iraqi army battle hardened from eight years of war against Iran, or battle weary? Would the troops on the front line, many of whom are thought to be ill-trained draftees who know they are cannon fodder, fight hard or give up quickly? For that matter, how battle ready...
...despite all the uncertainty, and on the U.S. side they have been at it since a few days after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait on Aug. 2. Specifics of the plans are military secrets, but enough is known to allow some educated guesses about how a war in the desert would be fought...