Word: desertions
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Ribat Qila is at the point of a triangle where Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan meet. It is a forbidding place, a desert ringed by crimson and black mountains, where laws can be bent or broken for a few rupees, and safe passage across any frontier is easily secured. The men who pass fleetingly through Ribat Qila are smugglers, heroin traffickers, bandits and, lately, al-Qaeda fugitives...
When you've been camped in the Kuwait desert for weeks, even dodging incoming SCUD missiles can become routine. Late Thursday morning air raid sirens blasted the 101st Airborne's Camp Pennsylvania. Seconds later every soldier in camp was wearing a chemical protective mask and scurrying to one of the concrete bunkers scattered around the camp. There they rested, many of them panting after the exertion of a full out sprint in chemical gear, until the all clear siren sounded some fifteen minutes later...
...Around 11 a.m., just over a small rise out of sight from Shorish, another DSHK let loose in long streams for almost a minute. A young Iraqi conscript had attempted to desert and was cut down by his own men. It was the third deserter killed this way since Monday after months of almost free passage for fleeing soldiers. "The ones the other day were torn up and the Iraqis took one of their bodies away in a blanket. This one will not be different," said Sajit...
...Kuwait, U.S. troops made their final preparations. Soldiers of the 101st Airborne Division began lining the bottoms of their vehicles with sandbags - a proven method of surviving a landmine. Inspections of aircraft and ground vehicles intensified; it's 400 miles to Baghdad from their camp in the Kuwaiti desert, and nobody wants to be left behind...
...that it's a space opera with a philosophical bent. Dune tells of the rise to power of Paul Atreides (Alec Newman), a young noble and psychic who is adopted by the Fremen, a nomadic warrior people, as their messiah. The Fremen have been exploited for centuries because their desert planet (Arrakis, or Dune) is the sole source of "spice," a substance that makes hyperspace travel possible, expands consciousness and extends life--it's oil, LSD and Botox all in one. (Spice is an excretion of Dune's giant sandworms, but people ingested weirder stuff for less benefit...