Word: dune
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...DUNE FORCE Spend enough time in Wadi Rum, a desolate and spellbinding valley of rocks and rolling sands stretching 130 kilometers through the southern desert, and you're bound to come across the Desert Police?Jordan's sandblasted law enforcers. Dressed in ceremonial khaki galabias and armed with silver-sheathed knives and Smith & Wesson guns, their camelback patrols are often regarded as little more than an example of Jordan's p.r. machine cranked into full effect. True, on a day-to-day basis, rescuing lost tourists is their primary duty, and most desert policemen are more than happy to pose...
When British explorer Wilfred Thesiger traveled through Oman in the 1950s, he did it the hard way: an arduous crossing by camel of the sand-dune seas of the Empty Quarter, the Arabian peninsula's desolate interior. Parched, starved, waylaid by tribesmen and imprisoned by local sheiks, he barely survived. Fortunately, today's traveler needn't be as tough or determined as Thesiger; regular flights now make the hop over the Empty Quarter...
...figures throughout the exhibition are not naked—they wear explorers’ garments, World War I leather pilots’ helmets and goggles—another print shows an unclothed man, only his waist wrapped in a small cloth, lying lifelessly on a sparsely vegetated dune. He is surrounded by five wolves, but their relation to him seems maternal and loving rather than violent. The wolves and the intense white of the sand and sky suggest a snow-covered, winter quality. The barrenness of the nature and the bareness of the central figure establish an intensely somber...
...Pentagon denies the Taliban's reports, but there were certainly other hazards. Returning from its mission and attempting to land in pitch blackness, one Black Hawk helicopter got caught on a sand dune near the Dalbandin runway, lost its balance and flopped over, killing two crew members and injuring three others, according to a Pakistani witness. American servicemen who returned safely to Dalbandin were so jittery that they refused to brief Pakistani military officers unless the officers removed their gun holsters before approaching the helicopters. Elsewhere in Afghanistan, bands of U.S. troops continued their covert search-and-destroy missions...
...Then, protected by Kevlar body armor, they will fast-rope to the ground, bending under the weight of night-sighted M-4 carbines and grenade launchers, carrying radios and handheld global-positioning gear. Some of the teams will feature snipers; others will race across the desert in specially equipped dune buggies; yet others will practice their mountaineering skills, crawling over Afghanistan's rugged mountains. For many search-and-destroy missions, the aim will be to get in and out so fast that forces stay on the ground in Afghanistan for less than an hour...