Word: dusts
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Central Highlands a giant helipad for the First Team's covey of copters. The division's assistant commander, Brigadier General John M. Wright, took machete in hand to show his men how to do it, chopping away the scrub without disturbing the grass, so as to avoid dust storms as the choppers rotated in and out. Today the First Team's garrison at An Khe is the largest concentration of fighting men and machinery in Southeast Asia since the French left Indo-China in 1954-and predictably its well-turfed 12,000-sq.-ft. helipad is known...
...marines at Chu Lai are accustomed to the roar over their tents on the steaming dunes. Less easy to take has been the choking dust, now damped down by the first northern monsoons, and the fact that the nearest liberty is the Marine headquarters town of Danang. "That's like being allowed to leave the state prison to go to the county jail," snorts one leatherneck. In Danang and Phu Bai, the rains have turned the infernal red dust into infernal red mud, in which a truck can sink to its door handles. On the perimeters, the marines...
...larger planets out beyond the earth. The most widely accepted theory holds that a vast cloud completely surrounds the solar system. According to Fred Whipple of the Smithsonian Observatory, about 4.6 billion years ago the cloud (a giant snowstorm") began to condense into separate bodies-"dirty snowballs" of dust and ices made up of methane, ammonia and water. Some of these bodies were captured by the outer planets and fell onto them, and some fell into the sun. About 1% of them, Whipple thinks, have gone into orbit around the sun as periodic comets ranging in size from tiny bits...
...until the story gets underway, Le Carre seems to feel an obligation to make up for in atmosphere what he cannot supply in action. Sometimes he succeeds. At its best, as in the opening paragraphs (reprinted on the dust jacket), Le Carre's style has an undeniable gloomy resonance...
...come from the north, driven by the night wind, smelling of the sea. There it would stay all winter, threadbare on the gray earth, an icy, sharp dust; not thawing and freezing, but static like a year without seasons. The changing mist, like the smoke of war, would hang over it swallow up now a hanger, now the radar hut, now the machines; release them place by place, drained of color, black carrion on a white desert...