Word: forte
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Nonetheless, American ground troops have already vindicated the nation's need for a strong, flexible army. From the training grounds of Fort Dix, where a massive statue of a charging infantryman is respectfully known as The Ultimate Weapon, to Viet Nam where kid infantrymen moved into a solid sheet of fire last month on a single word from a platoon sergeant, Johnny Johnson's soldiers exude a new confidence. They know they...
...will have trained 235,000 new recruits-70% of the overall 340,000-man increase in the armed forces set in motion by the President in July. To handle them, General Johnson is opening five new training centers. Three new 7,500-man infantry brigades are being organized. At Fort Riley, Kans., the Army will activate the brand-new, 14,000-man 9th Infantry Division. More than 700 smaller units are taking shape. Twenty-nine additional Army helicopter companies are sprouting rotors. Last week the Pentagon announced plans for at least one more chopper-supported airmobile division...
...dinner with men of the 8th Cavalry Regiment, the outfit he commanded in Korea. "What we are doing there," he says, "is fighting an island campaign on a land mass." Last week Johnson boarded his JetStar for a one-day visit to the Army's biggest training center, Fort Jackson, in the piney uplands of South Carolina, where 19,655 men are being taught to fight...
Snake Ration. At Fort Jackson last week, Sergeant Woodrow Weaver, a Viet Nam veteran, faced his class, unbuttoned his shirt and casually pulled out a writhing northern pine snake. "Any time you are going through the jungle and come across a nonpoisonous snake," he advised, "pick him up and put him in your shirt. If you find yourself without food, pull him out and eat him." A poisonous snake can also be eaten, said Weaver, "if you cut his head off just below the poison sacs." Pointing out that rattlesnake meat is "considered a great delicacy" (it sells...
...Johnson believes that the Army should treat its involuntary employees with particular solicitude. A "private's general," he takes pride in the good chow and creature comforts that soften a draftee's adjustment to military life. New men are greeted at reception centers with brass bands. At Fort Jackson, S.C., and Fort Dix, N.J., drafty, double-decker wooden barracks are giving way to modern brick buildings that resemble campus dormitories. They have bathrooms on every level, rooms with from two to eight bunks, telephones, lounge rooms and Laundromats. There are automatic dishwashers and potato-peeling machines...