Word: forte
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...began innocently enough when a few Cubans lit a fire to make coffee. Military police moved in and doused the flames, telling the refugees that open fires were outlawed on the Army base at Fort Chaffee, Ark. A small incident, but last week it ignited the resentment that had been smoldering in some of the 19,000 Cuban refugees from Castro awaiting relocation in the U.S. A force of 500 Cubans marched out through the front gate before being rounded up by harassed soldiers and police. That night 200 Cubans tried to storm the gates. Repelled, they staged a full...
...FEMA: "We had to set up while it was still happening." One key problem turned out to be a communications snafu between the federal agency and the private organizations that find homes for the refugees after they are cleared. The Immigration and Naturalization Service had approved 4,000 Fort Chaffee refugees for resettlement after concluding that they were not criminals. Simultaneously, the U.S. Catholic Conference, one of the main private agencies involved in the operation, had compiled a list of 4,735 people who had homes awaiting them. But the two lists did not match. Not until last week, after...
...were herded onto planes and flown to one of four refugee camps, where they began the dreary game of waiting as center officials slowly processed them. Of the 7,500 refugees now living at Eglin, 5,000 have been there since the center opened on May 3. Arkansas' Fort Chaffee remains filled with 18,800, Indiantown Gap Military Reservation, Pa., holds 15,000, and the just opened Camp McCoy near Sparta, Wis., has 172. "The boredom is overwhelming," complained Luis Martinez, an engineering technician who has been at Eglin for more than two weeks...
...Army guidelines call for retaining about 38 of every 100 soldiers with four years' service for at least six more years; only 30 of the 100 now stay in uniform that long. The shortfall is particularly serious among technicians, weapons specialists and drill sergeants. At Fort Benning, for example, much of today's training is done by drill corporals (and even acting drill corporals); these are recruits who have just completed their own basic training...
Then came the all-volunteer army and Cerce gradually became demoralized. A drill sergeant at Fort Dix, N.J., he saw instruction worsen and discipline decline. "These days we're just fooling around," says Cerce bitterly. "Basic training is a joke. My twelve-year-old daughter could go through it and pass...