Word: galahading
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...metal dinner jacket, slaying unbelievers when it pleased him. Even so, as Mark Twain speculated about the old warriors, "there was something very engaging about these great simplehearted creatures, (although) there did not seem to be brains enough . . . to bait a fishhook with." The knight has been Galahad, Don Quixote and every tin soldier, in Robert Louis Stevenson's couplet, "With different uniforms and drills/ Among the bedclothes, through the hills." The chevalier now answers the roll call as Rambo and G.I. Joe. He wears camouflage, may carry an UZI instead of a sword and has a way of setting...
Wilson ordered about 100 members of his advance party to rush ahead in helicopters, securing both Fitzroy and the nearby settlement of Bluff Cove. The small British contingents held the position for about two days, while other units of the Fifth boarded the Sir Galahad and the Sir Tristram at Port San Carlos to join them. When the ships reached Fitzroy, they began unloading men and equipment. In effect, the British had a second beachhead on East Falkland...
...used with great success at the Port San Carlos beachhead were already ashore at Fitzroy, but they had not yet been set up on hillsides overlooking the estuary. Although both ships would have been unloaded in another hour or so, at the time of the attack the Sir Galahad was still packed with most of its full complement of 68 crewmen and, according to some accounts, as many as 500 troops waiting to go ashore. Those on board had no time at all to react; those on land could only watch helplessly as the bombs fell on the two vessels...
...least two bombs hit the Sir Galahad. The Sir Tristram was raked with cannon and rocket fire. According to Michael Nicholson, a British television correspondent who witnessed the attack on the Sir Galahad from ashore, "boxes of ammunition aboard exploded, shaking the ground beneath us, and soldiers crouched as bullets from the ship whistled past." Hundreds of men rushed along the decks of both ships, pulling on life jackets and leaping into water that was sometimes aflame with burning oil. Bright orange life rafts were thrown into the sea; some immediately burst into flame as they were hit by debris...
Nicholson watched men dive into the burning waters with life jackets to rescue their comrades. Helicopters ignored the fire and smoke to hoist men out. Spotting life rafts drifting back into the blaze around the Sir Galahad, four helicopter pilots flew behind the vessel and turned their aircraft into gigantic fans: flying low, they used the downdraft of their rotor blades to push the rubber rafts to the safety of the beach. Ashore, all was chaos as casualties were brought to a makeshift field hospital and then flown by a continuous helicopter shuttle to the main British medical center...