Word: gravel
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Chinese-made military trucks and Soviet troop carriers clog the rickety Long Bien bridge over the Red River, hauling sand and gravel to reconstruction projects around the city. The army has been pressed into service restoring communications, repairing roads, digging irrigation canals and even harvesting rice...
...baseball diamond, its infield covered with gravel and stone dust, is not Koehan's major concern...
...move, like everything else connected with the $6.9 billion shuttle pro gram, required precise planning. For months, engineers from NASA and Rockwell International had been surveying the route to Edwards, relocating telephone poles and overseeing the resurfacing of 16 kilometers (10 miles) of gravel road so that it could withstand the shuttle's 68,000-kilogram (150,000-lb.) weight. They also constructed a special trailer to carry the craft, a 90-wheel affair designed to be steered both from the front and the rear like a hook-and-ladder truck...
...whose existence one is hardly aware until it malfunctions. "No wave of emotion sweeps it. Neither music nor mathematics gives it pause in its appointed tasks." The author is as wry and bemused when he describes bones, the digestive tract or a kidney stone, "this small piece of gravel" in Pascal's phrase, that could bring down Oliver Cromwell and alter the course of history...
...most touching song is "Sam Stone," about a Vietnam vet who comes back a heroin addict. The gravel-voiced Prine is the man's child, singing: "There's a hole in Daddy's arm where all the money goes," and the effect is chilling...