Word: grenada
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Revolutionary terrorism and religious fanaticism shed more blood in the Third World, and this time some of the blood was American. U.S. troops went into combat for the first time since 1975, invading the tiny Caribbean island of Grenada and overturning a clique of hard-line Marxists who had murdered Prime Minister Maurice Bishop, a milder Marxist. Suicide truck bombers, presumably Islamic Shi'ite zealots who share Iranian Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini's belief that the U.S. is "the Great Satan," blew up the American embassies in Lebanon and Kuwait, as well as the headquarters of the U.S. Marine peace-keeping...
Violence in the Caribbean Basin and the Middle East brought the superpower confrontation into still sharper focus. The invasion of Grenada, Reagan claimed, prevented Marxists from turning that island into a Soviet-Cuban colony. Elsewhere in the region, however, no such quick or decisive victory for Administration policy seemed in sight. U.S. aid to the conservative government of El Salvador in its fight against a leftist insurrection, and to the contra rebels battling the Marxist-led government of Nicaragua, did little more than sustain grim guerrilla wars. Just as the U.S. did after the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan...
...analogies were impressionistic and wrong: the Middle East, Central America and the Caribbean are not Indochina. But some of the bench marks were plain, blunt facts. Not since Viet Nam, until Beirut, had so many U.S. servicemen been killed in a single day. Not since then, until Grenada, had U.S. servicemen launched a combat operation of such size. Not since then, until a Navy A-6 was shot down over Lebanon, had a U.S. fighter pilot died in combat; not since then, until the capture by Syrians of the same A-6's bombardier, had a U.S. serviceman been...
Literally. The sand gets into everything, always. In Grenada and Lebanon, as in more peaceful G.I. terrains, the sand is in the dregs of the cloying powdered orange juice, gums up the bunkmate's cassette player, sticks to sweaty necks. The troops sit talking for hours in close tents and stifling bunkers, young men who hope, because they are lance corporals and gunnery sergeants, that they are above whimpering. The 1982 high school graduate from Pontiac, Mich., writing a letter home ("Don't worry, really!"), shakes his dried-up Bic. An infantryman with a tiny mirror, still...
...countries, from Iceland to the Philippines. But this year, at least, the most visible departures and homecomings have had a U.S. locus, the stretch of North Carolina that includes the Marines' Camp Lejeune and the Army's Fort Bragg. This month, 2,000 troops returned from Grenada, and 1,800 Marines, some aboard the Iwo Jima, came back from Lebanon. They stepped into a familiar dream. Bands played. Infants were tweaked. Couples swung M-16s out of the way and hugged. The troops were home. They had served, and served well...