Word: guerrillas
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...revolution is it, anyway? This solemn, incoherent, brown film is set in New York and Pennsylvania in 1776-81, but it often looks determined to analogize, one more time, the Viet Nam War. Local boys are indentured at saber point to fight in the woods, streams and back alleys--guerrilla warriors against the imperial power. Atrocities abound on both sides. There are no flaming heroics, no real winners: the visitors just get worn out before the home team does. The Americans are given a slight moral edge because the land is theirs. Well, it really belonged to the Indians...
There was no such progress in other familiar trouble spots. South Africa was torn by unremitting violence as blacks demanded abolition of apartheid and whites were willing to accept only gradual change. Guerrilla wars in Central America raged unchecked, and the so-called peace process in the Middle East made no discernible headway. Nature joined politics in contributing to human misery as earthquakes in Mexico City, a volcano eruption in Colombia and a cyclone in Bangladesh claimed tens of thousands of victims. In the U.S., Reagan became the first President to confer the full powers of his office voluntarily...
Special Forces play several different roles. In a conventional war, small teams of a dozen men are supposed to penetrate behind enemy lines, blend in with the natives and cut off lines of supply and communication. To train friendly forces in the art of guerrilla warfare, the Army has sent hundreds of teams to 60 nations in the past six years--more than twice as many as it sent overseas during a comparable period in the 1970s...
...built up the U.S. Special Forces, first organized in 1952 during the Korean War, and popularized the green beret many commandos had already informally adopted as their symbol. The Green Berets' role was counterinsurgency: to defend freedom by helping developing (and pro-Western) nations ward off Communist-backed guerrilla movements. The great test was to be Viet Nam. But as the war escalated, counterinsurgency was shoved aside as the U.S. resorted more and more to conventional tactics of massed firepower. Special Forces were increasingly miscast, used as garrison troops defending lonely outposts in the jungle...
...joined Yasser Arafat's Fatah arm of the Palestine Liberation Organization. He rose quickly through the ranks and in 1970 opened a P.L.O. office in Khartoum. About a year later he was asked to leave by the Sudanese, largely because of his efforts to recruit local Palestinian students as guerrilla fighters...