Word: hormuz
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...aircraft and 5,500 tanks. The U.S. has no ground troops in the region; its presence is limited to six medium-size ships of the Joint Task Force * Middle East, based on the island of Bahrain. The aircraft carrier Independence is steaming toward a station off the Straits of Hormuz, and the carrier Saratoga will join the Eisenhower in the Mediterranean, but they would be hard pressed to roll back Iraq's army...
...ever sees. In the open ocean, a possibly hostile plane can be tracked over hundreds of miles. But Admiral William Crowe Jr., Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has likened combat in the Persian Gulf -- only about 25 miles wide at the narrowest point of the Strait of Hormuz -- to "fighting in a lake." A plane can reach a ship's missile range in minutes or even seconds after it first appears on a radar screen; a captain who hesitates too long while trying to identify conclusively that radar-screen blip could lose his ship and the lives...
...first, the incident seemed like another deadly confrontation in the Persian Gulf between the armed forces of the U.S. and Iran. But the affair quickly developed into something far worse. On Sunday morning the Navy cruiser U.S.S. Vincennes, while battling several Iranian speedboats in the Strait of Hormuz, mistakenly shot down an Iranian commercial airliner. Iran said the Airbus A300 "exploded in the sky," killing all 298 people on board. Officers on the Vincennes had believed the aircraft was an Iranian F-14 fighter jet that was attacking the U.S. ship. The tragedy immediately invited comparison with the 1983 downing...
...Camp David at 4:52 a.m. and told of the new fighting. "I am saddened to report," said the President, "that it appears that in a proper defensive action by the U.S.S. Vincennes this morning in the Persian Gulf, an Iranian airliner was shot down over the Strait of Hormuz. This is a terrible human tragedy. Our sympathy and condolences go out to the passengers, crew and their families." At 1:30 p.m. a tense and obviously tired Admiral William Crowe, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, strode into the Pentagon briefing room to deliver the shocking details...
...sinking of the Joshan followed within minutes. Then the action shifted farther north, near the Strait of Hormuz. There, repeated hostile actions by Iran forced the U.S. to jettison its plan to limit Iranian ship losses to a single vessel. When two Iranian frigates, the Sahand and the Sabalan, fired on American reconnaissance aircraft, U.S. warships went after them. A Harpoon missile launched by the U.S. destroyer Joseph Strauss hit the Sahand. The missile, delivered from a distance of 20 miles, blew a hole in the Iranian vessel's hull. An F-14 Tomcat from the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Enterprise...