Word: huts
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Suvorov would probably be pleased with today's Soviet military. The typical barracks is a long two-story wooden hut with beds so crammed together that they touch. The soldier's only token of privacy is a small wooden locker in which he keeps his uniform, two sets of underwear, shaving gear, a toothbrush and a few other permitted personal items, such as photos and letters. Latrines are often no more than a row of holes in the ground. Hot water is rare and usually saved for "sanitary day," when troops take their once-a-week shower. One hygienic measure...
...time Mowat seeks temporary shelter in a blasted hut, and shares his rum with a dying German who got there first, the author is disarmed of illusion and no longer fit to wage war. In a letter to an un named intimate, he writes, "I wish I could explain the desperate sense of isolation, of not belonging to my own past, of being adrift in some kind of alien space." It is the unresolved anger of a soldier whose arms, legs, eyes and genitals are constantly threatened with mutilation...
...Correspondent David DeVoss visited the village of Dara Adam Khail, which lies to the south of the Pakistani city of Peshawar. Dara has long been famous for its handmade rifles, mortars and land mines, and the insurgency in Afghanistan has turned the place into a boomtown. Reports DeVoss: "Mud-hut arms factories are busy 24 hours a day. A handcrafted Kalashnikov rifle sells for $1,700. For just under $1,000, Chicago-style tommy guns are a bargain. The preferred weapon is the Enfield; its bullets cost $1 apiece, as compared with $2.20 for a Kalashnikov round. But Dara...
...struggle with an immediacy that makes detachment impossible. She bombards us with images harsh and lush; passion for the country whose policies she hates scorches the pages, evoking South Africa's beauty, sordidness and terror. She moves from the overripe living room of an apartheid apologist to the stinking hut in a black township, from the lucid vigor of South Africa to the luxury of the Rivieva. Her prose mimics the near-cryptic, emotionally loaded economy of poetry, with all its symbolic richness. Reading this book is almost like plowing through about 400 pages of poetry, too-as difficult...
Mexico's "guided democracy" has become so ossified that presidential election campaigns every six years are little more than repetitions of what voters cynically dismiss as "the great paint job." P.R.I. campaign workers plaster every available wall, hut and bridge with absurd slogans (TO NATIONALIZE IS TO DECOLONIALIZE) that make a mockery of the party's claim to be revolutionary. In fact, the campaign is a sham: since the reign of Calles (1924-28) every P.R.I, nominee has been personally selected by his predecessor. The decision is made after secret consultations with a tiny clique of labor leaders, senior civil...