Word: launcher
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Inside a small farmhouse in the Bekaa Valley of eastern Lebanon, eight Palestinian fighters warm themselves around an old kerosene heater. They have spent the afternoon training on a Katyusha rocket launcher that lies beneath crude camouflage in a nearby apple orchard. Most of these men are combat veterans who fled to the Bekaa Valley after the Israeli invasion of Lebanon and the bombing of West Beirut. Yet the war seems strangely irrelevant to their thinking. "First we will drive the enemy from Lebanon," declares a 20-year-old in a calm voice, "and then we will liberate Palestine...
...into the car. Another heavily armed Mujahedin squad blasted a corridor through the government forces to provide an escape route for the auto. Khiabani, though wounded, managed to drive off, but an Islamic Guard scored a direct hit on the Peugeot with a Soviet-made RPG-7 antitank rocket launcher. All of the Mujahedin, including the bodyguards and the two women, died. Rajavi's son survived...
Less safe but more fun, the ever-popular Rapid Fire Saucer Launcher this year sports a new label--"When in use do not direct towards user's face or any other person's face...
...plastic-hulled minesweepers, troop-carrying Hovercraft and even a 670-ft., 14,000-ton Vickers aircraft carrier. Nor is the infantry slighted: there are mortars (51 mm or 81 mm), silencer-equipped submachine guns, four-round sniper rifles (99% accuracy at 400 meters) and a battery-powered grenade launcher. Missiles? Try an air-to-air Sky Flash or a ship-to-air Seawolf, a Rapier ("low cost" and "low weight") or a Swingfire ("long-range" and "antitank"). Once the weapons are ordered, there are British firms that will train troops and commanders, plan communications systems and even help manage bases...
...those times when combat squads "have to fight violently at very short distances." The brief entries tend to a breathless specificity. A smoke bomb lets a tank "escape temporarily from the adversary's sight and prevent the latter from adjusting his fire"; a 105-mm antitank rocket launcher is "designed for use by either a right-or a left-handed soldier." The French grant far more space to the nitty-gritty of war: pistols, plastic explosives and grenades (including one that was "designed to dazzle several antagonists...