Word: masaka
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...rapid collapse of Amin's rule began a week ago when long-range Tanzanian artillery pounded Mbarara and Masaka, garrison towns held by what were supposed to be Amin's elite forces, the Suicide Regiment and the Simba (Lion) Battalion. These troops not only surrendered; some even joined the anti-Amin forces. Late last week Tanzanian units and various anti-Amin groups began pushing north of Masaka toward Kampala, 80 miles away. But a Ugandan tank force managed to retake the garrison town of Tororo, near the Kenyan border, which had briefly fallen to the rebels...
...entered southern Uganda a few weeks ago from northern Tanzania. The invaders, composed of recently organized bands of Ugandan exiles, slipped into Uganda amid heavy fighting between regular Tanzanian and Ugandan forces on the border. By last week they had advanced 50 miles and had fought their way to Masaka, a city just 80 miles from Kampala, Uganda's capital. Their goal: to overthrow Idi Amin Dada, 55, the self-styled President-for-Life whose tyrannical regime is believed to have been responsible for the deaths of 300,000 Ugandans in the past eight years...
Since October, the Tanzanians have shot down 18 of Amin's 26 combat aircraft, and in one recent week captured a Soviet T-55 tank, seven armored cars and other equipment. Some Ugandan army units based at Masaka and nearby Mbarara are reported to be in rebellion. Says a Western diplomat in Nairobi, capital of neighboring Kenya: "It looks as if Amin has abandoned all of southern Uganda...
...start of a full-scale invasion. First the radio announced that a 3,500-man army of Ugandan exiles, Tanzanian soldiers and some of the Asians whom Amin expelled last year were poised to attack. Next day it reported that the invasion force had crossed the border and reached Masaka, 80 miles from the capital, before being driven back. The radio solemnly warned that a second invasion was expected "within hours," and that all Ugandan soldiers "must be ready to die in the defense of the motherland...
...hostilities claimed the life of one American: Peace Corps Volunteer Louis Morton, 23, a schoolteacher from Houston, who had been driving with another Peace Corpsman, Robert Freed, along the road between Mbarara and Masaka on a game-spotting tour of nearby Queen Elizabeth National Park. They were unaware of the fighting until they ran into an army roadblock. According to Freed, the troops waved them through and then fired at them. Morton was killed instantly. Freed was taken prisoner but eventually set free...