Word: napalm
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...Adams plan caught the attention of the National Defense Research Committee, which spent $2 million on the scheme before deciding the little beasts were too difficult to handle. Miniature bombs made of celluloid and filled with napalm gel were attached to the bats with surgical clips, and the recruits hibernated in cold-storage chests until flight time. Then came the first test run, held at Muroc Lake, Calif, in May 1943. When released from the planes, many of the bats did not wake up, and plummeted to the ground like tiny kamikazes. Others drowsily flew off, never to report...
...when they get back to 100 ft. This time they did not pull out. One jet hit the ground and the other three, locked into their now fatal formation, followed within a tenth of a second. They exploded in a ball of flame that one witness likened to napalm explosions he had seen in Viet Nam. Dead were Major Norman L. Lowry III, 37, the Thunderbirds' leader, and Captains Willie Mays, 32, Mark E. Melancon, 31, and Joseph Peterson...
Lately, we have dwelt much on our impotence. Helicopters that won't fly in the desert, fly fine on a screen. Video games taste of power without purpose, like the smell of napalm in the morning. Our national naval gazing has led us to wish for more submarines, a resurgence of might that cannot remedy the defect of leadership determined to defend rights it only vaguely states. Like bigger defense budgets, video games, a projection of this shadowy pornography of power, curses rather than cures our seeming impotence...
...course, one can't miss a chance to say one more thing about Apocalypse Now. Who could pass up such an opportunity? First, and for the 100th time, Robert Duvall is magnificent as Kilgore, and when he heaves out that guttural "I love the smell of napalm in the morning," his power is unbelievable. So much of Apocalypse Now is unbelievable; the jungle, the eerie lights of the encampments, the unreal G.I. show, Wagner pouring out of choppers. Francis Ford Coppola comes so close to coaxing this monstrous myth into flight. Yet, at the end he fails because he abandons...
...always be done. Instead, the solution lies in forcing the men with brains to make individual moral decisions. Will they perhaps sacrifice their careers--will they perhaps not pursue some avenue of scientific inquiry--or will they participate in the same myths that produced the atom bomb, that produced napalm, that produced defoliants and guidance systems and all the rest? That is the question that each professor must consider--not in a confrontation with others, but in a confrontation with himself...