Word: noncom
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Iron Man. At 61, Rodion Yakovlevich Malinovsky is deprecated by many Soviet officers as a political marshal and a Khrushchev stooge. Gross (5 ft. 7 in., nearly 300 lbs.), diabetic and slow-moving, he retains the abrupt manner of a noncom. But over a 40-year career in the Red army, he has combined a talent for political survival with an impressive combat record...
...wife and children, loved animals and dreamed of farming as a livelihood. He had a bucolically innocent boyhood in southern Germany. Burning with adolescent patriotism, he saw action in World War I before he was 16, was decorated with the Iron Cross, First Class, and wore a noncom's stripes when he was 17. A restless postwar rebel, he joined the Freikorps, a kind of guerrilla band that refused to accept the peace of Versailles. He was an accessory in a political murder, served six years in prison, during which ''I nearly went raving...