Word: panama
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...initial phases of Operation Just Cause went off as planned. Shortly before midnight Tuesday, guests at Panama City's ritzy Marriott Caesar Park Hotel were awakened by sporadic shooting. A team of Navy SEALs (sea, air and & land capability) rushed the nearby private Paitilla Airport, where Noriega kept a potential getaway Learjet. In a brief but vicious firefight the SEALs overwhelmed guards, secured the landing strip and destroyed the aircraft. But four SEALs were killed, perhaps the earliest casualties of the conflict. Other SEALS died while disabling boats Noriega could have used to make an escape...
Over the next 24 hours, the American force nearly doubled as 9,500 troops, divided into five task forces, parachuted out of the Panama skies or scrambled from large transport aircraft...
TASK FORCE SEMPER FIDELIS. Essentially a blocking force deployed on Panama City's western border, its Marine rifle company and light armored infantry company occupied the Bridge of the Americas, which spans the canal, to prevent a P.D.F. counterattack on the crucial Howard Air Force Base...
TASK FORCE PACIFIC. Once Task Force Red had secured the airport, two waves of 82nd Airborne paratroopers jumped from 20 C-141 transports. They fanned out to assist Rangers and Special Forces units that had blocked the Pacora River bridge to prevent Battalion 2000 from reaching Panama City and to turn back any attack from P.D.F. infantry and cavalry units based at Fort Cimarron. When the Americans reached the fort, the crack battalion was no longer there...
Elsewhere, a boat filled with Noriega gunmen landed at one of the San Blas islands off Panama's Caribbean coast and took hostage eleven people working at a Smithsonian Institutions marine-research project. The group, including five Americans, was taken to the mainland and forced to march into the jungle. Next day, they were abandoned without food and finally rescued. At the international airport two terrified American women were threatened with death by a group of 30 P.D.F. soldiers, who used them as a shield against U.S. paratroopers surrounding the terminal. The two were freed just before dawn after...