Word: panamas
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...plan called for overwhelming American forces to intimidate and neutralize the P.D.F. while special units secured vital dams and the electrical facilities powering the Panama Canal. Once organized resistance had been shattered, military police and other units trained in MOUT -- military operations in urban terrain -- would undertake the house-to-house battle against the Dignity Battalions. At Southern Command Headquarters in Panama City, the arrival of General Maxwell Thurman last Oct. 1 brought a marked change in mood. Unlike his predecessor, General Frederick Woerner, Thurman saw Noriega as primarily a military rather than a political problem. According to Pentagon sources...
...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...