Word: peasant
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...stakes, the one-acre compound consists of five grass-and-straw huts, a camouflaged lookout tower, a well, a shaded hammock for the village chief. A dozen "Viet Cong" defenders-infantry troops who have completed their training and are awaiting assignment to Viet Nam-wear black pajamas and conical peasant hats. Underneath the village snakes a maze of tunnels that connect each hut to a passageway leading under the village wall. When the trainees attack, some villagers usually slip into the tunnels to get away; those who are captured and interrogated try to convince their captors that they are loyal...
...Poles refuse, the drunken, don't-give-a-damn patriot hustles messages back and forth, so ludicrous a target that a thundering German tank blasts him only with derision. At one point, he joins a long line of evacuees and is forced to shoulder household goods for a peasant woman, a greedy "old bitch" who makes him buy the stuff...
...with the moral issues of twentieth-century Russian history. Part of his reticence can be attributed to his initial concept of the book as the history of a Party rather than a biography. When he speaks of guilt at all it is in subtly collective terms: "Insofar as the peasant was concerned, no dialectic, no contradiction within Lenin's own thinking could obscure or explain away the essentially repressive and hypocritical policy of the Bolsheviks...
...commander in Viet Nam, "a soldier has to be much more than a man with a rifle or a man whose only objective is to kill. He has to be part diplomat, part technician, part politician-and 100% a human being." In a war in which the kindly-looking peasant often turns out to be a gun-toting guerrilla, that can be a tall order. Snapped a marine private: "We try to help these goddam people and you know what they do? They send in their kids to steal our grenades and ammunition and use them to kill...
...date, some 550,000 acres have been turned over to 17,000 peasant families. For the land-hungry Indian this is too little, too slow. Half a dozen times in the past six months, Peruvian army troops have been sent to turn back large groups of impatient peasants invading haciendas in the Andean highlands. Early this month soldiers were forced to fire on 300 Indians who descended on a ranch north of Lima, killing three squatters and wounding two. So strong is the pressure that the government is sidestepping its careful, step-by-step program and plunging ahead...