Word: peleliu
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...World War II was that Pearl Harbor was bombed by the Japanese on December 7, 1941, and that the American revenge came on August 6, 1945, when Army pilot Paul Tibbets dropped an atomic bomb from the Enola Gay on Hiroshima. For Hanks, the U.S. armed forces' island-hopping - Peleliu, Iwo Jima and Okinawa, among other bloody military engagements - was just a blur on a map that seemed impossibly exotic and faraway. "Strange to think that I've become the World War II guy," Hanks laughs. "All my friends had dads who were on the U.S.S. Nimitz or U.S.S. Enterprise...
...perspective," he says. "So we start with the vast Pacific Ocean from Hawaii, and you just keep going farther and farther west. You get a dramatic sense of what it must have been like to be on one of those battleships. I used to wonder why in hell little Peleliu was in any way, shape or form so damn important. But then when you see how close Okinawa is, well, you immediately understand. Peleliu was a stepping-stone...
...their glittering lagoons and rain-forested redoubts, the Japanese positioned their power to control all the Pacific in World War II-and the U.S. fight to thwart them made a litany and legacy forever of such unlikely flecks on the map as Kwajalein, Eniwetok, Saipan, Tinian and Peleliu. The Enola Gay roared off from Tinian to drop the A-bomb on Hiroshima; years later the shock waves of the world's first H-bomb tests rolled out from Micronesia, denuding the little atolls of Bikini and Eniwetok. Today, Nike X antiballistic missiles zoom up from Kwajalein in test interceptions...
...Paul H. Douglas of Illinois, 73, one of the most liberal of Democrats and a onetime economics professor at the University of Chicago, set out last week to try to teach a former student a postgraduate lesson, this time in political science. The tall, shambling Marine Corps veteran of Peleliu and Okinawa announced that he would run for a fourth term "if the Democratic Party wants me." There was little doubt that it would. His only announced Republican rival is Charles Percy, 46, the Bell & Howell board chairman who failed in a try for the governorship in 1964. Douglas...
...Medal of Honor winner was conspicuously absent from the White House ceremony: he was former Marine Captain Arthur J. Jackson, 38, who in September 1944 charged into withering enemy fire on Peleliu, destroyed twelve pillboxes and killed 50 Japanese soldiers. Now Jackson has been forced out of the Marine Corps, accused of killing a Cuban at Guantanamo...