Word: pined
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...real aim of Big Pine, of course, was to send an intimidating message to Marxist-led Nicaragua. "There has been a big change in Central America since the Nicaraguan revolution of 1979," said U.S. Ambassador to Honduras John Negroponte. "Since then, the Nicaraguan government has quadrupled the number of its uniformed soldiers and brought in between 1,700 and 2,000 Cuban security advisers. Honduras and Costa Rica are worried. So is El Salvador, which has suffered from Nicaragua's role as the springboard for the Salvadoran insurgency." Said another U.S. diplomat, who traveled from the Honduran capital...
...also a highly provocative maneuver. The area chosen for the exercise is part of a surreptitious battleground used by Nicaraguan exiles in a growing counter-revolutionary war against their homeland. U.S. Air Force pilots learned about the covert war the hard way during Big Pine: two days after the exercise began, a U.S. C-130 transport aircraft was sent back to the U.S. with bullet holes in its tail assembly...
...exercise in the U.S. ability to transport and supply the Hondurans, Operation Big Pine went off without a hitch. But as a test of Honduran military ability, the exercise appeared to be a failure. The ill-trained Hondurans were unable to cope with the 1,300 tons of equipment rained on them by the U.S. Nor did they show any great mastery of the battlefield discipline necessary to repel a hypothetical Corinthian advance. The 528 Honduran paratroopers dropped into the war-game zone, for example, spent two full hours attempting to regroup into companies. When one trooper was slightly injured...
That state reached a new height last week as the Nicaraguans watched Operation Big Pine taking place across the border. Claiming that Big Pine was the prelude to a major U.S.-backed invasion of Nicaragua, the Sandinista government called a full-scale alert in five frontier provinces. Green-uniformed guardsmen scanned border outposts for signs of more incursions of the kind that occurred at Bismuna...
Nicaraguan officials candidly admitted that they were embarked on a form of propaganda campaign against the Big Pine maneuvers. Said a Sandinista diplomat in the Nicaraguan capital of Managua: "When there's a well-known rapist in the neighborhood, you scream in order not to suffer...