Word: pistoled
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...American dilemma took on a certain urgency on Dec. 6, when three anti-Castro refugees arrived in Key West. Using a fishing knife and a pistol that would not shoot, the three forced two pro-Castro crewmen on a Cuban fishing boat to take them to Florida. It was clearly a hijacking, whatever the American sympathies in the case. The refugees were arrested, and for the first time since Castro came to power in 1959, anti-Castro Cubans were ordered to return to their native country. The Cubans appealed the deportation order and are now free in Florida on bond...
Miles from Hanoi, another flyer tried to steer his parachute away from militiamen on the ground. Landing, he pulled out his pistol, but the North Vietnamese disarmed him, yelling, "Hands up! Hands up!" in English. The pilot, in Vietnamese, replied, "Toi xin hang [I surrender]." A third pilot only managed to smear his face with mud before he was captured. All told, the raids added 93 Americans to the list of missing and captured...
...Holmes, the reader's mind wanders to The Unicorn in the Garden, to The Night the Ghost Got In. He imagines that he is writing Walter Mitty: ta-pocketa, ta-pocketa, go the typewriter keys. He remembers Thurber's unsettling word games-mice in chimes, lips in pistol-and plays a game of his own that he has played before: her, hurt, rue, brute in Thurber; the battle of the sexes, the dogs. What hides in Holmes? SOLEM? No, it doesn't quite work. M-O-L-E does, though...
Numerous skyjackers have confessed suicidal fantasies to Hubbard. Sometimes this intent is displayed when a skyjacker purposely delays opening his chute after jumping from a plane. Sometimes it comes out in an expressed indifference to death. Said one young man: "I bought me a plane ticket and a pistol. I thought, I'll either die or I'll do it. Either way was O.K. with me." Thus for many skyjackers, Hubbard says, death may be "not the ultimate punishment but the ultimate reward...
...such men, Hubbard believes, the threat of force is actually "counterproductive." In fact, the skyjacker seems to respond to greater force with increasingly violent tactics of his own. A good example, says Hubbard, is the sky-marshal program. "Before marshals arrived on the scene, skyjackers were arming themselves with pistols. When the Government escalated, so did the hijackers; now they use a pistol and a bomb." To make things worse, the Government has virtually abandoned the marshal program, yet has made only a low-key-and little noticed-announcement to that effect. As a result, skyjackers have not reduced their...