Word: platoons
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...need for a Homeric hero to defend us from all the world's evils is perpetual. We needn't be discouraged when events work themselves out without the crack of gunfire, the staccato commands of platoon leaders and the anguished screams of the dead and wounded...
...Administration was deeply disturbed. It was convinced that the hijackers of Flight 847 were in the same league as the ones who seized a Kuwaiti airliner last December, took it to Tehran and eventually killed two American passengers. That incident ended when the Iranians sent a platoon of security men aboard the plane dressed as a maintenance crew. The hijackers were arrested, but there is no evidence that they were ever brought to justice...
...degrees heat as two helicopters, their blades whipping up dust in the clearing, touched down at the base camp in Honduras, three miles from the Nicaraguan border. Out of one jumped Texas Governor Mark White, in combat boots and freshly pressed camouflage fatigues. Out of the other, a platoon of reporters, who quickly surrounded him. The Governor also brought 400 lbs. of Texas barbecued beef, 7,200 flour tortillas, 100 lbs. of pinto beans, and buckets of barbecue sauce and jalapeno peppers...
Clearing turf for Santiago, Vignali and junior George Sorbara is the league's most impressive offensive line. That platoon features senior Mike Pascucci and pro prospect Roger Caron, who open up real estate faster than Agent Orange...
Humanity itself is here an endangered species. One story introduces a cheap carnival girl whose "act" requires her to spend all day being licked by a bat; another implicitly compares the hero's lickerish mother to a pleasure-loving lizard; a third likens the members of a platoon to an anteater, a peafowl, a civet cat and other zoo dwellers. To make so beastly a world bearable, an author should ensure that disgust is in his characters' minds and not in his own. At this Boyd does not invariably succeed. In the title story, for example...