Word: quicksands
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...officials argue that by stationing Marines in Lebanon, the U.S. played into Syrian hands, since Washington, in effect, put itself at the mercy of forces largely controlled by Assad. If the U.S. could leave the Lebanese quicksand tomorrow without losing face, and without the risk of causing further chaos by doing so, some Administration officials undoubtedly would grab the opportunity...
...battle. But then war tended to fade into jungles and a thousand ambiguities of costume and faction and political subtlety. Viet Nam was America's painful education in this new form. Overarmed and under informed, the Americans came onto the battlefield and found that it was all quicksand and fog. Viet Nam was morally impenetrable as well. Americans could not tell enemies from friends. The war became a terrible waste of idealism. An older generation of men who had had their war at Normandy and Iwo Jima would grow nostalgic for the moral simplicities they had known. After...
...another sort of swashbuckler. He landed his Bell Jetranger III helicopter in Fort Worth not long ago, after flying around the world in three stages. Smith is notorious for his publicity stunts, but his troubles were real enough. He was shot at by fishermen off Greenland, he landed in quicksand in Burma, and over the northern Pacific bad weather nearly forced him to miss a refueling ship. Smith's understated conclusion: "I was extremely lucky to get back. I would never try it again...
...from this distance that Richard Nixon's conspiratorial bent helped him understand the dark maneuverings of America's adversaries around the world. But that was the very trait that snared him in Watergate. He thought he could conspire his way out of political quicksand...
...main wall rising 30 ft. around 53 acres in the middle of dead-quiet upstate greenery. The wall is gray gray. Nothing in nature, including a rock, could be that color. Guards say the wall goes down 30 ft. in spots so as to hold fast in the quicksand. At intervals along the flat surface, watch turrets sit with witch-hat tops; Disney World, had it been built by Albert Speer, would have this look. The wall encompasses five separate cell blocks. Inside these are individual cells, 7 ft. from floor to ceiling, 9 ft. by 6 ft. in area...