Word: ragtag
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Ragtag Collection. Driving to the district capital of Lethem, the ranchers and some of their Amerindian employees struck at the airfield, where a 600-yard-long block of buildings houses the police station, power plant, post office and even a slaughterhouse. A cop ran from the station house, wrestled with Jim Hart for Hart's rifle; another rebel shot the cop from behind. When the shooting stopped, five policemen were dead. John Hawkins, a Protestant missionary from Texas, rushed to the airport and ran into Jim Hart. "We've talked enough -we're taking action," Hart shouted...
Someone managed to radio a report of the attack to Georgetown. In a ragtag collection of airplanes, about 226 of Guyana's 1,800-man defense force flew in and scattered the rebels. Guyana's ambassador to Venezuela, Novelist E. A. Braithwaite, handed the foreign ministry in Caracas a note written in words more angry than those of the gentle author of To Sir, With Love; the Venezuelans handed it back. As for the heirs of that old South Dakota pioneer, Ben Hart, they fled over the border to Venezuela. And the fine houses that the Harts built...
...village of Da Loc, in the Mekong Delta, seven civilians lay quietly in the mud. Cold rain dripped down their necks from the leaves of banana trees overhead. Suddenly, they spotted more than 20 black-pajama-clad figures creeping across the ripening paddies. At close range, the ragtag villagers opened fire with ancient rifles and M-l carbines. The Viet Cong attackers fled swiftly, leaving behind four dead and a prized Browning automatic rifle...
...Sweepers. As the war progressed, the chants turned into terrible reality. In captured village after village, frontline troops were followed by ragtag "sweepers" from Northern Nigeria. They nailed Ibo tribesmen to the walls of their wooden huts, then sprayed them with automatic-rifle fire or set torches to their clothes. "Mop-up" soldiers raped women, sometimes lined up whole villages to be shot. The Ibos concluded that the Hausa tribesmen fully intended to use the war to systematically exterminate them. This fear, more than anything else, has hardened the Biafran determination to fight on to the end. "We shall...
...July 26, 1953, a ragtag band of 160 Cubans tried to trigger an uprising against Dictator Fulgencio Batista by attacking Santiago de Cuba's Moncada Army barracks. The chancy venture was squashed, and half of the partisans were killed. Among those imprisoned was 25-year-old Fidel Castro, a lawyer turned revolutionist, who drew a 15-year sentence. In an act more merciful than wise, Batista granted Castro amnesty after only two years. In 1956, after a brief Mexican exile, Fidel was back in Cuba with another guerrilla band; but this time he was not to be caught...