Word: ragtag
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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African mercenaries: the very term is redolent of Bondish machismo memories. "Mad Mike" Hoare and his swaggering Fifth Commando punishing the ragtag Congolese army during the 1965 Katanga rebellion. Or perhaps Frederick Forsyth's dirty dozen in The Dogs of War, liberating the fictional kingdom of Zangaro from a maniacal, Soviet-backed African dictator-for a price...
...life Springsteen saw then and lived through found its way into his songs, but indirectly, filtered through an imagination that discovered a crazy romanticism in the ragtag boardwalk life...
...told all of you for the last year and a half that we were going to catch them, but nobody believed me." With those uncharacteristically exuberant words, Special FBI Agent Charles William Bates, 55, celebrated last week's capture of Patty Hearst and her ragtag radical comrades. As chief of the FBI office in San Francisco, Bates doggedly led the nationwide hunt for 19 frustrating months. He had coolly endured newspaper complaints that the investigation was being badly run. Bates never responded publicly to the criticism, but repeatedly expressed confidence that his agents would crack the case...
...full of pulp-magazine notions about honor under pressure. Bite the Bullet is made in blatant-indeed, often desperate -imitation of The Professionals, and the character Hackman plays is a virtual reincarnation of Robert Ryan's softspoken, steel-fisted horseman of the previous film. Instead of forming a ragtag commando unit, though, the heroes now make up a party of racers, heading over 700 miles of rugged territory for $2,000 in prize money...
...those who out of religious belief or political conviction made themselves early enemies of the new regime; those whose service in the Vietnamese army or government or whose working for the U.S. guaranteed their arrest, their "re-education," or in some cases their death. Most, though they looked as ragtag as any fleeing refugee, are urban and middleclass...