Word: raid
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
First stop on Friday morning was Arlington National Cemetery, where an hour-long memorial service was held for the eight servicemen* who died in the aborted raid in Iran. After meeting beforehand with the families of the dead men, Carter delivered a nine-minute eulogy. "It is not the length of life," he said, "that determines its impact or its quality, but the depth of its commitment and the height of its purpose." While Carter spoke, his voice was firm. But later, when a lone bugler played taps, when six Thunderbird jets swooped across the sky in the "missing...
Nonetheless, a worldwide debate was raging over the raid. A Pentagon whose planes had not even been detected while flying into Iran, much less shot at, now was barraged by bombs of criticism. Some were hurled wildly by armchair strategists, others by more knowledgeable experts...
Under Phase 1 of the raid, three C-130s carrying some 90 air commandos and three others transporting fuel for helicopters took off from an airfield in Egypt. Eight Sikorsky RH-53 helicopters, flying in pairs, left the nuclear carrier Nimitz in the Arabian Sea. All were to meet at "Desert One," an unimproved landing strip in the Great Salt Desert southeast of Tehran...
Other questions about the raid and the answers insofar as they were known last week...
...Americans have on the whole reacted with a surprising forbearance toward the Iranians. But beneath the surface they have marinated in an odd, atavistic cross-cultural rage. Their anger has been ripened by the long spectacle of their nation's ineffectuality and the humiliation of the failed rescue raid, by the nightly TV pageant of Iranian mobs pumping their fists in the air and screaming death threats in Farsi, and by the image of Sadegh Ghotbzadeh's cretinous smirk. Dark impulses that normally stay below, like Ahab's harpooners, begin to straggle up on deck...