Word: raids
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...lasted only a few minutes, but Pretoria claimed that more than 60 people were killed, including 41 members of the outlawed African National Congress (A.N.C.), the black nationalist movement that last week belatedly admitted responsibility for the Pretoria bombing. Mozambique officials, however, reported that only six died in the raid over Maputo, five of them civilians. Correspondents who flew into Mozambique to view the aftermath of the air strike generally agreed. But they also came across black South African refugees, some of whom were apparently A.N.C. members. Said one angry survivor: "They shot us in South Africa, and they...
...South Africa, the raid marked the first time its Impalas had been used to raid suspected A.N.C. strongholds. For the A.N.C., the Pretoria bomb blast that provoked the raid seemed to signal the start of an ugly new phase in its struggle against apartheid, South Africa's official policy of racial discrimination...
...Lebanon's Bekaa Valley, where both sides have been bolstering their forces. The Soviets have sent substantial reinforcements to Syria, whose army is now in better shape than it was a year ago. Prime Minister Begin denied a charge by Moscow that Israel was planning a "piratic raid" on Syria. Said he: "All these threats have a totally artificial basis...
...good day to die," declared James Gordon ("Bo") Gritz. The date was Nov. 27, 1982, and Gritz, 44, a swashbuckling former Green Beret, was about to lead three American daredevils and 15 Laotians on an improvised commando raid across the Mekong River. Their scheme: a 14-day trek to rescue American prisoners of war in the jungles of eastern Laos. After only three days, however, the bravado of "Operation Lazarus" was abruptly buried when a band of local guerrillas ambushed the raiders, killing two Laotians, capturing an American, and forcing the others to turn tail...
Gritz, the son of a B-17 pilot shot down over France in 1944, is a self-appointed caretaker of those hopes. Decorated 60 times during the Viet Nam War, he once led 250 Cambodian mercenaries on a daring raid that attacked 53 Viet Cong camps in 60 days; he lost only one man. Even after he left the Army in 1979 as a lieutenant colonel, Gritz never really left Indochina. In 1981 he rounded up 21 drifters, dreamers and desperadoes, recruited a psychic, a hypnotherapist and some reporters, and began practicing quixotic Laotian expeditions at an unlikely locale...