Word: ransoming
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...some of the veterans were armed, and about 100 Vietnamese angrily surrounded the U.S. convoy. After shooting out the front tires of the first and last trucks in the nine-vehicle U.S. convoy, the veterans strung barbed wire around it and demanded the equivalent of about $9,000 to ransom the 14 Americans involved. Eight hours later the G.I.s were finally released after U.S. officers and the province chief agreed to give the veterans $720 in cash, 170 cases of salad oil and 150 cases of cereal...
...vitality belies a long career whose roots are with Edgar Allen Poe and Rudyard Kipling, whose growth shows the influence of John Crowe Ransom and T.S. Eliot and whose maturity, in turn, affected Theodore Roethke and John Berryman. It is somehow easier to believe Tate has had three children in the past four years than to realize Robert E. Lee and James Meredith could figure in his imagination simultaneously...
Loyalty to the South he'd inherited and devotion to the South he invisioned were crucial to Tate's intellectual development. As an undergraduate at Vanderbilt after the first World War, he became part of a group of literati called the Fugitives, including John Crowe Ransom and Robert Penn Warren, deeply dedicated to Southern regionalism, but "fleeing from nothing faster than the high caste Brahmins of the Old South...
Nevertheless, the nucleus of the group's members (John Ransom, Donald Davidson, "Red" Warren, and Tate) not only improved on their initial, poetic promise, but by 1930 had sketched a credo for the South, with the anthology I'll Take My Stand, urging agrarianism over industrialism and warning the South against becoming a replica of the North. "The culture of the soil," wrote Ransom, "is the best and most sensitive of vocations...
Tate's artistic demands on himself are even more stringent than his social demands. His early training was rigorous. "In his Advanced Composition class. Mr. Ransom would assign all of Shakespeare's sonnets for us to study," Tate remembers. "Then we'd have to write a Shakespearean sonnet of our own, then an Italian sonnet...