Word: sand
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First to hit the beach was Corporal Garry Parsons, who splashed onto the wet sand and sprinted 50 yards into a stand of pine trees-and a platoon of photographers. Parsons' comment was candid if not immortal. Cried he, "I'm glad to get off that damned ship...
...situation really gets ugly. Here come several hundred other Lan celotians marching behind loudspeaker trucks. In their own tongue-a kind of pidgin Spanish-they shout anti-American slogans. They hurl fistfuls of sand in the Marines' faces, threaten them, push them and form human barricades. They are then joined in their hostility by the natives who originally had welcomed the Marines. "Form wedges! Form wedges, goddammit!" cries a harassed Marine sergeant. Finally, the Marines disperse the mob and start pushing inland...
...Doom Club. Danang itself is ominously quiet. The white sand beaches on Tourane Bay are deserted; pedicabs and taxis have given way to Jeeps and deuce-and-a-half trucks. Danang's populace doesn't bother to look up at the Skyraiders and jets bellowing off the runways en route to another strike north. Military men stick to their posts. Bars and brothels go dead at night, leaving girls to play cards and dance with each other; little children with wild eyes pick one another's pockets. Even in the "Doom Club," a hangout for U.S. officers...
...tiny, torrid new capital of Gaberones, rainfall permits some crops, mostly maize, sorghum, cowpeas, pumpkins and tobacco. Only a single railroad, 394 miles long, and a highway connect the north and south of the protectorate. East-west roads branch off this central spine, but typically peter out into sand within 40 or 50 miles. A few mining companies are probing Bechuanaland's deposits of manganese, copper, silver and gold, but it will be years before they pay off-if they ever...
Reader, beware. Wouk is writing for grownups, and he has a murky, modern, antiromantic intelligence. The promise of enchantment is fulfilled only in irony. His coral cuts, his sandy beaches are alive with stinging sand flies. His ocean has sharks and floating garbage. His only pirate is a boozy, busted corporate raider named Lester Atlas, who staggers into every scene with a yo-ho-ho and a rum and tonic. His hero is a middle-aged (49) New York Jew with a heart condition. The result is not romance but farce laced with tears...