Word: sanding
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...your mind that something can happen," says Greg Lynch. "You wonder, Is the equipment ready? Have they trained enough? I don't know." He knows all the things that can go wrong even under the best circumstances. "They trained with those trucks on concrete. Bases don't have sand, and they don't have sand like over there. You put one of those machines in sand for eight, 10 hours. That's when you see what you really...
What they got, in Jessica Lynch's case, was not just one bad break but one after another in the first days of the war. The battle plan didn't allow for engines ambushed by sand. And judgment and reflexes are not sharpened by three days with no sleep. "To me, we weren't ready," Lynch says. "But obviously they wouldn't have sent us over there if they didn't think we were ready." The 507th Maintenance Company was at the very end of an 8,000-vehicle, 100-mile-long supply convoy. From the start, Lynch says...
...front turned out to be beside and behind and all around them. There were no antitank weapons, no heavy artillery, just a .50-cal. machine gun that--like the soldier's M-16 rifles--didn't work very well, clogged and jammed with three days' worth of blowing sand. By the time her lost convoy came under fire in the streets of Nasiriyah, Lynch's rifle was about as useful as a hockey stick. The soldiers had been instructed to clean their weapons "anytime we got the chance," Lynch says, "but we never really had a chance...
...come to understand why they’re painful. The white people in Bolivia are rich. They are not all white like we think of white. Their skin is not palely freckled like an Irishman or ruddy red like a Norwegian. They are people the color of beach sand, descended from the Spanish who came 500 years ago and engorged themselves and their empire on Potosí’s silver. They hold the money and the power and control of the military, and their money and power has been handed down and will be handed down so long...
...Hawks such as Undersecretary of State for Non-Proliferation John Bolton warned just last week that signals of cooperation from Tehran should be seen simply as an attempt to "throw sand" in the eyes of the international community to avoid confrontation, but the involvement of Britain in brokering the latest agreement signals the fact that Washington's closest ally on Iraq has no interest in pursuing military action against Iran. Still, it may well be that the "regime-change" saber-rattling in Washington and the recent history of Iraq will certainly have helped the Europeans play "good cop" to Washington...