Word: sands
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...watched, supine, as a series of wildly divergent film clips unrolled on the television screen: in downtown Manhattan, hundreds of protesters were flopping onto the pavement to dramatize the war’s civilian casualties. In Iraq, dusty embedded reporters were squinting at the camera and gesturing towards the sand behind them. In the major networks’ morning television studios, anchors were grasping coffee mugs and transitioning smoothly between updates on Survivor and updates on America at War (as CBS has entitled its coverage of the current conflict), with no more segue than a slight deepening of their frowns...
Instead, Charlie Rock is guarding swatches of desert where danger swirls like sand devils and then disappears. Sure, kids still pester the troops for candy and water. But the grownups aren't in a hospitable mood. In fact, small groups of Iraqi soldiers, many in plain clothes, are letting the heavy metal pass--70-ton M1A1 Abrams tanks and Bradley troop carriers--and lying in wait for the soft-skinned, lightly armed trucks hauling fuel, food and water. Every day, the journey to Baghdad stretches ever longer as Charlie Rock and other units like it that expected...
...glued these days to the all-news TV networks. As a break, he walks the neat subdivision, tying yellow ribbons around trees. The streets are named after baseball heroes: Roger Maris, Casey Stengel, Yogi Berra. Just to the north lies the Fort Bliss military reservation, spread across white sands. With winds kicking up the Chihuahuan Desert last week, the sky over El Paso was filled with irritating sand--much like that coating the troops in Iraq. Johnson, trapped in his own hell, doesn't notice. "The wait is extremely painful now," he says. "We just don't know what...
What these young Marines--many of them barely out of their teens--are discovering is that real-life enemy terrain is not quite like the models on which they trained. A miniature Iraq, built in the sand at their camp in Kuwait, had towns that were small patches of red with Iraqi soldiers represented by black-and-white targets. Now the towns are real and populated by flesh-and-blood Iraqi soldiers ready to kill...
...while the first bombs fell in Baghdad, I went to the Army Barracks Army/Navy Store to purchase a travel bag for my trip to Cancun, taking advantage of the marked-down army gear that some use in the sand storms of Iraq, and I chose to use in the sand dunes of Cancun. I purchased something called a “British CFP Pack,” and an “Ammunition Bag,” and used both as carry-ons, for such important belongings as my snorkel...