Word: servicemen
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...praise was a welcome shift. Except for the U.S. air strike on Libya in 1986, American military performance since Viet Nam has been miserable. In 1983 commanders in Lebanon failed to erect defenses to prevent a mere truck from crashing into a Marine barracks and killing 241 American servicemen with a load of explosives. The invasion of Grenada that same year was ultimately successful, but so botched that 18 Americans died even though the island was defended only by a ragtag of Cuban construction workers and Cuban and Grenadian soldiers...
...from power and gave a new government a chance to take root. As a bonus, it recovered some 48,000 weapons that might one day have been turned against Americans or sent off to El Salvador as part of Noriega's gun running to rebels there. In Panama, American . servicemen fully earned the kind of medals that were so lavishly dispensed after Grenada...
Twenty-three U.S. servicemen were killed in the operation and 322 wounded. Among Panamanians, 297 soldiers and some 300 civilians were killed, according to the U.S. military...
Noriega obligingly provided it. The dictator had his rubber-stamp People's Assembly name him "Maximum Leader" and declare that American provocations created a "state of war" between the two countries. That coincided with attacks on U.S. servicemen in Panama. There had previously been hundreds of . similar incidents and not all one-sided; in an altercation outside a laundry in Panama City, a U.S. officer, who was not supposed to be carrying a gun, shot and wounded a Panamanian. It is possible too that Washington took Noriega's declaration of "war" more seriously than it was intended. Nonetheless, the President...
...iffy and risky (probably wisely, in view of the later inability of American forces to snatch the dictator during the invasion). Powell outlined the plan for a full invasion, forthrightly telling Bush that "there is no way this operation is not going to result in casualties" among both U.S. servicemen and Panamanian civilians. Bush listened and then simply said, "Let's do it" -- by far the most fateful three words of his presidency to date...