Word: shock
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Even more worrisome was the possibility that the latest assaults will touch off additional violence. As Michael Simpson, 9, was carried into a Rome hospital last week in a state of near shock, he kept repeating, "It will never end. It will never end." He was, of course, referring to the horrible ordeal he had just endured. But he could just as easily have been describing the inevitable cycle of terror and retaliation that has come to characterize politics in the Middle East. --By Ed Magnuson. Reported by Walter Galling/Rome and Gertraud Lessing/Vienna
Partly as a result of this attitude, America's Special Forces are still woefully unprepared for the challenges they could face. Though it is far more likely that the U.S. would use its handful of quick-reaction shock troops rather than any of its 17 active Army divisions or 13 Navy carrier battle groups, special operations still receive less than 1% of the Pentagon's $300 billion budget. Warns Jeffrey Record, a respected expert on military affairs: "I have no doubt that low-intensity conflict is the sort of scenario we'll be fighting in coming decades. What...
Other Special Forces, like the Army's Rangers, are lightly equipped shock troops parachuted in to seize air bases and key installations before the heavily armored main force arrives. The Navy's SEALs (Sea, Air, Land forces) would be stealthily deployed to blow up bridges and ships. The Air Force's First Special Operations Wing (1st SOW) is set up to ferry combat troops in high-tech flying machines that can race undetected in the dead of night. But the most highly visible, politically popular mission of the Special Forces is counterterrorism. The Delta Force is trained to rescue hostages...
...preferred to see the Rose Parade or the soap All My Children. No such gripes were reported from Moscow, where Reagan led the 9 p.m. news. His appearance was not billed in advance, but the Soviet audience may have reached 150 million. For them, it was a mild shock, certainly a rarity. The last time a U.S. President had come on, eyeball to lens, was in 1972, when Richard Nixon appeared. Reagan, the Great Communicator, made his plea "to try to reduce the suspicions and mistrust between us," then tried a little shaky Russian: "Let us look forward...
...Pope John Paul II, gathered in the chapel of Rome's North American College for the funeral of Natasha Simpson, 11, the American schoolgirl who was the youngest of the airport victims. The Rev. Diarmuid Martin, a Vatican official and family friend, summarized the shared sense of sorrow and shock. Noting that many of the mourners were journalists, including Natasha's father Victor, an editor for the Associated Press in Rome, Father Martin observed, "We've written or spoken about suffering, about anguish, about tragedy, about natural disasters. We've spoken about violence and terrorism, about all the good...