Word: skies
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
With that, the paratroopers began a show that wowed the President and his party. After fighter-bombers had seared a jump area with Napalm and blasted it with 500-lb. bombs, six C-130 transports lumbered overhead at 1,250 ft.-and the sky turned alive with paratroopers from the 101st Airborne, the sister division of the 82nd. Behind the men floated the equipment of war-a 105-mm. howitzer, a self-propelled antitank gun, an 18,000-Ib. bulldozer dangling from six 100-ft. chutes that blossomed like giant flowers...
These reports were phony. They had been planted as an elaborate preparatory touch to the biggest air-defense exercise in history-Sky Shield II. When Sky Shield II actually started last weekend, all commercial and private flying over the U.S. and Canada ceased for twelve hours, from 11 a.m. to 11 p.m. C.S.T., and some 2,100 commercial flights were canceled...
...obvious difference between Sky Shield II and the real thing was that no bombs exploded, no antiaircraft missiles were launched, no guns were fired. But there was another difference; it would take days and weeks of study to assess the effectiveness of NORAD's response to the make-believe attack. If that attack had been by someone else and in earnest, the results would be all too apparent all too soon...
North House's bright blue bell tower ("It clashes with the sky.") prompted aesthetics to re-name it "Bleak House," while others, of a less literary disposition, simply proclaimed "No!" Rumors that Moors Hall 'Cliffies planned to paint the bathrooms the same shocking blue have been subsequently denied...
...starving people's retreat would be many individual calamities. But Aten and his ghostwriter cannot leave well enough alone- throughout the middle part of the book appear such signposts as "It was as if, with Nina's departure (her unit had been ordered away), mercy left us and the sky fell in." Spelling things out has its virtues, but this is a little too much...