Word: snake
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...hawk-faced, silent, evil-battling spook whom Jack Duluoz invents (and then sees, fearfully, in every dark doorway), gets from place to place by grooking. Dr. Sax plays poker incessantly, has a high, fiendish laugh ("Mwee hee ha ha ha"). And when his stalking of the evil Great World Snake makes it necessary, he pulls a rubber boat out of his slouch hat, pumps it up and paddles across the Merrimack...
...sleep each), set off live explosive near TVA's Blue Ridge Dam. For food they had one C-ration can, a share in a live chicken. (New problem for the city-bred: how to kill and cook it.) They had learned in earlier problems to live on snake meat in Florida's Everglades, cross open country on a run (about five miles every 40 minutes). Sent to tactical units, the Rangers are under orders to set up five-week courses of similar toughness throughout the Army, will soon introduce a new standard physical-fitness test for basic trainees...
...Snake Charmer. The man who stands between Iraq and all-out Communism is a lean, hard-muscled and ascetic professional soldier with a fixed, snaggle-toothed smile. His name Abdul Karim Kassem. On the face of it, Karim Kassem, 44, seems a weak reed on which to rest the free world's hopes. Modest in deportment, moderate in conversation, Kassem is nonetheless inordinately and naively suspicious. (He recently asserted that one section of the U.S. embassy in Baghdad lured Iraqis in with stories that automobiles can be bought there-and then filled them with anti-Kassem talk.) Cursed...
...Born in Baghdad, the son of a lower-middle-class family, Kassem graduated from the Royal Military College in 1934, fought with distinction in the Palestine war, and over the years won regular promotions. At senior officers' school at Devizes in southwestern England, his classmates nicknamed him "the snake charmer" because of his ability to argue them into undertaking improbable courses of action in field problems. (He once got the members of his team to send hypothetical tanks off to the left flank, though everyone knew that this routed them through a deep swamp.) A British officer-instructor, less...
Behind this sordid record lies the soul of a romantic. On his left arm Marks wears a tattooed double heart inscribed "Love, Nellie." On his right is an eight-inch snake coiled about a dagger stuck through the top of a skull and bearing Marks's motto, which happens to be "Death Before Dishonor...