Word: soldiering
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...last unknown soldier? 1st Lieut. MICHAEL BLASSIE's 138th combat mission ended in flames near An Loc, South Vietnam, in May 1972, when the enemy blasted the wing off his plane. What is unknown is whether Blassie, then a 24-year-old Air Force Academy graduate, now rests beneath a sacred marble slab in the Tomb of the Unknowns at Arlington National Cemetery. That possibility got a boost last week as veterans detailed their hunch that, through snafus and an eagerness to anoint a Vietnam-era vet as an unknown, the Pentagon ignored evidence that could have determined...
Esprit de corps is a crucial factor in the military. But sometimes the spirit can get a little carried away. For a long time, at Fort Leonard Wood in Missouri, when night fell and the sergeant was away, the soldier boys and soldier girls did play. And if the sergeant showed up, he was often greeted by a loud "Hello!" The greeting, uttered heartily by recruits standing watch on each floor of the three-story brick barracks, was not quite military protocol. Rather, it was a warning to those engaged in hanky-panky to end their trysts and jump back...
Five years later, when angry Tibetans rose up ever more fiercely against Chinese aggression, their young leader consulted the State Oracle again and, one night, dressed as a humble soldier, slipped out of his summer palace, with his family and some bodyguards. For two weeks the party traveled over the highest mountains on earth, dodging Chinese planes and moving only under the cover of darkness, until at last, suffering from dysentery and on the back of a hybrid yak, the Dalai Lama arrived in India and began a new life in exile...
Speaking of Showgirls, Starship Troopers is also audaciously political and even--gasp!--feminist in its handling of the gender-mixing of its military forces. Gender is never portrayed as an impediment to becoming a spaceship pilot or front-line soldier; actually, neither the film nor its characters acknowledge any gender gap at all. The harmony between male and female soldiers is so improbably complete that everyone showers together in the wide-open locker room. Sexual liaisons do occur among unit members, but cease en flagrante when the battle-siren sounds. Not a character in the movie questions any of this...
...play which treats the persecution and internment of gay men in Nazi Germany. Handsome and likable but startlingly self-centered, playboy Max (Clive Owen) regularly hurts the feelings of his young lover Rudy (Brian Webber) by sleeping around with other men. But one night Max picks up the wrong soldier at a club, and the next morning the Gestapo appears at their door. On the run from the S.S. for two years, Max and Rudy are finally captured, and are hustled onto a prison train to the concentration camp at Dachau. After Rudy's brutal death at the hands...