Word: soldiers
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...morning after the great Communist offensive began. From positions around doomed Nanking, Nationalist artillery still fired an occasional shot toward Communist positions on the Yangtze's north bank. Retreating Nationalist soldiers poured back across the river in tugboats and barges. In the yellow glare of the capital's bare electric street lights, they shuffled toward the railway station. The trains they hoped to take to the south never came. A soldier guarding a ferry building watched the routed men and said: "They have been coming back all night. I don't know what's going...
Taciturn, thirtyish Edgar Cardona is what Costa Ricans call a "finger soldier" -i.e., a soldier who has received his rank through favoritism ("Somebody points a finger at you and says: 'You're a corporal; you're a captain; you're a colonel.'"). In last year's civil war, Cardona was a colonel. Afterwards, Junta President Jose Figueres kept him on as Security Minister, even though he took to hobnobbing around San Jose with the President's conservative enemies...
Robert was not an especially adventurous man; back in Buffalo he had been a hardworking, uninspired advertising salesman. As a soldier in Italy, he had weathered battle and he was deadly tired of the male odors and loud talk of the army barracks. More than anything else, he wanted to find a complaisant girl. For Lisa, the girl he found in Rome, it was a case of surrender or hunger. But Robert and Lisa soon found that love could never be simple, not even when it was sold by a desperate Italian girl to a lonely G.I. in a tawdry...
...better. But Adele's apartment was a home, redolent of strong emotions. In it lived Adele, a tough-faced old woman, "all leather and insomnia"; her husband Ugo, a gentle soul who felt in his bones the sufferings of his countrymen ; their son Antonio, an embittered ex-soldier who had welcomed the American soldiers but now hated them for their attentions to Italian women. It was a house where one could love or hate, but where no one could engage in the sort of painless barter Robert had hoped...
...when the Germans invaded Russia in 1941 he was appointed political commissar on the Moscow front, and in 1942 when the city was saved he was handed high military rank. He took over from Stalin himself as Minister of Armed Forces in 1947. Vasilevsky, a medal-shingled career soldier who came to the top in the war, distinguished himself at Sevastopol, Voronezh, Stalingrad...