Word: sprang
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Glowing Red. The main battalion force soon had an even larger tragedy on its hands. At dawn, two platoons of C Company manning X Ray's southeast corner fanned out on patrol. The Communists cunningly sniped and retreated ahead of them, then sprang an ambush from the flanks and rear. Simultaneously a direct Red onslaught smashed head-on at the main ¶Company positions back at the landing zone, diverting both attention and possible aid to the two trapped platoons. Both were virtually annihilated. When relief forces arrived, they found several G.I.s who had been taken prisoner, later shot...
...hemisphere?also went wild. The power output surged from 1,500 megavolts to 2,250, then sank abruptly to zero. "The needle came clear off the paper!" exclaimed one engineer. "There were more squiggly lines than in an earthquake." Giant generators spun uncontrollably out of step, and overload switches sprang open...
...midday the heat had Yen's men gasping. Some were vomiting. Then the V.C. sprang their ambush. Two marines were killed instantly, and five were wounded. "Get up, you bastards," snarled Yen. "It's only a few snipers-get up and move after them." The marines went, and Bill Leftwich, one of the 6,500 U.S. advisers who sometimes feel that they are the "forgotten men" in the new war, went too. The brittle Yen had run through five U.S. advisers until Leftwich came along. By quiet persuasion, Leftwich got Yen to add an engineering platoon...
Many went west. Author Boorstin styles them the "Transients," finds in the story of their trundling, urgent progress the paradigm and impulse for much of later American life. Because they explored an unknown world, mutual assistance was a necessity. Law was invented as needed, government sprang up from the grass roots of democracy, and leadership fell to the organizer, whose powers of persuasion could cajole conflicting interests into cooperation. Because land went to the first man who settled it, the Transients were always in a hurry, and the nation committed itself with almost religious fervor to a technology of haste...
...inspired obvious reverence from his colleagues. Two violinists helped him to the podium, where he sank gratefully into his special chair. He conducted sitting down, but sprang upright at moments of crescendo or crisis. His right arm sustained the tempos with wide, sweeping gestures; his left hand energetically swayed from the wrist with a vibrato movement, coaxing sweetness from the orchestra as he does from a cello. The result was a Bach that no one had heard ever before. At concert's end, the Vermont mountains echoed with bravos for the world's greatest cellist, who had proved...