Word: swooping
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...rays of the sun. Thousands of rare giant land tortoises, some 4-ft. across and weighing as much as 600 Ibs., creep across the pitted coral and ridged limestone surface of the island. Tiny flightless rails nestle amidst Aldabra's bushy scrub and mangrove forests, while above them swoop red-footed boobies, sacred ibises and fruit-eating bats. Twenty of the island's plant species are nonexistent elsewhere in the world; so are a host of its insect inhabitants...
...even trickier for Major Dick Desing, 36, who flies night missions out of Ubon; he must swoop low through enemy fire, seeking out moving trucks and barges with only the glow of his flares to guide him. "You see all the flak coming up, all the guns flashing on the ground," he says. "But you're too busy to be afraid. You're tracking, moving, dropping bombs and climbing." When it is all over and the pilot heads back to Thailand, the reaction is almost always the same: a dry, cotton mouth. "After that, the rest...
...exemplars of a new concept of air mobility in waging ground war. It was just after President Johnson had announced a massive U.S. buildup in mid-1965, and the 18,000 men of the U.S. 1st Cavalry (Airmobile) were given a single vital mission. Their job was to swoop down out of the skies on the enemy's big main-force units wherever they could be found, engage them in battle and then whirl back to the landing pads of the Air Cav "golf course"at An Khe in the Central Highlands to await the next alarm. Brilliantly executed...
...tactics of Delta warfare are far from ideal. Helicopters swoop in low and drop troops in the open. Other armed choppers orbit overhead, ready to help out if the enemy is in the trees, but the infantryman must slog forward, sinking up to his knees at times in oozing, smelly mud, wading through canals that cut across the fields every few hundred yards, and finally rushing into the village to overrun the enemy's positions. Vietnamese troops, who seldom weigh much more than 100 Ibs., move with considerable ease through the mud and can keep going from sunup...
...current season-so lovely in anticipation, so disappointing in actuality. Last week the frump finally combed her hair and put on a touch of lipstick. In a spare, dust-dry dramatization of Katherine Anne Porter's novella Noon Wine, Adapter-Director Sam Peckinpah in a single swoop revived much of the all-but-dead hope that serious drama can find a regular place in the TV schedule...