Word: trek
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...cold war winds down, history is offering up startling new images that bear none of the hallmarks of traditional statesmanship. Last week history was made amid the flutter of colorful balloons, the sputtering of rattletrap Trabants and Wartburgs and -- pop! -- the burst of champagne corks. It was the Great Trek Westward, and as East Germans headed for new lives in West Germany, the world witnessed a unique spectacle: an East European country defying its Warsaw Pact brethren and openly collaborating with the West to aid and abet refugees in their flight to freedom...
Most moved on quickly, eager to complete the 250-mile trek across Austria to their new homeland. Cries of "Free at last!" filled the air as newcomers leaped from their vehicles to kiss the West German asphalt. In Passau, volunteers passed out candy and fruit to sleepy-eyed children, who must have thought they had awakened in the midst of a carnival. "I came for her," said a young father, hoisting his daughter into his arms. "She deserves more than a life in East Germany." The first signs were promising. Because Bonn acknowledges only one German citizenship, the refugees were...
Mixed in, largely unnoticed, among the thousands of East Germans making the trek westward was a handful of Rumanians and Soviets. That trickle could portend problems for all of Europe. While the Germans are a special case with their historic claims to a single nationhood, other East Europeans are eyeing Hungary's hole in the Iron Curtain and fantasizing about life on the other side...
...command of a Sergeant Meserve (Sean Penn, in an uncompromising performance) sets off on a long-range reconnaissance mission. On Meserve's orders, it stops at a peasant village, where it abducts a young girl and sadistically binds and gags her for the many awful hours of their trek. The girl, who is heartbreakingly played by a delicate newcomer named Thuy Thu Le, will serve as "portable R. and R." In other words, Meserve intends that he and his men will gang-rape her. This they eventually do, with only one among them, Eriksson (Michael J. Fox), refusing to participate...
...minutes later we were bound for the Delaware River. Our options: an eight-mile trip through "leisure water"--what the canoe people called "easy, easy canoeing for 65-year-olds with heart problems." Or, we could go for the more expensive 10-mile trek through white water rapids, designed for those human beings who want to "grab life by the antlers and suck out its marrow...