Word: trooplift
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...troubles began with a quiet Dutch trooplift to West New Guinea aboard KLM commercial flights. As long as the soldiers wore civvies, carried no arms and traveled aboard regularly scheduled commercial airlines-as they had done for months-nobody complained. But fortnight ago the Dutch decided to step up the airlift by chartering two special flights, and Japan promptly closed Tokyo International Airport to the jets for refueling. Forced to find an alternate route, the Dutch won U.S. permission to refuel at Anchorage, Honolulu and Wake Island...
...Djakarta, newspapers promptly blazoned stories of the U.S. role in the Dutch trooplift, and 100 students, right on cue, went into a shopworn routine. Toting bamboo spears, rocks and anti-American posters, they reduced the glass facade of the U.S. embassy to a saw-toothed shambles, smashed eight embassy autos, stamped a U.S. flag into the gutter and injured an American woman. Ambassador Howard Palfrey Jones lodged a formal protest and demanded $5,000 in damages. In return, he got a mild expression of regret and a gratuitous lecture from Foreign Minister Subandrio to the effect that "the anger...
...baffled Dutch had a point. They may have chosen a bad moment for their trooplift, but this scarcely justified Washington's hasty retreat to appease Sukarno...
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