Word: truckful
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...silence, come the missiles, no longer metaphorical but physical and nuclear. U.S. Pershing IIs, looking incongruously toylike with their bright red and yellow stripes, being deployed in West Germany. In Britain and Italy, Tomahawk cruise missiles, sleek, innocent-looking and small enough to fit into a pickup truck, all targeted on the Soviet Union. On the other side, Soviet mobile rockets going into Czechoslovakia and East Germany, aimed at U.S. allies in Europe. Tomorrow, perhaps, Soviet depressed-trajectory ballistic missiles on submarines off America's Atlantic shores, capable of hitting Washington as rapidly as the Pershing IIs could strike...
...Third World, and this time some of the blood was American. U.S. troops went into combat for the first time since 1975, invading the tiny Caribbean island of Grenada and overturning a clique of hard-line Marxists who had murdered Prime Minister Maurice Bishop, a milder Marxist. Suicide truck bombers, presumably Islamic Shi'ite zealots who share Iranian Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini's belief that the U.S. is "the Great Satan," blew up the American embassies in Lebanon and Kuwait, as well as the headquarters of the U.S. Marine peace-keeping force at the Beirut airport, a shocking attack that killed...
...highly critical reports added fuel to the intensifying national debate on the Marine deployment. Both spoke of the lax security around the Marine compound at the Beirut airport before it was blown up by a suicidal truck driver on Oct. 23, killing 241 U.S. servicemen (see following story). Republican Congressman Larry Hopkins, one of the authors of a report by a House subcommittee, went beyond the security question to criticize the "peacekeeping" role of the Marines. Said he: "The people in the Mideast have been fighting since the days of Abraham. Asking our Marines to stop the fighting there...
...training and tradition, the U.S. Marines prefer going over the top to hunkering down in the trenches. Their indifference to digging in may have proved fatal, however, when a terrorist truck bomb blew apart Marine headquarters in Beirut on Oct. 23, killing 241 men. So concluded a highly critical report last week by the Investigations Subcommittee of the House Armed Services Committee. The hawkish subcommittee, in a document approved by a vote of 9 to 3, charged the Marines with slack security and inadequate intelligence gathering, and accused the entire military chain of command of "very serious errors in judgment...
...first assault was similar to the truck-bomb attacks that have occurred in Lebanon this year, including the ones in October that took the lives of 241 U.S. servicemen and 58 French paratroopers. It was an ominous warning that the oil-producing gulf, a region of vital interest to the U.S., is not exempt from the kind of violence that has plagued Lebanon...