Word: viet
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...Navy set up sea checkpoints off Colombia in an antidrug maneuver dubbed Operation Hat Trick. The operation was cut short, according to a U.S. military officer, because the results did not seem to justify the costs. Nor does the military have much of an interdiction success record: in Viet Nam it was never able to close the primitive Ho Chi Minh Trail; quarantining 88,000 miles of U.S. shoreline is at least as daunting...
...been killed in violence "directly related" to the invasion -- an ominously qualified statistic. But even that number, which has been challenged, is proportionally equivalent to 22,000 Americans. Add 314 Panamanian troops, and Panama's loss in a couple of days is equivalent to America's during the entire Viet Nam War. Yet compare the American press's indifference to Panamanian deaths with its lavish emphasis on -- and, it seems, exaggeration of -- the death count in Rumania...
...marking key milestones. What makes the series most satisfying, however, are the interviews with onetime partisans who look back with surprising insight and clearheadedness. It's the sight of a graying Carmichael smiling as he recalls a phone conversation with King just before King came out publicly against the Viet Nam War. Or Ron Scott, whose apartment was raided by National Guardsmen during the Detroit riots, explaining, "Inside of most black people there was a time bomb . . . a pot that was about to overflow." If the historian's job is to bring some sort of order and sense to events...
Acrimony between the press and the military is hardly new. It existed even during the fondly recalled days of World War II, when correspondents had to wear uniforms and submit to censorship, a practice the military abandoned in Viet Nam and has avoided since. In response to criticism over the barring of reporters from the 1983 Grenada invasion, the Pentagon created a National Media Pool of rotating news organizations. The military not only decides when a pool will be "activated" and "deactivated" but also sets the ground rules for participation, including understandably strict limits on what information can be published...
Although the judges were hardly impartial, few military experts dissent from their glowing assessments of Operation Just Cause. The praise was a welcome shift. Except for the U.S. air strike on Libya in 1986, American military performance since Viet Nam has been miserable. In 1983 commanders in Lebanon failed to erect defenses to prevent a mere truck from crashing into a Marine barracks and killing 241 American servicemen with a load of explosives. The invasion of Grenada that same year was ultimately successful, but so botched that 18 Americans died even though the island was defended only by a ragtag...