Word: woode
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Esprit de corps is a crucial factor in the military. But sometimes the spirit can get a little carried away. For a long time, at Fort Leonard Wood in Missouri, when night fell and the sergeant was away, the soldier boys and soldier girls did play. And if the sergeant showed up, he was often greeted by a loud "Hello!" The greeting, uttered heartily by recruits standing watch on each floor of the three-story brick barracks, was not quite military protocol. Rather, it was a warning to those engaged in hanky-panky to end their trysts and jump back...
Even before the panel arrived to inspect Fort Leonard Wood last September, the Army had tried to control the raging hormones of the teenagers it recruited into basic training. Male and female recruits were moved into adjoining rooms housing up to eight soldiers, all the same sex. The Army also removed all of the bedroom doors to allow sergeants to monitor activities more closely. But with the recruits' doors gone, lights-out in barracks also meant lights-out in the halls if the recruits were to get any sleep. The increased darkness, however, only allowed for more sexual misbehavior...
...stay away from mixed-gender barracks at night. That, said an Army inspector general's report, opens "a potential window for trainee-trainee sexual misconduct." Indeed, until now the Army's preoccupation had been the behavior of its sergeants, to the point where local commanders at Fort Leonard Wood had ordered the doors to sergeants' offices taken down as well. When the sergeants complained, the doors were put back. But the doorknobs were left off, leaving two-inch-wide peepholes so the doors could not be locked--and making it easier to keep tabs on the goings-on behind closed...
...Miracle on 34th Street. The 1947 version, or it's coal for you--from Natalie Wood to John Payne, this one thrives in that postwar black-and-white glow. And Edmund Gwenn (no offense Richard Attenborough, you were great in Great Escape) is Santa Claus...
...appreciate fully the incongruities of Tenzin Gyatso's life in the celebrity age, you have to recall that he was born in a cowshed in a tiny farming village in what was locally known as the Wood Hog Year (1935). The previous Dalai Lama, the 13th, had been one of the great reforming spirits of a tradition whose leaders had all too often been ineffectual boys manipulated by regents. Beset by imperialists of all stripes, the farsighted Lama, in his last written testament, predicted a time in Tibet's history, soon, when "monks and monasteries will be destroyed...