Word: commandant
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...troops into combat in Korea and Viet Nam with such gallantry that he was twice awarded the Silver Star, the nation's third highest combat medal. He moved easily from battlefield to classroom, from Pentagon desk to international command, gathering ribbons and rank along the way and, last year, becoming the youngest four-star general in the Army. Then, last spring, Sam Sims Walker became trapped in a bureaucratic Pentagon crossfire, and last week he resigned from the Army after more than 32 years of service-at the same time bringing into the open a battle between generals...
Fourteen months ago, Walker was given his fourth star and his toughest assignment: commander of NATO's land-based forces in southeastern Europe, with headquarters at Izmir, Turkey. This command used to have 600,000 troops, but the Greeks pulled out their 150,000-man contingent after Turkey invaded Cyprus in 1974. Walker thus found himself in the unenviable role of being an American general leading a Turkish army on Turkish soil at a time when the U.S. Congress was punishing Turkey with an arms embargo...
Burt Lancaster, who has been playing veteran soldiers since long before he became a veteran actor, is in command of the American detachment and in solid command of the best starring role he has had in years (he was, of course, superb as the dying patriarch, a character role in Bertolucci's sprawling 1900). Without the slightest fuss, he gives us a portrait of a dutybound professional whose soldierly instincts tell him that his duty this time is madness. Revolt is beyond his character, but disgust is not. Lancaster's presence, carrying with it the memory of other...
...problems here are an ill-equipped and ill-motivated local soldiery (they go into battle carrying shotguns), the corruption of the local district leader, a high command that doesn't understand the nature of guerrilla warfare, and a less-than-inspiring crowd of American helpers. Among them: A sergeant whose gung-ho spirit has been burned out in the war. A lieutenant who moronically parrots-because he moronically believes-all the official rationales for the war, all the official ideas of how to conduct yourself on this dark and bloody ground. A sometime college student one suspects of having...
Readers of Fate Is the Hunter, Ernest K. Gann's unnerving account of his days as an airline and Air Transport Command pilot, will recognize the flying style. What is surprising about this rambunctious autobiography, however, is that although Gann tells a number of good wing-and-prayer yarns, some of his most surprising adventures have had nothing to do with aviation. He has been a newsreel cameraman, soldier, Broadway actor, polo player, farmer, cartoonist, commercial fisherman, deepwater yachtsman, Hollywood talent scout and, of course, a bestselling novelist (The High and the Mighty, Band of Brothers). He wrote, directed...