Word: commando
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Just after Gorbachev took office in 1985, the Soviets intensified the war and appeared to gain ground. Deadly Mi-24 helicopters and elite Spetsnaz commando units regularly ambushed rebel units and supply caravans with devastating effect: mujahedin casualties rose to all-time highs. Then the Reagan Administration began shipping Stingers, those compact but lethal antiaircraft missiles, to the guerrillas. Soon the air war turned around. By one conservative estimate, the Soviets last year alone lost 270 aircraft worth about $2.2 billion...
...National United Front for the Liberation of Viet Nam, they stealthily crossed the jungles of Laos last July, making for the Central Highlands of their homeland. There they hoped to link up with mountain tribesmen opposed to the Communist government and begin a guerrilla war to overthrow Hanoi. Each commando carried an automatic rifle and 200 rounds of ammunition. Beyond that, the battalion had only some rocket-propelled grenade launchers and machine guns. In August, a day's march from their goal, they were attacked by 2,000 soldiers of the Vietnamese army. More than 100 of the intruders were...
...make daily commando raids into about half a dozen shops if I wanted get footage of food lines without waiting forever," he said. Because of these restrictions, most news programs in the early '80s used exterior scenes as background for broadcasts from the USSR, he added...
After the shelling stopped, a Navy SEAL (Sea, Air and Land) commando team in a rubber Zodiac raft tied explosives to the pilings that remained and demolished them. Five miles away, a second SEAL team boarded another oil platform abandoned hours earlier by Iranians and destroyed communications and other equipment...
...show than his fellow coup leaders found tolerable. Following Sankara's execution, Radio Ouagadougou accused him of having built up a "concentration of power" and of harboring the "ambitions of a madman." In seizing power last week, Compaore, 36, the Minister of State and Justice, used the same special commando unit he placed at Sankara's disposal in 1983. Western diplomats in Burkina Faso expect him to be a less flamboyant leader than Sankara but to continue most of his policies. Despite the death of their author, the national radio said, the policies' basic wisdom "is not called into question...