Word: regiment
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...lieutenant in a tank regiment before he entered the priesthood, the Oxford-educated Kent became head of the C.N.D. in 1980. He led a drive that has expanded the membership from 3,000 to 50,000-in addition, there are at least 200,000 politically active sympathizers-and mobilized effective mass demonstrations against the Bomb. Last month C.N.D. members and their allies held hands to form a 14-mile chain between Greenham Common in Berkshire, where the first U.S. cruise missiles are scheduled to be installed later this year, and Burghfield, site of Britain's nuclear warhead factory...
...trim, perfect vessel, 412 ft. long, glided into overcast San Diego Bay a bit ahead of schedule after a five-day sail up from Mexico, and the regiment of photographers onshore nudged into position. Cannons roared from the escort frigate Diomede, and a U.S. battery returned the 21-gun salute. After Her Majesty's Yacht Britannia steered toward the freshly painted yellow moorings of the Broadway Pier, her Royal Marine band played, then a U.S. Navy band. Suddenly the craning crowd of 6,000 broke into unbuttoned cheers, while several hundred reporters looked on. There were even scattered choruses...
...sometimes the music is a weapon, and sometimes it is a trap. For centuries, Celts have given themselves battlefield noise and nerve with bagpipes, making the "our song" of the regiment, the tribe, stirring up the blood. The pipes have their wild rhetoric. It may both stiffen and imprison the spirit. Sometimes people cannot escape from their songs. The Irish gift for the instant ballad that glorifies this afternoon's martyr will ruin a human heart and turn children into killers, the heroes of tomorrow's pub songs...
...unexpectedly productive sources. Sometimes children simply take ordinary words and hold them up to the light at a slightly different angle, an old trick of slang. The ten-year-old will pronounce something "excellent" in the brisk, earnest manner of an Army colonel who has just inspected his regiment. (Primo means the same thing.) The movie E. T. has contributed penis breath, an aggressively weird phrase in perfect harmony with the aggressively weird psyche of the eight-year-old. In Minnesota, they say, for weird. Bogus is an ordinary, though slightly out-of-the-way word that has been recommissioned...
...regiment's last major action, ironically, was as part of the United Nations peace-keeping force that was assigned to Lebanon in 1978. The regiment stopped patrolling in the demilitarized U.N. zone after P.L.O. forces opened fire on the regiment's outposts and ambushed its commander, Jean-Germain Salvan, wounding him seriously...