Word: sand
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Dates: during 1950-1950
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From the training camp, troops graduate to the volcanic black sand beaches not far away. There, facing the mainland, they build concrete pillboxes, string barbed wire, drill endlessly to repel the invasion from the sea. In their off-duty hours, the soldiers sing a new army song...
...derrick, got an ancient, 3,000-ft. East Texas drilling rig and a leaking secondhand boiler and boldly set out to sink a 6,000-ft. hole in Hardin County. He drafted his father as a tool pusher, his younger brother William as a laborer. It was agonizing toil. Sand ruined the rubber rings in his pumps every half hour; each time, he dismantled the mechanism and installed new ones. The "coffee pot" rig broke down endlessly. He says: "We might as well have been drilling with a high-heeled boot." It took six months to sink a hole which...
Along the 30-mile jungle track from the airfield to 300-year-old Paramaribo, he was hailed by ragged Negroes, Indians, white-scarved East Indians, stolid Dutch farmers and Javanese women in bright-colored, close-fitting sarongs. In the steaming riverbank capital, workers had poured sand into the biggest puddles in the unpaved streets. Dutch flags and orange banners hung from the front of the green-shuttered, two-story wood Parliament building. As Bernhard drove up, a band played the Dutch anthem, then broke into Surinam's own anthem, outlawed until The Hague granted the colony self-government last...
...rifles for rice. The Little Tiger struggled for discipline. Demoralized troops were moved out of the towns into the countryside, paid in silver dollars (for a change), reorganized and re-equipped. Hsueh now has 160,000 men of varying fitness. His best units are digging in along the white sand beaches of Hainan's northern coast...
...inside it, while other prisoners carried it outdoors and set it up in front of a guard box. Almost every afternoon for the next four months the P.O.W.s vaulted tirelessly while Peter and John took turns burrowing away with a trowel at their ever-lengthening tunnel. The loose sand was packed into bags made from trouser legs. The bags were hung inside the wooden horse while the men were digging; later the sand was scattered in latrines, tomato patches, or under the prisoners' huts. Each time the diggers meticulously smoothed the original topsoil over the tunnel entrance...