Word: sand
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Dates: during 1990-1990
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...that moved furiously toward Basa's three-vehicle convoy telegraphed the worst news possible. An Iraqi patrol -- two armed jeeps -- was converging on Basa's position. As planned in advance, Basa quickly shifted his Nissan out of four-wheel drive. In a moment, he was stuck in the loose sand. In another, he was in custody. But Basa's confederates got away, their Chevy Blazers roaring off for Kuwait City. By nightfall they would resupply the Kuwaiti resistance with 90 AK-47 assault rifles, 17 rocket-propelled grenade launchers, 5,000 rounds of ammunition and, at $25,000 each, three...
...young Americans wait for their presents in the desert. They come addressed to Operation Desert Shield, APO New York, 09848-0006. They are parcels of home shipped into a zone that is nearly as alien and inhospitable as space -- temperatures unnatural, planet sand-colored to the horizon, days blinding, nights full of stars. Home, built around the cave and fire pit, belongs to a more Teutonic, cold-weather scheme of things...
Television brought Vietnam into America's living rooms only when the fighting was well under way. This time, Americans are watching the preparations in the sand on television every night: an instant, electronic diary. "We are being told how many casualties we can expect on the first day, on the second day," says Alan Chartock, a political scientist at the New Paltz campus of the State University of New York. "The enemy is talking to us, giving us nightly forecasts of doom...
...imponderables range from the nitty and literally gritty (how badly will the fine desert sand foul the gears of tanks and the breeches of rifles?) to the conceptual (could U.S. troops bypass the dug-in Iraqi forces in Kuwait with a flanking attack?). They include questions of psychology: Is the Iraqi army battle hardened from eight years of war against Iran, or battle weary? Would the troops on the front line, many of whom are thought to be ill-trained draftees who know they are cannon fodder, fight hard or give up quickly? For that matter, how battle ready...
...creature whose bravado consists in allowing chance to work its will on him, at first believes he will enjoy feeling stranger in a strange land. North Africa, he thinks, will offer escape into adventure, exotic peril, the seductions of oblivion. He is wrong. The desert demands his surrender. The sand is quicksand; it will swallow him whole...