Word: starlight
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...tanks. It can dash 400 miles at a top speed of 42 m.p.h. without refueling (v. 100 miles and 18 m.p.h. by the Panzer IVs of Rommel's famed Afrika Korps). It can cross rivers simply by driving underwater, locate targets in the night with infra-red and starlight viewfinders, and pinpoint their range with a laser beam. Automatic devices have reduced the standard four-and five-man crew to three, and a sophisticated stabilization system keeps a big 152-mm. gun so steady that it can fire artillery shells or guided missiles accurately even as the tank rumbles...
...operation is carried out by "night hunters," teams of helicopters equipped with a new sniper's scope, called a Starlight, that can see in the dark and cannot be deceived by the enemy. Unlike the older infrared scope, which sought the enemy by heat detection but gave off a detectable beam of light, the new scope amplifies light from the stars or the moon, making its targets appear as pale white images on the scope's green, radarlike screen...
...choppers go up on each mission-one carrying two Starlight snipers or spotters and the other loaded with rockets or miniguns. "We'll get an intelligence report that the Cong are likely to bring some goods down one of their supply routes," says the 1st Infantry Division's Sergeant Leonard Knipe. "So we go after them, zipping up and down the trail with our lights off, both scope men studying every inch of ground below us, as though it were day. As soon as we see something, the lead chopper informs the other ship, we wheel around...
...kill. During Operation Junction City last March, they demolished a convoy of oxcarts carrying weapons and supplies and killed 50 Viet Cong. But the night run is more often a modest operation that catches smaller groups of Viet Cong at meetings or trudging along trails. Through such harassment, the Starlight snipers hope to cut V.C. troop and supply movements at night, and deny the Communists what has been virtually a nighttime sanctuary...
When she was twelve, her stepfather, "a whiz at selling anything," got Julie a spot with the "Starlight Roof" revue at the London Hippodrome. On her first night she stopped the show with an incredible F above high ¶in Titania's aria in Mignon. Immediately, her parents' agent, "Uncle Charlie" Tucker, moved in, arranged to get Julie's buckteeth straightened. Within a year, she was belting out her "bastardized opera" in a special command performance. "You sang beautifully, Julie," Her Majesty, now the Queen Mother, told her. She had become, at 13, the family...