John Barry

His entrance could not have been more perfectly timed. The last toasts had been given, the wine quaffed, when there came a sudden stir in the rear of the ballroom.

The troops had practiced there was nothing more to rehearse. In a make-believe Bosnian village called "Schwend," located at a U.S. base in southern Germany, some of the soldiers dressed up as civilians needing help, while others posed as potentially troublesome Serbian, Croatian or Muslim fighters.

Bosnia--A terrible ethnic conflict in terrain that virtually nullifies American military power--posed a crucial test for the incoming Clinton administration, and Colin Powell was worried about it.

The terrorists went undetected. In the noon-hour crush of a spring day in midtown Manhattan, the two men with suitcases looked like hotel-bound businessmen.

Some editors held their noses, but the story was too good to resist. GANG OF CLOWNS STOLE MY BABY, trumpeted one Sao Paulo tabloid. Slum residents reported that two men dressed as clowns and a woman dressed as a ballerina had lured children into a van, murdered them, removed vital organs and left the bodies on their parents' doorsteps with a note of thanks and $80.

Hands on hearts, leathery cheeks streaked with tears, elderly Europeans turned out with their children and grandchildren to commemorate, for the 50th time, the almost unimaginable feat they accomplished two generations ago: the destruction of Hitler's juggernaut.

Running the central intelligence Agency was once a dream job --lots of high-level secrets, critical briefings at Langley, late nights in the White House Situation Room.

Pity the American military, overstretched, strapped for cash and grudgingly acknowledging the need to delay or cancel some of its most cherished big-ticket programs, the Pentagon is now caught between the Clinton administration and the Republican majority in Congress.

FOR BOTH AMERICANS AND the Hammurabi Division represents unfinished business. When George Bush called off the ground war after only 100 hours in 1991, the Hammurahi, a key element of Iraq's elite Republican Guard, escaped almost unscathed.

At first, it will be a quiet affair. There will be none of the airborne razzle-dazzle of the Panama invasion or the kind of showy amphibious landings that, unopposed, looked silly on CNN in Somalia.

Perhaps he's getting the hang of it. When Bill Clinton announced last week that North Korea had agreed to freeze its nuclear program in return for talks with the United States, he stuck grimly to a short statement, and, in a break with tradition, answered questions without contradicting himself.

H-HOUR ON D-DAY, THE HOUR ON The Day. Every one of the 370,000 soldiers and sailors aboard the 5,300 Allied vessels steaming toward the Normandy beaches on the morning of June 6, 1944, was carrying a mimeographed piece of paper, the "order of the day" from Allied commander Dwight Eisenhower: they were, he told them, embarked on "the Great Crusade." Churchill called D-Day "the most difficult and complicated operation ever to take place." With British phlegm, the chief of naval operations for the...

THE RISE AND FALL OF LES ASPIN is a Washington tragedy. He had spent most of his professional life thinking about better ways of defending the United States.

It was a thought that probably struck a lot of politicians last week. Bob Dole was in Abilene, Kans., when he heard the news of Colin Powell's imminent resignation.

There's a world of difference between peacekeeping and military intervention. When the Bosnian Serbs rejected the Vance-Owen accord, the Clinton administration and its European allies had to shift their military planning, at least temporarily, into a peacemaking mode.

"The military hasn't retooled their thinking," says Phillip Karber, vice president of the giant defense consultant BDM. One crucial reason is the extraordinary influence of the Joint Chiefs chairman in the Bosnia debate. "I don't know what the administration would have done without Colin Powell," says one of Clinton's most senior advisers.

By the unhallowed and patently irrational traditions of American pork-barrel politics, the merest mention of shutting down stateside military bases is supposed to touch off a firestorm of indignation on Capitol Hill-and sure enough, last week it did. "The mother of all base-closure lists clobbers Charleston," bellowed Sen.

It was pitch black when the two British intelligence experts stepped inside the chamber. As one of them turned on his pocket flashlight and scanned the steel walls and equipment, his escort grabbed his wrist. "Switch that off or give it to me," shouted the Soviet Foreign Ministry official. "You agreed-no electronic devices!" The visitor, an official guest of the Soviet government, turned off the light.

The morning after the bombing of Hiroshima, Hanson Baldwin of The New York Times summed up the general sense of a new era dawning. "Yesterday," he wrote, "we clinched victory in the Pacific, but we sowed the whirlwind." It would take more than two decades of tense and often tedious negotiation, beginning with the first strategic arms limitations talks in late 1969, to contain that whirlwind.

Memo to incoming White House junior staff: volunteers required for taking on an interest group. Immediate, sweeping reform is the goal. The group? Oh, it's more than twice the size of the military-industrial complex.

Presidential candidate Bill Clinton made a lot of promises. President-elect Bill Clinton must decide which ones to keep. Following a Veterans Day speech before an audience of retired and active officers, he reiterated a commitment to one of his most controversial pledges: overturning the military's 48-year-old ban on homosexuals in the uniformed services. (Gays and lesbians can serve openly, if discreetly, on the civilian side of the Defense Department.) "I don't think [sexual] status alone, in...

Time was when presidential campaigns we about foreign policy. Remember the missile gap in 1960? Nixon's secret plan to end the Vietnam War in 1968? The Iranian hostage crisis in 1980?

On the face of it, General Schwarzkopf's book tour should be a campaign advertisement for George Bush. Watching the great general relive the gulf war on TV and radio talk shows could remind voters of the finest moments of Bush's presidency.

You knew them by their pallor. The pilots of the army's top-secret Task Force 118 slept through the Persian Gulf's searing 120-degree days, and hunted by night.

The modern navy has many ladders. Its officers can earn their stripes at sea or in the air. They can prosper by navigating the shoals of technocracy. But the one sure path to glory is the same as in Roman times: victory at sea.

A year after Desert Storm, Saddam is still in power. Did the fighting end too soon? A behind-the-scenes look at the decision to halt the war.Few war leaders have ever faced as pleasant a dilemma as the one that awaited George Bush on Feb. 26,1991 for on that day, Bush learned that his high-stakes gamble in the Persian Gulf was finally paying off.

It is axiomatic of conspiracy theories that their true believers see nefarious design where others see mere human error. Last week the ultimate conspiracy theory was spelled out in elaborate detail with the publication of The October Surprise, by Gary Sick (278 pages.

It is a story that will not die--a dark tale of conspiracy and political intrigue that, if true, would constitute something like an accusation of treason against George Bush, the late William Casey and other members of Ronald Reagan's 1980 presidential campaign.

Even by the gamy standards of British tabloid journalism, the controversy that erupted in London last week over author Seymour Hersh's new book was an all-time screamer.

Last month President Bush signed off on a set of military options aimed at forcing Iraq to comply with the U.N. Security Council's cease-fire terms. Last week he took the first step: protecting Saudi Arabia.