Code name from '84 movie

2003-12-14 18:30

Washington - "Operation Red Dawn," the code name for the US raid which resulted in the capture of Saddam Hussein, appears to have been inspired by a 1984 film in which US teenagers battle a Soviet invasion of the United States.

Announcing Saddam's capture, Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, the top US military commander in Iraq, said Operation Red Dawn was conducted by US troops against locations identified as "Wolverine One" and "Wolverine Two."

The former Iraqi leader was found, according to Sanchez, hiding in a hole at the location known as "Wolverine Two."

"Red Dawn," starring Patrick Swayze, Jennifer Grey, Lea Thompson, Charlie Sheen, Harry Dean Stanton and Powers Boothe, takes place in a typical small town in the midwest of the United States at the outbreak of World War III.

Following an invasion of the United States by communist Cuban, Nicaraguan and Soviet forces a group of high school students band together to form a guerrilla resistance unit known as the "Wolverines," after the bear-like creature known for its ferocity.

The gun-toting teenage US guerrillas spend the film, made at the height of the Cold War, fighting back heroically against the more heavily armed invaders.

Directed by John Milius, who co-wrote Francis Ford Coppola's "Apocalypse Now," the movie is something of a cult film among right-wing US extremists and is held up as a Second Amendment cautionary tale by some opponents of gun control.

The Second Amendment to the US Constitution regards the right of the populace to bear arms.

"A well-regulated Militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed," it says.

- AFP