ICELAND: The Keflavik Incident

For weeks relations between Iceland's 170,000 citizens and the U.S. garrison at the great NATO base at Keflavik Airport had been growing steadily touchier. On the Fourth of July a group of U.S. airmen went on a drinking spree at Thingvellir, a pastoral spot sacred to all Icelanders as the first meeting place (in A.D. 930) of the Althing, the oldest continuous Parliament in the world. Last month a U.S. officer's wife was arrested on the suspicion of drunken driving. She phoned the airbase and almost immediately the Icelandic police were surrounded by U.S. troops and had to...

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