Berets

By now, every soldier in the Army was supposed to be sporting a new black beret, thanks to rush-order contracts given to mostly foreign manufacturers. But the Army's plans went awry. Most of the foreign-made berets will not be used or delivered, and the Army recently decided to seek bids from small American companies to supply 3.9 million berets over the next two years. The trouble began last spring, when some members of Congress criticized the Army's order of 618,000 berets from China.

WHEN THE GOIN' GETS TOUGH, THE TOUGH GET TO PROPOSIN' The safety lecture you get on airliners before takeoff doesn't always cover everything. Jeff Shrouds improvised a new emergency procedure. When thick smoke filled the cabin of a Northwest Airlines plane, he turned to his girlfriend, Jody Nichols, and popped the question. "We had talked about getting married," he said after Monday night's scare 30,000 feet over North Dakota. "This looked pretty serious so I thought, 'Do it now.' " Nichols accepted the proposal.

From MICHAEL LACING: AU REVOIR The French are threatening to fight back America's pressure to cut European crop subsidies. Oh gosh, no more white wine, berets and lousy movies. THE BIG STORY Catherine Crier, a judge in Texas before joining Cable News Network two years ago with no broadcasting experience, is joining ABC as a 20/20 correspondent. She atributes her quick resources to eliminating bad hair days. NO SPARK The fire at Windsor Castle has caused great anxiety in the royal family.

The United States Olympic Committee on Tuesday announced the 2012 U.S. Olympic team that will compete in the London Games. The 530-member team is comprised of 269 women and 261 men, marking the first time in history that Team USA features more female athletes. The United States will be represented in 25 sports (38 disciplines) and 246 of the 302 medal events that will be contested in London. Penn is represented. Former Penn basketball standout Koko Archibong has made it to London as a member of the Nigeria basketball team.

The Philadelphia chapter of the Guardian Angels has turned in its red berets and changed its name after a falling-out between the local leader and Curtis Sliwa, the activist who founded the citizen crime-fighting army 24 years ago to combat New York City subway muggings. The exact nature of the dispute was itself in dispute. Gregory Bucceroni, a security guard who was in charge of the local chapter, said he decided to break away because Sliwa wanted to exert too much control over the Philadelphia Angels.

Well, if it isn't Curtis Sliwa, the omnipresent and now international Guardian Angel, holding a press conference outside the Earl's Court tube station while traffic jams and London bobbies stifle an occasional snigger. Sliwa is in town to train a new set of lads and lasses in his peculiar form of public angelhood. Thirty recruits were selected from 140 local applicants. It is not immediately apparent whether the number of recruits reflects the exact number of Angel T-shirts and red berets Sliwa packed in his traveling bag. Since one of the newly winged Angels is a 25-year-old cosmetician who stands 5 feet 4 inches in her combat boots, brawn was clearly not a consideration.

The khaki-clad soldiers in the blue berets bent over their yogurt and muesli in the Polana Hotel's breakfast room, its glass panels overlooking the Indian Ocean bluffs and the distant blue swells of the Madagascar Current. "Poor devils," said Manuel Lopes de Costa, Portugal's ambassador to war- spoiled Mozambique. "In a few weeks, they'll be living in tents in the mud with the mosquitoes. " Sixteen years of brutal war are melting into a fragile peace between an ex- Marxist government and right-wing guerrillas.

They waited for hours in the steamy heat, standing by helplessly as others fainted, begging for water to sustain them until they could see the man they fondly called "the president of the world. " The people of Ghana danced and sang and tossed white doves into the air as a symbol of peace, getting President Clinton's trip to Africa off to a dazzling start. Standing before what the White House called the largest crowd of his presidency, Clinton pledged yesterday that the United States was committed to helping African countries secure their new and sometimes shaky democracies, climb out of poverty, and end the war and genocide "that still tear at the heart" of this continent.

Your mother was right. Wear a hat and you will be warmer in winter. You will also be chic, debonair and au courant, according to the Headwear Institute of America - which is at least as important as keeping the sniffles away. "Fashionwise, wearing a hat is great, because when you wear one, heads turn. Especially the bare heads," said Susan Bunnell, director of the Headwear Institute of America. "For instance, people are not really used to seeing someone wearing a fur felt fedora and a matching overcoat, which is a very nice look.

She's on the cover of this month's Vanity Fair, looking possessed by the shade of Joan Crawford - impenetrable sunglasses, crimson lips, teeth ever so slightly bared. Cadaverous '30s movie star skin; impossible cheekbones hung with black veiling. At 46, Faye Dunaway, the chic-o mag declares, is making a "return. " She's divorced her second husband, the hard-drinking British hipster photographer Terry O'Neill, enrolled their 7-year-old son, Liam, in school in New York, and is starring with Mickey Rourke in "Barfly," a very grim story about an alcoholic couple's decline.

A Green Beret from York, Pa., was killed over the weekend in Afghanistan, the Defense Department said Monday. Staff Sgt. Brandon Pepper, 31, died in an enemy attack Saturday while he was on patrol in Afghanistan's Ghazni province. Pepper was a communications specialist assigned to the Fourth Battalion of the Third Special Forces Group at Fort Bragg, N.C. Pepper was serving on his first deployment to Afghanistan. He served in Iraq in 2003. Pepper is survived by his spouse, his parents, and a brother.

The United States Olympic Committee on Tuesday announced the 2012 U.S. Olympic team that will compete in the London Games. The 530-member team is comprised of 269 women and 261 men, marking the first time in history that Team USA features more female athletes. The United States will be represented in 25 sports (38 disciplines) and 246 of the 302 medal events that will be contested in London. Penn is represented. Former Penn basketball standout Koko Archibong has made it to London as a member of the Nigeria basketball team.

City Council candidate David Oh issued a formal apology Thursday for what he described as carelessness in describing his five-year stint in the Army National Guard - an issue that led some veterans to complain he was embellishing his military record. Although Oh was assigned to a National Guard Special Forces unit, he said he should have been more careful as a candidate in his use of the terms Special Forces and Green Beret , both used to describe elite units whose combat soldiers typically have endured months of rigorous training.

City Council candidate David Oh is struggling with allegations that he embellished his military record, threatening his campaign in a race in which he was considered a front-runner just a week ago. The Philadelphia Daily News reported Friday that Oh's former commanding officer disputed Oh's claim that he had been an officer in an Army Special Forces unit and was a former Green Beret. Oh immediately contested the story, promising "an official response" within days. But the controversy has festered for nearly a week without an official statement.

DAVID OH, a Republican front-runner to win a seat on City Council this year, apologized yesterday to U.S. Army Special Forces members and former members angered at what they consider his overstated military credentials. And Oh lashed out at the Daily News for our report Friday that his former commanding officer and another ranking military officer said he was not a Special Forces officer, as he has claimed in campaigns since 2003. Oh insists that his "brief and uneventful" time in the 20th Special Forces Group of the Maryland Army National Guard gives him the right to make that claim.

By Bobbie Anne Mason 368 pp. Random House. $26 Reviewed by Rita Giordano It would be easy to say Bobbie Ann Mason's new novel is about coming to terms with the past. It is, but it is also much more. The Girl in the Blue Beret is one man's journey to find people from his past that leads him to the self he unwittingly left behind. Mason's storytelling manages to juggle two contrasting realities, to rich effect. This book is a bighearted story about a closed-hearted man, a hero in the eyes of others who is haunted by a failure.

The short version of David Oh 's political resume: The former city prosecutor enlisted in the U.S. Army National Guard, joined an elite Special Forces unit and then came home to run a law practice. But two high-ranking military officers familiar with Oh's National Guard record say his claim to have been a Green Beret is bunk. Oh, a front-runner for a Republican at-large City Council seat in the Nov. 8 general election, did not make it through the training to become a Green Beret in 1991.

James Simmons was suspicious. The Vietnam veteran had read a newspaper article referring to Atlantic City Mayor Bob Levy as a former Green Beret and wanted to recruit him for a veterans' group. But when Simmons sent the mayor a letter more than a year ago seeking proof of his service in the Army's Special Forces during the Vietnam War, he received no reply and began checking for himself. He used Internet military databases such as homeofheroes.com, enlisted a professional researcher, and contacted the Special Forces Association in Fayetteville, N.C., to determine whether Levy had been a member.

Tiger Woods arrived at the home of the Green Berets yesterday for a week of military training at Fort Bragg, N.C. Woods, who finished 22d in the Masters on Sunday, will work with the Army Special Forces. But he probably won't get the same type of training as his father, an ex-Green Beret who trained at the base during the Vietnam War. On Friday, he will give a clinic and demonstration at the base's Stryker Golf Course. Football Safety Antuan Edwards, formerly with the Green Bay Packers, signed a one-year contract with the Miami Dolphins.

Joseph Edward Cooper, 60, of Wynnefield Heights, a Green Beret paratrooper who was shot after a combat jump in Cambodia in 1968 - and lived the rest of his life fighting the ill effects of those wounds - died of cardiac arrest June 4 at Lankenau Hospital. From the moment he was wounded, Mr. Cooper spent the rest of his live in a ferocious battle just to stay alive. Shrapnel had destroyed three-quarters of his pancreas. After numerous surgeries, he developed diabetes and pancreatitis, and he was put on kidney dialysis in 2000.