IN: Hafez al-Assad (Arabic: HfZ l'sd Hafiz al-'Asad, Levantine pronunciation: ['ha:fez? el'?asad]

After graduating from high school, Assad aspired to be a medical doctor, but his father could not pay for his study at the Jesuit University of St. Joseph in Beirut. Instead, in 1950 he decided to join the Syrian Armed Forces. Assad entered the military academy in Homs, which offered free food, lodging and a stipend. He wanted to fly, and entered the flying school in Aleppo in 1950. Assad graduated in 1955, after which he was commissioned a lieutenant in the Syrian Air Force. Upon graduation from flying school he won a best-aviator trophy, and shortly afterwards was assigned to the Mezze air base near Damascus. In his early 20s, he married Anisa Makhlouf in 1957, a distant relative of a powerful family. In 1954, the military split in a revolt against President Adib Shishakli. Hashim al-Atassi, head of the National Bloc and briefly president after Sami al-Hinnawi's coup, returned as president and Syria was again under civilian rule. After 1955, Atassi's hold on the country was increasingly shaky. As a result of the 1955 election Atassi was replaced by Shukri al-Quwatli, who was president before Syria's independence from France. The Ba'ath Party grew closer to the Communist Party not because of shared ideology, but a shared opposition to the West. At the academy Assad met Mustafa Tlass, his future minister of defense. In 1955, Assad was sent to Egypt for a further six months of training. When Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalised the Suez Canal in 1956, Syria feared retaliation from the United Kingdom, and Assad flew in an air-defense mission. He was among the Syrian pilots who flew to Cairo to show Syria's commitment to Egypt. After finishing a course in Egypt the following year, Assad returned to a small air base near Damascus. During the Suez Crisis, he also flew a reconnaissance mission over northern and eastern Syria. In 1957, as squadron commander, Assad was sent to the Soviet Union for training in flying MiG-17s. He spent ten months in the Soviet Union, during which he fathered a daughter (who died as an infant while he was abroad) with his wife. In 1958 Syria and Egypt formed the United Arab Republic (UAR), separating themselves from Iraq, Iran, Pakistan, and Turkey (who were aligned with the United Kingdom). This pact led to the rejection of Communist influence in favor of Egyptian control over Syria. All Syrian political parties (including the Ba'ath Party) were dissolved, and senior officers--especially those who supported the Communists--were dismissed from the Syrian armed forces. Assad, however, remained in the army and rose quickly through the ranks. After reaching the rank of captain he was transferred to Egypt, continuing his military education with future president of Egypt Hosni Mubarak.

What did he do in the airforce?

OUT: a lieutenant in the Syrian Air Force.

input: Paul Bowles is considered one of the artists to have shaped 20th-century literature and music. In his "Introduction" to Bowles' Collected Stories (1979,) Gore Vidal ranked the short stories as "among the best ever written by an American", writing: "the floor to this ramshackle civilization that we have built cannot bear much longer our weight. It was Bowles's genius to suggest the horrors which lie beneath that floor, as fragile, in its way, as the sky that shelters us from a devouring vastness". Critics have described his music, in contrast, "as full of light as the fiction [is] of dark...almost as if the composer were a totally different person from the writer." During the early 1930s, Bowles studied composition (intermittently) with Aaron Copland; his music from this period "is reminiscent of Satie and Poulenc." Returning to New York in the mid-30s, Bowles became one of the preeminent composers of American theater music, producing works for William Saroyan, Tennessee Williams, and others, "show[ing] exceptional skill and imagination in capturing the mood, emotion, and ambience of each play to which he was assigned." Bowles said that such incidental music allowed him to present "climaxless music, hypnotic music in one of the exact senses of the word, in that it makes its effect without the spectator being made aware of it." At the same time he continued to write concert music, assimilating some of the melodic, rhythmic, and other stylistic elements of African, Mexican, and Central American music. In 1991 Paul Bowles was awarded the annual Rea Award for the Short Story. The jury gave the following citation: "Paul Bowles is a storyteller of the utmost purity and integrity. He writes of a world before God became man; a world in which men and women in extremis are seen as components in a larger, more elemental drama. His prose is crystalline and his voice unique. Among living American masters of the short story, Paul Bowles is sui generis." The Library of America published Bowles' works in 2002. (It prepares scholarly editions of American literary classics and keeps them permanently in print.)

Answer this question "How is his legacy assessed?"
output:
His prose is crystalline and his voice unique. Among living American masters of the short story, Paul Bowles is sui generis.