A thousand feet below was the Huallaga River, and on the slopes above this winding jungle stream grew more than half the annual supply of leaf for America’s ongoing cocaine binge. In the mid-‘80s the Reagan Administration had determined to cut this plant off at the roots in the literal sense, and a massive coca eradication program was launched with the cooperation of the Andean nations. Teams of local police and contract workers—armed, financed, and led by American drug agents—were choppered into the jungles to attack the coca plant with gas-powered weed cutters. By 1987 the team in Peru was demolishing 3000 acres a month.^[10] At this point, unfortunately, the Maoist Sendero Luminoso guerilla movement decided to join with the peasants in return for a piece of the action, and they were wreaking havoc with the U.S. plans.  This helicopter used to be based at Tingo Maria, a jungle outpost in the heart of the drug trade. But when the guerrillas wiped out an Army patrol and blew up the power plant a few weeks back, the DEA decided to fall back to a more defensible position. So at the moment Bush was promising to end the drug scourge, the U.S. effort in Peru happened to be in full retreat.

A new encampment was established down-river at the village of Santa Lucia, but like the Vietnam fire bases it was modeled after, it turned out to be a prison for its occupiers.  All supplies and personnel had to be flown in from the coast because everything outside the barbed wire perimeter belonged to the enemy. And since there was no way to protect the workers short of bringing in the 82nd Airborne, the eradication effort was abandoned. The current strategy called for targeting the labs where the coca leaves were processed. The idea was that if all the labs were wiped out, there would be no market for coca leaves and the farmers would stop growing it.^[11]  But this theory had the earmarks of a solution dreamed up by bureaucrats in faraway Washington. The Huey helicopter, without refueling, has