[b]Puebla, Puebla [/b]
[i]July, 1955[/i]

	“We have two weeks until we go to war with the British Empire.”

	The company commanders around the table were stunned by the battalion commander’s blunt admission of the situation. They had been called into a briefing, unscheduled by anyone’s staff, with up-to-date readiness reports. Every soldier who had a mild cold was reported up with a timeline for their recovery, every weapon with a spot of rust on the barrel was examined and given an exact time and date it would be cleaned spotless, and every man from colonel to cook had their five-kilometer run time and rifle qualification score mercilessly examined with a foolproof plan to coach them into better shape. Despite the unannounced homework, the paratroopers in the [i]Brigada de Fusileros Paracaidistas[/i] were in mostly good shape.

	The meeting let out at seven in the evening, two hours past the five o’clock end of the duty day. Captain Dominic Lopez emerged from the door sipping his cold coffee out of a mug and grabbed one edge of the frame. He leaned forward to stretch out his sore shoulder for a few seconds, then swapped his coffee mug to the other hand and repeated the exercise. Behind him, First Sergeant Antonio Kan crossed his arms and waited for his commander to get out of the doorway before rejoining the officer in the hall. They were the command team of the second battalion’s [i]Compañía A[/i] and would be participating directly in the first wave of the planned attack into Belize.

	“We’re looking good out there,” Captain Lopez said nonchalantly. “Ever since we got… who was it… Vivanco back from the hospital with his motorcycle crash we are pretty full up on our people.”

	The First Sergeant nodded and crossed his arms. His sleeves were rolled to his elbows, revealing the faded tattoos on his forearms, Mayan patterns weaving between depictions of a jaguar and an eagle. With paternal disapproval in his voice, he acknowledged: “Gotta remind that motherfucker to stop racing his motorcycle. If he’s going to get killed, I at least want him leading his squad while he does it.”

	Lopez chuckled as he walked to the front entrance of the battalion headquarters building. The unit footprint was set up like a campus, with a battalion building occupying the center with four company buildings to its front. A fifth support company was slightly larger of its own footprint located opposite the line companies, with its own facilities for supply storage and maintenance. Lopez and Kan paused to withdraw their maroon-colored berets from under their shoulder epaulette straps and don them. The paratroopers were uniquely identifiable by their red headgear and purple rank insignia, derived, ironically enough, from British airborne tradition.

	The two men walked together on a footpath through the immaculately groomed landscape that had been planted outside of the battalion headquarters. Their sergeant major had been putting the extra duty personnel – those who had gotten in trouble for a variety of things from being late to work or not getting haircuts – to work making the footprint look fit for an aristocrat’s mansion. Little signs, hand-painted by the extra duty soldiers, warned others to stay off the grass. The two men turned the corner to the company office and reached the strip of parking lanes in front where they both had put their automobiles. Cars were becoming increasingly common in Mexico, to the point where most officers and senior non-commissioned officers had owned one.

	Captain Lopez’s automobile was a stylish, if slightly older, 1947 Nissan model made for the Mexican export market. The [i]Pionero[/i] was the family of Mexican offroad trucks built similarly to the standard-issue jeeps that were driven by Mexican troops. Pulido’s was painted a dull blue with a spare tire strapped to the hood, but had no scrapes or mud marks on it. He always claimed that he was going to go offroading with it eventually, but never actually did. The commander put his coffee mug on the hood and told his First Sergeant to go home as he reached into his glovebox and withdrew a steel cigarette book.

	The sun had since dipped below the hills in the distance as he lit a cigarette. His lighter clicked open with a metallic clink and the air was soon filled with the scent of burning tobacco. He watched as First Sergeant Kan turned on his bright red, two-doored sports car, which roared to life with the growl of its V8 engine thrumming through the aluminum body. Its tired squealed as he reversed it out of his parking spot and the transmission changed back into gear: the car hurtled out of the parking lot, almost drifting around the corner to reach the access road that would take Kan back to the housing area. Lopez remained alone, smoking his cigarette as the shadows of dusk encroached on the lone vehicle in the parking lot. He checked his watch, its radium dial faintly glowing in the darkening light, and saw the hand strike eight. 

	He was quiet at breakfast that morning while his wife fried some eggs for them on the stove. The kids had long since gone to school; Dominic had walked them down to the bus stop near the park where most of the army officers lived in base housing. He had twin sons who had just turned eleven the month prior and were going to a primary school in Puebla. It was a nice district in a nice part of town, the money invested by the well-to-do officers’ taxes probably having something to do with it. He had nodded to the others similarly dropping off their children. His colleagues at work in the other companies had similarly aged children.

	His wife set the ceramic plate down with a clink on the scuffed wooden table. They had gotten it from his wife’s family as a wedding present, an old hand-me-down piece of furniture that he had much appreciated as a young Lieutenant. As the years dragged on, Captain Lopez and his family were slowly but surely replacing their older furniture with more high quality pieces: the dining table remained stubbornly sturdy even when couches were ruined by spilled drinks and shelves broke down from a too-heavy item. The pair both prepared their breakfast, a simple meal of [i]huevos rancheros[/i] in near silence.

	“Is everything alright?” Ana asked, her eyebrow cocked at Dominic.

	“Sure. Busy few weeks coming up at work,” her husband answered simply, sipping on coffee in a different mug. This one bore the insignia of the parachutists, a welcome gift from his current company.

	“Is that why you were late last night?” she probed further, a sly sense of humor creeping into her voice. “Not chasing skirts at the bar with that First Sergeant of yours, are you?”

	“No, nothing like that,” replied Dominic with a perked up tone, playfully swatting his hand in her direction. “Leave Kan alone, he was on his third marriage. I think he needs time to act like he’s twenty again.”

	“I thought your big training exercise was in October, did it move up?” Ana said, bringing the topic back on track.

	Dominic shrugged and looked Ana in the eye. They had plenty of these talks before. Ana knew what he would say next. She heard it every time before a big operation: “I guess we aren’t doing that anymore, but we have about two weeks to hit the guys hard for something. I can’t really say what now, but you will know sooner or later.”

	Ana nodded and pursed her lips in disappointment. “Just two weeks this time?” she asked, almost dejectedly. Her husband, caught in between bites of his breakfast, nodded and swallowed quickly.

	“Two busy weeks,” Dominic confirmed, looking down into his coffee. As he spoke, he stood up from the chair and stepped over to the cabinet behind him. High above the counter, he opened the door and withdrew a half-emptied square bottle of gold tequila. “It will be a lot of late nights like that one, maybe a field exercise. But they do want us to at least spend some time with our families before we go.”

	He sat back down and unscrewed the cap, splashing a bit of the alcohol into his coffee. He took a sip, the sensation of the liquor coursing through his body and calming his nerves enough to continue eating. Ana laughed at him, shaking her head in mild disapproval. They carried on finishing up their breakfast quickly, Dominic helping place the dishes in the sink before Ana told him to check the time.

	His eyes made a pass on the clock hanging from the kitchen wall: it was fifteen to nine, giving him just enough time to get in the car and drive to work. He shrugged again, returning to the jacket that he had draped over the dining chair. He swung it over his shoulder, pushed his arms through the sleeves, and buttoned it unhurriedly. Gripping his coffee mug in one hand, he stopped to let Ana step over to give him a kiss on the cheek. “Okay, I’ll see you tonight,” he told her. “Have a good day.”

	That week, Captain Lopez found himself managing the fastest-paced training he had ever seen since joining the military just six years prior. The battalion had been dedicated thousands of rounds of ammunition from sources unknown to immediately get people out onto the range. Through the checkpoint on his way to work where the gate guards checked the papers of all soldiers going on and off base, he saw dozens of green supply trucks being waved through the express lanes, bearing the white letters “MX” on their doors. He had never seen blatant identification marks on the plain vehicles before, but assumed it was a new standard made up to reduce friendly fire incidents. The British were an industrialized nation, far removed from bandits or the border smugglers that the military usually fought.

	The training ramped up from there. Days spent in the hot summer sun on ranges turned into qualifications on all sorts of weapons. Rifles, grenades, machineguns, mortars, and even a run on the bayonet assault course generated massive piles of paperwork that were ferried off to battalion staff for their tracking purposes. Several chalkboards had been wheeled into the battalion office, with staff officers crossing off each squad in the companies as they reported finishing steps in the process. By the end of the week, all individuals would have gone through a refresher of basic individual skills. Leaders down to the sergeants running squads fulfilled extra requirements, like an afternoon of land navigation twenty kilometers south at the El Aguacate course.

	Each night, Captain Lopez and First Sergeant Kan returned home sweaty and exhausted, tanned and reddened from spending hours underneath the beating sun repeatedly practicing their tasks. Every spare moment of waiting was to be filled with refresher training, from teaching impromptu classes on rope tying and jungle operations to meticulously cleaning and maintaining weapons. The only respite came as the soldiers were granted Sunday off to spend at church and with their families before the second week arrived. Monday was their qualification jump into the training area just of the city’s [i]Parque Estatal Flor del Bosque[/i].

	A quiet Sunday turned to an early Monday as Captain Lopez found himself geared up and standing on the tarmac of Puebla base’s airfield in front of his hundred-or-so-man company. Ahead of him, a twin-engine plane’s engines roared to life and swept up a cloud of dust and dirt around them. Crewmen on the ground scrambled to load the men into carefully planned groups of paratroopers, counting them with slaps on the back of their equipment as they were rushed into the cargo holds of the plane. Captain Lopez had been through the process all before: the deafening noise of the propellers precluded any sort of conversation aside from the yelling of the jumpmaster.

	The entirety of the transport plane’s cabin smelled of oil and the sort of industrial grime that permeated any military vehicle. The seats, thinly padded over an austere metal frame, shook violently. None of the flights had ever been comfortable, and neither was the gear that bogged down the parachutists like thick winter coats. As the plane followed others off the runway – the pilots had been practicing this maneuver themselves for the previous week, a close order takeoff to maximize planes in the air at a given time – Captain Lopez found that he had the sudden urge to piss.

	Their flight was short, a relief to many of the men onboard as the jumpmaster ordered the troops to stand up and hook their static line clips to the metal wire overhead. Captain Lopez felt his carabiner clamp into place and screwed the lock on as the jumpmaster came by to quickly check for safety concerns. A red light lit the dark compartment where the troops nor stood, pressing into each other. One of the jumpmasters, looking out the door, brought his head back in and gave the other a thumb up: he hit a switch on the hull behind him, flashing the red light to a solid green.

	“Go!” shouted the jumpmaster, setting the process into motion. Captain Lopez at the front couldn’t have stopped even if he wanted to, with the mass of men rushing forward and out the door pushing him more than he ran. He barely had time to think before he felt himself whipped out of the plane door in the crisp morning air, body hurtling out of the plane’s fuselage. Automatically, he kept his feet and knees together and counted to four in his head. The static line worked, and his body jolted with the shock of the parachute being pulled violently out of its pack. The muscle memory of instinct took over and the veteran paratrooper soon had his hands on the risers of the parachute: he inspected the rigging and the canopy and found he had made a perfect exit.

	One of the soldiers behind him was not so lucky. The man had fallen for a moment longer than four seconds before noticing that his main chute failed to deploy. Captain Lopez saw the figure drop for a split second longer than it should have before a smaller white parachute canopy erupted from the reserve pack. A good catch. Lopez checked the rest of his element as the plane finished its drop and sped off towards the rising sun: everyone else was just fine. He then turned his attention to the sandy drop zone below him that was rapidly growing closer. Through a visual cue, Lopez dropped his gear on the paracord line below him that let it dangle below his feet and braced for impact.

	Nothing about airborne landings was graceful. It felt more like being dropped like a sack of bricks than landing pleasantly. To distribute the shock, Lopez fell to his left side hitting his body into the ground sequentially: first, the balls of his feet, followed by his calf and thigh and rear before landing on the side of his back. He rolled to his back and quickly unclipped his gear as the parachute fell to the ground behind him. The man’s knees and ankles ached in pain, but he was used to it by now. Maybe one day he would find a nice desk job, but that would not be until much later for him.

	Captain Lopez flipped open the clasps on his rifle case and withdrew the semi-automatic rifle known colloquially as the Mondragón. A quick check around him revealed that the paratroopers under his command were doing the same. The men of the [i]Brigada de Fusileros Paracaidistas[/i] were on the ground and forming up into their sections to head out on their mission for that exercise: a mock attack on a mock village with a “government building” at its center. Their opponents would be wooden targets painted green, but bearing Union Jacks as bullseye targets. Someone’s clever little joke for the paratroopers.

	With the rest of his gear donned and rifle in hand, Captain Lopez rallied with his small headquarters element and contacted his platoons through his radioman’s manpack. He gave the order to move out immediately.