[b]Belmopan, British Belize[/b]
[i]August, 1955[/i]

	Captain Lopez walked forward at the high ready, his eye focused through the radium-painted tips of his Mondragón rifle’s sights. Ahead of him, a distinctly official British soldier held his hands clasped in front of his waist. Atop his head lay a worn round officer’s cap and his shoulders bore the two diamonds of a First Lieutenant. His formation behind him looked down at their boots, hands over their heads as more Mexican soldiers marched out of the fields to surround them. Captain Lopez stopped in front of the officer and lowered his rifle. The two stared at each other; the British officer parsing his complicated emotions silently before moving his hand to his leather belt holster.

	Lopez’s hands jumped but he kept himself composed. His executive officer had arrived to the left of the commander. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Lieutenant Mun͂oz jolt his weapon back towards shoulder level and bark a command to stop. The commander, acting quickly, grabbed the barrel Mun͂oz’s rifle and forced it back down. The British officer’s eyes were wide, his right hand paused on the latch of his leather holster. Lopez nodded at him. Shakily, the lieutenant unclasped the cover and withdrew an ancient-looking Webley revolver pointed carefully towards the ground. He extended it out in his hand.

	Lopez reached out with his left hand to take the piece from the lieutenant. It felt light in his hand, unloaded and harmless. The Mexican commander brought it up to eye level and inspected the officer’s sidearm: he had never seen an authentic British weapon so up close and personal before. Without another word, the British lieutenant repeated the process with his pistol belt, removing it from his waist and handing it over. Lopez nodded again, taking the leather holster and replacing the revolver in its pocket before handing it off to Mun͂oz.

	“What’s your name?” asked Captain Lopez simply.

	The British officer hesitated. “First Lieutenant Baker, Lloyd S.,” he answered in his accented Spanish. “Platoon commander of 3rd Platoon, Company A, Belize Rifle Regiment.”

	He looked five to ten years younger than Captain Lopez. Lieutenant Baker was practically a boy, probably a recent graduate from their Sandhurst academy. Lopez remembered his time as a lieutenant, how he didn’t know about anything. At least he had a strong captain to guide him: Baker was out in the middle of nowhere with no guidance and no superiors.

	“And these are your men?” Lopez asked, gesturing towards the British soldiers who were now submitting themselves to checks and inspections by the Mexican paratroopers. There were roughly a dozen men left out of the small guard force in Belmopan. Anything of value was taken from their person. Militarily, this meant maps and notebooks and useful objects like compasses or field gear. Other items like watches, rings, and money from the prisoners’ pockets also found their ways into the rucksacks of the Mexican men.

	Belizean townspeople had begun to congregate on the outskirts of the barracks now that the shooting had died down. At first, cautious men emerged from hiding to inspect what had happened. They were soon engaged in conversation by the Mexicans spreading out throughout the streets to secure and inspect other parts of town. Soon after, women and children appeared as well after hearing that the invaders were friendly and spoke better Spanish than the British. They talked to the Mexican troops, confused. Was this a liberation for them, or a conquest? Not even the Mexican soldiers knew.

	Lieutenant Baker sighed, looking back at his formation. He turned to Captain Lopez. “What are you going to do with us?” he asked cautiously. The scenes of Mexican soldiers looting valuables from his platoon had not inspired confidence in their treatment, but so far nobody had been beat or otherwise abused.

	“We have orders to escort all prisoners to an exchange point with military police,” Lopez answered. It was customary. Officer to officer, he knew that the British platoon commander deserved to know the situation. “The military police will transport you to a prisoner of war camp.”

	“You really went all out, didn’t you,” Baker mused. “And we had no idea you were coming until your planes dropped you in the fields.”

	Lopez shrugged. He didn’t have an answer for that either. They were both just doing what they were told. “We are going to remove the British occupation from this country. That’s our job here.”

	Baker sighed dejectedly. He had no way to contact his higher command and inform them about the surrender. For all he knew, the regimental leadership in Belize City were just not arriving to work clueless of the situation in the outskirts of the country.

	From behind Lopez’s shoulder, First Sergeant Kan emerged from a throng of headquarters soldiers moving into the town to set up their command post. Hulking above the shorter commander and muscles rippling underneath his uniform shirt, he simply asked if the British officer spoke Spanish. Baker affirmed that fact with his reply.

	“I don’t like you,” he growled intimidatingly, “and you sure as hell don’t like me.”

	Baker, caught off guard, clutched his hands into fists with his knuckles white.

	“But rules are rules and I have orders,” he instructed. “You are to be quartered in your barracks after we inspect it for arms and equipment. You’ll be guarded. You will be fed. Where is your senior sergeant?”

	Baker nervously turned back to the formation and called a sergeant over. His lack of stripes and terrified demeanor denoted him as a lower NCO, inexperienced as a platoon sergeant. Perhaps he was a replacement for a killed superior. First Sergeant Kan took the British man aside to lay out the rules of their custody, hammering home the facts to a man who could barely stand up straight and shook like he had just stepped into harsh winter without a jacket. Lopez looked at the scene, then turned back to Baker.

	“Right, I’ll leave you to your quarters,” Lopez said. He motioned his hand for a party of NCOs and paratroopers to move forward and prepare their captive quarters while he turned away to Lieutenant Mun͂oz.

	“Have the platoons checked in via radio?” he asked his executive officer. The younger officer nodded as they both started walking back towards the company command point. It had been moved into town, in the backyard of a farmhouse where the soldiers were busy raising radio antennae and setting out their maps and graphics on top of a weathered white wooden table. The operations sergeant was beside the house, talking to the owner about how they were going to need to occupy the land for a little bit until they moved out. The Belizean farmer nodded solemnly, looking at the Mexican soldiers rushing back and forth across the town.

	Captain Lopez walked through the wooden fence’s gate and unbuckled his helmet with a heavy sigh. He tossed it onto a chair near the map table and set his rifle down leaned up onto it. He followed by stripping off the uncomfortable web gear that he had worn throughout the assault, solely keeping the holster that he had received from Lieutenant Baker on his hip. The British officer’s pistol belt sagged heavily on Lopez’s skinny waist: the Brits fed their men quite a bit out in the colonies.

	“Morning, sir,” one of the operations soldiers greeted him. It was [i]Especialista[/i] Reyes, his radioman. The bulky manpack radio was leaned up behind him and a cable had been connected to a portable antenna that now reached high into the air. The platoon leaders were squawking at each other on the static-filled net, setting up their security positions and pulling men off the line to handle priorities of work like cleaning weapons or eating for the first time that day.

	Lopez returned the greeting as he rummaged through his heavy rucksack for a notebook and his pens. On a separate radio, someone was trying to raise their sister company who had dropped in a few kilometers south and was securing another town on the western flank. All of the [i]Brigada de Fusileros Paracaidistas[/i] were committed to closing the western passes to Guatemala before the mechanized [i]2/a Brigada Blindada[/i] rolled into the country. They had just finished preparations at Mérida in Yucatan state and were staged on the border at Chetumal for their attack.

	The [i]Brigada de Fusileros Paracaidistas[/i], including Lopez’s company, would wait in Belmopan for the day before regrouping with two other companies and beginning the 25-kilometer push to the twin towns of Churchyard and La Democracia. Other units would secure the rear area as glider-borne reinforcements would deliver support units to build up the area. All of this was being coordinated on the radio. They knew that the element of surprise was going to be lost any hour now, especially as the sleepy Belizean towns woke up. Word traveled quickly, and it wasn’t like the Mexicans could kill anyone who could spread a message of invasion.

	Lopez sat down with Lieutenant Mun͂oz at the map table as the executive officer began writing down the things that he needed to do. He was a good officer and knew his role well: the executive officer wasn’t merely the second in command, but handled the day-to-day tasks that kept the company running. He, along with First Sergeant Kan, coordinated for the mundane things like food and supply, medical treatment of the injured, maintenance of the weapons, and now the movement of enemy prisoners. It was a lot on his plate, keeping with the fine tradition of XOs being the most overworked junior officers in the military.

	As they worked, the distant sounds of gunfire picked up again in the still morning air. Lopez stopped writing and looked over his shoulder down south to where a friendly company of paratroopers was fighting. He turned to Reyes, who was sitting on a bag of flour eating rations out of a can next to the radio. “Make sure the platoons know to expect action soon,” he said to him. “I’m not sure if that’s a counterattack or just residual fighting. But we got off easy here.”

	Reyes acknowledged the order and got onto the radio to repeat it out to the subordinate officers. They all repeated their same acknowledgements as the message went further down their chains of command.

	For the day, however, nothing happened. Mexican soldiers watched the road to La Democracia but nobody ever came their direction to investigate. Dismounted patrols throughout the jungle to their north and south never yielded any enemy scouts or reconnaissance soldiers. Aside from the sporadic fighting earlier that day, the west of Belize was quiet. The British never had many forces in Belize to begin with, of course, but it was curious that there was no attempt to fight back against a brigade of Mexican soldiers who had just dropped from the sky into their territory.

	Lopez had heard from the colonels that this whole operation was to split the Brits in two and take advantage of their commitment to the war with Japan. Maybe they were right, maybe the British really had allocated most of their manpower to the Pacific theater.

	Men rotated in and out of resting that night, holing up in their mosquito nests to keep the damned insects away from them. The jungle, filled with diseased and malarial troubles, was no place for man. Lopez wondered how the rural folks did it, as he himself was a city boy from Guadalajara. Camping was a vacation for him, not a way of life. Because of that, he had found himself a sofa to sleep on in the first floor of their command post’s building. The owner, an elderly Belizean man, kept to himself in the second floor since talking to the operations sergeant, but Lopez could hear him sneak downstairs to use the kitchen for food.

	Lopez, half asleep and half naked in his undershirt and skivvies, opened his eyes to see the old man in pajamas holding a candle as he crept across the creaky floorboards. Lopez shifted, sitting up and letting his field blanket fall softly to the floor. The Belizean man turned around, freezing in his tracks. “Oh, I’m sorry to wake you sir,” he said meekly. The candle cast a flickering light across his worried face.

	“It’s alright,” Lopez said, shrugging it off. “I hope I’m not-“

	“No, no,” the farmer said. “I talked to that, uh, Sergeant Delgado earlier. You are free to come and go, you will be here for only a few nights.”

	“That’s right,” Lopez replied groggily. “I, uh, we’ll leave you be after that. I hope we didn’t scare you too bad coming in.”

	The Belizean man placed the candle in a holder on the wall and shuffled over to a chair to sit down in. “I never thought war would come to Belize, at least not in my lifetime.”

	“Well, the Briti-” started Lopez. The old man shook his head and crossed his arms.

	“The British have been here. They don’t bother me,” the old man sighed. “Would I like it if we were our own country? Sure. But ‘Belize’ or ‘British Honduras’, I just sell my harvest.”

	He looked over Captain Lopez’s uniform, noticing the shiny rank insignia on his collars. The old Belizean man asked him if he was an officer.

	“Captain,” simply replied Lopez. He frowned, noticing the upset look on the Belizean man’s face.

	“So you’re in charge?”

	“I am, yes,” Lopez said. “Of my little company, at least.”

	“Then you’re the sensible one here,” the old man said. “Listen, I don’t care much about the great game of countries. But I care about my family and my people. I know you’re not stopping here in my little town, once you leave. You’re going to the capital.”

	Lopez nodded. “Of course. We have to.”

	“My kids and grandkids live there now,” the old man stated firmly. “They went there for school and work. Nobody wants to be a farmer anymore. You know how it is.”

	Lopez nodded again, listening to the old man.

	“Well, when you get there, there will be fighting. The people who live there… I need you to keep them from getting hurt. I know you don’t want to hurt us, I watched you. You shot at the British but you let them surrender. You weren’t shooting at us. Your men don’t shoot at us. You’re just playing the game of politics. Keep us in mind when you get to Belize City, Captain.”

	The old man smiled at Captain Lopez, satisfied. He rose from the chair, his joints and bones creaking and cracking as he bent down to retrieve the candle. He shuffled towards the kitchen again but paused when he got to the doorway. “Do you want anything, Captain?”

	Lopez, still processing the conversation, looked up at the figure of the old farmer. He gestured to his rucksack in the corner with some tin cans inside glinting in the candlelight: “No, I- I have my rations.”

	The old man squinted, then shook his head again. “[i]Dios mío[/i],” he muttered in paternal disapproval. “You army boys with your canned food. Tell you what, I will get with the town tomorrow and we will make you all something.”

	“I think, sir, that would be appreciated,” Lopez said with a heartfelt nod. “I’ll look forward to it.”

	The old man grunted in approval before vanishing into the kitchen. Captain Lopez laid back down on the sofa, turning to his side. Outside, the night was dark and quiet. The Mexicans had dug into their fighting positions with small shovels, laying down prone with eyes down the dirt roads leading west. Others patrolled the town in silence. The night would be just as quiet as the day, with only the semi-frequent radio checks coming through the command post’s radio speakers to punctuate the calm.

	Captain Lopez awoke to the sounds of roosters calling in the new day with sunlight shining through the windows of the farmhouse. He rose up off the sofa, stretching his arms out and searching for his uniform when he smelt a familiar smell. On the side table, an aged porcelain cup had been placed with steaming coffee inside. Captain Lopez looked around the empty room, then to the stairs that led to the second floor of the farmhouse. He took the cup of coffee and felt its warmth in his hands. The company commander blew across the top of it to cool the heat before drinking: it was strong and black. He smiled, looking back towards the stairs where the old man lived. Then he began to gather his uniform and get ready for the day.