Memories of an Emerald World - Emerald World aviation adventures, #5

A thrilling, funny, poignant memoir of the author's first year as a U.S. Air Force pilot stationed in Panama in the early 1990s.  From his introduction to the C-27 Spartan and the mischievous characters who flew that workhourse airplane, to his escape from Peruvian fighters determined to shoot him out of the sky, Bleriot paints vivid and exciting portraits of a sliver of time in America's last colonial outpost in South America.  Ordered to support remote radar sites looking for drug runners in the Amazon jungle, Bleriot and his fellow aviators must first survive in Panama only a few years after Noriega's fall.  Hilarious accounts of dealing with local realtors, bureaucrats, and thieves alternate with hair-raising air assaults to jungle strips, supply drops onto minefields, and a well-meaning but almost disastrous attempt to bring Christmas to the front-line troops.  With a gift for putting  readers into the action, Bleriot has captured a little-known but dramatic slice of history in his Emerald series, and Memories of an Emerald World perfectly sets the stage.