The following account was submitted by one of your fellow listeners,

a veteran of the U.S. Army who actively served during the 1980s.

He writes,

It was December, 1986, and most of our combat engineering battalion had been deployed to the small Central American country of Honduras to construct a new airfield just north of the Rio Coco, a river which served as much of the official border between Honduras and Nicaragua.

Although it was my first deployment outside of the U.S., I wasn't thrilled

to be spending Christmas in the jungles of Central America. But being in the Army, missing

holidays away from your family just goes with the job, I guess. That, along with some degree of risk.

But far from what amount of danger I could have ever anticipated going into a combat zone,

this lesser inhabited region of the Honduran jungle appeared to be harboring something far more frightening than a few socialist

guerrilla fighters.

The truth is, this is not a story I'm very excited to share with you.

Because not only was it a terrifying experience, the way my command

treated me afterwards is somewhat embarrassing. My name is Robert. I'm a U.S. Army veteran,

and this is my story of an encounter I had with something they called El Diablo.

I'm Luke L. Mana. And this is wartime stories. The 1980s stories.

The 1980s was a turbulent time time for Central America.

The third world country of Nicaragua had suffered a major earthquake in

1971, followed by an economic collapse, extreme government corruption, and a violent

political revolution. Similar to the recent war in Vietnam, there were two sides to this fight.

The first being the Sandinistas, the socialist rebels who overthrew

their corrupt government at the end of the 1970s, and were ultimately being funded by the communist

regimes of the Soviet Union and Cuba. The other side was the counter-revolutionaries,

...