The bombing mission had made worldwide news. Ivan, now "Crazy Ivan", had fundamentally changed the way Mexico viewed the US. They'd decided that "war on drugs" was a losing proposition, and had formally declared War on the United States. Which, amusingly, consisted of posting half of a division on the border, split between Tijuana, Nogales, and some shithole in Texas. Every couple weeks, they'd shoot at, and miss, some of the Guardsmen assinged to "drug interdiction" work, who would dive for the dirt, complain about their ROE, then go back to the base.
When it hit the papers, though, a bunch of congressmen had decided that if this was the "War on Drugs" that they'd been promoting all those years, it smelled to much like real war, and the assholes legalized pot. Since the Mexican cartels were only traffickers of coke and heroine, and not producers of illegal drugs, we lost our contract.
The CIA spook cited some technicality about "excessive force" (which pleased everyone in PBE) and canceled the contract, which we thought was totally unfair. We downsized the Arizona base, bringing staffing down to just a few new guys and some drones. We'd keep it open for business, but only as a training base. It wasn't going to make us money anymore. Those of us assigned to combat duties went back to Florida.
Crazy Ivan decided that he wanted to keep killing cartel members, so he took his paycheck, reinstalled the MAFFS unit, filled that thing with gasoline, and started firebombing coca fields in Colombia. It worked for a week or two, then his plane exploded in midair. That incident also made the papers, and some commie asshole in Venezuela worked out a deal wherein the Colombians would accept VZ help in the same manner the old Soviet satellite countries accepted Soviet help.
Six weeks after the bombing mission, a man arrived from India, with a briefcase full of gold and a contract to start a war.
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