LINES AND SHADOWS

Strange and powerful cop-fact, from a past-master of cop-fiction: the story of ten San Diego police officers assigned to patrol, on foot, at night, the cactus-filled, snake-infested canyons along the Mexican border. Not, however, to intercept aliens illegally entering the country—there were far too many—but to arrest the violent, sadistic bandits who preyed on the defenseless aliens in the canyons, The ten were the Border Alien Robbery Force (with the inevitable acronym), almost all Mexican-Americans, led by the super-macho Sergeant Manny Lopez ("I was bored. Real bored. . . . That's why I joined [the] task force")—who seemed to know no fear and whose men, as time went on, became more and more convinced he was both invulnerable and crazy. ("This bastard would draw on The Holy Ghost!") Night after night, dressed like winos, crawling around in the brush, grappling with "guys with knives and icepicks. . . guys who smelled like garbage," it began to get to the men in the BARF squad. "We were afraid to use our guns at first," said one. "We were still normal policemen." They didn't stay normal long. For one thing, the media found them: "Border shooting! Film at eleven!" Celebrity turned them into The Last of the Gunslingers. ("Think of it: ten little hardball lawmen, shooting down Mexican bandits. . . out there in the cactus and rocks and tarantulas. . . . If that wasn't a John Ford scenario, what the hell was it?"). And they worked hard in off-duty hours (drinking, police groupies) to live up to the image. On the job, they had more shootouts per month than most cops see in a lifetime, and they got crazier and crazier. Even war, thought one, made more sense than "seeking out armed men in the darkness"—the intimacy of it was terrifying. Ultimately they began beating up bandits they lacked cause to arrest, and not giving a damn about anyone or anything. (Manny to a bandit he's shot: "I hope you die of gangrene. . . . I hope it hurts like cancer.") When the bandits wised up and stayed on the Mexican side of the border, the BARFers ignored the international boundary, and an incident in which a Tijuana policeman was shot signaled the beginning of the end of the entire patrol experiment. Ironically, the BARF squad members paid the highest price: broken marriages, psychiatric problems, police careers that fizzled. "Maybe it would take a foreigner," Wambaugh suggests, "to know how typically American it was to thrust ten young men into a monstrous international dilemma with an implied mission to dramatize it." Tough, funny, and moving—with plenty of dead-on cop dialogue.