The field-kitchen conditions are terrible. The sleeping accommodations are even worse. Yet morale appears to be high among the 800 officers and enlisted men in the Santos Lopez counterinsurgency battalion, an elite Nicaraguan army unit stationed on the banks of the northern Bocay River. "I enjoy what I am doing," says Filemon Avilez Alfaro, 36, the battalion's commander. "None of us is obliged to be here. We want to be here." Similarly, despite reports of widespread draft resistance in Nicaragua, the 1,200 reservists of the less glamorous southern command who were recently summoned to the front in Juigalpa, about 150 miles...
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