Behind Enemy Lines: Colombia

Not the best movie in the world, but it moved along. They seemed to try for some technical accuracy, especially at the beginning. There were several things that were not accurate / believable. Kind of a mix of good and bad.

The best part was the opening where the narrator is explaining the economics of the 40 year old civil war that is going on in Columbia. The United States Government sends a billion dollars a year to the Colombian Government to help them fight the war against FARC, which is a guerilla operation that controls the cocaine business there. They also control about half of the land area. The citizens of the United States send a billion dollars a year to FARC for cocaine.

Actually, we probably send several billions to FARC: say 800 tons times 2000 pounds per ton times 454 grams per pound times 100 dollars a gram comes to roughly 72 billion dollars. That's retail. If you figure only 10% of it gets all the way back to Columbia, that's still 7 billion dollars, which is quite a bit more than the one billion our government is spending.

Have you ever heard of anything quite so insane? You go to work, you work all week, you get paid. The government takes $100 and sends it to Columbia for them to shoot cocaine farmers. You spend $100 with your local dealer for a couple of hours of entertainment. That $100 goes to buy bullets for FARC to shoot at the soldiers shooting at them.

All this noise, and less than one percent of the US population uses the stuff. Well, at least according to some people. 800 tons is enough to supply five percent of the population (13 million people) with one gram of coke a week. I supposed we could have 3 million people doing 4 grams a week. I can't imagine spending that much money on toot.

Back to the movie. The SEAL team is going to do a HALO drop into Columbia. They fly down in a Hercules, they are wearing oxygen masks and helmets with face shields. I wonder how high you can go with just an oxygen mask but no pressure suit? There is one scene just before they jump where they are standing in the aircraft with the roof just over their heads. Sorry, not accurate. The Hercules is a big plane, you are not going to be short on headroom. One of these days I would like to see a scene where they depressurize a Hercules cargo bay before opening the big doors. It's got to be a serious step, though I'm not sure there would be anything to see. Anyway they jump and they fall for a while, but they still open their chutes while they are still kind of high up, but what do I know? I've never done a parachute jump, much less a HALO. I suppose the main trick is having the airplane high enough up that no one suspects any trouble from it. With the aircraft at 30,000 feet, you wouldn't hear it on the ground.

Then there's the scene where they want to break into an enemy compound. The place is surrounded with a big fence, but they notice a water tank inside the compound and another one a short way up a nearby hillside. They surmise the two are connected by a pipe. Only in Hollywood would that pipe be large enough to swim through. In South America, they would be lucky if it was big enough for a rat. Not only is the pipe large enough to swim through, there is enough light to see. It was one of those things that you know is bogus, but hey, James Bond does this kind of thing all the time, so why can't our commandos do it too?

Update November 2015. Added pic.