Enemy Lines

When she arrived in Afghanistan in December, Marie, 21, had never interrogated a prisoner. The only indication that she might have some aptitude for it, she said, was her success in extracting secrets from her sisters while growing up in Michigan. "I always found out what I was getting for Christmas," she said. Many of the Al Qaeda and Taliban prisoners held here are Muslim extremists reluctant to make eye contact with a woman, let alone sell out their cause to one.

Robert Maloubier likes to tell people he is a retired accountant. That he studied finance in college, that he had a quiet life, that he stopped working at 66. He can barely get the last words out without a chuckle that pulls up the ends of his bushy white mustache so it curls around his cheekbones. "Oh, I love doing that," he says with a satisfied sigh. "Nobody knows about me here. " The truth is Maloubier, 88, never went to college. It's also hard to say whether he ever really retired, though he admits that when he turned 80 he had to stop rollerblading and flying his plane.

The experience level of many TV reporters covering the Persian Gulf conflict is something the networks shouldn't want to brag about. While observing some of these foreign correspondents enlightening us on the air war (CNN Jerusalem correspondent Linda Scherzer was an NBC News intern less than three years ago, for example), it occurs that perhaps we should be enlightening them. Nonetheless, there are dramatic exceptions.

When a U.S. military helicopter was destroyed in the backyard of Osama bin Laden's compound, it left not only a pile of smoldering wreckage but tantalizing evidence of a secret stealth chopper. The quest for a helicopter that can slip behind enemy lines without being heard or detected by radar has been the Holy Grail of military aviation for decades and until this week nobody had thought such a craft existed. But aviation experts are now convinced that the Pentagon may have developed such an aircraft.

The crack troopers of the top-secret British Special Air Service Regiment (SAS) are operating behind the lines in Kuwait and Iraq and are expected to play a key role in relaying information to the main allied armies in the Gulf ground war, according to senior military sources here. SAS teams, the sources say, have been been placed in Iraq and Kuwait to monitor Iraqi army activities, and to send, via sophisticated communications equipment, valued intelligence to allied headquarters in Riyadh.

They were top scientists, language experts, Ivy League professors, cops and career military men. That's not to mention criminals and gangsters proficient in the "arts" of safecracking, picking pockets and forgery. This hodgepodge of unique talents, which President Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered to be formed five months before Pearl Harbor, became known as the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the precursor of the Central Intelligence Agency.

JACQUELINE Bujanda proudly plays the outcast in this table-flat farming community surrounded by grain silos and antiabortion billboards. At age 24, she endures stares, insults and slammed doors as she performs the political version of peddling Coke in a Pepsi town: She sells the Democratic Party in dark-red western Kansas, a state that hasn't elected a Democratic U.S. senator since Prohibition -- the longest streak in the nation.

Robert Maloubier likes to tell people he is a retired accountant. That he studied finance in college, that he had a quiet life, that he stopped working at 66. He can barely get the last words out without a chuckle that pulls up the ends of his bushy white mustache so it curls around his cheekbones. "Oh, I love doing that," he says with a satisfied sigh. "Nobody knows about me here. " The truth is Maloubier, 88, never went to college. It's also hard to say whether he ever really retired, though he admits that when he turned 80 he had to stop rollerblading and flying his plane.

On Assemblyman Tom Hayden's (D-Santa Monica) idea for a memorial to Vietnam War protesters: That's the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard, a slap in the face to Vietnam veterans (of which I am one). Maybe we should give Jane Fonda a medal, too, for bravery behind the enemy lines. TIM ELLIOTT North Hollywood

"He wanted the wet look." That's what Ken Metcalf, associate producer of Cannon Films' "Behind Enemy Lines," said of Israeli director Gidi Amir's decision to shoot the action picture during the Philippines' rainy season. For added authenticity, Amir ordered construction of a dike on a river outside Manila to control flood levels on sets and locations. Amir got authenticity and then some when late June delivered one of the worst monsoons in island history.

It starts at the airport. A burly guy in a hoodie drapes himself over the barrier that leads out of the parking lot. Watching. Just watching. Most taxi drivers are on the drug cartels' payroll, ordered to spy on visitors and monitor the movements of the military and state investigators. Their license plates brazenly shed, they cruise streets dotted with paper-flower shrines marking the dead. Watching. In the main downtown plaza, in front of City Hall and the cathedral, about a dozen guys in baggy pants with sunglasses on their heads hang out alongside the shoeshine men. They eye passersby, without speaking.

USC defensive tackle Jurrell Casey abides by a simple philosophy when it comes to stopping running backs such as California's Jahvid Best. "If they don't get to the line, they can't do anything, right?" Casey said. That's the plan USC's front seven wants to execute Saturday when the seventh-ranked Trojans play No. 24 California at Memorial Stadium in Berkeley. So far, the strategy has worked fairly well. Consider: USC ranks fifth nationally in rushing defense, giving up only 59.5 yards a game.

The difference between the USC and UCLA football programs is working late. It's Monday night, a chilly wind blows across the wet grass, his team has left the practice field, yet he does not. He is tutoring a player. One player. He stalks around him, shouts at him, laughs with him, pushes him, again and again. The difference between the USC and UCLA football programs is a three-time Super Bowl champion, a former Pro Bowl linebacker, one of the winningest players in pro football history.

When she arrived in Afghanistan in December, Marie, 21, had never interrogated a prisoner. The only indication that she might have some aptitude for it, she said, was her success in extracting secrets from her sisters while growing up in Michigan. "I always found out what I was getting for Christmas," she said. Many of the Al Qaeda and Taliban prisoners held here are Muslim extremists reluctant to make eye contact with a woman, let alone sell out their cause to one.

In the new movie "Behind Enemy Lines," an American pilot and navigator are shot down over the former Yugoslavia, with the pilot summarily executed by Serbian soldiers. That one combat death is one more than all the combat deaths suffered by all U.S. forces in the Balkans, according to the latest Pentagon tabulations. Why? Because since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the U.S. government has never been willing to risk American lives for a cause that didn't directly engage American vital interests.

It may look like a little like him, but that's definitely not Tom Cruise on the poster for "Behind Enemy Lines." The confusion, though, is understandable, given a film that might as well be called "Top Gun Goes to Bosnia." Hotshot flyboys rule one more time, proving to the world that once a lone American gets riled up, adversaries on foreign shores, no matter how numerous, had best look to their laurels.

In the new movie "Behind Enemy Lines," an American pilot and navigator are shot down over the former Yugoslavia, with the pilot summarily executed by Serbian soldiers. That one combat death is one more than all the combat deaths suffered by all U.S. forces in the Balkans, according to the latest Pentagon tabulations. Why? Because since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the U.S. government has never been willing to risk American lives for a cause that didn't directly engage American vital interests.

It may look like a little like him, but that's definitely not Tom Cruise on the poster for "Behind Enemy Lines." The confusion, though, is understandable, given a film that might as well be called "Top Gun Goes to Bosnia." Hotshot flyboys rule one more time, proving to the world that once a lone American gets riled up, adversaries on foreign shores, no matter how numerous, had best look to their laurels.

Warfare in one form or another has always been a part of John Moore's life. He grew up in Dundalk, Ireland, the hardscrabble border town long known as a hide-out for the Irish Republican Army where car bombs killed a few of his relatives and bloody riots were commonplace. As a news cameraman years later, Moore braved Israeli shelling while covering the peacekeeping mission in south Lebanon.