But if the situation on the ground at Apiay was dicey, security in the air was hardly better, former unit personnel said. Increasingly, the spy planes were taking fire. More and more, they were being tracked through the night skies by ground-to-air missiles of the narco-guerrillas.

"Every time they came back from a mission," Jennifer's husband, Chuck Odom, recounted in a previous Salon story about her death, "there'd be small-arms bullet holes on the fuselage or the tail. I asked her about it, and she said, 'It's a dangerous place. We're always getting shot at and lit up (by missile radar).'

"It wasn't Colombian government radar," declared Odom, who'd had many sensitive assignments during his own Army career. "It was a missile lock" by someone armed with advanced, U.S.-made Stingers or foreign equivalents.

Dawn Smith and other pilots say their flights were compromised even before their wheels lifted off the runway. For starters, Colombian civil aviation authorities required all aircraft -- including spy missions -- to file flight plans. Thus, air controllers broadcast their progress through the skies.

The situation was crazy, pilots said.

"One time coming back from another country, you could tell they were giving our call sign to somebody else," Smith said. "We thought, 'Who are they talking to on the air? Why are they saying anything about us?' I didn't know that much Spanish, but I knew they were talking about us. So we felt that their ATC (air traffic control) was definitely giving out information about us ..."

In the end, Briana Krueger was able to avoid an assignment to return to Colombia in July of 1999, but her husband of one month, 20-year-old Ray, couldn't, or wouldn't, resist.

"I told him before he left that I didn't want him to go," Briana recalled. "We were talking about breaking his arms so he wouldn't be able to go. I just felt really uncomfortable that he was going. He said, like, 'Orders are orders.'"

On the night of July 30 the flight took off from a Colombian military base at Apiay. Its lone runway, set in a high meadow and buffeted by wind, rain and fog off the Andes, had a lot of customers, from the 204th's Dash-7's to CIA, DEA and U.S. Customs Service aircraft. Sometime after 3 a.m. that same night, Odom and her crew crashed into the side of a steep mountain near the border with Ecuador. All were killed. The plane wreckage, already pulverized by the crash, was blown up by a Delta team from the U.S. Embassy. The Army said neither of the two flight data recorders was working.

While the military disputes Chuck Odom and Briana Krueger's theories about the role of Colombian drug collaborators in their spouses' death, it's clear the losses had one impact: Anti-drug generals in Washington have stepped up the recruitment of civilians to fight the war, to minimize the political fallout more U.S. military deaths could cause back home.

To some extent, the strategy worked: When three pilots employed by Dyncorp of Reston, Va., died in Colombia a few years ago, it hardly made the news. According to military sources, the U.S. employs about 70 "contractors" in Colombia, but there are many more in border regions, such as Iquitos in northern Peru, working as military advisors, mechanics and pilots. They're coming in for more scrutiny now, however, thanks to the death of Veronica and Charity Bowers.

Since her husband's death, Briana Krueger has left the military and is trying to get on with her life; she'd like to open a restaurant. When she thinks back on her time in Colombia, she says simply: "We're just wasting our time doing this."

Chuck Odom wishes the Bowers family well, trying to get to the bottom of the mystery surrounding its loved ones' deaths, but his voice reflects his weariness. "You never get over something like this," he says. "You learn to deal with it, to live with it ... I just march along every day."

Reflecting on the conflicting accounts of the Bowers tragedy coming from Peru and Washington, Odom said sadly, "It sounds like business as usual down there."

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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