The new drugs and sprays not only made war safer, they made movement safer. No longer were areas like Panama graveyards for mainlanders, the sorts of places to which they’d bring their coffins in their luggage. In fact, during the war the United States established 134 bases in Panama outside the carefully policed Canal Zone. Those bases were partly to protect the canal, but they also served as places to practice maneuvers and experiment with chemical weapons, such as the jungle tests Cornelius Rhoads oversaw.
