Like Pancho Villa in northern Mexico, an indefatigable nationalist revolutionary by the name of Augusto César Sandino strung U.S. Marines along a multiyear chase around the Nicaraguan countryside in the latter half of the 1920s. Once again, the mighty United States found itself confounded by a Latin American “bandit.” To make matters worse, Sandino’s charisma and emotive denunciations of American domination of his fellow Nicaraguans made him an international celebrity and turned many against the U.S. campaign in the Central American republic. The hunt came at a time when, following World War I, both the American politicians and the public were wary of the nebulous and protracted dirty wars the United States had been involved in with frequency since its war with Spain in 1898.

The elusive hunt for Sandino is also instructive because it was easily the most important dirty war (the marines themselves called them “small wars”) that the American military fought post-Philippines and pre–World War II. Many military historians attribute the fighting prowess of the U.S. Marines on South Pacific islands such as Iwo Jima to the hard-won lessons they learned over the course of years in the mountains and jungles of Nicaragua.