This story is about the Marines who served in Panama around the time of Operation Just Cause. Since the Marine forces comprised only a fraction of the troops in Panama, the contribution has been overlooked in some other histories. This is especially true of the Marines who served in Panama before and after the operation itself. Nevertheless, they faced, and met, a very real set of challenges of their own, and wrote one of the first chapters in the Marine Corps' history of operations other than war since the fall of the Berlin Wall. The Marines who patrolled the jungles of the Canal Zone in the period before Just Cause, in what was neither peace nor war, broke new ground. So did the young officers and NCOs who, for all intents and purposes, took over the reins of municipal government after the operation.