LUSK - The Americans had their chance once, imprisoning the once-powerful Latin America strongman for drug-trafficking charges after they couldn't topple his government.

He was released in September from a Miami prison cell, but his battles with the law aren't over.

France may yet have its turn to try him on additional criminal charges.

Thomas Bleming already had the chance - and paid dearly for trying to take down Manuel Noriega.

Twenty-six years after he was led out of a Panamanian prison and greeted with a cheeseburger and cake reception following nearly two years of confinement under the de facto leader's watch, Thomas Bleming still can't shake the fact that Manuel Noriega got the best of him.

But Bleming may yet exact his pound of flesh from the one-time military dictator, now 73 and awaiting extradition to France on money-laundering charges.

A new self-published book about Bleming's experiences in Panama, "Panama: Echoes From a Revolution," became available for purchase online Friday.

The Panama memoir, published a generation after his nearly 22-month prison term for allegedly coordinating a botched assassination attempt on Noriega, and his journey into the jungles of Myanmar have Bleming re-energized in his role as a mercenary-for-hire.

It's the story of a man who has spent the better part of three decades as a real-life Jason Bourne, globetrotting the world in the name of democracy.

"I've been behind the scenes and seen more backdoor deals than anyone," said Bleming, 61, a decorated Vietnam War veteran.

The battle with Noriega

Thomas Bleming's biggest battle, however, remains his conflict with Noriega. It's a war that's turned both hot and cold over the past quarter-century, and began with his capture by the general, who was acting on the orders of his boss, Gen. Omar Torrijos Herrera.

Bleming arrived in Panama in 1979. Much of his stay, however, was seen through the iron bars of a jail cell.

Bleming was with a group of six Americans seeking to oust Herrera's military dictatorship when he was captured and imprisoned on Oct. 11, 1979, for an alleged attempt on Noriega's life after a bomb had been placed under a 5,000-gallon gas tank in an attempt to kill the general.

The facts of the case, as well as Noriega's treatment of Bleming as a prisoner, remain somewhat in dispute.

"I never admitted I tried to kill Noriega," Bleming said, noting that "our intentions were to assassinate him if we could. (Noriega and Torrijos) were a bunch of gangsters ripping off the country, and ran the country with an iron fist."

To this day, Bleming says the U.S. government has "denied any involvement in this activity."

Nevertheless, Bleming keeps reams of declassified documents regarding his time in Panama, though there is no mention by the United States of any plot to exterminate Noriega in the documents.

The correspondence includes a March 12, 1981 letter from L. Paul Bremer, then the executive secretary for the U.S. State Department to President Reagan's national security adviser, of the U.S. Embassy's efforts to contact Panamanian officials, who sought to try Bleming and an accomplice, Wilfredo Bermudez, on criminal charges. No trial was ever held.

Bleming and Bermudez boarded a Braniff Airlines plane bound for Miami at 12:45 p.m. July 21, 1981, some 569 days after their capture.

Bermudez, originally from Cuba, settled in Miami, gave an interview to The Miami Herald and hasn't spoken to Bleming since.

Bleming, on the other hand, does not speak of Noriega fondly, and simply wants to make peace with the man.

While in prison, Bleming said, he was subject to myriad forms of torture.

In various court filings Bleming made over the years in an effort to make Noriega pay for his alleged crimes, Bleming said he was forced to have his hair torn out by its roots, beaten with the butt end of a rifle and was once threatened with ejection out of an airplane as it flew over the Pacific Ocean.

In rejecting an initial lawsuit brought by Bleming asking Noriega for monetary reparations, U.S. District Judge Alan B. Johnson in Cheyenne wrote in December 2004:

"The characters, places, conditions and treatment that Bleming describes would be suitable for a Hollywood movie or Tom Clancy novel."

On June 15 of this year, Johnson again rejected Bleming's $21.5 million lawsuit against Noriega, calculated as $1 million for every month of his imprisonment. Johnson did so because he said the complaint, refiled under the terms of the 1991 Torture Victims Protection Act, had to have been filed within 10 years of the act's passage. Bleming's initial lawsuit was filed in 2002.

The lawsuit was rejected just as Bleming was finishing his self-published book, "Panama: Echoes From a Revolution."

Bleming spent in excess of $25,000 to publish the tome.

"I've mortgaged myself, you might say," said Bleming, who lives frugally on a military disability retirment. "I'm not getting government approval to write this book."

Joe McCullough, Bleming's representative at Bloomington, Ind.-based Author House Publishing, said "Echoes" should appeal to those interested the U.S.'s sometimes-questionable foreign policy tactics in Latin America during the Reagan administration.

"The story is very compelling," McCullough said. "I think we're in a position in this country, where there's an interest in rehashing events from 20-30 years ago."

With Noriega in the news as he awaits his fate, "I'm predicting it to be one of our bigger titles this year," McCullough said. "Not a lot of people know (Bleming's) story."

McCullough immediately sensed Bleming's fervor to tell the tale.

"My opinion of his situation is that he's a little more (upset) at our government than anything. I think he's using the book as a way to get compensation for that difficult time in his life."

From war hero to mercenary

It was perhaps the last time Thomas Bleming ever felt like a patriot. He had earned a Silver Star for his heroic actions dragging members of his detachment up a hill near Dak To, with the advancing North Vietnamese exchanging grenade fire with his American comrades. Those were the shots fired that made the 23-year-old member of the 52nd Aviation Battalion Airborne Pathfinders Detachment a hero in the eyes of his superiors.

A copy of the commendation and his Silver Star medal are displayed for a visitor in his Lusk home. They haven't been brought out in a long time, he says.

"All I can say is, we survived it, thank God," said Bleming of May 22, 1969. It was a just duty for a just cause - at the time.

"I would see these young men, literally ripped to pieces, and I thought to myself, 'What in the name of God have I gotten into?'"

Nevertheless, he bought into the mission at the time. "I thought that I was fighting communism, and I thought we were going to win," said Bleming, who grew up in suburban Willow Grove, Pa., and followed in the footsteps of three uncles who served in the Marines.

Bleming, burning with red rage, was on his second enlistment in Fort Rucker, Ala., when Saigon fell on April 30, 1975. "I made a vow that I would launch a personal crusade. I was going to get my share of communists, to get even."

Bleming's anti-communism fervor landed him in the jungles of Rhodesia, where he was sent as a weapons supplier later that year to help establish an anti-communist government led by Ian Smith against the country's Marxist leader, Robert Mugabe, who now serves as the country's president.

That defeat, and his imprisonment in Panama, have Bleming well aware that he's never been on the winning side of a conflict, including Vietnam.

Eventually, like many of his brothers-in-arms who served in Vietnam, he came to denounce his role in the conflict.

A comment made by a North Vietnamese soldier who declined Bleming's offer of a pack of smokes after a confrontation came back to haunt him, Bleming said.

"One day, you'll find out the truth, that your government sent you here for lies," Bleming said the soldier told him.

"I just scoffed at it. I just thought it was pure propaganda."

Slowly, the years unpeeled, until, on Christmas Eve 1998, when, in the Veterans Administration hospital in Sheridan, Bleming saw a documentary on Ho Chi Minh that portrayed the communist leader in a different light.

Twenty-six years after seeing combat in Vietnam, Bleming realized the war, at least for him, was a lie.

"I realized I'd been a willing tool of the capitalist, globalist agenda," said Bleming, who has led anti-Iraq war marches in Casper and is a frequent critic of President Bush on the Star-Tribune's letters page.

And those medals, once heroically displayed for everyone, stay locked away.

"They don't belong to me," he said. "The lies that were used to start (the war) cheapened these. It underlined (American soldiers) dying in vain."

His next challenge

So he sits in his cramped, cluttered home, a self-proclaimed "spent bullet" who never experienced a life most of us take for granted, waiting with his overgrown and ever-present dog, Talon, for the chance to return strap on a rifle and fight for an indigenous sect's independence from Myanmar. The life of a mercenary hasn't been without its sacrifices.

Bleming has been married at least once before and has a 36-year-old son who lives in Sydney, Australia, and another 28-year-old son who lives in Costa Rica, both of whom Bleming said he hasn't seen in years. He married his current wife, the former Zoe Beauregard Caizalez, in the Panamanian city of David in 2003, yet he's lucky to see her a few weeks each year when he travels to Panama.

"I gave up a lot," Bleming said. "I should be with my grandchildren. But I have a life to do. Some people may think I'm calloused, because I'd run off in a revolution or war before anything else."

His is a life, Bleming says, built upon the principles of the swashbuckling, brash leadership of Ernesto "Che" Guevara, the Argentina-born Marxist revolutionary, and by Cuban leader Fidel Castro.

There is no retirement for this man whom some in Lusk believe to be full of boast and bombast, only a look to the next challenge far away, to fight for the indigenous Karen people caught in the middle of a nearly 60-year war for independence in Myanmar.

"I believe in revolution or death," he said, sounding not unlike his heroes, "to be able to put aside materialism to fight for people you don't know.

"I've given up a family, an awful lot to pursue the life of a tri-continental soldier."

To view a video of Bleming's take on the current crisis in Myanmar, please click here.