Smithsonian 

Abstract: g, T tright now as I sit on the porch of a shack in Armopa, a tiny outpost deep in the Indonesian jungle. d *45vA The sun slipped below the horizon 30 minutes ago, and in the gathering dark, danger rises from Armopa's swampy earth like an incoming tide. From daylight hiding places in the humid shadows, the mosquitoes have come out, zeroing in on any flesh they can find. They begin biting my bare feet, then move up my ankles. Within minutes, dozens of them are on the back of my neck. Some, no doubt, are carrying one of the malaria-causing species of Plasmodium, single-celled parasites that are transported by mosquito from human to human, leaving deadly infections in their wake. I lift my feet from the porch's planked floor, resting them on a rail above the malarial flood. Beyond the porch, Armopa's stilt huts are illuminated by flickering cooking fires. Armopa is a region in Irian Jaya, Indonesia's state on the island of New Guinea. Much of the area is made up of new villages-grids of dirt paths, irrigation canals and garden plots-that exist because of a government "transmigration" policy. Mile-square clearings have been bulldozed into the jungle and populated by the landless and unemployed of Indonesia's other, more crowded islands. To my left, seated beneath a bare lightbulb and sipping a lukewarm soda, is J. Kevin Baird, a 4z-year-old commander in the U.S. Navy. An athletic man dressed in khaki shorts and a T-shirt, Baird has a thatch of wavy dark hair and a precisely trimmed mustache. He, too, has lifted his feet above the biting tide. "Here they come," he says, slapping a mosquito on his leg. Baird has a Ph.D. in parasitology and is the malaria program direc-