Grenada: How The U.S. Invasion Hit The Reset Button

If you've been following our adventures from a distance, chances are you knew nothing about the island of Grenada, up to and including exactly where to find it on a map, when we announced our arrival here last month.

You can take a moment to google it now. No, farther south. All the way down there, sort of close to Venezuela. Yeah, that's it.

If you do know anything, it's probably this: sometime in the 1980s (1983 to be exact) the U.S. rolled over this small Caribbean island in the first such deployment of American forces since the end of the Vietnam War. In one of the Pentagon's initial efforts at melding a code-name with a public-relations ploy worthy of a sixth-grader, the venture was dubbed Operation Urgent Fury.

More than 30 years later, you'd think everything would be forgotten. But you'd be wrong.

Few, if any bitter memories of Yankee imperialism. Instead, Grenadians are more likely to stop an American on the street and thank him or her for "saving" the country. That hasn't happened to me personally, but I have spoken to more than one cruiser from the states who's experienced it. There's even freshly renewed murals that appear on some street corners with American flags, or 82nd Airborne logos, thanking the United States.

This got me thinking. I do remember the invasion, but it is close to the periphery of my political consciousness. I was only 17 at the time. So, this post is sort of a study exercise in the history -- mostly for my own edification, but perhaps for you, too:

First, the backdrop. Reagan had been elected president three years before. The U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut had just been blown up by a suicide bomber, killing 241 marines. Some critics saw the move on Grenada, coming just days after the Beirut attack, as a "wag the dog" distraction (years before that term entered the popular lexicon). The evidence doesn't support that claim. However, Reagan -- always eager to reassert the Monroe Doctrine of U.S. hegemony in the Western Hemisphere -- had been eyeing the situation in Grenada for some time. An influx of money and contractors from Cuba, and some from the Soviet Union, had alarmed him. The focus of their concern was a new international airport being built on the island's south side with help from international donors, including former sovereign Britain, but most worrying to Reagan's people, also Cuba. Ostensibly a commercial entrepot, the Reagan administration saw the 9,000-foot runway, able to accommodate large (Soviet) military transports, as a threat.

PBS writes that for Reagan, Grenada had been "something of a pet project ... since his visit to Barbados in 1982." Regional leaders had bent his ear about the socialist country, that it "could become a Communist beachhead in the Caribbean."

There is some historical evidence that Grenada's governor-general at the time, i.e., the British Commonwealth's representative on the island, had requested the U.S. intervention. Assistance had also been solicited by the Organization of Eastern Caribbean States, thus giving the Reagan administration diplomatic cover.

Grenada, the smallest sovereign country in the Caribbean, had won independence from Britain in 1974. Less than a decade later, the political situation was turmoil.

The events of October 1983 would have been hard for anyone inside or outside of Grenada to follow:

The country's prime minister, Maurice Bishop -- a socialist who had forged development deals with Cuba and the Soviet Union (thus alarming Washington) -- had toppled Grenada's first premier, Eric Gairy, in a bloodless coup four years previous. On October 13, Bishop himself was deposed and placed under house arrest by his ambitious deputy prime minister, Bernhard Coard. Within days of the putsch, mass demonstrations occurred in support of the popular Bishop. The crowds snatched him from his captors and paraded him through the streets. On the same day, military chief Gen. Hudson Austin seized the government, deposing Coard and recapturing Bishop, who was executed along with several of his close associates on the same day.

Maurice Bishop

Enter the U.S. The chaos offered an opportunity to make a few points in the Cold War containment game and to get rid of the (military trained) Cuban contractors. Gen. Austin had issued a shoot-on-sight order to enforce a dawn-to-dusk curfew on the island. One main justification for the intervention was the "rescue" of some 800 students, many from the U.S., who were attending the St. George's University School of Medicine. Otherwise, they might get shot.

Six days after Gen. Austin's counter-coup, on Oct. 25, U.S. forces, including Marines, Navy SEALs and Army special forces, landed on Grenada -- deployed at several points near St. George's Bay on the southwestern and southern side of the main island (including the cruisers' anchorage of True Blue and the resort island Calivigny), as well as on the windward side near Grenville.

Credit: Wikipedia Commons

It was supposed to be a cakewalk. While no one doubted that vastly superior U.S. numbers would score a quick victory against the tiny, poorly trained Grenadian forces and the better trained, but small contingent of Cuban contractors/soldiers, it didn't go exactly as planned for the Pentagon.

Famously, U.S. forces lacked proper military-style contour maps of the island and had to rely on the same ones handed out to tourists. As a result, they had a difficult time finding the medical students they had ostensibly been sent to rescue (many of whom, when located, had no idea that an invasion was even underway). The Army and the Navy couldn't talk to one another because their radios worked on different frequencies, which contributed to a friendly fire incident that caused U.S. Navy A-7 Corsairs to mistakenly bomb a brigade headquarters of the 82nd Airborne, wounding 17 army soldiers, three of them seriously. Navy A-7s also mistakenly bombed a mental hospital instead of the actual target, the Grenadian command post at Fort Frederick. Eighteen civilians were killed in that mishap. In that same raid on Fort Frederick, three Marine helicopters were shot down. As Military.com notes, "The Grenadian Army and its Cuban allies also offered greater resistance than the Americans expected."

The whole David and Goliath confrontation ended up taking weeks instead of days and the mop up wasn't finished until mid-December. A provisional government was installed that served a year until things had returned more or less to normal and elections could be set.

For the U.S. military, it was a hard lesson. It was also a training ground for future leaders, such as Norman Schwarzkopf and Colin Powell, who both played major non-combat roles as major generals (two-star) at the time. Schwarzkopf was the Army's liaison to Vice Admiral Joseph Metcalf III. In hindsight, Powell -- who at the time of Urgent Fury was an Army liaison officer to Secretary of Defense Casper Weinberger -- deemed the operation "a sloppy success."

Today, Grenadians seem to understand that the outcome of the U.S. invasion can be separated from Washington's rationale for it. A taxi driver, who goes by the name of Cutty, who says he personally knew Bishop and other top government leaders, said he thought the United States had "done the right thing for the wrong reasons."

The threat of communism in the Caribbean, especially given the collapse of the Soviet Union a few years later and the slow withering of Cuba that it triggere, was overblown. Serious Soviet military adventurism in the Caribbean arguably ended with the Cuban missile crisis and despite some support for civil wars in Central and South America, was never again a serious regional challenge to the U.S.

For Grenada, however, U.S. military forces helped push a reset button on the island's politics. Since 1983, there have not been any more coups. Democratic governments have come and gone, with peaceful transitions.

And that airport that caused so much concern? That would be Maurice Bishop International.