Stupid Wars : A Citizen's Guide to Botched Putsches, Failed Coups, Inane Invasions, and Ridiculous Revolutions

by Ed Strosser

  Meanwhile in Grenada, a tiny island at the bottom of the Caribbean near South America, its prime minister Maurice Bishop, under the banner of his “New Jewel Movement,” was running the palm-tree-lined country with a Communist government so small and secretive that very few Grenadan citizens realized it was actually Communist. Interestingly, Bishop grabbed power in a coup against the kooky president Eric Gairy while Gairy was in New York trying to convince the UN to hold a conference on aliens. Bishop’s main pledge project for the worldwide Communist fraternity became shoehorning a large airport into a corner of the hilly little island with the help of Cuban engineers. It could be used for tourist jets or — more ominously — military planes.

  To the rabid anti-Communists in Reagan’s administration and the Pentagon, it seemed obvious that the ten-thousand-foot runway was the first step by a brazen cadre of revolu­tionaries intent on turning the small island into a hub of revolution in the Caribbean. Nothing was done, however, until Bernard Coard, the number-two man in the island’s micro-Marxist Party, felt that Bishop was somehow betray­ing the revolution by not letting him be number one. An American-educated economist who in reality was a crypto-Stalinist, Coard strongly agreed with himself that to further the revolution in textbook KGB style, Bishop should be lined up against a wall and machine-gunned.

  The rabidly anti-Communist American government, eager to crush the tiny Grenadan threat and win a clear-cut victory with their new, shiny weapons, realized that hundreds of American medical students lived at Grenada’s St. George’s medical school, only a few hundred yards from the dreaded runway’s edge. In the revitalized military, the United States had the diamond-hard might to get these possibly threatened young men and women, along with their hematology text­books, safely home. Once Coard shot Bishop and took over, Reagan’s anti-Commie crusaders fueled up the jets for a quick weekend invasion in the Caribbean.

  No one wanted to miss the fun.

  THE PLAYERS

  Ronald Reagan — U.S. president, ex-movie star, anti-Communist who revived jingoistic military operation code names.

  Skinny — Never let an invasion spoil a good golf game.

  Props — Invaded one of Margaret Thatcher’s commonwealth countries without her permission.

  Pros — Once his aides advised him of a decision he should make, he stood behind it 100 percent.

  Cons — Often didn’t remember what his advisors had decided for him the day before.

  Oliver “Ollie” North — Marine colonel on National Security Council staff and proto anti-Communist.

  Skinny — Absolutely never tempted to skip an invasion to play golf.

  Props — Hired leggy paper-shredder Fawn Hall as his right-hand man.

  Pros — Pledged to defend the Constitution of the United States.

  Cons — Believed the Constitution allowed him to do whatever he wanted.

  Bernard Coard — U.S.-educated treasury secretary of Grenada’s micro-Marxist party who promoted himself to island ruler by killing his predecessor, Maurice Bishop.

  Skinny — Practiced a revolutionary theory of “lead the revolution by hiding” when the invasion began.

  Props — Very organized, kept his folders stacked neatly on his desk.

  Pros — Thought Communist revolution and industrialism would provide a better future for Grenada than tourism.

  Cons — Had no idea that the United States could actually invade a country.

  THE GENERAL SITUATION

  In 1983, American soldiers were patrolling Beirut in a futile effort to establish democracy in Lebanon while desperately trying to fend off Syrian control of the Islamic militias. Nu­clear missiles were being delivered to Western Europe to counter the thousands of Russian missiles already in place. The Contras were being funded to battle the Communist Sandinistas in Nicaragua, and the CIA was funding the mujahideen to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan. The Cold War was pretty damn hot.

  Also that year the secret micro-Marxist party running Grenada was bubbling with dissent. Cuba had indeed sup­plied hundreds of engineers to build a giant runway, but island strongman Maurice Bishop’s main partner in the gov­ernment, Bernard Coard, wasn’t happy.

  Coard, the party’s treasury secretary, had studied econom­ics at Brandeis University in Massachusetts and at Sussex University in Britain and had somehow, inexplicably, man­aged to turn himself into an ardent Marxist hard-liner. Per­haps jealous of Bishop’s power, Coard accused Bishop of betraying the revolution, despite the obvious evidence of the giant airstrip being slowly built by the Cuban engineers and the piles of weapons delivered by the Cubans and Russians.

  As the money man, Coard knew that the revolution wasn’t going well. The 100,000-person island nation was having trouble paying its bills, perhaps because turning it into a tiny version of such giant, failing states as Cuba and Russia was working all too well. Other than the production of nutmeg and some tourism, the one bright spot for the regime was St. George’s Medical School, which paid the government a lot of rent. But for a government trying to foment Marxist revolu­tion, relying on a couple of hundred B-level American medical students for funding was embarrassing. One thing everyone understood, however, including Bishop and Coard, was that you didn’t mess with the American meal tickets.

  The unhappy Coard finally confronted Bishop and bullied him into sharing power. But while he was on a trip, Bishop called Coard from Havana and reneged on the deal. When Bishop returned, Coard placed him under house arrest, which was easy enough because Bishop happened to live right down the street from Coard, on a sort of a Revolution­ary Row of Grenada. When word of Bishop’s arrest got out, most Grenadans, blissfully ignorant of the intraparty squab­bling, were angry that the widely admired Bishop had been pushed out by Coard in the name of the “Communist revolu­tion.” Most Grenadans still didn’t realize Bishop was a Com­munist or that any such revolution had taken place. Marches spontaneously began to happen; shops began to close; Fidel weighed in, and he wasn’t happy. For five days the situation festered as Coard tried to force Bishop’s ouster down his throat. He didn’t accept. Realizing that he wasn’t as popular as Bishop, Coard hid.

  On October 19, a large crowd marched up the hill, past Coard’s house, brushing past the armored personnel carriers (APCs) manned by soldiers who fired in the air to scare away the demonstrators. Undeterred, the crowd rescued Bishop. Coard watched from his living room window as the exultant swarm swept Bishop past his house again. The rescuing crowd carried Bishop into Fort Rupert, the army headquar­ters, on the other side of town.

  At this point it was a standoff. Bishop, still getting his bearings after six days of house arrest, didn’t move to arrest Coard. Concluding that since the soldiers hadn’t fired on the crowd, he controlled the streets and the situation, he relaxed. But Coard grabbed the initiative and went after Bishop.

  Under Coard’s orders, three APCs drove over to Fort Rupert, pushing through confused crowds that thought the vehicles supported Bishop. Coard’s hastily conceived plan was to make it look like Bishop had thrown a coup and was killed while the government was retaking the headquarters. This would make it more palatable to the citizens who were solidly behind Bishop. It would, of course, just confuse those citizens who asked how the head of the government could coup himself. But no plan is perfect.

  When the soldiers arrived at the fort, they machine-gunned the crowd in front, killing dozens, and stormed inside. Bishop was easily captured but refused to die fighting. After checking back with Coard, the army lined Bishop and seven others up against the wall and shot them. Coard had gradu­ated to Stalinist first class.

  Coard, who had declined to witness the executions, formed a new government called the Revolutionary Military Council (RMC). Their first official duties were to implement martial law and a curfew, creating great hardship in a coun­try where the revolution had not included providing electric­ity or refrigerators for many people. Their second duty was to dispose of the bodies of the former government leaders
, a two-day process involving a series of trucks and jeeps, and culminating in burning the decomposing bodies in a pit behind a latrine.

  Coard, already proving that his style of leading-by-hiding was brutal but effective, now receded even farther into the background as General Hudson Austin, the army chief, was named the head of the RMC. The next day Austin went to the vice-chancellor of St. George’s Medical School to assure him that the students would not be harmed. Until then the school administrator was totally unaware that any danger existed.

  When news arrived in Washington of Bishop’s execution, Reagan’s cadre — always on a hair-trigger alert for any Communist provocation, even against other Communists — stood ready. Col. Oliver North, assisted by Fawn Hall, held the post of deputy on the National Security Council staff with the responsibilities of coordinating the various political and military departments. This role put him in a position to influ­ence the legal decision-making process or to safely cut it out completely, as he later did during the Iran/Contra scandal.

  On Grenada, however, North saw an opportunity to work within the system. Initially, the military chiefs were against an invasion of a sovereign country, no matter how small, without a really good reason. The students-who-could-easily-be-hostages concerned them, of course, but there hadn’t been any reports of actual harm to them. The hard-liners, who were convinced that Grenada was poised to become the nexus of a Communist push into Caribbean tourist hot spots, felt that this was too good of an opportunity to pass up. They recommended an invasion.

  The Joint Chiefs, despite being rabid anti-Communists to a man, were reluctant to invade a country even if it was Communist (albeit secretly) and could be conquered in about seventeen seconds. There was virtually no intelligence on the size or composition of the enemy they would face on the ground. The CIA intelligence reports roughly went as fol­lows: the beaches were lovely, the drinks icy cold, the Cubans were building a runway, and yes, in fact, there were Ameri­can students-who-could-possibly-be-hostages. The one bright spot was that the island had been discovered to be infested with easily beatable Communists who had wandered into their gun sights.

  It was a stalemate at the NSC, but North kept pushing. A request was arranged from the Organization of Eastern Ca­ribbean States (Antigua and Barbuda, Barbados, Dominica, St. Kitts-Nevis, St. Lucia, Montserrat, St. Vincent, and Gre­nada) asking for American armed forces to please invade one of their member states. The fact that Grenada was a fully sovereign nation and a member of the British Common­wealth didn’t really matter much.

  Over the weekend before the invasion, diplomats from the United States and Britain met in Grenada with RMC leaders and the vice chancellor of the medical school. American offi­cials wanted to get every student out. Evacuating all six hun­dred could not be done by air from the smaller airport in the north, and the larger airport in the south, the new nexus of Communism, was not actually finished, so a commercial jet could not be flown in. A warship was suggested, but the Grenadans didn’t have any (they didn’t have any airplanes either), and they rejected using an American warship as an embarrassment, since it would look like an invasion. Using a cruise liner for the evacuation was posed as an alternative but was never followed through. Essentially, the students had gotten onto the island but could not get off.

  The RMC sent two telexes to try to ward off an invasion. The first one was sent to the American embassy in Barbados, not an obvious hub of U.S. foreign policy. It was ignored. The other telex was sent to London, where it arrived at a plastics company instead of the British government because the wrong number had been used. The plastics company called the British government who told them to drop the telex in the mail. There was no follow-up from the Grenadan Caribo-Stalinists, who despite the swirling rumors of an im­minent attack by the Americans, didn’t really seem to be paying attention.

  Back in Washington, North pushed on with the invasion planning without any formal warnings or notification to the Grenadans, the British, most of the Pentagon, and almost all elected U.S. government officials. The main feature of the plan was that it be secret and quick, a giant hostage rescue operation, to ensure the safety of the students. The Pentagon had an invasion plan handy, as they do for many countries, but it was tossed aside as not germane. North’s vision for the invasion did not include involving such hangers-on as the head of logistics for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, someone presumably critical to planning an invasion, who was not informed. North believed he could not be trusted to keep word from leaking out.

  Reagan was presented with the plan on Friday, October 21, 1983, and was so staggered by the enormity of invading another country that he immediately left for a weekend of golf at the famous Masters Championship course in Augusta, Georgia. Rather than involving just the two obvious military branches in the invasion — the U.S. Navy and Marines — North had pumped up the plan to make sure all the branches would get a slice of glory. Nothing brings out the pro-invad­ers at the Pentagon more than an easy win in the Caribbean followed by a lengthy beachside occupation.

  As it turned out, however, a marine amphibious unit, about 1,600 strong on a flotilla of ships with everything needed for a nice small-scale invasion, happened to be on the way to Beirut, Lebanon. It was quickly redirected to Gre­nada. A navy armada led by the carrier Independence also sailed. Army Rangers and paratroopers from the Eighty-second Airborne would catch direct flights from the States and land right on Grenada’s giant airfield.

  On Sunday morning, October 24, terrorists blew up the marine barracks in Beirut, killing more than two hundred soldiers. Reagan couldn’t get his last round in. He flew back to Washington to deal with the emergency. The whole ad­ministration became preoccupied with the enormous crisis in Lebanon, where large, pressing issues of national security were actually at stake. Grenada suddenly became an after­thought. The only thing that resonated with Reagan was that he did not want to repeat the Americans-as-hostages scenario. He did not want to get Jimmy Cartered so close to home. So, he gave the final go-ahead for the Grenada opera­tion: Tuesday was D-Day.

  When the commanders got the final orders, the first thing they did was look for their maps. They found that there were none.

  WHAT HAPPENED: OPERATION “OVERKILL”

  When the commanders of the RMC realized the rumors were true and their nearby superpower was going to invade, they hustled into tunnels under Fort Frederick. The fact that they would also not be able to communicate with their army by radio from inside the tunnels did not stunt their determina­tion to stay safe from the inevitable bombing and strafing that happens when a superpower invades your tiny island.

  In fact, they didn’t have many troops to command. The main assault force of the RMC was a mobile company of about one hundred men with APC’s, two antitank rifles, some mortars, and two antiaircraft guns. There were another dozen antiaircraft guns scattered throughout the island manned by the militia companies. The militias, which in peacetime counted over three thousand strong, had quickly dissolved back into the populace when Coard had taken over, and only about 250 showed up to tackle the super­power invasion. The regular Grenadan army numbered about 500. They had a half dozen or so of the handy APCs with machine guns, manned by brave, bloodthirsty troops, as had been proved emphatically when they wiped out Bishop without hesitation in the name of the revolution.

  Castro refused to provide any reinforcements to the 600 or so Cubans at the airport, except to dispatch an officer at the last minute to make sure the Cubans stood firm before the inevitable collapse. Castro was determined to make sure that the rabid anti-Communist, running-dog imperialist gen­erals of the superpower weren’t tempted to go island hop­ping through the Caribbean, issued strict orders only to fire at invaders if fired upon. The RMC, sensing perhaps that fighting a superpower army without radio contact with their own troops could perhaps occupy all of their attention, left the Cubans to handle themselves.

  Arrayed against them were thousands of heavily armed, technologically superior, hi
ghly trained superpower warriors in planes, helicopters, ships, and vehicles, tracked and un-tracked. The force was overwhelming. Resistance would be futile. Or so it seemed.

  In 1983 the U.S. military was still recovering from the debacle of the Vietnam War. There were not yet precision, satellite-guided smart bombs that promised collateral-damage-free attacks, with streaming video footage to prove it. In order to blow things up with its vast arsenal of rock­ets, bombs, and artillery shells, Combat Control Teams (CCT) — actual soldiers with binoculars and radios — had to direct the attacks. These spotters were usually accompanied by some of the growing forest of special forces the Ameri­can military now featured: Army Rangers, army Delta Force, Navy SEALS, and Marine Special Forces.

  Special Forces had taken on a life of their own after the failed 1980 mission to rescue the hostages in Iran. With the entire U.S. military establishment desperate to chalk up a vic­tory in the first real action since Vietnam, confidence ran very high. Ollie North’s attitude was that coordination was for desk jockeys and ping-pong. But coordination of all these forces on such short notice proved to be complicated and as lethal as the enemy shooting back at them.

  In addition to not knowing exactly where they were going, the commanders were not sure who they would be fighting, or how many of them existed. Old tourist maps were pulled out, and anyone who had actually visited the island was la­beled an expert. While the maps provided little information on enemy strongholds, they did inform the U.S. commanders where they could rent mopeds.

  After careful consideration, American commanders esti­mated that they would defeat the enemy, no matter how well armed or how many there turned out to be, in one day. They also assumed that all the medical students were at the True Blue Bay campus adjoining the runway. This information, which could have been confirmed by calling someone run­ning the medical school or, perhaps, even a student there, was apparently beyond the operational scope of the mission.