Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power (12 page)

Grenada was a tougher mission to back, but Tip O’Neill was also convinced that partisanship ended at the water’s edge in wartime. Even in a war against a tiny, poorly armed island military, he was not going to criticize the president while American troops were in a fight, and he would implore the House Democratic Caucus to do the same. On the way out of the meeting, O’Neill wished Reagan good luck, sincerely. He wasn’t interested in seeing American boys die. But he privately worried that Reagan’s insistence on making war in Grenada would start our own country down a dangerous new road.

The United States military might have been facing one of the weakest foes on the planet, but Operation Urgent Fury was no cakewalk. The Grenadian soldiers put up more of a fight than intelligence had suggested they would, but still, resistance melted away pretty quickly. Most of the damage the United States suffered in the invasion was self-inflicted. The lack of intelligence and basic tactical maps along with the inability of the various services to communicate with one another led to results ranging from comic to mortal. The SEALs sent to rescue Governor-General Scoon had to be rescued themselves. They had to use the house phone to call Fort Bragg to request fire from the US naval ships off the coast. The radio station selected to be used for Scoon’s address to the people of Grenada turned out to be nothing more than a remote transmission tower. Navy
Corsair pilots accidentally blew up a mental hospital, killing eighteen patients. A US Marine liaison team mistakenly called in a naval air raid on a nearby US Army command post, wounding seventeen American soldiers and killing one. Helicopters were lost to small-arms fire, to the rotors from another chopper, and to a confrontation with a palm tree.

When word of the invasion began to reach home that first day, the early results were a cold slap in the face for Team Reagan. Members of the United Nations Security Council immediately began debating a resolution “deeply deploring” the US invasion of Grenada as a “flagrant violation of international law.” (The vote would go 11–1, with the United States exercising its veto power.) Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher called to register her anger with Reagan. Democrats and Republicans alike in Congress were not happy about being kept in the dark about this multimillion-dollar military adventure. “I was the designated person on the day of the beginning of the action when it became public to go to the Congress,” Secretary of State George Shultz told an audience a few years ago. “I spent all day long and there was hardly a good word said.” Sen. Lawton Chiles told reporters: “One day we’ve got the numbers of Marines’ deaths, which shocked us all, the next day we find we’re invading Grenada. Are we looking for a war we can win?”

The press corps, meanwhile, was apoplectic that they had not been brought along on the combat mission, and that a White House official had flat-out lied (“Preposterous!”) when asked in advance about the operation. The executive vice president of the National Newspaper Publishers Association called for a full-on congressional investigation into Reagan’s “policy of secret wars hidden from the American people.” Four years later, the conservative columnist and Republican defender William Safire was still pitching into Reagan’s national security team. “The United
States Government may on rare occasion fall silent for a time, but it must not deliberately lie; only the presence of reporters pledged to temporary secrecy can help justify a news blackout. By breaching the democratic precedent, and by issuing a lie, the Reagan Administration engaged in self-corruption far more important than one victory in the Caribbean.”

Meanwhile, on Grenada, the way operations were unfolding did not exactly bolster the administration’s case that the point of Urgent Fury was saving the St. George’s University medical students. The plan to pluck the students from what was called the True Blue campus just a short hop north from the Point Salines airfield was executed to perfection. The Army Rangers swept in and secured all the students living on the campus without a serious hitch on the first day. But the Rangers found fewer than a third of the six hundred American students they’d been expecting on the campus. That’s because, the students explained,
most
of the students lived at the Grand Anse campus a few miles north.

Oops. In the full week after the crisis came to a head, nobody in the Pentagon or the White House made an effort to contact the school to see where everybody lived. Nobody picked up the telephone and called the dorms. Nobody checked the student-loan records to get actual addresses for the Americans studying at St. George’s. There was no plan to rescue students at the Grand Anse campus
because nobody in the United States government knew there was a Grand Anse campus
. Now the Army Rangers picked up the phone and called Grand Anse, and the students told them they thought a small group of Grenadian and Cuban soldiers had dug in around the campus. Whether they were to protect the American students or to hold them was anybody’s guess. But it must be noted that those Grenadians and Cubans had more than thirty-six hours after the first American troops
landed to do as they pleased with the students. And they did them no harm.

While the Ranger commandos made plans for a new assault/rescue on the Grand Anse campus, the military kept reporters at bay, in Barbados. The last thing they needed now was reporters crawling around, which meant the media missed the most seamless operation of Urgent Fury. Firepower from the USS
Independence
took out a couple of hotels near the campus (part
deux
), and then three waves of helicopters came roaring in over the Atlantic, blasting their .50-caliber guns into the smoke and haze and off-loading dozens of Army Rangers. In a matter of half an hour, another 224 American students had been freed from their beachside apartments and shipped off to safety in military helicopters.

The triumph would have been complete, except for one sour note. The Grand Anse students inquired about the condition of their classmates who lived across the island at Prickly Bay; must be another two hundred or so people over there. Prickly Bay? What’s Prickly Bay?

The rationale of Operation Urgent Fury—this $135 million, 8,000-strong expedition—may have been to save these Americans from being kidnapped by ruthless Caribbean Commie thugs, but that wasn’t much of an operational focus for what happened on the ground in Grenada.

Once some of the students had been “rescued,” the administration wasn’t sure what to expect from them. The chancellor of the medical school had already been telling reporters that their students hadn’t needed rescuing. And frankly, the students’ scariest moments may have been when US Army Rangers came in with guns blazing. Oliver North later said the State Department had failed to get its operative on board the plane home to work on convincing the students of the danger they had been
in. So when the plane full of students touched down in Charleston, South Carolina, Reagan and George Shultz were watching the live television feed with some trepidation until one of the first kids off the plane knelt down and kissed the tarmac. “Mr. President,” Shultz claims to have said, “the fat lady just sang.” By the time Reagan went on the air to address Congress, that tarmac-kissing scene had been seared into the American brainpan. Nearly two-thirds of the country professed approval for Operation Urgent Fury. And that was before the speech!

Reagan led his Urgent Fury speech to the nation not with Grenada but with an explanation of the bombing at the Marine barracks in Beirut. Although just fifteen weeks later, in February, Reagan would order a full US withdrawal from Lebanon, that night in prime-time in October 1983, he promised to stand strong:

Only at the end did the president turn to the daring liberation of all those young Americans in the Caribbean:

President Reagan may have “believed in peace … as much as any man,” but in Washington a war like this one sure felt good.

After that speech, approval for the American peacekeeping mission in Beirut jumped more than ten points; approval for Operation Urgent Fury spiked even higher. Of course, at the time the president spoke, there were still two hundred or so Americans as yet unrescued at Prickly Bay in Grenada—probably wondering if they needed to stick around home in case the Army was coming to rescue them, too, or if they could maybe get in an afternoon at the beach.

The toll in the end was this: 19 American servicemen killed (17 from friendly fire or accidents), 120 Americans wounded, 300 Grenadians killed or wounded, including those 18 mental patients killed in their beds. And also, precedent: operational
secrecy justifying flat-out lying to the press corps and therein to the public. Secrecy, again, and the blunt assertion of executive prerogative justifying a cursory dismissal of the constitutional role of Congress in declaring war, and even of the need to consult them.

Whatever the costs, the Reagan White House reaped the benefits: in the American mind, the toll and humiliation and political inexplicability of Lebanon was now “closely related” to this much more satisfying rescue mission. And for a president who had traded on the emotional potential of American military strength and glory for his political aims, it was a chance to put taxpayer money where his mouth had long been, to let the US Armed Forces flex their arguably atrophied muscles.

“For all of its shortcomings, for all of the derisive commentary about the pathetic stature of the enemy against which American power was hurled, the invasion of Grenada was a victory,” Marine Corps chronicler Rick Atkinson wrote in
The Long Gray Line
. “Armies fight with morale and esprit as much as they fight with tanks and bullets; after Grenada, soldiers walked a little taller, not because of their battlefield exploits but because of the huzzahs from the rescued students and an appreciative citizenry at home. The United States Army, its self-esteem battered in Southeast Asia, needed to win a war, any war. That slender campaign streamer from Grenada buried beneath it the seventeen preceding ribbons from Vietnam.”

And it wasn’t just the military that was walking taller. Reagan was enveloped by the glorious success of the first war of his presidency—even this small one. In terms of public approval ratings, it turned out to be better than getting shot. The founders had been right about the politics of war: the benefits of military victory really do accrue to the Executive.

Not that there weren’t a few thorns in the laurels. Republican
senator Lowell Weicker accused his president of “flouting the law.” Congress took a little time away from raising the debt ceiling to vote through a resolution invoking the War Powers Act, forcing the Reagan administration to pull the troops out of Grenada within sixty days or face begging explicit permission from Congress to prolong the mission. And Tip O’Neill—now that the fighting was done in Grenada—laid down a spray of verbal fire on the president: “You can’t justify any government, whether it’s Russia or the United States, trampling on another nation,” O’Neill confided to the equally venerable
New York Times
reporter Scotty Reston. “I’m worried about the effects of this. Where do you go from here?… This is Machiavelli: If they can’t love ya, make ’em feel ya. He is wrong in his policy. He’s caused us continuous harm.” And that was just on policy; then O’Neill got personal: “He only works three and a half hours a day. He doesn’t do his homework. He doesn’t read his briefing papers. It’s sinful that this man is President of the United States. He lacks the knowledge that he should have, on every sphere, whether it’s the domestic or whether it’s the international sphere.” It was time for Reagan to pack it in and take Nancy back home where she could be the “Queen of Beverly Hills,” he told Reston.
Damn
.

O’Neill’s opposite number in the House rushed to the president’s defense: “I am willing to concede that any leader of the majority party knows more about sin than we Republicans do.” Gerald Ford’s onetime White House chief of staff, now a congressman from Wyoming, jumped in too: “A lot of folks around the world,” said Dick Cheney, “feel we are more steady and reliable than heretofore.”

The White House floated mostly above the fray. When asked what he thought of a hundred nations at the UN voting for the resolution deploring the US invasion of Grenada, Reagan waved it off, saying, “It didn’t upset my breakfast at all.” Team Reagan
had the footage of the rescued medical student kissing the Carolina tarmac to rely on. They had unnamed “senior administration” sources out leaking to reporters that US soldiers had found smoking-gun evidence that the Grenadians and their Cuban advisers had been planning to grab Americans. The senior officials wished they could release the details and specifics of this plan, but of course all enemy correspondence had to be translated and analyzed first. They were happy, however, to characterize what they’d found. “It is clear from these documents and other information we now have that serious consideration was being given to seizing Americans as hostages and holding them for reasons that are not entirely clear, but seem to involve an effort to embarrass the United States and, more immediately, to forestall American military action in Grenada,” one senior official said.