Word: grenada
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...Marines aboard troop helicopters from the amphibious assault ship Guam roared into Pearls airport, the island's only functioning airstrip. Thirty-six minutes later, hundreds of U.S. Rangers, the Army's elite special forces, parachuted onto the barricaded, uncompleted 10,000-ft. strip at Point Salines on Grenada's southeastern tip. They had been dispatched from a staging airfield in Barbados, just 160 miles, or 45 minutes, away. Grenada, the once sleepy tourist haven, barely 80 miles off Venezuela in the Caribbean's Windward Islands, was now fully awake-and frightened...
...first time since the end of the Viet Nam War, the U.S. had committed its troops to a combat attack. The abrupt use of force immediately drew a worldwide chorus of protest. U.S. allies, including British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, deplored the violation of Grenada's sovereignty. Many Latin American nations saw the invasion as a revival of the type of gunboat diplomacy that has haunted them for more than a century. At home, members of Congress and ordinary citizens alike wondered what had prompted President Reagan to take such drastic action against a tiny island. Coming only...
...even as the students rejoiced, the fighting in Grenada continued. The initial invasion force of 1,900 had grown to 6,000 men. They controlled the island's major populated areas, but not its wooded and mountainous ulterior. Although the Administration had at first expected the U.S. troops to be able to withdraw within a few weeks at most, leaving police from the neighboring islands to maintain order, the military field commanders were becoming less sanguine. "If the Cubans want to go up hi these hills and play games, it will take a while," said Vice Admiral Joseph Metcalf...
...Grenada's General Austin, whose cold-blooded executions had created the chaos that prompted the invasion, had still not been located by week's end; he was believed to have fled into the mountains with his hard-core followers. But on Saturday a Marine detachment found the long-missing Coard in a guarded house in St. George's. Said he of the Bishop murder before he was whisked off to the Guam: "I'm not responsible. I'm not responsible...
Still, having employed force in such a dramatic and massive way, the U.S. had probably assumed the practical burden of helping shape Grenada's future. Observed a Grenadian lawyer familiar with his nation's tangled politics: "The U.S. can't just invade a nation and then leave. If we are to be healed now in a democratic way, the U.S. must stay." The lesson was all too familiar: it is easier to intervene in a country's affairs than to walk away from its problems...