I believe I gave Maj Adkins credit where credit was due but did point out some of the factual errors I found in the book as examples – there was no way in the limits of the review I could list (nor would I care to) all the problems I had with some of his facts. As it was I merely listed those I could remember off the top of my head.
As far as the battle being unnecessary – that is a matter of opinion. I can still remember hearing the Grenadian people singing "God Bless America!" You say there was no possibility of Grenada becoming a "springboard for world revolution" – again, you weren't there. When my battery moved up from the airstrip on D+3 I was assigned to take a couple of my troops and clear out a school behind our area. It turned out the place was being used to train Grenadian soldiers. Among some of the documents we recovered was a photo album with a pictures of a black man with fur coat and hat with snow all around him. In the background was a building with cyrillic lettering on its signs.
We also found notebooks containing instructions on how to establish insurgencies in a foreign land, how to locate folks who were displeased with their government and organize them. Another interesting subject discussed was how to defend against a probable invasion from the US.
Couple that with some 300,000 Soviet-made weapons we found in warehouses on the islands (AK-47s, etc.) – enough personal firearms to give about 3 AKs to every man, woman and child on the island (population around 100,000 at the time) it makes one wonder what all those guns were for? Of course then, that's not talking about all the other weapons we found still in cases. They definitely had more military style weapons than were needed for self-defense.
It is easy to say now, almost thirty years removed, that the revolution was sure to fall apart; at the time we had no real way of knowing exactly what was going on – just that chaos was breaking out, there had been executions, we in the 82nd heard rumors of mass executions but I've not been able to find anything to confirm that in anything I read so it might just have been rumor control. In the middle of that were our students. Remember, just a few years before 54 US citizens had been held hostage when a similar situation broke out in Iran. Reagan was not about to allow that to happen on his watch. Hindsight is always 20-20, the fact the invasion was successful means we'll probably never know exactly how much danger our people were in. I do know from guys who were there was that when the Delta Force folks went in to secure the students at Grand Anse, they had been under armed guard.
Were mistakes made? No doubt. As I explain in my review there were reasons for those mistakes. But even Norman Schwarzkopf, who was ground commander of the operation admitted those mistakes and said the battle was won on the squad, platoon, and company level – something I still believe Maj Adkins gives short shrift to. Also, accept the fact this operation was pretty much thrown together – hence the code name "Urgent Fury." As I say in my review, I didn't even have a good military map of the island, this operation came up at the last minute; in a perfect world we would have had more time to plan, more time to organize, more time to gather intelligence; and though we did have some Delta people on the ground observing the situation the situation changed so rapidly in the days leading up to the invasion it appeared to the command at the time that time was of the essence.
To that I agree.
One of the things that struck me most when I first arrived on the island was the numerous anti-aircraft emplacements scattered around the airstrip. The AA guns for those emplacements were still in crates in warehouses we liberated. I have often wondered (and shuddered) at what would have happened had Reagan delayed the invasion by even a day or two or, worse (from my point of view) gone through the diplomatic rigamarole that seems necessary today to get UN permission to go into the island. Those guns would have been out of the crates and in their emplacements waiting for us when we came in. The rangers would have been obliterated in the air. Considering the fact that at one point I was chuted up ready to drop in but was stood down when the airstrip was finally cleared I might have been a target, too.
The entire situation in Central and northern South America was very tense. With the accession of the Sandinistas to power in Nicaragua under the Carter Administration all h--- broke lose in that region of the world. I know from firsthand experience that all sorts of guerilla and insurgent activity was being sponsored by the Nicaraguan government; much of this activity was being financed through co-operation with the drug cartels in Columbia and other places; groups like FARC and shining path were running drugs and terrorizing the folks in the region in general.
I made a couple trips down there following Grenada as part of the effort to halt or stop the flow of drugs and/or stop the narco-terrorists from terrorizing the folks down there. I left the service due to residual effects of injuries incurred in JTX Gallant Eagle 82 in 1987 so wasn't in on the invasion of Panama. Your final statement on the invasion again reveals an arrogance and lack of appreciation for the situation on the ground in the late 80s as the Cold War was coming to a climax. The fact is; when I was in Noriega was considered an ally in our fight against the spread of communism and narco-terrorism. We needed allies. As JFK once said about Anastasio Somoza, "He may be an SOB, but he's our SOB."
That was the realpolitik of the Cold War. As they say in the Middle East, "The enemy of my enemy is my friend." We were in the middle of a struggle for the survival of our way of life (and for those of you who are too young to remember the Cold War, or didn't see the communists at work and play in the various nations across the globe I'm not exaggerating here); we found ourselves in bed with some unsavory people. I'm not saying it's right or it was the right thing to do, hindsight tells us often it was a mistake. However, the alternatives seemed no better. After all, Jimmy Carter turned his back on the Shah of Iran after years of his being our friend – we now deal with the current regime in Iran. Carter turned his back on Somoza, we got the Ortega brothers and the Sandinistas and the communist-backed revolutions in El Salvador, Costa Rica, Honduras and in the Southern parts of Mexico.
And it is an easy thing to say the US should have backed off and had I not been in some of these places and seen the atrocities performed on innocent civilians by so-called "freedom fighters" I might agree. But I've seen up close and personal things that haunt me to this day, done in the name of the "People's Revolution." I think we were on the right side. As bad as some of the guys on our side were, my experience tells me the alternatives were usually much, much worse. But what do I know, I was just there,right?
As for Noriega, the best I can tell is the guy went crazy – maybe always was. I never got to meet the guy, that was above my paygrade; but the guy not only ceased to be useful to us, he was a danger to his people as well as our interests.
As far as non-combatants getting killed are concerned it is a sad fact of war that it is the innocent who suffer most. I know from my own experience that we do the best we can to avoid killing civilians – even to the risk of our own lives; but people talk about "surgical" strikes with high explosive rounds and I laugh. The "surgical" solution is 5.56mm (or 7.62); that isn't always practical.
I remember the first Grenadian civilian I met. We were north of the airstrip and a group of civilian refugees was being led through our position to the school I talked about that had now been converted to a refugee holding area. She was a young mother, holding a young son, about two years-old with one hand and carrying a suitcase with all her earthly possessions in the other. I felt kind of awkward, after all, here I was a foreign invader and I didn't quite know how the local people would receive us. So I tried to open up a conversation by telling her what a lovely island Grenada was.
"Denks," she said in that Caribbean accent they have down there. "We lak it."
"It's a shame we have to come down and blow it up," boy, I felt silly. But what does one say?
"Dat's okay," she said. "You do what you have to do and you give it back to us."
I think that about sums it up for both Grenada and Panama.
I suppose one could say it had a Gilbert & Sullivan feel to it if one wasn't there or wasn't killed or maimed in the battle. There was a movie one time that made the comment the battle lasted about twelve hours. Actually it lasted somewhat longer than that, but for those who were killed there on both sides and for guys like a kid in my unit who lost his legs there it lasts forever.
The sad thing about the book is that this IS one of the best out there (I kind of liked Osprey's book, but it didn't attempt to be nearly as comprehensive). Adkins makes some valid points in his analysis there were command and control problems left over from the horrific post-Vietnam military of the late 70s. I make point of that in the review. And he did write the book before the corrections to those flaws became apparent. I would love to have given the book five stars but the factual errors may seem minor to some, but they are vital in understanding the battle and learning its lessons. To accuse we in the artillery of leaving our aiming circles at home is a serious accusation of incompetance that is exacerbated because it is so wrong. To say our artillery bombardment of Calvigny Point missed the target altogether is another example. All one has to do is Google it up and you can see pix of the damage we did. It was still there the last time I checked. Now, the problem with these factual errors (and several others) is that if he is wrong about these things what else did he get wrong? But I still gave the book three stars. A good read, but one I would approach with caution.
goes beyond the straight line.
poor intelligence. Too many cooks spoilt the broth.