ST. GEORGES, Grenada — Happy Thanksgiving Day.
No turkey, no stuffing, no food coma. No family reunions. No legacy football games. But plenty of joy in the one place in the Western Hemisphere — maybe the one place on the face of the globe — where people unabashedly give ungrudging thanks for the United States, and have done so every October for 40 years straight.
This hot island — average October afternoon temperature: 88 degrees — is a forgotten battlefield of the Cold War.
Here, four decades ago Wednesday, the rumbles of conflict mixed with the perfume of nutmeg and cinnamon. The spices remain; the spies are gone, along with the global spotlight that came when Ronald Reagan dispatched nearly 8,000 troops — a regiment of Rangers, the 82nd Airborne, Marines, Navy SEALs, Delta Force, the whole Pentagon portfolio — to this island, joined by forces from six Caribbean nations who served as public-relations shields. All this amid congenital political upheaval, a leftist power struggle at the commanding heights of the government, and heightened fears that the island would soon become a Cuban staging area for Communist expansion in the region and beyond.
It is tempting to say the world has spent the past 40 years debating the little war in this one-time British colony, but the world has moved on. It is only here, where American intervention is venerated, that it is recalled — and recalled with a remarkable sense of gratitude.
“The Americans came in when Grenada was an unsettled place,” the musician Sidney Hyppolite told me. He used his guitar to demonstrate how Maurice Bishop, the Marxist prime minister and leader of the revolutionary New Jewel Movement, was killed by a firing squad after the coup that set in motion the upheaval which, in turn, prompted American intervention. Today, the airport that the Reagan administration feared would provide the landing strip for planeloads of Soviet soldiers determined to establish a new Caribbean Communist foothold bears Bishop’s name.
Neither the streets nor the political logic runs in straight lines here, part of the island’s character, and maybe its charm. Shortly after the invasion came the unusual juncture, as seasoned Army Ranger Col. Jimmy Ashworth, the head of military and psychological operations, would tell me, when a communist and close ally of Fidel Castro, Bishop, “was a very charismatic figure” whose death “was very tragic.”
The Reagan administration, heeding pleas from a group of Caribbean nations to bring order to this island, situated less than 100 miles from Venezuela, found a handy, even attractive, pretext: the safety of 1,000 Americans here, the most visible and photogenic being the students at Grenada’s medical school, long a destination for aspiring physicians who didn’t find places stateside. (American medical authorities now consider the training provided here roughly equivalent to that available in the U.S.)
It was into this steaming cauldron — high drama, high temperatures, maybe not-so-high stakes — that I was dispatched, alone, by The New York Times 40 years ago. I was 29 years old. I thought Grenada was in Spain and that the vowel at the center of the word was a short A. I was wrong on both counts, and much more.
I had never been to the Caribbean, never heard a gun fired in anger, didn’t know an Army Ranger from the New York Rangers, and was one of the least likely war correspondents in the history of journalism. (Indisputable proof: I brought along a volume of short stories by Nathaniel Hawthorne, from my native city of Salem.) I had no idea what I was doing, but maybe I was a perfect match for the moment, because the United States had little idea what its mission was about, and the rest of the world — including Canada and Great Britain — thought the mission was madness.
Today, Grenada is an almost-different place.
At the waterfront is a kitchen and housewares store — unimaginable four decades ago. The roads are paved and smooth — inconceivable 40 years ago. Tourists walk aimlessly and leisurely through the streets — implausible in the fog of a long-ago Cold War skirmish.
All about the island there are new buildings; the automobiles are newer. The air is a fanfare of fragrance, just as it was, but the island now has the air of 21st-century bustle, even in the old streets, even in the hills, where the prosperity and the prospects are considerably thinner. When the sun hits the beaches, as it has since forever, the feeling is festive, not furtive. No shots rumble from the hills. No soldiers duck into the mews with guns pointing. No helicopters hover overhead. I looked in vain for someone to split a coconut with a machete and offer me a refreshing drink. That has disappeared, along with the scars of struggle.
The conflict left 112 dead, including 19 Americans, 24 Cubans, and the 18 Grenadians killed when American forces mistakenly bombed a mental hospital. In that period, nobody was kayaking or windsurfing, and the sea turtles were left to their underwater wandering. Nobody had cell phones, and we correspondents filed our reports by a technology closer to the age of Samuel F.B. Morse than Steve Jobs.
The American forces, crammed into military transport planes, filled the skies with their helicopters, the bushes with their armed foot patrols, the resort hotels with their billets, the bars with their rowdy toasts and oaths. Along with the ginger and the allspice, the land swiftly was planted with barbed wire and sandbags. Soon there sprouted a bureaucracy and a detention center with grim isolation chambers. The bureaucracy remained; the detention center was dismantled after a global uproar.
Today, houses painted from a pastel palette hug the hills, as they have since colonial times. The laundry dries in the breezes of the tropical trade winds, as it has done for centuries. Front-porch fruit and vegetable tables line the roads, as they have for decades.
Goats linger by the nutmeg trees; cocoa plants line the hillsides. The island is basically an apothecary, for here are fruits whose juices can be brewed into tea for those who cannot sleep, fragrant grasses that can be transformed into means of easing the pain of menstrual cramps, and wild basil that can be employed to reduce cholesterol.
One of Grenada’s spices has the evocative name of Jump Up and Kiss Me. That’s pretty much how the island reacted to the American presence in 1983. Four decades later, that is still the case.
A Swampscott High School Class of 1972 member, David M. Shribman is the Pulitzer Prize-winning former executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
