Proceedings Vieques
Edwin Hernandez-Delgado
coral_giac at hotmail.com
Tue Dec 7 17:58:44 EST 1999
Dear all.
I found some messages that people had trouble accessing the web site
regarding the Navy opinion about Vieques and Puerto Ricans. For the benefit
of those of you who were not able to access the site, here is the
information that I just cut and pasted.
regards,
Edwin
Professional Notes
The Navy is the Best Thing That Has Happened to Vieques . . .
By Captain John E. O'Neil, Jr., U.S. Navy (Retired)
sidebar
"Bridge, combat--we have an urgent fire mission for illumination and
high explosive."
"Bridge aye, are navigation and gun plot set?"
"Yes, sir."
"Very well, batteries released!"
Both gun mounts silently traversed 90 degrees out on the smooth riding
destroyer's starboard
beam and gently quiver with the receipt of the train and elevation gun
orders from the fire control
computer. Then, with large bang and bright flash, followed by the sound
of the smoking, empty
powder can clanging on the steel deck under the forward mount, the
first star shell left the ship.
The sound of the powder can momentarily distracted the skipper as he
watched the first round his
ship had ever fired in combat arch high over the dark, calm sea to pop
1,500 feet above the target
ashore some 8,800 yards away. "Good flare," he said to no one in
particular.
Several more star shells bloomed high in the near distant night. The
commanding officer (CO),
Commander Roberto Rodriguez, saw his paraflares blooming brightly over
the terrorist position
that had been firing at the recently landed mechanized company from the
26th Marine
Expeditionary Unit. Excitement and tension rose on the bridge as the
Marine spotter's voice called
for rapid continuous fire. The sharp crack of the aft mount signaled
the first of six rounds of high
explosive (HE) speeding to the target. Suddenly--even before the last
round landed--the spotter's
voice came screaming over the bridge and combat information center
radio speakers: "Check fire.
Check solution. Damn it, your HE rounds are on my position!"
Commander Rodriguez, born and raised in Puerto Rico and a graduate of
the U.S. Naval
Academy, reacted quickly and saw that the error was corrected.
Fortunately, the errant rounds
had only slightly damaged two of the Marines lightly armored amphibious
assault vehicles. Newly
arrived in the Mediterranean, the destroyer was rated M4 (not
qualified) in amphibious warfare, a
primary mission area, because neither the ship nor the MEU had gone
through any of the live-fire
training exercises regularly held at the island of Vieques, east of the
large Navy base at Roosevelt
Roads, Puerto Rico, before they deployed.
"That was no way to support my Marines," thought Rodriguez. "Working
out gunnery and
spotting problems in a combat situation is not the way to learn. People
can do more damage to
friendly forces than the enemy," the skipper told his officer of the
deck on the starboard bridge
wing. He was unhappy that some Puerto Ricans--in particular
Commonwealth
politicians--routinely used the Navy as a convenient scapegoat to cover
their own lack of fiscal
support for the 9,000 Viequensens. "Statehood, Commonwealth ,or
Independence for Puerto
Rico" were the politically charged slogans the 39-year old commanding
officer had been hearing
all his life--but now they were affecting his ability to carry out his
mission.
Lest this sound melodramatic, consider
the real world: On 22
September 1999, shortly after these
words were written, Vice
Admiral William Fallon, U.S. Navy.
Commander Second Fleet,
told Congress that the USS John F.
Kennedy (CV-67) carrier
battle group had left for the
Mediterranean only the day before
with a destroyer, the USS John Hancock
(DD-981), that had
been unable to qualify in naval gunfire
support during its
pre-deployment work-up. "In some cases,
we're not trained to
the level we'd like to see." 1 He added
that the USS Dwight D.
Eisenhower (CVN-69) carrier battle
group, scheduled to deploy
in February 2000, probably would be
affected also.
The admiral's remarks came as he and
Lieutenant General Peter
Pace, U.S. Marine Corps, commander,
Marine Forces Atlantic,
testified before Senator James Inhofe's
(R-OK) Senate Armed
Services Committee's Readiness Panel
Pace said that the 22nd Marine Expeditionary Unit (Special Operations
Capable) was deploying "this
week" without the benefit of training at Vieques.
Both flag officers said that they were more than willing to discuss
ways to improve the quality of life for
island residents, but emphasized that, considering all East Coast
locations, " . . . only at Vieques can we
do the combined arms training that is so essential to the success of
our forces in combat."
A little history of the Vieques Weapons Range is in order. The Navy
originally bought some 22,000-plus
acres of the sparsely populated island during World War II, paying fair
market value for the property.
Since that time, the Navy has conducted hundreds of thousands of
live-fire training missions with
shipboard guns, aircraft, and troops ashore using their artillery.
Vieques is geographically special because
of its overall length with high hills where observation of the fall of
shot can be carried out without
interfering with ongoing training missions in the Live Impact Area
(LIA), located on the last mile or so of
the 21-mile-long island, and the 8 to 10 mile by 4-mile-wide Eastern
Maneuvering Area (EMA)
immediately adjacent to the LIA.
Vieques is the only weapons range readily accessible to U.S. East Coast
units where mission-essential
combined arms training can be conducted. There are five critical war
fighting and national security reasons
to use the island:
Vieques is outside the path of commercial airline flights, thus
military pilots can fly the target ranges
at the necessary tactical delivery heights. Since the air defenses
of potential adversaries are
becoming more sophisticated, our aircrews often operate at higher
altitudes.
Naval ships can operate in deep water (water depths are over 70
feet just 3,000 yards from the
island shoreline) within gunfire range of land-based targets
without disrupting commercial shipping
traffic.
The island beaches and land formations, with no existing civilian
presence, permit amphibious
landings and subsequent operations ashore.
Naval Station Roosevelt Roads, only eight miles away, provides for
the refueling and supplying of
the ships and exercise aircraft and houses the Atlantic Fleet
Weapons Training Facility (AFWTF)
control center, radar, microwave relay points, and radio
communications. The base has contributed
thousands of jobs, and pumped literally billions of dollars into
the Puerto Rican economy over the
years supporting Vieques operations.
Most important, the island range offers 22,000 acres on which
Marine or Army combat-equipped
ground troops can maneuver with appropriate support from aircraft
and Naval ships without
danger to the adjacent civilian population. In more than 50 years
of combat training operations,
there has never been a civilian casualty outside the Vieques
range, and, until very recently, there
had never been a casualty on the range.
The entire range complex at Vieques has been designed specifically to
give senior commanders an
opportunity to train, evaluate, and improve combat readiness. The
supporting arms coordination exercises
conducted at Vieques just before carrier battle groups and amphibious
ready groups deploy assess not
only quantitative elements, but also more qualitative, subjective
performance criteria. As the units normally
deploy within a month of the exercise, the training here is vital for
success in combat.
Live fire is extremely important to the fleet operators because it
provides three critical and interlocked
factors in the training equation:
Realism, which will save lives in time of crisis
Valid assessment of the operators' ability to put ordnance on
target
End-to-end training, in which the desired ordnance goes directly
from the magazines to the actual
target ashore on the range
All politics are local--except in Vieques. The most challenging piece
of the Vieques puzzle is to
comprehend thoroughly the economic and, more important, the emotional
political issues that have
surfaced periodically since Puerto Rico became part of the United
States at the turn of the last century.
Puerto Ricans became U.S. citizens in 1917, and the great population
migrations to the states began in the
1940s. Feelings ran very high over considerations of independence,
commonwealth status, or statehood
from the late 1940s through the mid 1950s; commonwealth status was
granted in 1952.
In the late 1970s, President Jimmy Carter pardoned a Puerto Rican
convicted in 1950 of trying to kill
President Harry Truman and also pardoned four independentistas who had
stormed the U.S. House of
Representatives in 1954, unfurling the Puerto Rican flag, firing
pistols, and wounding five congressmen.
Reviewing these facts, you could infer that the pardons were granted
because of the rising acts of violence
that began with the first terrorist act attributed to the Fuerzas
Armadas de Liberacion Nacional
(FALN) in the bombing of Fraunce's Tavern in New York in 1975, which
killed four patrons and
wounded 60.
In 1979, macheteros ambushed a military bus full of unarmed U.S.
Sailors on their way to the Naval
Communications site at Sabana Seca; two Sailors were killed and 10
others were wounded in this
murderous act. After the January 1981 bombing of seven Puerto Rican Air
National Guard jets, a
machetero was convicted in absentia; others were convicted for stealing
millions from a Wells Fargo
armored car. Some in the press would have readers believe these
criminals were patriots.
In 1975, the Navy's gave up the live fire ranges on the nearby,
smaller, neighboring island of Culebra. Use
of Vieques over the years has shown a series of ebbs and flows in the
often emotionally charged
relationship between the local population--mostly a few fishermen,
independentistas, a couple of late
1960s/early 1970s war-protester type immigrants from the states--and
the Navy. Many of these ill
feelings surface when assorted Puerto Rican independence, statehood, or
commonwealth groups get the
attention of the press, and in particular when a commonwealth,
stateside congressional, or presidential
election approaches.
New York City residents of Puerto Rican descent--traditionally
Democrats--are said to be a key voting
bloc in the next New York senatorial election, and Puerto Rico is more
in the national political limelight
this election because Puerto Rican Governor Rossello is a co-chairman
of Vice President Al Gore's
campaign and a top Gore fund-raiser.
President Bill Clinton's decision to grant conditional clemency to some
dozen members or accomplices of
the macheteros terrorists and their forefathers, the FALN, does a
disservice to the vast majority of
law-biding Puerto Ricans in that none of these criminals ever did
anything for Puerto Rico. They bombed
U.S. political and military sites between 1973 and 1983, stole money,
killed innocent people, maimed
policemen, and violated numerous firearms and weapons laws. A major
fault in the overall handling of the
Vieques use issue is that the Navy has essentially worked the problem
by itself with little productive
assistance from high-level Navy officials, the Congress, or other
federal agencies or departments. This has
given some Puerto Ricans the feeling that they remain only a colony
wrested from Spain and are not
important for the common defense of our country.
While Puerto Ricans may not vote for the President, they are very well
represented by more than 1.4
million expatriates in New York and New Jersey; the island receives
more than $12 billion a year in direct
federal money, has a large Veterans Administration hospital system, and
residents pay no federal income
tax.
Following the 1979 murders of the innocent Sailors, the Navy and the
Commonwealth of Puerto Rico in
1983 signed a memorandum of understanding and made significant efforts
to orchestrate a cease-fire in
the turbulent legal battle over Vieques. Since then, the Navy has put
forward a good-faith effort to live up
to it, especially in the area of environmental stewardship. A case in
point: I recently drove from the
Vieques airport to Observation Post (OP)-1, then to the radar site in
the Naval Ammunition Supply
Depot and conservation area at the western end of the island, back
again to OP-1, and finally to the
airport. During the nine hours I spent on the island, I carefully noted
the general care and upkeep of the
Navy property and the civilian areas--including the beach in the LIA
where the trespassing
squatter/protesters are living illegally.
One has only to drive around to observe the immense amounts of trash
and junk that exist all over
Vieques--and Puerto Rico itself. Violent crime is a daily event in most
parts of the main island; police
wear blue armored vests in full view of the general public. Few traffic
laws are observed by the driving
public or enforced by the police.
Most telling of the volatility of Puerto Rican political reality in
1999 are the words of Herberto Acosta,
writing in The San Juan Star's Viewpoint column of 31 August 1999,
headlined "P.R. needs to create
civic consciousness."
This short but truthful--and painful - article validates the
observations I made between the time I arrived in
San Juan in late August 1999 until I left 10 days later. According to
Acosta, "The worst failure of Puerto
Rico in the last 50 years has been the inability to create a society
with a civic conscience. Just six months
before the millennium, Puerto Rico is unable to reach a civic, economic
and social status that will fully
define ourselves as part of the first world countries. In a society
where our streets, beaches and public
places are full of trash, no civic conscience can be established. This
lack of responsibility by the citizens is
the product of the big pseudo-socialistic and pseudo-capitalistic
government, established by Munoz
Marin with the precept that big statism, and by a not-so-subtle
interchange of favors between citizens and
governments, in which government patronized its political acolytes by
giving them jobs and saving
privileges for them, political power could be maintained."
He has struck a nerve. I drove from Fajardo, just outside the base at
Roosevelt Roads, through San Juan
over to the Camuy Caves and down to Ponce via extremely narrow roads
with hairpin turns--colloquially
called a scenic route on the tourist maps--and then back to Fajardo via
the toll road to San Juan. There is
indeed seems to be no civic pride to clean up any of the debris. The
difference between Navy and civilian
property is night and day. I have been going to Puerto Rico since 1970
and the trash situation remains as
bad today as it was then.
Acosta goes on to highlight many other needs of the population, which
he feels have been totally ignored
by the island's governing elite. Many importers find their goods
routinely tied up on the docks in the major
ports by a series of confusing customs rules that seem to be lifted
after a certain amount of time passes or
a favor is granted to the official whose stamp is needed to release the
material. Incoming privately owned
vehicles for service personnel often are held for weeks before being
released. The same goes for the
military construction materials that contractors attempt to import for
federal government contracts.
The Puerto Rican press is filled with semi-sensational stories about
the environmental disasters that the
Navy has visited upon Vieques and Roosevelt Roads. The allegations
simply are not true. I saw no trash
along the 11-mile gravel roads that I used to travel up to the OP on
Vieques. In addition, the return of any
Navy property on Vieques to the Commonwealth would certainly trigger a
free-for-all among several
federal agencies--the Fish and Wildlife Service, the Environmental
Protection Agency and other
environmental regulators, and the U.S. Forest Service--who will want
the present conservation areas to
remain undeveloped. This will clash with the small group of politicians
and land developers who hope to
expand the tourist industry on Vieques.
The two southern landing beaches in the Eastern Maneuvering Area were
as pristine on this trip as I had
seen them 11 years ago during my last coming ashore with my Marines.
There are significant wildlife
refuges and conservation zones throughout all the Navy property. The
silly claims by some--including
Ruben Berrios Martinez, president of the Puerto Rican Independence
Party--that the Navy is maltreating
the sea turtles, brown pelicans, and fish are ridiculous in light of
the stringent environmental safeguards the
Navy has put in place on the island. In fact, local poachers routinely
raid the Navy property to capture
these endangered creatures. If the Navy is forced to give up the
training sites, I predict every sea turtle
and brown pelican will leave their age-old nesting sites; if not, they
will be poached into extinction. When
all is said and done, the Navy is the best thing that has happened to
Vieques
In more than 55 years, only one unfortunate incident that resulted in a
death on the island. A pair of Mark
82 500-pound iron bombs landed very close to OP-1, spraying heavy
shrapnel, causing mortal injuries to
a local hire Viequensen who was an employee of the 50-person civilian
contract guard force that provides
security for the Navy facilities on the island. The bombs landed more
than 1,000 yards from their intended
target, but were seven miles from the closest town.
Nevertheless, the Puerto Rican press, politicians, island agitators,
and stateside opportunists, immediately
seized upon this accident and filled the print and television media
with a gross distortion of the entire
Vieques situation. Activists proclaim that stateside Americans do not
have to tolerate live bombing ranges
"right next to them"--but poor Viequensens do! In fact, Eglin Air Force
Base in the Florida panhandle has
a variety of live weapon drop areas that are closer to civilians than
any of those on Vieques. The Vieques
LIA is almost 10 miles from the closest town on the island, and there
has never been a piece of live
ordnance dropped outside the Navy training areas on the Vieques Island
ranges that has injured a local
person.
Economic development of the small island and other attempts of
improving the life of the inhabitants must
fall squarely on the local Commonwealth politicians with an assist from
the Department of Defense with
the Navy as its lead agency. I met several local people on the island
and they were very complimentary
about the Navy's rapid assistance following hurricanes, as well as the
number of jobs the Navy provides.
Most interesting, they wanted their leaders in San Juan to get on the
ball to help them move forward
instead of getting their photos on the social pages of The San Juan
Star.
The death was truly regrettable, but it was an extremely isolated
occurrence. If the President decides to
order the Navy to leave the island range, we will see young American
blue jackets and
Marines--including Puerto Ricans--going into combat without proper
predeployment training.
1. Sheila Foote, "Military Officials Seek Dialogue to Reopen Vieques
Range," Defense Daily, 23
September 1999. Subsequent quotes and references to this hearing also
came from this article.
Captain O'Neil, who spent a 30-year career primarily with the 'Gator
Navy, is a consultant in
Jacksonville, Florida. He is a frequent Proceedings contributor.
. . . and it's Not Time to Give it Back
As a naval officer who first visited the Navy range facility at
Roosevelt Roads, Puerto Rico, in August
1969 and continued sailing or flying down there through August 1999, I
must comment on some of the
naive, ill-informed comments in Lieutenant Commander Matos's article.
(See "It's Time to Return
Vieques," Proceedings, October 1999, page 76.)
First and foremost, the future of Vieques Island remains the
responsibility not of the U.S. Navy, but of the
Commonwealth of Puerto Rico--whose leadership has shown very little
real interest in the island's future.
Emotionally biased rhetoric, inaccurate press reports, non-existent
high-level participation on both sides in
"conflict" resolution, has poisoned a legitimate look at the on-going
live-fire issue on Vieques.
The author's claim that Pacific Fleet training facilities are not able
to provide the particular level of training
available at Vieques is inaccurate. West coast units train at Camp
Pendleton, California, nearby San
Clemente Island, the offshore Pacific Missile Range, and periodically
send their aircraft to use the myriad
of inland training ranges from Arizona to Washington. Ships routinely
fire live ammunition at targets ashore
and carefully follow California's environmental rules and guidelines,
which are much more demanding than
those of Puerto Rico.Regarding opposition criticism of the Navy's
environmental stewardship of its Puerto
Rican property, one has only to stand at the Navy fence line and look
outside; it is night and day.
I am hard pressed to see the "harm" that the anti-Navy,
get-out-of-Vieques antagonists claim the island
residents live under. The Navy population on Vieques is extremely
small, and the range is not in constant
use as indicated by the opposition. The Navy follows a very detailed
set of rules whenever there is a
live-fire operation or when the Marines come ashore on the southern
Vieques beaches to test their landing
plans and weapons support prior to deployment.
The claim that supersonic aircraft continually roar over the hapless
islanders is bogus. In fact, the small
commuter aircraft--and the planned larger jet aircraft that will soon
use the larger runway at the local
airport being constructed on property the Navy signed over to the
island-- will produce a daily level of
aircraft noise that will surpass any noise levels that the Navy would
ever generate over the populated
areas of the island.
I predict that if the Navy leaves its present pristine acres, the
squatters who are a familiar sight all over
Puerto Rico will claim land, trash it, and kill, eat, or
capture-then-sell the existing wildlife. The brown
pelican, the large sea turtles, and fish are indeed now protected, yet
there are well-documented cases of
local poachers in these teeming tropical waters and beaches.
Economic development has been attempted several times on the island
since the 1983 Memorandum of
Understanding, but. frankly no one wants to go to the island. The same
is the case for the former gunnery
range at the smaller yet island of Culebra to the north. Navy money has
helped improve the basic
infrastructure on both islands, but without Commonwealth interest--
except vitriolic rhetoric at election
time--these efforts have failed.
Local Viequensens told me that Commonwealth politicians have woefully
ignored their true needs for
decades. The abysmal roads and public infrastructure serve as mute
testimony. While there appears to be
a modern hospital/clinic (viewed from the outside), little has been
done to staff the facility adequately.
Trash disposal is almost nonexistent. The islanders rely upon the Navy
to help restore basic services
following hurricanes. Last year, a few U.S. expatriate and local
anti-Navy protesters even blockaded Sea
Bee efforts to deliver clean water to the hospital that the local mayor
had agreed to accept!
There is no reason for tourists to visit the island because there is
nothing available for them to do except
to get sunburned, drink rum, and trash the Navy beaches, which
generally are available for tourist use.
The large charter fishing industry at Fajardo on the large island of
Puerto Rico does not want any
competition from the looked-down-upon residents of the two nearby
islands. There are no
Commonwealth programs to assist the job situation, and selling the Navy
land back to the people is a silly
notion. There is no local money available to provide an economic
stimulus, let alone pay a fair market
value for the Navy acreage.
I am willing to bet that if President Bill Clinton orders the
Department of Defense to leave Vieques, very
few of the islanders will ever see their way of life improve. The
now-clean Navy beaches of the southern
side of the island will be littered and trashed in a short amount of
time, the sea turtles will be slaughtered,
and the brown pelicans taken from their rookeries in the sanctuaries.
Little infrastructure money would be
saved by closing the small Navy facilities on the island. More than 130
local-hire Viequesens would lose
their jobs. And when--not if, but when--Cuban President-for-life Fidel
Castro exits the scene, that very
large island nation will be ready for major economic development--with
tourism at the top of the list. The
Cubans might even be ready to provide the United States with some of
the old Soviet traing areas--for a
price. Whatever happens, Puerto Rican officials confronting a
diminished tourist industry will wish they
had never brought up the subject of closing down Vieques.
The federal government should take the lead in resolving the live-fire
controversy. As an aside, the Puerto
Rican National Guard routinely conducts artillery firing just south of
Roosevelt Roads and occasionally
lands a large-caliber round outside the impact areas--in or near a
local town; this happened most recently
last spring. The Puerto Rican press overlooked this training incident,
but the Commonwealth ordered the
National Guard to cease firing until the Navy is forced out of Vieques.
All politics are indeed local.
Many are at fault for the sad way this important national defense issue
has been handled. The Navy, by
moving out its only flag officer more than four years ago, sent the
wrong signal to Puerto Rico: the lack of
Department of Defense and Congressional support. The Commonwealth
leadership, posturing for votes,
has placed the readiness of deployable fleet units at risk. The closure
of the U.S. bases in Panama,
coupled with the recent relocation and expansion of the Southern
Command and Special Operations
Command forces in Puerto Rico, will place an even greater demand for
live-fire training. More federal
money, good will on both sides, and a better exchange of information
will solve this problem.
Let's get on with it.
John O'Neil, U.S. Navy (Retired)
return to top
Published November, 1999
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