Sidebar: . . . and it's Not Time to Give it Back
"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.
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.
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. back to article
. . . and it's Not Time to Give it Back
By John O'Neil, U.S. Navy (Retired)
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.
back to top
<table summary=">