Machine Guns in Paradise

By Pico Iyer

U.S. forces arm, and alarm, the Spice Islands

Is it necessary to have so much soldiers in this small country?

No, no, no, no.

Is it necessary to shine soldiers' boots with taxpayers' money?

No, no, no, no.

Well, don't tell Tommy, he put them in St. Lucy

Unemployment high, and the Treasury low.

And he buying boots to cover soldiers' toe.

I see them boots, boots, boots and more boots

On the feet of the young trigger-happy recruits.

--Boots, by Anthony Carter

The "Tommy" of that popular calypso song is Barbados Prime Minister Tom Adams, 53, whose 1979 decision to dispatch friendly troops to the nearby island-nation of St. Vincent and the Grenadines moved one local songwriter to tuneful protest. Adams' aid to his neighbor enabled St. Vincent to send its own security force to suppress an uprising on outlying Union Island. Now, almost five years later, that Barbadian intervention still upsets many in the usually placid eastern Caribbean. Adams is sensitive about the matter too. Boots has been banned in Barbados.

Nonetheless, the ditty is on local lips more than ever these days as conversation piece and as cautionary tale. The U.S.-led invasion of Grenada last October has been followed by a sudden and sizable militarization of the six other island states in the eastern Caribbean.* The U.S. is sending $15 million in military assistance to the region this year, 75 times more than in 1981. The aid package includes machine guns, automatic rifles, grenade launchers, radio equipment, uniforms and, of course, boots. At the same time, eight-to twelve-member U.S. Army Special Forces teams have been conducting training courses for soldiers and policemen on five of the sweet-smelling Spice Islands. Those developments are reassuring to some islanders, who feel that a build-up is long overdue and that by strengthening their defense forces they can resist leftist insurgencies. Other residents, however, fear that larger local armies will bring more war than peace to the region, turn their islands into U.S. satellites and thrust them into the middle of superpower conflicts. Says Dominica's former Finance Minister Michael Douglas: "During the last few months, we have seen a lot of military assistance akin to that in El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras."

That may be something of an exaggeration, but the languorous region is certainly unaccustomed to military force. Until now, the eastern Caribbean islands have generally done without armies. St. Kitts-Nevis established a defense force in 1967, but found it to be so expensive and unproductive that nearly 14 years later it converted all its soldiers to policemen and firemen. Dominica disbanded its military force in 1981 after many key officers were implicated in a failed coup attempt. Indeed, with the exception of Antigua and Barbados, the islands have been guarded mainly by policemen since they began to win independence from Britain in the 1960s. "They had no form of transportation or weapons for use in the field," says Donald Dunn, the Barbados-based U.S. Navy commander who is the liaison officer for the new American training operation. "The British left them at the mercy of anyone who wanted to cause them mischief."

The teams of Green Berets sent down from Fort Bragg, N.C., are working to change all that. By the end of the month they will have completed their second six-week course and finished training some 80 men from each of the six islands in skills like map reading, conducting basic field operations and using the new U.S. weapons. Most of the graduates will become part of the Caribbean Peace-keeping Force, which could eventually replace the 300 U.S. troops still serving in Grenada.

That, however, may be just the beginning. At the annual conference of his ruling Labor Party in January, Tom Adams issued a spirited proposal for a region-wide regular army. The defense force, he said, would be merely an extension of a 1981 regional security pact under which each of the islands agreed to provide volunteer assistance for the others in the face of such problems as hurricanes, smugglers or threats to national security. The pact was most famously invoked during the Grenada invasion, when a total of 300 police and soldiers from six islands were sent to support the 8,000 U.S. fighting troops. Champions of the proposed regional defense force insist that it would include no more than 1,000 troops, but Barbadian Brigadier Rudyard Lewis, the regional security coordinator, has already suggested that the contingent should have as many as 1,800 men. An informed Barbadian analyst predicts that the final tab for such a force could amount to almost $100 million over five years.

Such figures have raised questions, and some tempers, in a region that may be richer in protest songs than ready cash. "Our banana and grapefruit economies can't maintain a gun state," declares Egerton M. Richards, publisher of the staid weekly Vincentian. Other pleas have been Seven more plangent. The St. Vincent opposition paper New Times greeted the arrival of a U.S. training team on the island with an impassioned editorial: "We want roads, and an international airport. We want university scholarships abroad. We want food, technology and cash, not guns, please." Some islanders fear that the presence of American visitors in uniform may sabotage the more lucrative business of attracting American visitors in swimsuits.

Or worse. Last December, only two weeks after he arrived on St. Vincent, U.S. Master Sergeant Willie Washington was sitting in a bar when an islander named Keith Walker began taunting him about the U.S. presence. Tempers flared; Washington threw Walker to the floor, and another local retaliated by flinging a barstool at the American. At that point, Washington allegedly drew his gun and beat the second islander about the head with it. After arriving on the scene, police arrested only the two Vincentians. The incident merely intensified misgivings about the presence of arms.

Some of those worries were voiced by James Mitchell, former St. Vincent Prime Minister and current opposition leader. The influx of advisers and arms, claims Mitchell, disturbs him as much as the oppressive Grenadian regime that provoked it. "I was the first political leader in the Caribbean to call for intervention in Grenada," he says. "But the Americans arming the islands are making the same mistake the Grenadian revolutionaries made. The armies you set up to deter others always end up pointing their guns at the government and the people." --By Pico Iyer. Reported by Bernard Diederich/Bridgetown

* Antigua and Barbuda; Barbados; Dominica; St. Kitts-Nevis; St. Lucia; and St. Vincent and the Grenadines.

With reporting by Bernard Diederich