Marines Back on Familiar Turf

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti —  Lance Cpl. Joshua Hazelwood, who carries a shotgun to stop anyone trying to enter the airport here, is the latest in a long line of U.S. fighting men sent to Haiti to help sort out its seemingly endless problems. And the 21-year-old Marine wants to help.

“Some think the Haitians should deal with it themselves,” said the 6-foot-2-inch native of Redding, Calif., who was a wide receiver on his high school football team. “But we got to help out anyone.”

Hazelwood was one of the first Marines to arrive in Haiti on Sunday night to, in his words, “try to restore order, really. Maintain peace.”

Haitians seem less certain about the reason the ruddy-cheeked Hazelwood and 1,100 other U.S. Marines are here and can cite their own history as grounds for skepticism.

“Is this a force that has come to restore security or a force to install a new government?” asked James Louis, 30, an auto mechanic. He said he hadn’t worked for a week because of the turmoil sparked by the final days in power of Jean-Bertrand Aristide. People stayed off the streets and kept their cars at home.

In the seaside district of Port-au-Prince where Louis lives with his two children, a line of rotting wooden pilings extending about 200 feet from the muddy shore is the sole remaining sign of one past U.S. military intervention. In this small cove, a force of about 300 Marines and sailors came ashore in July 1915, dispatched by President Woodrow Wilson to “protect American and foreign interests” and restore order after Haiti’s president at the time was torn to pieces by a mob.

The Americans who landed in 1915 ended up staying 19 years and ruling Haiti by means of a military government. In the provinces, Marine Corps commanders served as administrators. In the capital, the legislature was dissolved after its members declined to adopt a constitution reportedly written by Franklin D. Roosevelt, then assistant secretary of the Navy.

That earlier generation of Marines and other American occupiers built roads, bridges and hospitals, created a telephone system, eradicated yellow fever and gave Haiti its first modern system of government administration. But the Americans also conscripted Haitian peasants into road-building gangs, repressed a widespread and stubborn uprising in the countryside at an estimated cost of 2,000 Haitian lives, and too often treated the mostly black population with contempt and disdain.

Michel Soukar, a historian, writer and radio commentator, believes that the 1915-34 U.S. occupation left a deep imprint on the national conscience that endures even today.

“When the Americans came, they never bothered to find out what we Haitians wanted,” Soukar said.

“They didn’t come in to help us, really, or our economic development. They came in to defend their own economic interests. What will remain in the collective mentality is that these people never come to help us, but for their own interests.”

That judgment may be too sweeping. When 20,000 U.S. Marines and soldiers returned to Haiti in 1994, sent by then-President Clinton to restore the democratically elected Aristide to power, they were greeted by rapturous crowds.

Interviewed this week on the streets of Port-au-Prince, many Haitians expressed fervent hopes that the presence of the Marines in this Caribbean city anew was a portent of good things to come.

“We are in misery, the country is destroyed,” said Laurent Prophet, 35, a street vendor who sells cans of evaporated milk to support himself and three children. “We’d like American help. Help to eat, help to work.”

Col. Mark Gurganus, a North Carolina native who has assumed command of the growing U.S. force in Haiti, said the Marine Corps had learned many lessons from its long occupation of Haiti, as well as from the numerous low-intensity conflicts and peacekeeping operations it had taken part in since.

“One of them is, we try hard to win the support of the people. That’s what it’s all about,” said Gurganus, 49, who also served in Somalia. “We hope we don’t fire a single round of ammunition the whole time we’re here. That’s my goal.”

Some of the Marines who drove through Haiti’s capital this week said onlookers cheered and flashed a friendly thumbs-up. Staff Sgt. Tim Edwards, in charge of the detachment’s public affairs, said, “There’s not been any hostility toward the American forces at all. We’ve heard shots fired in the distance, but there’s never been any directed against us.”

Hazelwood, of the 8th Marine Regiment based at Camp Lejeune, N.C., said all he knew about Haiti before coming here was that “they had some problems back in ‘93, ’94.”

He talked with a reporter as he stood guard at a terminal doorway at Toussaint L’Ouverture International Airport outside Port-au-Prince, where the Marines have set up their command post. Hazelwood said that his girlfriend at Shasta College back home in Redding was upset because he had to deploy on short notice, and that he had no idea when he’d be going home. But he said the Haiti operation was exactly why he enlisted 2 1/2 years ago.

“To travel, and to try to make a difference,” he said.

For some citizens of a nation that won independence by vanquishing an army belonging to French Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte, the return of both U.S. and French troops in connection with Haiti’s latest bout of troubles is a stinging humiliation, even if they see it as a necessary evil.

On Wednesday, a crowd stood outside the National Palace gazing at Marines in camouflage uniforms lounging on the steps and at Humvees parked on the well-tended lawn. What was running through these Haitians’ minds was perhaps what Americans would be thinking if the British redcoats came back to sort out a prolonged government crisis in Washington.

“What a consternation to see foreigners on our soil,” said a 24-year-old man named Fritz. “To have worked out a compromise among us Haitians would have been far better.”