Page 9 - Veterans' Issue

By Alice French

Tracy Hill enlisted two weeks out of high school in were sustained throughout the entire invasion:
Long Beach, CA. at the age of 18. He wanted to maybe 40 on our side and around 200 on their side.
join the Marines but the Navy was shorthanded, so Tracy said, “It wasn’t like a big war. It was more of
he had to serve a year and a half in the Navy before a skirmish.”
starting with the Marines.
Within a couple of weeks, the US had come
In October of 1983, Tracy and fellow Marines in, appointed a new leader and established the
were aboard the USS Guam steaming across the democracy that Grenada still enjoys today. Tracy
Atlantic towards Beirut when all of a sudden, the believes, when it comes to military conflict, “If it
ship changed course. Heading south for five days involves Americans, I think we should be right in
without really knowing where they were going, the middle of all of it. But I don’t think we should
they finally learned they were about to invade the be in the middle of every war that’s out there…”
Caribbean island nation of Grenada. Other than this invasion, Tracy’s service was “pretty
There had been a coup some four years earlier, peaceful”.
and recent internal strife within the People’s Just FYI, the movie entitled “Heartbreak Ridge”,
Revolutionary Government resulted in the produced and directed by Clint Eastwood (who also
assassination of leader Maurice Bishop. This left a stars in the film), focuses on the American invasion
police state and potential concerns for the 600 US of Grenada and the release of those medical
medical students on island whose freedom to leave students.
had been taken away. From the U.S. perspective,
this intervention was justified in order to quell fears
of a repeat of the Iran hostage crisis.
Tracy was in the 2nd Division 8th Marine
Amphibious Assault Unit a.k.a. “Beach Runners”.
They were trained to pull up on beaches and “go
forward”. Without any actual maps of the island,
they were sort of going in blind. The objective was to
secure the heavily guarded runway at Pearl’s Airport
on the north end of the island. That mission was
accomplished.
At first, there were only a couple thousand troops
but within a week, there were over 7,000 various
U.S. military forces defeating some 3,000 untrained
militia of Cubans and islanders. Minimal casualties

VETERANS ISSUE 9