Profile of a Grenada X Militia Man

“Bishop, he was my good friend,” he said sadly as we zoomed around the Island of Grenada in his taxi.

“I was there. I marched with the crowd to storm his house and rescue him when he was put under house arrest. He was so beat up we started to take him to the hospital but he said ‘NO!, there is no room for all these people at the hospital. Take me to the Fort’ that’s what he wanted so had the doctors come to him,” his voice drifted off.

I had asked about the US Invasion of Grenada and the events leading up to it. What I got was his personal story. First hand action. His side of the story. He was speaking of a 1983 internal power struggle that ended with the deposition and murder of revolutionary Prime Minister Maurice Bishop where at the Fort, a caravan of vehicles drove up and open fired on him and the crowd.

He was 16 years old when his story started, a militia officer with a team under him prior to the invasion when the country was fighting within.

“Bishop called me ‘the little one’ because I was so small,” he said as I pondered this large man telling me the story and tried to imagine him 50+ years ago.

“The Cubans came and taught us many things.  There were many people that did not know how to read or write. They did a lot of good things for the country but they wanted us to be communists. We resisted this. Bishop said no.”

“When the Americans came, the Cubans left those two planes,” he said as we drove by them an onto the tarmac of the old abandoned air strip. “Castro wanted them back but America said no, they could not come back!”

“We love America. They are our heroes. We asked for help and they came. Reagan wanted Bishop to get out of the country but he said ‘no, I stay with my country men and if I die, then I die. I stay just like my Father,’ that’s what he said to Reagan.

“They said ‘let the Americans come and we will drive them into the sea.’ America came and drove THEM into the sea in such a short time.”

“There were signs painted everywhere saying ‘Thank You America,’ there is still one left I can show you.”

“I was in Canada at a library and was reading a book with the historical account of the Invasion and it was wrong. I was there, and what is in this book is wrong. How can that be that they can make history different than what it was?”