Kingdom of Fear

by Hunter S. Thompson

  But Randolph explained that things were different on the other side of the island, where the recent violence had happened. He welcomed the U.S. invasion, he said. It had freed him, at last, from the grip of a cruel situation that had been on his neck like an albatross ever since he and his wife had decided to join the Revolution, almost five years ago.

  Neither one of them had been Communists, at the time, and Marxist was just another word he’d picked up in school, along with Maurice Bishop and Bernard Coard and the other neighborhood kids. All they knew about the U.S.A., back then, was that it was a big and powerful country where cowboys and soldiers killed Indians. They knew nothing at all about Russia, Cuba, or guns.

  But things changed when Grenada became independent. Some of the boys went off to school in England, and they came back feeling ambitious. The new government was corrupt, they said; the prime minister was crazy, and the world was passing them by. Bishop and a few of his friends decided to start a political party of their own, which they called the New Jewel Movement. It was The People’s Party, they said; mainly young people, with a hazy socialist platform and reggae music at rallies. Hundreds of people joined, creating a nucleus of grassroots enthusiasm that forced Eric Gairy out of office and replaced him with Maurice Bishop.

  Randolph went along with it, he explained, because he believed the New Jewel Movement was going to make a better life for all the Grenadian people. He knew most of the leadership personally, and he was, after all, a businessman. While Bishop had gone off to the London School of Economics and Coard was at the University of Dublin, Randolph was climbing the ladder of commerce as an independent trucker and saving money to buy his own home. When the New Jewel came to power, he was not without friends in high places. Among them were Hendrick Radix, the new attorney general, and Hudson Austin, soon to be appointed commanding general of The People’s Revolutionary Army. It was a heady time, for Randolph, the year of life in the fast lane. He had a home on a hill in St. George’s, a commercial trucking license, and enough personal influence to get his new wife a job at party headquarters.

  That was when the trouble started. First it was General Austin, who cheated him out of some money; then it was Phyllis Coard, wife of the deputy prime minister, who lured his wife off to Cuba. After that it was all downhill for him.

  . . .

  My tape recorder was running from the time we left Pearls Airport until we pulled into the small parking lot of the St. George’s Hotel. We made a few stops in dimly lit huts along the way for cold beer, which Randolph graciously paid for, because I had no Grenadian money. “Don’t mention it,” he said. “It’s my pleasure.”

  Which was true. He was having a good time, and so was I. There are worse ways to enter a war zone than by stopping at every back country pub along the road and mingling with friendly people. In one place I got edgy when a huge negro wearing a hospital shirt called me a “stupid fucking Russian,” but Randolph waved him off. “That man is totally crackers,” he whispered. “He is one of those who ran away from the insane asylum when the bombs hit.”

  . . .

  From my room in the St. George’s Hotel, high on a steep green hill overlooking the harbor in downtown St. George’s, I can see the whole town coming awake on a hot Sunday morning. The roosters begin crowing around six, the church bells begin a joyous tolling at around seven, and when I wake up at nine, there is a half-eaten pile of blue grapes on the floor between my bed and the shower stall in my bathroom. It is the sign of the fruit bat. I have never seen the beast, but the grapes are there every morning. The fruit bat brings his midnight meal into my room every night, through the window, and gnaws on his grapes while hanging upside down from the ceiling. It is his regular eating place, and neither war nor revolution nor invasion by U.S. Marines and a horde of international newsmongers will change his dinner hour.

  The fruit bat is a big one. I can hear him flapping around sometimes in the darkness, and by the sound of the wings, he seems about the size of a crow. Some of them carry paralytic rabies, but it is hard to know which ones.

  . . .

  The lobby of the St. George’s is usually empty on Sunday morning. The locals along with a handful of British subjects have gone to church, and the war correspondents are sleeping. Even Maitland—the young bartender with the high black forehead and the quick brown eyes of a boy who should be in law school somewhere—is not at his post today. The bar, attached to the dining room off a flight of steep stairs, is empty.

  Even the dining room is empty. The only people in sight are a few taxi drivers sitting sleepily on the concrete wall looking down on the harbor and the big freighters tied up at the pier along the Carenage.

  There is a press briefing scheduled for 10 A.M. at the Maryshaw House, recently converted into an international press center, and some of the correspondents will want to wake up in time to be there.

  My room is number 15 and there is only one key. No master at the desk, no passkey with the maid, no locksmith on the premises or anywhere closer than Bridgetown. When I locked myself out of the room yesterday, the entire infrastructure of the hotel broke down. Maitland had to abandon the bar and spend the next 45 minutes outside in the rain on a broken, rotten-wood ladder that we managed to brace up against the wall beneath my window. I held the ladder while he pulled the glass slats out of the louvered window and crawled inside to open the door.

  The St. George’s is a world-class hotel. It has always been one of my favorites, ranking up there with the Hotel Continental Palace in Saigon and the infamous Lane-Xang in Laos. Just after the invasion, there were six hundred reporters headquartered here and only nineteen rooms, nine with hot water. No women on the premises, no ice in the drinks, no credit cards honored, no phones, no TV, hot sauce and stale ham for breakfast . . . but the management was gracious, three elderly women who remained determinedly neutral in a situation that would have destroyed the best minds behind any desk at any Hilton or Holiday Inn.

  After four weeks in the frantic heat of an utterly baffling war zone, there were no more surprises at the St. George’s. When I came back to my room the other night, I found two huge wooden crosses leaning against the wall outside my door. One was about nine feet long, made of four-by-fours bolted together, and the other was six feet long, constructed in the same way. Maitland told me they belonged to the people who had checked into number 16, right next door to me—an American evangelist and his teenage son, who had carried the crosses through sixty-eight countries in six years. Nobody asked why.

  The invasion of Grenada would not have happened if other island states in the area had not been frightened into overreacting. It takes only twelve men in a boat to put some of these governments out of business.

  —Commonwealth Secretary-General Sir Shridath Ramphal, Barbados, November 29, 1983

  . . .

  There is a lot of loose talk in the waterfront bars on the Carenage these days. People are talking about vengeance and violence and perhaps another invasion. Psy-Ops, the U.S. military’s unit for winning, whipping, and terrifying the hearts and minds of the population, has been spreading the word that Fidel Castro is promising the people of Grenada “a surprise present for Christmas.”

  They are still reeling from the shock of the last invasion, a full-bore assault by the U.S. Marines, Rangers, Seals, Navy jets, warships, the 82nd Airborne; thousands of parachutes, terrible explosions at all hours of the day and night, their prime minister murdered and their women carried off by wild Cubans. Their cars were stolen and all their doors were kicked in and some of their closest friends and relatives were chopped in half by machine gun fire, set on fire by rockets, drilled full of holes like something out of a Fearless Fosdick nightmare. We hit this place like it was Iwo Jima. The invasion of Grenada was one of those low-risk, high-gain, cost-plus operations that every West Point graduate dreams of. Unleash the whole weight of the U.S. military arsenal on a small island in the Caribbean and call it a great victory. Bash the buggers silly; bomb the insane; walk h
eavy, talk wild, and kick ass in every direction. That’s how it went in Grenada.

  Nobody knows why quite yet, but it will all come out in the wash. The word in the St. George’s lobby today was that Tony Rushford, the new attorney general and legal representative of the British Crown, was going to put Bernard Coard on trial for murder as soon as possible.

  “Those bastards are going to wish they’d never heard the word revolution before we get finished with this place,” said a CIA plotter working for the U.S. embassy, disguised as a Caribbean scholar. “All this bullshit about Nazis and wargames and Negro target practice is going to come to a screeching halt. All you hear around this place is people saying we’ve got to put these bastards on trial. Okay, we’re going to give you a goddamn trial. We’ll have Bernie Coard and we’ll hang Hudson Austin and we’ll hang Liam James and Abdullah and Redhead and every other one of those Communist sons of bitches. Their mouths will run like jelly. The myth of the New Jewel Movement will be utterly destroyed. We won’t even need Maurice Bishop’s body. There are plenty of witnesses, and we have every one of them by the balls.”

  I was shocked by the tone of his voice.

  He was talking about the entire leadership of the so-called military coup that overthrew Maurice Bishop’s neo-Marxist, limbo-style revolutionary government that had ruled Grenada for four and a half years until an orgy of shocking violence in the last days of October turned the island into something like Uganda in the blackest days of Idi Amin . . . Bernard Coard was the deputy prime minister, a once-respected Marxist theoretician and personal friend of Bishop’s. Hudson Austin was the general in charge of The People’s Revolutionary Army. Abdullah, James, and Sgt. Lester “Goat” Redhead were the soldiers accused of the killings. Not just Bishop, but four of his ministers and his mistress and dozens, perhaps hundreds, of innocent civilians had been gunned down by the army when a mass rally attempted to restore Maurice Bishop to power.

  There was no question of guilt, but there were some legal niceties to be observed. The bodies had been burned, and, under British Commonwealth law, it is awkward to hold a murder trial without a corpse. Treason was another possibility, but the only witnesses were dead or in Richmond Hill Prison locked up by the CIA. The first phase of the trial was scheduled for February, but without bodies or witnesses it was going to be what Tony Rushford called “a sticky wicket.”

  “Our mistake was not killing them instantly,” said a colonel from the U.S. Army. “Summary execution—shot while attempting to escape.” He laughed bitterly, sipping his beer at the Red Crab, a chic roadhouse on the outskirts of town. The mayor of Ft. Lauderdale was at the other end of the bar, whooping it up with a businessman from New Jersey who was gnawing on the throat of a black woman.

  “You people are shameless,” I said to the colonel.

  “We are warriors,” he replied, stuffing the bowl of his pipe full of Mixture 79.

  “The thousand-year Reich lasted twelve years and eight months,” I said.

  “That’s plenty of time,” he replied. “Two years from today, I’ll be retired and drawing a full pension.”

  The Yanqui press in Grenada with U.S. Army censors, Winter 1984 (HST archives)

  . . .

  There is some art you don’t have to sign.

  —Psy-Ops

  Saturday night was quiet in Grenada. For the first time in three weeks there were no soldiers on the road to Grand Anse. No 82nd Airborne patrols, no roadblocks bristling with M16s and dim red flashlights, no roaring of big Cobra helicopters overhead; a man in the right mood could move along the road in a quick little topless Mini Moke and be menaced by nothing at all except wild dogs and potholes.

  It was a night like any other night 300 years ago in Grenada. That is about how long it has been since the people who live here have had any peace from drunken foreigners. First it was boatloads of vicious Caribbean Indians coming over the horizon in war canoes, then it was pirates and Spaniards and Moors—all of them crazed on grog—and then came the French, who built prisons, and 200-odd years of sodden, sweating Englishmen. Finally, in 1974, came independence and a voodoo-crazed prime minister who spoke of flying saucers at the UN. Sir Eric Gairy, weirder than Papa Doc, lasted five years. He was overthrown in 1979 by a cabal of homegrown Marxists and international Trotskyites. Four years after that came the U.S. Marines.

  It is a war story, but it is not like Vietnam. This is not Indochina, and the U.S. is not losing.

  The people who run the White House, along with the Pentagon and the CIA, have finally done what we pay them to do, and they have done it pretty well. If the business of America is business—as Mr. Coolidge said—then a lot of people are going to get big Christmas bonuses for what was done here in the savage year of our lord 1984. We have seen Americas interests threatened in the Caribbean basin, and we have crushed that threat like a roach. The Pentagon has finally won a war, in public, and the victors are enjoying the spoils.

  As well they should. These are warriors, and some of them fought and died here, Cubans and Grenadians as well as eighteen American soldiers. It was not altogether a toy war. The action was swift and hazy, the truth remains unknown, and the future is decidedly cloudy.

  But never mind these things. They are fey. They are only side effects compared to the wave we are riding on the south coast of Grenada these days.

  Earlier in the night we had a series of crude and unstable discussions with people from the 21st Military Police Company on the lawn of what used to be the Calabash Hotel, far out on the beach past Grand Anse. They have turned the whole place into a war zone, with sandbags and machine-gun nests and trip flares strung between palm trees. And they stretched rolls of concertina wire across the lawn in front of the Time magazine photographer’s cabana, which caused a serious argument. This was the work of the infamous “Captain Calabash,” a wild-eyed MP commander who kept his troops in a sleepless frenzy of bogus security drills around the perimeters of the hotel grounds, seizing turf like a homeless mad dog for reasons that were never made clear. When his troops weren’t patrolling the moonlit beach with night-vision scopes and enough weaponry to kill every fish between Grenada and the south side of Barbados, they were doing discipline drills with commando knives and twenty-five-pound steel balls and digging up the beach to fill sandbags that the Captain ordered to be stacked in huge piles across the driveways and walkways, all the way out to the sea. . . . Even the CIA spooks were embarrassed.

  DINNERTIME IN GRENADA . . . MORGAN PLAYS THE PIANO AT THE RED CRAB . . . THE BOMBING OF THE INSANE ASYLUM, THE TRIAL OF BERNARD COARD, RAISING SERIOUS QUESTIONS . . . WHAT TO DO WITH BERNIE?

  Some people will tell you that the army has become sophisticated, and they will have evidence to bear it out. They will have T-shirts from the war zone and they will have color slides from the beach on Prickly Bay where the naked girl danced with Captain Henegan’s sentries. Or they may have videotapes of Navy F-14s dive-bombing an insane asylum overlooking St. George’s harbor across from the St. George’s Hotel.

  Morgan was his name, they said. He played late-night piano at the Red Crab, a Caribbean roadhouse set back in the palm trees not far from the Calabash Hotel. He showed up one night not long after the invasion, and after he played a few tunes like “Fandago” and “Way Down upon the Swanee River” people liked him, and when the place was crowded, he would play for as long as they wanted, doing singalong gigs with the State Department people and the Military Police.

  They would gather around his piano and raise their beer mugs and croak hoarsely at one another, like young lions. On some nights, Colonel Ridgeway, from the State Department, would come in with a carload of women and then go out back with the waiters and smoke huge spliffs on the ledge behind the garbage cans.

  V. S. Naipaul was there, along with Hodding Carter and General Jack “Promotable” Farris and a girl who was posing for a centerfold spread for Australian Playboy. Farris wouldn’t come inside, for military image reasons; he would sit outside in his Jeep and w
atch the merriment from afar, feeling Joy in his heart and safe at last from all fears of botch and embarrassment. And never seeing his main man, Jim Ridgeway, back there on the ledge with the Rastas.

  It was our kind of war. And when somebody finally asked Morgan where he came from and he said he’d spent the past year or so in the insane asylum up there on the hill near Fort Frederick, people laughed and called for another round. “Good old Morgan,” they said, “he’s crazy as a loon.”

  Which was true, or at least certifiable. This is not one of those situations where you want to start delving into questions like who’s crazy and who’s not. Nobody needs that down here. This thing was weird from the start. People fought and died on this island, for reasons that were never explained—and probably never will be until Bernard Coard comes to trial.

  That should happen sometime around the spring of 1988, when the press is busy elsewhere. His lawyer will be Ramsey Clark, former attorney general of the U.S.; the prosecution will represent the Queen of England, and among those subpoenaed will be Fidel Castro, the director of the CIA, the Russian ambassador in Grenada at the time, several members of the Vigoreese Family from Marseilles, and a whole raft of armed dingbats ranging from international Trotskyites to wild whores from Trinidad and Mini Moke salesmen from Paris and vicious thugs wearing uniforms and pearl-handled .45s.

  The trial of Bernard Coard—the man who killed the revolution in order to save it—will not be ignored in some circles.

  Bernard Coard faces the firing squad in Grenada, Winter 1984 (United Press)