And, like the annoying little kid in the Shake and Bake commercial, I helped.
For those nostalgic for the Eighties, The Great Communicator's Caribbean Triumph, or just farcical expeditionary extravaganzas, it's Grenada Month all November at Graphic Firing Table!
Nice posts Chief. Just shortly after your sojourn on that 'Spice Island' the Raygun managed to win 49 states and well over 95% of the EC.
ReplyDeleteMike,
ReplyDeleteA nice win to balance out the dead in Beirut.
The point is= always take the cheap shot.
jim
To me the common thread is the combination of strategic confusion and tactical fuckupitude. GIs get put in harm's way for a variety of Cold War reasons which may or may not actually be sensible and then the guys on the ground screw up and get people killed.
ReplyDeleteOne of Ronnie's most "brilliant" successes was to sell the U.S. and most of the rest of the world the notion of the U.S. as the indispensable nation, free from venal motives and technically and tactically shrewd. Those of us on the ground knew better, but who the hell was listening to us? He was The Great Communicator, right?
jim -
ReplyDeleteI agree with you (to a certain extent) about taking a cheap shot. But I believe that the "strategic confusion and tactical fuckupitude" that Chief mentions had a lot to do with Ronnie Raygun rushing the job so to push the 254 dead Americans @ Beirutoff of the front pages. Election politics is what it was all about IMHO.
I'd agree, Mike, except it was a year before the '84 election, so not even an off-year. Reagan's people supposedly wanted to erase the Beirut bombing with attacks in Lebanon but were talked out of it and, remember, the whole Grenada business had been cooking since 10/13/83 when the Austin/Cooard coup went off.
ReplyDeleteI won't disagree that the primary considerations in Grenada were political prestige, but I think they were parochial to the Caribbean and Cold-War-related as much as about the U.S. global image being dented in Lebanon.