Crisis in Haiti

an interview with Craig Hurd

A Note from the Editor: Economic and political refugees from Haiti, commonly and disparagingly referred to as “boat people,” have long attempted to take to the sea in order to seek asylum in the United States some 650 miles away. The journey is risky; all too often the vessels of passage are pitifully inadequate. The phenomenon exposes the controversial double standard of reception by the United States to asylum-seekers from the Caribbean. On the more privileged end of the continuum are Cubans, who are subject to a ‘wet feet/dry feet’ test. If refugees from Cuba reach our shores, they’re “in.” Their counterparts in Haiti, however, are excluded from this consideration, although particularly during the coup years of 1991-94, many activists could claim legitimate fear of political retribution as the military dictatorship was particularly lethal to advocates for democracy in Haiti.

Craig Hurd, who is finishing a degree at St. Charles Community College, served in the United States Navy from 1991 – 1995. He had first-hand experiences in the Haitian interdiction campaign which was part of Operation Restore Democracy during the 1991-94 coup. Hurd, a Petty Officer Second Class, spoke to The Global Pages this spring. In his own words, this is his story.

I was in the Navy stationed aboard FFG16 Clifton Sprague. It’s guided missile freighted, no nuclear weapons or anything like that; it has surface-to-air missiles and a 3 ½ inch cannon and a few machine guns and other defense systems in it. It was built as an escort ship for convoys, but as the roles of the military changed, they started using these ships any way that they could.

We were stationed in New York City, in Staten Island, and we went down to the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico to do counter-narcotics operations. We were on station three months, and then you’d go back to your port, but the ship that was supposed to relieve our position failed an inspection and we stood there to take their duty for another three months.

I woke up one morning and our assignment had changed. Now our job was to pick up refugees. This was surprising to a lot of us. The whole news of what was happening in Haiti – we didn’t have any of that. You’re out on the ocean. There’s not much mail; your mail comes haphazardly by helicopter once every two or three weeks if you’re lucky.

Basically what we would do is, an aircraft initially assigned to chase drug boats would fly over, and when they would see someone drifting in the water, they would send back coordinates to us and our ship would pick them up any way that we could. Sometimes we would put out a fast boat – an inflatable boat, a Zodiac – or sometimes we would pull our ship right alongside their raft depending on the size of the vessel that they were on.

Some of these people were in two innertubes with a two-by-four latched to it, and they’d have eight people hanging off of it. Car innertubes, not tractor-trailer innertubes. Sometimes it would be grandma and grandpa sitting with their grandchildren kicking. Some of them were a little more elaborate, something with a deck and 55 gallon drums latched together underneath it, but almost all of them looked like they were built on some deserted island. Nothing looked seaworthy by any means, definitely nothing I would want to take on a journey outside of the local pond. There are better vessels in the Meramec River Race. The thing that struck me the most was how desperate the people were to come to America. Even at that moment, we didn’t know what was going on in Haiti; we just knew there was a coup and everyone’s afraid of the new leader.

We were picking up people like crazy. At one point our ship had almost 250 people on it.

The crew of the ship is supposed to be 250 but my ship is a reserve unit. Half of the crew is active duty and they maintain the ship, and then half the crew is reservists who come aboard and fill positions when we go out to sea. But a lot of times the ship is undermanned. We had 220 people, where you’re supposed to have 250, and that means 30 positions that can’t be filled. So the crew is tired. A lot of people are doing two different duties. I was the ship’s machinist. I served on the flight deck and I was in charge of rescue and assistance, so if there was another ship having a problem, I would be tasked with going over to the other ship and helping them out. I was in charge of repair locker, which is basically a fire department. I was in charge of the biggest one, which is the engineering department. In the engineering department we have fuel fires, oil fires, engine fires and electrical fires for all the equipment on the ship; if there’s going to be a fire on the ship, that’s probably where it’s going to be. That’s the number one enemy on a ship. You can’t call 911 and have the fire department come. You have to do it yourself.

So I shared a lot of duties, and on top of that they put me in charge of destroying these rafts. Because if you rescue the people off of them, now they’re a hazard to navigation because there’s this boat floating somewhere and if a smaller craft were to hit it, it could damage it somehow. We would either dismantle it, or destroy it with hammers and hatchets and sledgehammers and pop the innertubes. Sometimes we would set it on fire. We would pour jet fuel over the side on top of it and set it on fire.

We did that a while, picking up these refugees, and like I said, we had 250 refugees on board this ship. We had to build latrines for them because we got reports of the AIDS epidemic in Haiti. We didn’t want them using our facilities, so we made facilities on the flight deck, which is where we were housing these people basically. We took all the mats from our gym and spread them out all over the flight deck, and then we had a canopy that we strung up over the flight deck to give them some kind of shade. We rigged up a couple of misting stations, so fresh water would be spraying and cool them down. It’s the Caribbean, you know, it’s hot. So we tried to accommodate them as best we could, but it was a military ship. There isn’t much on it that’s comfortable.

Everyday we’re making this up as we go along. I worked in the repair division, so we did maintenance on anything that wasn’t the diesels and turbine that drove the ship. We fixed anything. If the urinal is clogged, you call my division; if the door latch doesn’t work, you call my division; if you need something built or a part made, you call our division. They were coming to us, ‘build a latrine.’ Build it out of what? We took a 55-gallon drum, turned it on its side and cut a hole in it. Then we took some foam padding and padded the hole. How sanitary is that? Not very, but we were making due. We cut a hole out of the side, and then we hit the fire hose on the side of it, and the fire hose was constantly running. You’d sit down, or stand up, whatever, and it would flow over the side of the ship. We had to station somebody nearby it because it was on the flight deck and there’s a net on the side of the ship that we would lower when a helicopter would land; that way, if anyone’s blown over the side by the prop wash or anything, it would catch a person. We had to remove that gate, that fence, in order that this stuff would flow off. And we put someone there – there’s ocean underneath. It wasn’t enclosed. You’ve got 250 people on this flight deck watching you go to the bathroom, sitting on this 55 gallon drum. You don’t have a wood shop with piece of plywood sitting around where you could build some kind of partition. How are we going to do this, make a urinal? We would come up with ideas, modify them, and we got to a point where the flood of refugees kind of subsided.

I guess word got back to Haiti that what we were doing is picking them up and dropping them off at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where they were being held or processed and most likely returned to Haiti. Sometimes when people would come aboard, the first thing they would say was, “No Guantanamo, no Guantanamo.” When they would come aboard, we would search them, and they showed that they didn’t have any, I don’t know, weapons or drug paraphernalia. The information we were given about the Haitians was so sketchy that a lot of us were on edge. ‘Oh, two-thirds of the Haitian population has AIDS. Is that true, is that not true?’ They had us tape our ears down shut. We had to wear safety goggles and surgical masks – in case they spit on us, no fluid would go in your ears or in your eyes. We were really on edge, we didn’t know what we were dealing with. We would bring the people on board the ship, search them and like Ellis Island ask, “What’s your name? Where are you from? Where are you trying to go?” We had one woman who gave birth to a child on board the ship – a U.S. citizen because it was born on a U.S. ship.

The main thing we were told to be worried about is if they got caught in the Gulf stream, they would be swept out into the Atlantic. We would run around and try to pick up as many as we could. The first time, I think we picked up 120 people; then we took them to Guantanamo Bay. The next time we had almost 250. That was more than we had crew on the ship. We don’t know the turmoil they’re going through, and things are going through our minds like, ‘Is there any way they would try to overthrow us and take over the ship? Would they do that?’ We were really pretty tense.

We made two trips to Guantanamo Bay to drop refugees off, and then we got pulled off that detail. I think they figured that the LST, an amphibious assault ship, was better for picking up refugees; it’s got a well deck where they keep amphibious assault vehicles, an enclosed area that has air conditioning, where they can control a population. We were then assigned to enforcing the embargo. Before it was rafts and small boats and a little john boat with a motor. Now we were going after ships because there was an embargo against Haiti, and they don’t want any kinds of food coming in or any type of goods. Any ship that would be reported by the P3 Orions, that’s the airplane, a boarding team would go on this boat and we would determine, Did it have refugees on board? Were they in violation of the embargo?

Sometimes we just got a larger boat with a larger number of refugees on board. One boat we came alongside was maybe sixty or seventy feet long, sail-driven, a fishing-type boat. A boarding team consisting of myself and five or six other men, we asked to see the captain. This man comes in a robe, and you’re thinking, ‘You’re the captain of the ship?’ This boat was just loaded down with people, and the forward compartment of the ship had rice in it. The ship was leaking, and they had eight guys who took turns running a hand-driven pump that pumped water overboard. They couldn’t keep up with the water.

We came aboard the ship and saw the disrepair the ship was in. The second-in-command of the ship was with this boarding team. He asked me to go below and check the stability and structure of the ship; that’s something else my division did. I went below and looked at it, and that’s when I saw the leaking. I came aboard deck and said, There’s so many people down there, and while the ship is leaking, I don’t know … What it came down to is, the ship is seaworthy and all they have to do is turn around and go back to Haiti. We escorted them back to Port-au-Prince, and once they were within two or three miles, we turned and left them.

Another vessel we came across, the rescue and assistance detail got called on. They put a call out that they were sinking. Once again it was me and eight people on the rescue and assistance detail. This was another fishing boat, probably sixty feet long; when we came aboard there was a crew of about six. We knew that their vessel was sinking, so the first thing we did was secure it. We took them in our boat and took them back to the ship. Then we went below and assessed the damage to the ship. Not good. The side of the boat, as the boat would rock, you could see the sun through the hull because it was so rusted. It looked like a ’72 Dodge pickup that’s been sitting out in the field too long, rust holes all over it. We reported back to my ship that there’s a hole in the side; they wanted us to repair it. You need a dry dock to fix this thing because every time it would rock, more water would come in. The de-watering capacity of the ship wasn’t much. They had a piece of plywood pressed up against the wall, so certainly no water-tight integrity.

What we did, we had some portable pumps and started de-watering. As we did, we searched the rest of the vessel. You couldn’t get into the forward compartment because it’s completely loaded with sacks of rice, 50-pound sacks, just jammed packed. So the vessel is in violation of the embargo. When we reported that back, then they really wanted us to save the vessel. That was the trophy – something we need to bring back. Things started to get frantic then. They brought the ship alongside this boat, and it doesn’t seem like much, but when you have two really large vessels in the water, when they come together, there’s always chance of damage. Close in the ocean is 1000 yards. We brought the ship alongside this little vessel, with holes in the side that could be easily crushed.

We took everybody but me and one other guy off the vessel, and the two of us were sent below deck with a pickaxe and we tore out the side of the ship so it would sink. The rice sank with the ship. I don’t know how to estimate how much it was, maybe five tons. It was a lot. Being sent below deck to punch out a wall on the side of a vessel was really kind of spooky because the water came in fast. We were kind of nervous. It was kind of a bonding thing between us to go down below decks and punch out the side of the ship. We tore it out and came up and by the time we did, the rear end of the ship was sinking into the water. We got to the forward end of the ship and the other rib-boat came to pick us up, and by the time they reached us, we ended up jumping off the ship and swimming to the little boat to get picked up. It was kind of spooky.

That was enforcing the embargo. We boarded a lot of cargo-type ships that were just passing through the area en route to different locations. But since they were in the area, we still boarded them, talked to the captain, found out how many people he had on board, we would search it down and basically look at his records and documents and make sure they were in order – where are you going, where are you coming from, what do you have on board, that type of thing.

But then, word came back that we might invade, so our duties changed again, and we went into attack mode. We were building up to go into an attack. We went back to Cuba and took on five Army Bell 501 helicopters. It’s basically like traffic choppers, but on top of the rotor, it has a big night vision device, two Hellfire missiles mounted on the side and a 50-millimeter Gatlin gun on the other. As we’re picking up this, we’re thinking, What’s really going on over there? We brought aboard an attachment of Army Rangers; the 42 Air Cavalry. We brought aboard five helicopters and the men to support them, but it was our detail to be on the flight deck, so I was on the flight deck all the time. The watches I normally stand had to be manned by somebody else, which left us further downsized. Every night for a week, they would go out and test operations to build up for this invasion. All the while, word was getting back that Jimmy Carter was in and discussing what they were going to do ashore. So it came down to the day we were getting down to invade. If I remember right, there were three other frigates down there, an amphibious ship and a communications ship. There was a PHM, the one that ran aground: a fast-attack boat, the only ship in the Navy smaller than the one I was on other than submarines, manned by machine guns, no missiles or cannons. They ran aground, and our ship came in to protect it. They had to wait until the tide came in.

It was like, ‘at this night at midnight, we’re going in.’ Word came back to us that ‘Jimmy Carter is in a meeting. He’s negotiating with them,’ and so the hour was pushed back. So now it’s one o’clock in the morning that we were going in. Everyone’s trying to get some rest, everyone is sleeping out on the flight deck with all our gear on, and when one o’clock rolls around and we’re firing up the helicopters, getting ready to go, word came back to shut everything down. It went on all night like that about ten times: We’d get ready to go, fire up the helicopters, get everyone in position, and all of a sudden they would shut it down. Finally, daybreak came around, and the word back to the ship was everything was resolved. We didn’t invade.

When we would bring refugees aboard, the people all seemed nice. Everyone seemed happy to leave Haiti. There wasn’t much news coming back to us as far as what was going on. We had only sketchy details about Haiti, about the citizens. We were always kind of on edge whenever they would say hello or where is the bathroom. A lot of them had limited vocabulary in English. A couple of people on the ship – one spoke Spanish, one spoke French. We really didn’t have any way to speak with them other than hand gestures. I think that most of them thought, they’d made it to the U.S. by being on a U.S. ship. They thought they would be taken to streets paved with gold or something like that. Later, they were disappointed to be picked up by the ship because I think word had gotten back that we were taking them to Guantanamo. The main thing that struck me was how desperate these people were to get out of Haiti.

A range of ages—the one woman had the baby right on the ship. There were children as small as five to seven years old. The whole range, the whole family would get on this small raft. One raft that we picked up, it was one of the more elaborate ones in that it had three innertubes and a couple of planks on it. One of the gentleman who had a nice compass in a wooden box, a nautical type, four inches by four inches. When he came aboard the ship and I was standing there, he asked me to hold onto it, almost like he was presenting it to me. I was thinking, What do you want me to do with it?

When they were on the flight deck, it was them and the clothes they had on. No possessions. We had another area where we had had with all their belongings, which was so minimal. I can’t imagine moving without bringing the family photo album or Grandma’s china or something like that, and some of these people had two forks. Really odd things that they brought with them. Why would you bring this on your journey to America? Almost nobody had money. Almost nothing got returned to these people. A lot of them were claiming political asylum.

I knew that there were a lot of Marines on Guantanamo, with the ears taped shut and glasses in these prison camps, that’s what you would call them. They were tents strung out all over with a barbed wire fence with Marines guarding the perimeter of it. They were held there for the longest time. By then, the Haitian people were pretty uncomfortable with the setting and pretty disgusted with the way they had been treated, yelling obscenities at the Marines. And the Marines were getting really uptight: ‘Who are these people? We’re trying to put out the fires in their nation, and here they are treating us like this?’ But they just wanted to get to America and leave it all behind.

Now I wish I knew more of the political aspects, the internal workings of Haiti. We knew there was a coup, the people were unhappy, and they were fleeing. Two-thirds of the population has AIDS – that’s one of the things they told us to keep us on our guard. [Editor’s note: There is indeed cause for concern regarding AIDS in Haiti, but the rates of infection are nowhere near this high. In a BBC report dated November 20, 2003, the United Nations AIDS coordinator in Haiti, Raul Boyle, cited a widely corroborated figure of 5%.]

The larger ships, the aircraft carriers, they would have [access to television news], CNN, but not the smaller ships. There was a department that had VHS cassettes, and we would get three movies a night, three channels. You could pick and choose which movie you wanted to watch over and over and over and over. And over and over. Harley Davidson and the Marlboro Man—I know every word. And I hate the movie. It’s gotta be the worst movie ever made. But I can sit there and say every word because I’ve seen it so many times.

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The Global Forum

Craig Hurd

SCC student

interviewed by

Michael Kuelker

SCC English