In Haiti, These U.S. Paratroopers are Saving Lives, Not Taking Them

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti -- Trained and equipped to kill: the paratroopers of Delta Company, 2^nd Battalion, 325^th Airborne Infantry Regiment, 82^nd Airborne Division drop silently from the sky with .50-caliber heavy machine guns that can stop a truck, TOW tank-killer missiles, and Mark-19 automatic grenade launchers that can punch through two inches of steel. Delta is a heavy weapons unit; its men are killers and proud of it.

They are not killers here, though. Here, four of them are crawling deep into the unstable ruins of a building because somebody thought they heard a survivor alive inside. A tremor, like the aftershocks the city had been feeling for several days, could shift tons of teetering concrete walls and broken slabs, crushing them in the wreckage with the unrecovered bodies of the dead.

"We just went in to figure out whether somebody was alive in there," shrugged Sgt. Darren McIntyre, a 21-year-old from Hermon, Maine. "Sergeant Cleary (that would be Michael, 25, of Warwick, N.Y.) held my feet while I dangled into the basement but there was no one. We went all the way through -- nothing.''

Wasn't he scared? "Hell yeah, I was scared,'' said McIntyre, wiping grime and sweat from his forehead. "I was like, 'Don't touch the walls!' But you gotta do what you gotta do to help these people. It's awesome to be able to help people at this level.''

Over the years, I've come to believe two fundamental things about American infantrymen. They are good at warfighting and they like it. That's why re-enlistment rates are so high, and why they (grumblingly) put up with repeated, long deployments.

And, a strong, persistent streak of altruism runs through all of them. They seem never happier than when they are Doing Good.

So the mission of providing relief after the Haitian earthquake, while mildly inconvenient -- they basically were told to grab their stuff and get on the plane -- has been a major morale booster despite the hard living conditions here and the near-hopeless misery of the Haitians around them.

"I told my guys, there are millions of people around the world who wish they could help -- you are doing this in their name,'' said Capt. Keith Benedict, a West Point grad and Rhodes scholar who commands Delta Company.


They climbed into the rubble: from left, the paratroopers are Sgt. Darren McIntyre, 21, Hermon, Maine; Sgt. Michael Cleary, 25, Warwick, N.Y.; Pvt. Charles Wallace, 23, Fort Worth Tex.; and Spec. Nelson Whitney, 21, Lansdowne, Pa. (David Wood, Politics Daily)


There are roughly 3,000 paratroopers on duty in Port-au-Prince, delivering food and water, working with the Haitian police on security, using their bulldozers to clear rubble and their medics to treat the injured and increasing numbers of sick.

Even if it's not combat, soldiers tackle the missions with military efficiency. When tractor-trailers, ancient buses, motorcycles and "tap-tap'' jitneys merge into a honking, immobile mass at a traffic circle on Grand Rue Dessalines, a couple of paratroopers leap from their Humvee and start directing traffic. It's an assumed authority, but they bring it off and gradually clear the road.

Here is Staff Sgt. George DeMayo, leading his men through a "rock drill'' rehearsal before he takes a convoy of trucks into the city to deliver food and water. Drivers stand in the order in which they will drive; they march, turn a corner and stop, while the security teams fan out to block off the imaginary street.

The men grumble and sigh, and DeMayo rushes around bawling at the drivers and straightening out the security lines, but when they do the real thing an hour later, it goes off like clockwork.

"Thing is, the end state is the same,'' William Forro, command sergeant major of the battalion (2/325^th Airborne Infantry Regiment), told me one afternoon, when I asked how different this was from the soldiers' experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan. "That is, we are working to support a government, we want them to take charge, and we want to be in the background as much as possible.''

At the city's University Hospital, for example, paratroopers are helping treat and transport injured Haitians. They scrambled to get out of the picture when Haitian First Lady Elisabeth Preval came to visit. "We didn't want even to be in the background; this is the Haitians' show,'' said an officer.

And while Canadians, Germans and other nations' relief workers fly their national flags over their camps, the U.S. military is under orders not to raise the American flag -- a well-intentioned, but probably futile, attempt to downplay the American presence.

"The troops get that,'' Sgt. Maj. Forro said. He paused while a U.S. Navy transport thundered low overhead. "What's different from Iraq, of course, is the violence. Your muscle memory is to grab your weapon. That's a big difference.''

And here, living conditions are a sharp departure from the way many troops live in Iraq and Afghanistan. Soldiers sleep in the open on flimsy cots and get two MREs a day -- the prepackaged meals that feature the likes of meatloaf & gravy, imitation pork ribs or the (universally despised) vegetarian patty, along with foil packs of crackers and cheese, applesauce or milkshake powder.

In the windswept park where Delta and other companies of the 2^nd battalion are bivouacked, meals are taken while soldiers sit on the sea wall enjoying the calming view of the harbor and the turquoise sea beyond. At their feet, pigs root in the garbage washed up on the shore. There are portable toilets but no running water. Soldiers wash with bottled water or baby wipes, a difficult task after a helicopter landing nearby has blasted infantrymen with dirt that sticks to sweaty clothes and skin.

After only a few days, most men were displaying hundreds of tiny red bumps on their hands, feet and faces, sharpening fears about being exposed to the diseases that have ravaged the island. "You've been HIV'ed, man,'' one paratrooper advised me.

There is no power, no Internet, no PX to replenish baby wipes, headlamp batteries or tobacco. One soldier brought three cartons of smokes with him from Fort Bragg, N.C., and after two weeks, was running so short he was smoking each cigarette halfway, then carefully saving the stub for later.

The Navy helicopters thundering constantly overhead were a reminder that the aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson was lying offshore tantalizingly close.

"They should helo us out to the Vinson on one a them things,'' said a young paratrooper, gesturing at a gray helicopter scudding away toward the horizon. "They've got showers, hot showers, huge dining halls ... and a PX the size of our whole sleeping area!''

"Yeah, this is good duty,'' said Staff Sgt. DeMayo, whose sunburn is maturing from crimson toward brown. Waiting for his water-distribution mission to launch, he was standing in the classic infantryman's pose, his weapon held in his gloved hands across his chest.

Suddenly, he remembered that here in Haiti weapons are to carried -- but slung on the back, in a non-threatening posture. "Hell, I can't get used to having my weapon back there,'' DeMayo groused. "I don't know what to do with my hands.''