In the Gunboat Tradition

At his press conference last week President Reagan played down the importance of the U.S. troop maneuvers to be conducted jointly with Honduras over the next six months and the unilateral Navy operations now under way off both coasts of Nicaragua. "We have conducted joint exercises with Latin American countries on a regular basis since 1965," he said. That is indeed the case. He went on to add, "These are maneuvers of the kind we've been holding regularly." On that point there can be some debate.

The current naval operations involve two American aircraft-carrier groups and one battleship group (19 ships in all) that will be stationed in Caribbean and Pacific waters near Nicaragua during the next several weeks. What makes this unique is that for the first time in recent years the ships will hover off the coast of a particular Latin American nation. But there have indeed been past U.S. exercises in the Caribbean on a comparable scale.

Among them:

> In March of this year a joint maneuver of NATO units, called READEX 83, was held off Puerto Rico that included two aircraft carriers and 34 other U.S. warships.

> In May 1982 the largest unilateral American exercise in the Caribbean, known as Ocean Venture '82, made waves near Cuba and Grenada with 60 ships, including two carrier groups.

> In each of the past 24 years the U.S. has sailed a small fleet, usually led by a destroyer and three or four other surface ships, around the South American continent to conduct a series of joint maneuvers with allied nations.

> Since the early 1960s the Navy has occasionally landed as many as 1,800 Marines at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in a show of muscle designed to protect the U.S. claim to its naval base there.

The ground-troop exercises in Honduras, known as Big Pine II, will involve upwards of 3,000 U.S. combat troops for two months beginning in November. Among the past exercises on the ground in Central America:

> In February the U.S. and Honduras conducted the weeklong Big Pine I, involving 1,600 U.S. personnel, none of them combat troops.

> In 1982, 30 U.S. support troops helped to airlift Honduran soldiers to an area near the Nicaraguan border and to construct a new military base.

> Each year joint maneuvers are held in Panama to practice defending the canal. Between 7,000 and 10,000 American troops participate, many of them from the 9,000-man force based there.

The most dramatic U.S. military maneuvers over the past 20 years in the Caribbean have been the periodic mock invasions of Vieques Island just off Puerto Rico's eastern coast, usually accompanied by vociferous protests from local fishermen. The largest of these practice assaults, and the one whose scale and timing most resembled the military exercises now being planned, began on Oct. 21, 1962. It included 7,500 Marines and four aircraft carriers. The goal was to "liberate" the island from a mythical dictator named Ortsac, which happens to be Castro spelled backward. The following day John Kennedy went on television to reveal that Soviet missiles had secretly been placed in Cuba and that the U.S. ships in the area would set up a "quarantine" of that nation until the missile crisis was resolved.

Conclusion: In his comparison of the proposed Latin American maneuvers with those of other years, the President did not misspeak. At least not excessively. This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.