DATELINES
Davis., William Steif, Michael Ervin, Tony Depaul, And Cheryl A.
Date Lines A Doctors Dilemma ST. GEORGE'S, GRENADA Terry Marryshow is a thirty-five-year-old physician who has been home in his native Grenada for more than two years. But he can't practice...
...Skinner shakes his head and says, "Down the road, one of us is going to meet one of these missiles, and it's a terrible way to have to prove to the military and the public that we were right...
...It is designed to pop a parachute over Navy property in western Maine...
...The float-plane base at Shin Pond is in sparsely populated north central Maine, in the shadow of Baxter State Park and mile-high Mount Katah-din...
...Michael Ervin (Michael Ervin is a free-lance writer in Chicago...
...Our struggle was broken," says Marryshow...
...She had pieces of bread, a ruler and chalk eraser, and a toy medical bag, to symbolize hunger and inadequate funding for education and medical care...
...There's a shortage of farm workers, despite the young men lounging in town, and tourism is constrained because Grenada has only 700 hotel rooms...
...About seventy-five supporters cheered her and the others...
...We had kids...
...since May, he has chaired the Maurice Bishop Patriotic Movement, the political party dedicated to reviving the once-popular policies of the charismatic socialist prime minister whose murder precipitated the U.S...
...Any day now, the Navy will launch a Tomahawk cruise missile in the Atlantic Ocean and send it streaking across the northern woods at low altitude...
...Small room for error, and small comfort, the pilots say, with a missile that travels 733 feet per second...
...Three bear hunters from Connecticut, disappointed after a week in the back country, have hired Scotty Skinner to take them aloft for a consolation prize: a photograph of a bull moose from somewhere deep in the pale green deadwaters north of here...
...They burst into laughter when Skinner turns around, flashing a grin, with mischief in his eyes...
...Calling it the Missouri Peace Planting, they cut the locks off the silos and planted flowers...
...Lown uses the word "provocative" to describe the cruise missile...
...It will take years to undo what happened...
...Agency for International Development—to scour the United States for physicians willing to take short-term assignments here...
...At the trial, the judge refused to allow a defense based on a "higher law" of faith and morality...
...In 1987 he wrote to Representative Owens, "I was told that I could not communicate with members of Congress even though the legislation called for the Council to be an adviser to the Congress as well as the President...
...but it, too, had seen delays in implementation...
...Joe Dusenbury, director of vocational rehabilitation in South Carolina, was appointed in 1982 to head the Council, created under an amendment to the Rehabilitation Act...
...The Navy contends that an AWACS radar plane, watching from high altitude, will warn the chase pilots in advance if a bush pilot is in the way...
...In the same spirit, Eber headed for Missouri last August...
...Marryshow was one of ten Cuban-medical-school graduates who returned to Grenada simultaneously...
...He went to New York in 1987 to renew that permit and, while there, he spoke at a meeting of former supporters of Maurice Bishop...
...Bartels says Will not only forced out Dart but also David Gray, head of NIDRR...
...Dart blasted RSA and Will's staff as "individuals who have not yet overcome obsolete, paternalistic attitudes about disability," resistant to "sharing their centralized authority with people with disabilities, their families, advocates, and professional service providers...
...Let us have the peace,' we cry, 'but at the same time let us have normalcy, let us lose nothing, let our lives stand intact...
...We have to demonstrate that democratic governments are relevant and seen to be relevant to the population...
...Since then, Blaize's party "has lost considerable support," says Marryshow...
...But she is certain the Peace Planting was worth the effort...
...And Eber never got to tell the story she'd planned, using all the props she took into the silo...
...On his return here in 1978, after graduating from CUNY, Marryshow taught biology at an Anglican high school and was active in Bishop's New Jewel Movement, which overthrew the authoritarian goveminent of Eric Gairy and his "mongoose gang" in a nearly bloodless coup on March 13, 1979...
...In the 1984 election won by Blaize's New National Party, the small Bishop party got only 5 per cent of the vote...
...Marryshow, who earned a bachelor's degree in biology at the City University of New York in 1978, holds a "green-card" permit to work in the United States...
...Later two more of the ten broke ranks, another went to Jamaica, and one went to St...
...At an arms-control conference last fall at the University of Maine, Nobel laureate Bernard Lown of Harvard Medical School said Maine people were about to become "accomplices in mass murder" by allowing the Navy to test the cruise missile over their state...
...On July 1, 1987, he received a letter from Health Minister Danny Williams informing him that nothing could be done—"even though," Marryshow says, "the only thing at stake was my medical qualifications...
...William Steif (William Steif, a former national and foreign correspondent for the Scripps-Howard newspapers, is a free-lance writer based in the U.S...
...Son of the late Justin Dart, wealthy entrepreneur and member of Ronald Reagan's original "kitchen cabinet," the younger Dart was popular in the disability community for vigorously advocating the right of the disabled to participate in the shaping of programs for them...
...I accepted that as the President's prerogative even though I knew it was punitive action for my participation with the Congress...
...This system can watch, simultaneously, a jumbo jet over Iceland, a single-engine Cessna over Puerto Rico, and hundreds of aircraft in between...
...Each faces the possibility of up to two years in prison and $2,000 in fines...
...Woahhhhhh," the hunters groan, reaching out for whatever they can grab hold of— seats, doors, one another...
...It will pass over Shin Pond about 130 miles into its 300-mile flight...
...Grandmother as Lawbreaker VILLA PARK, ILLINOIS When Dorothy Eber's children grew up and became self-sufficient, she decided it was time to go out and start breaking the law...
...The Tomahawk missiles that will fly in Maine are eighteen feet long, weigh 2,800 pounds, and can deliver conventional or nuclear warheads...
...With both those excuses gone, Eber joined local peace activists for events like the Morton-Thiokol vigil...
...She and the others were given "ban and bar orders," whjch prohibited them from staging any similar protests...
...As a result, he has all but abandoned medicine for politics...
...A former chair of the National Council on the Handicapped supports Bartels's view that the trouble at RSA dates back to the early days of the Reagan Administration, before Dart's appointment, and suggests a policy of deliberate obstruction...
...He fell from grace at oversight hearings of the House Subcommittee on Select Education in November 1987, when he departed from a prepared statement to deliver an unauthorized "statement of conscience...
...In recent years, however, the Rehabilitation Act has made it responsible for Independent Living programs, which enable severely disabled people to live more self-sufficiently, and for Supported Employment, which provides a job coach or some other service to help the severely disabled to work...
...She hung up pictures of her children and grandchildren and a picture of a child burned in the Hiroshima bombing...
...It made me feel stronger than ever...
...The moment of radicali-zation that led her to the Peace Planting occurred when she came across a passage in Daniel Berrigan's book, No Bars to Manhood...
...When Cruise Missiles Zoom Across Maine SHIN POND, MAINE The rugged old DeHavilland, a favorite among bush pilots from Alaska to Maine, cruises along in rough weather about 700 feet above the forest...
...We have assumed the name of peacemakers," he wrote, "but we have been by and large unwilling to pay any significant price...
...Eber played hymns on a tape recorder, planted her geranium, and knelt to pray...
...He concedes "there was a lot of hostility in 1983 and 1984, but we really represent the interests of the Grenadian masses...
...The testing of the cruise missile is just one aspect of Maine's emerging profile as an important center in military development...
...But Terry Marryshow, deprived of the chance to work at his profession by his democratic government, is increasingly bitter about the course his country is taking...
...She and six others from Illinois and Wisconsin tried to "reclaim the earth" and protest the presence of 150 missile silos in the state...
...In late 1986, the ten were told there were places for five of them to take part in a "pre-registration internship program" and then receive licenses...
...This is a clear case of victimization on political grounds, contrary to our constitution," says Marryshow...
...RSA's staff was cut roughly in half over the years, from a pre-Reagan level of about 300...
...Sitting on a stack of lumber, having tied up his plane for the day, Skinner says that, for him, this is not an arms-control issue...
...The departures of the highest officials having disabilities in the Reagan Administration sent a disturbing message to the disabled community...
...There he learned Spanish, did well in his classes, did clinical work, and served a residency before returning to Grenada in the summer of 1986...
...On a lark, Skinner lets the sev?n-passenger float plane fall like a wounded bird for a second or two, leaving stomachs at a somewhat higher altitude...
...Will has destroyed the place," said Elmer Bartels in a recent interview...
...This was done...
...In October 1979, he was among the first group of ten Grenadians chosen to study medicine at the University of Havana...
...It is also dead center in a ten-mile-wide flight path that the Federal Aviation Administration has reserved for cruise missiles...
...Despite the doctor shortage, Prime Minister Herbert Blaize's U.S.-dominated government told the ten they would have to take medical examinations even though there is supposedly a reciprocal arrangement between the University of Havana and the University of the West Indies...
...Virgin Islands...
...At Bangor International Airport, General Electric and the Air Force are testing a $700 million array of transmitters, receivers, and computers called the "Over The Horizon Backscatter" radar...
...But, says Freeze director Robert Stein, "There's not a great sense right now of where Mai-ners are on this issue...
...After about ninety minutes, some young, nervous, angry soldiers came in with their guns drawn and escorted her out...
...They suspect that both the Navy and the Air Force want to know how much warning the fancy radar can provide against a Soviet first strike with sea-launched cruise missiles—even though the Navy denies this link...
...Tony DePaul (Tony DePaul is a staff writer for The Providence Journal in Rhode Island, where a longer version of this article originally appeared...
...He felt it dishonored the men who died next to him...
...No matter which scenario applies, some officials in Maine speculate that the missile launchings have nothing to do with testing the cruise missile...
...or some kind of advanced cruise missile, perhaps employing stealth technology, or one with greater speed and range than the existing Tomahawk...
...She set up a house made of Lego blocks to symbolize homeless children...
...In the five years since the U.S...
...How many of them are so afflicted with wasting disease of normalcy...
...He was trained in Cuba, where he received his medical degree in 1986...
...I have not been able to earn a cent in my profession since I returned here," says Marryshow...
...In September, Suter left...
...She set up a crucifix and poured her own blood over it...
...RSA oversees programs largely aimed at helping disabled adults become gainfully employed...
...Shearing it was easy, she says...
...Expectations were too great...
...Things were tough financially...
...intervention" of October 1983...
...Still incomplete, the system is already remaking the game of cat-and-mouse played out over the Atlantic by American and Soviet pilots...
...Eber lined up family members to take care of her mother-in-law while she turned her attention to the Peace Planting...
...Don't I have a right to freedom of speech, a right to express my conscience...
...There are no peacemakers because the making of peace is at least as costly as the making of war— at least as exigent, at least as disruptive, at least as liable to bring disgrace and prison and death in its wake...
...Eber was arrested for planting a geranium and praying inside a missile site...
...She made some improvements in services, hired thirty-seven professionals, and got staffing up to 200...
...Then, defying court orders not to repeat their action, they went back three more times that week and did just that...
...He was devastated that the Bomb was dropped," she says...
...Its computer brain can "see" the terrain as it flies up to 1,350 miles at high-subsonic speeds of more than 500 miles an hour...
...Buildings along the square sport graffiti demanding Yankees Out and Yankees Go Home...
...The restlessness grew deeper over the years, but there were the usual reasons for not acting on it...
...The Navy and the FAA say the test missiles will climb to about 2,000 feet whenever they approach areas like Shin Pond, where bush pilots are known to be flying...
...Three others had been convicted in an earlier trial and one pleaded no contest...
...Grenada is a microcosm of the hemisphere," says a U.S...
...The door closed behind her...
...Bishop is still revered in Grenada...
...Maine people seem largely indifferent to the sudden creation in their state of a test range for weapons of mass destruction...
...Skinner, forty-three, who lives on the pond with his wife and their two teen-agers, takes off and lands on the pond several thousand times a year...
...You can't measure the success you've had," says Dorothy Eber...
...All sought licenses and jobs in the local medical system, which is so seriously understaffed since the intervention that Project Hope has spent $12 million—half of it from the U.S...
...But she gave them no hint what she was up to, because she didn't want them to be considered accomplices...
...However, no further rotation has taken place...
...They felt they were fighting a just war...
...At their next protest, they burned the orders...
...She supported it so strongly, critics said, that it interfered with other programs...
...And that was the story of services for the disabled in the Reagan Administration...
...More, obviously, is at stake than Marryshow's medical qualifications...
...The questions fall on deaf ears in Blaize's government...
...But after they dropped the Bomb on those people, it wasn't just any more...
...Originally, the oversight hearings were supposed to consider Supported Employment, and this new program was strongly defended by Madeleine Will, secretary of the Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services (OSERS) and Dart's superior...
...We're trying to bring out the best aspects of the People's Revolutionary Government—Bishop's government— today...
...While Skinner was flying bear hunters in and out of Shin Pond in October, the Air Force was at work just seventy miles away opening up a strategic radar gap between the United States and the Soviet Union...
...Aside from bush pilots, who raise the safety issue, and peace activists, who raise the political and moral issues, there has been little public opposition to the cruise-missile tests...
...Further hearings have been held...
...Dorothy Eber has felt a restless anger over the weapons of nuclear war since 1945, when her husband returned home after World War II with a feeling of betrayal...
...The General Accounting Office has come to call...
...Thought I'd get your attention," he says...
...official here, "but here the terms are starker, more clear-cut...
...She wrote Save the Children on the cement cylinder with her blood...
...On that day, Marry -show was commissioned a captain in Bishop's People's Revolutionary Army...
...I can safely say our percentage of support has increased, though our opponents always try to portray us as a small, communist-leaning party...
...In March, Sue Suter, a rehabilitation counselor who had polio as a child and walks with crutches and braces, was appointed...
...Before her stood a thick cement cylinder, an eerie icon that gave her a chill of fear...
...The Navy has said the cruise missile must be tested in Maine to learn more about cold-weather flights, and to train the fleet operators who may one day be ordered to launch them in wartime...
...Vincent, leaving him alone...
...No polls have been taken...
...The intervention was the easy part...
...Now we have to work together to meet the needs of the people, provide a context so democracy has a chance...
...In November, after a three-day trial in a Kansas City Federal court, Eber and two co-defendants were found guilty of four counts each of trespassing...
...It was the most spiritual Holy Thursday and Good Friday I ever had," says this sixty-four-year-old mother of four and grandmother of eleven...
...Here, the black humor of someone in the Air Force may be showing: Whenever a Soviet pilot is intercepted, it is because his plane was hit with radar signals beamed from a transmission tower in a town called Moscow, Maine...
...was forced to resign his post as commissioner of the Rehabilitation Services Administration, he learned that not even a politically appointed agency head can blow the whistle...
...After I was refused staff that had been authorized by Congress with the appropriations in place, it was apparent that I could not have the Council function like the law required____I quietly went to Congress and requested that the Council become independent...
...So, on Holy Thursday of 1984, she was arrested for praying...
...He heads the Massachusetts Rehabilitation Commission, and he continued, "She damaged the credibility of three agencies—not just RSA and OSERS but also the National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation Research (NIDRR...
...invasion, per-capita income in this island nation of 94,000 has risen from just above $900 to more than $1,300, thanks in large part to about a quarter of a billion dollars in aid, half of it from the United States and most of the rest from Canada, the European Economic Community, Great Britain, Venezuela, and South Korea...
...George's Market Square...
...But the jobless rate is still between 20 and 33 per cent, depending on who's making the estimate...
...And there is a major brain drain, with the skilled and educated going off to Canada and the United States...
...But that was only a year after the U.S...
...The cruise missile will fly low, at speeds approaching the speed of sound, with two war-planes in pursuit...
...When Justin Dart Jr...
...Shortly thereafter, I was removed from the chairmanship by a letter from White House personnel indicating it was the decision of the President to rotate the chairmanship on an annual basis...
...At the missile silo, Eber was surprised at how cheap the lock was...
...After Dart's departure a year ago, his position and that of the deputy commissioner remained vacant for several months...
...Small enough to be hidden in the back of a truck, or under a lifeboat on the deck of a fishing trawler, "smart" enough to fly under any future Star Wars umbrella, able to level the largest cities and the millions who live in them, the cruise missile, Lown says, is the ultimate terror...
...invasion...
...I think of the good, decent, peace-loving people I have known by the thousands, and I wonder...
...She now cares for her mother-in-law, who is ninety-seven...
...First two went, then two months later three more accepted...
...Since then, six dentists trained in Cuba and five more Cuban-trained physicians have been routinely licensed to practice in Grenada...
...Given its cost—$1.5 million—the missile will be recovered and reused...
...Cheryl A. Davis (Cheryl A. Davis is a free-lance writer in Palo Alto, California...
...But even if you don't change anything, you still have to do what's right...
...I realized this would open up and cause such destruction," she says...
...He said RSA collected and evaluated data inadequately, issued both regulations and funds late, lacked policy guidance and expertise, and failed to train its personnel and service providers properly...
...So like most people, we didn't think about it...
...Don't I have a right to employment as much as these other physicians...
...If the missile stays on its northern course, it will dart through the valleys of northern Maine, skimming around mountains and veering off on a new southwesterly heading somewhere north of Shin Pond...
...As he drops out of the sky at 100 miles an hour, he is busy shifting his gaze straight ahead, left and right, up and down, looking for any of the other eight or nine pilots who fly out of Shin Pond regularly, and anyone else who might be dropping in for fuel...
...The arms race," Lown told his audience, "is soon about to whirl around your very homes here in northern Maine...
...The Navy says the higher altitude should keep civilian pilots at least 500 feet away from the missile...
...As midair scares go, this one was harmless compared to the one Skinner soon will have to face...
...So the trial was frustrating...
...She uses a wheelchair...
...This is one of those little things...
...It will be the first of many...
...With little public opposition, the Navy simply announced last spring that it intends to fire missiles across Maine every few months until the end of the century...
...After Dart's testimony, Representative Major Owens, the New York Democrat who chaired the hearing, heaped further criticism on the agency...
...So Marryshow, married to a Cuban woman and father of two children, has turned his attention to politics...
...The missiles can skim along a valley at treetop level and veer around the next mountain, or jump over it...
...I have to cross that missile's flight path twice on every flight," he says, "and I would dare to say that 60 per cent of the time, I'm not looking out that front windshield...
...Both former agency heads are disabled, Dart a "post-polio," Gray a quadriplegic...
...But since the mission is classified, no civilians know exactly what the Navy is testing: the missile, which has been tested more than 200 times over Western and Southern states and deployed at sea for six years...
...One of seven people who held a prayer vigil in the lobby of Chicago-based military contractor Morton Thiokol, she spent most of Good Friday in jail...
...But then her husband was diagnosed as having cancer, and she took on the full-time job of caring for him the last three years of his life...
...They told me anything I took in with me would be used as evidence in court," she says...
...But it's the little things that make the difference...
...A devout Catholic, she looked at this work as a calling from God and enjoyed immense spiritual satisfaction...
...The ten refused, holding out for several months...
...There's been no big boom," says a grocer in St...
...The Navy estimates that its chase pilots will have four seconds to spot and avoid a midair collision with someone like Scotty Skinner...
...He is not against the Navy shooting off cruise missiles, as long as they shoot them off somewhere else...
...RSA, he said, was an agency in trouble, "ravaged by disunity and hostility," its relationships with state rehabilitation agencies and the disabled deeply disturbed...
...When the doctor returned home, he spent a month pounding on the doors of Grenada's government officials...
...One director of a state agency places much of the blame on Madeleine Will...
...The Maine Freeze Campaign and the state's chapter of Physicians for Social Responsibility are collecting signatures to force a nonbinding referendum on the missile launchings in November 1989...
...An Agency in Trouble WASHINGTON, D.C...
...But, until the Bush Administration finds a new commissioner and deputy commissioner able and willing to take on a mess, the Rehabilitation Services Administration remains in need of rehabilitation...
...You just have to plant the seeds and hope the next generation reaps the harvest...
...But he can't practice medicine here...
...The cruise missile is the high-tech "smart bomb" already deployed in the arsenals of the superpowers...
...People often don't do things because they expect big results...
Vol. 53 • January 1989 • No. 1
