DAN'S PAPERS, April 3, 2009 Page 11 www.danshamptons.com
Bombing Islands Vieques, Puerto Rico, Kahoolawe & Fort Tyler, East Hampton By Dan Rattiner It has always seemed incredible to me that our army and air force, for many years, would bomb the hell out of beautiful islands along our coasts for target practice. They don’t do it anymore. But until about 1975, they did. It was at that time that Americans woke up to the fact that we were poisoning our environment and one way we were doing it was with gunpowder, smoke, explosives and rockets. So we stopped. In my travels, I have encountered numerous such islands. One was the Island of Vieques, off the coast of Puerto Rico. (I was actually on the island while they were bombarding it. One half, the Navy owned. The other half, the Navy did not own, and so the locals there put up with thunder, smoke, jets flying overhead and flashes of explosions on the Navy half. And so did I. Just part of the day, is what it seemed to us all at the time.) Another victim, off the coast of Maui, was the Island of Kahoolawe, which the Navy bought in its entirety. It was just a mile off Wailea. They had stopped bombing by the time I was there, but because it was going to take years to find all the landmines, live shells and other poisonous material there, it was off limits. But you could look at it. Or secretly skin dive or snorkel off it. There was a great coral reef filled
with colorful fishes just offshore. Here on the East End, there was an island just off our shores that was bombed so much over a 50-year period that it is no longer an island, but just a pile of rubble. Because there was a sandbar that you could walk across to get to it at low tide, the discoverers of it considered it part of the larger island it was attached to, which they called the Isle of Wight.
known, stuck out from the sand bar extending along the north side of Gardiner’s Island, ending in a small earthen blip of land about four acres in size. In 1851, President John Tyler (who married his second wife, East Hampton born and raised Julia Tyler, in the White House) ordered that the government buy Gardiner’s Island Point from the Gardiner family so the Army could build a stone lighthouse on the tip. The sale went through, the lighthouse was built, but then, just 30 years later, a hurricane washed away the sandbar and in 1894 another hurricane damaged the lighthouse beyond repair and it was abandoned. It actually collapsed into the sea three years after that. What a mess. One year later, in 1898, Spain and the United States were on the brink of war. President William McKinley sent a delegation of diplomats to Cuba — Cuba was a Spanish colony then — to try to work out a peace deal. But at the same time, he ordered a gun battery built on the rocks of the ruined lighthouse at Gardiner’s Island Point, facing out to sea, in order to prevent the Spanish Navy, which was formidable, from coming into Long Island Sound to invade America. McKinley renamed Gardiner’s Island
On the East End, there was an island that was bombed so much that it’s now just a pile of rubble. You do not know an island by that name today. It was discovered in the 1500s, but it was not until 1639 that Lion Gardiner sailed across the Long Island Sound from Connecticut with his family to settle there and subsequently rename it Gardiner’s Island, which you do know. Gardiner was the first English settler in the State of New York. Gardiner’s Island Point, as it came to be
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