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Home » Culture » Life

Sunday, September 7, 2008

Winning hearts, minds in Latin America

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Pentagon's humanitarian missions a 'soft power' for locales

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  • U.S. Navy photograph
Lt. Brian Barber unwraps the bandages from Ches Lacallo while he recovers from eye surgery in the medical ward of the amphibious assault ship USS Kearsarge  off of Puerto Cabezas last month.
  • Photograph by David Axe/Special to The Washington Times
USS Kearsarge sailors man the rails as the ship departs Norfolk last month. The ship's usual complement of 1,100 sailors was boosted by around 500 medical staff, engineers and aviators for the humanitarian mission  to Latin America.
  • Photograph by David Axe/Special to The Washington Times
Air Force engineers unload gear from a Marine helicopter at the Puerto Cabezas airstrip last month. The Latin American soft-power mission included members of all the U.S. military branches, plus many civilian medical and humanitarian personnel.
  • Photograph by David Axe/Special to The Washington Times
With their shifts over, weary doctors and nurses board a landing craft bound for the USS Kearsarge off of Puerto Cabezas last month.
  • Photograph by David Axe/Special to The Washington Times
Angry Nicaraguans gather at the main medical site in Puerto Cabezas after waiting hours to see doctors from USS Kearsarge last month.
  • Photograph by David Axe/Special to The Washington Times
The USS Kearsarge, an 840-foot U.S. Navy amphibious assault ship, is one of roughly three dozen such ships in the U.S. Navy.  It has been used for humanitarian missions in Latin America.

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By David Axe SPECIAL TO THE WASHINGTON TIMES

PUERTO CABEZAS, Nicaragua | From the time he was 4 years old, Ches Lacollo, 11, suffered from an abnormal growth on the inside of his right eyelid. The mass obstructed his vision, made reading impossible and so deformed his appearance that, he said, his friends and family avoided looking directly at him.

Removing the growth required only a fairly simple surgery. But in Puerto Cabezas, on Nicaragua's impoverished eastern coast, there are few doctors and only basic health facilities. Most surgeries require that the patients fly hundreds of miles across the country to the capital of Managua. But the $100 for the twice-daily flights out of Puerto Cabezas' sole airstrip is more than most local residents can afford.

So for seven years, Ches suffered and hoped for a miracle.

That miracle arrived in perhaps the strangest possible form. On Aug. 11, the hulking gray shape of the USS Kearsarge, an 840-foot U.S. Navy amphibious assault ship, appeared in the ocean haze a few miles from Puerto Cabezas' sun-scorched, seaweed-strewn beaches. Four days later, Ches found himself on a bed in Kearsarge's air-conditioned medical ward, being prepped for a quick surgery to remove the growth at no cost to his family.

"Even though it's a simple surgery, it will have a big impact on this child's life," said Cmdr. Brian Alexander, an optometrist normally assigned to the Portsmouth Naval Hospital in Virginia.

Mere hours later, Lt. Brian Barber began unwrapping the bandages from Ches' head to give him his first view of the world through "new" eyes.

Ches had many people to thank, but none more than Adm. James Stavridis, the charismatic boss of U.S. Southern Command, based a thousand miles away in Miami.

Despite the distance, Adm. Stavridis was a constant presence in Kearsarge's gray corridors, in her chilly operating rooms and in Puerto Cabezas' sweltering streets, which for two weeks in August hosted some 300 medical specialists fromthe amphibious ship.

For Adm. Stavridis, a prominent former destroyer captain and the author of four books, is one of the masterminds of a radical, but largely unheralded, new strategy for protecting American interests without ever firing a shot.

With the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan gobbling up most U.S. military resources and monopolizing the attention of the nation's top policy-makers, Adm. Stavridis and like-minded senior officers, with the blessing of Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates, are using leftover people and weapon systems, plus the freedom that comes from being mostly ignored by the public, to invade some of the world's most desperate and volatile countries with free medical care and education and economic assistance.

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