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While the medical school staff tried frantically to locate the 200 students living off campus, John Doyle of Lindenhurst, N.J., heard banging in the back of the house he shared with four roommates between the two campuses. Grenadian soldiers were battering the kitchen door with gun butts. The students fled to a bathroom, then feared that if they surprised the intruders by being there, they might be shot. Doyle took off his U.S.A.-emblazoned T shirt, walked into the kitchen and found himself facing 30 soldiers carrying AK-47 rifles and dressed in battle fatigues. The soldiers set up portable radios and turned the house into a small battle center. After three hours of captivity, the students were released without harm. Said Doyle about the soldiers: "I asked them to please lock up when they left." (He later found the house abandoned, locked, the AK-47s left behind.)
By nightfall on the invasion's first day, the U.S. force was far from firmly in control of Grenada. It was not until 7:12 a.m. on Wednesday that the Marines were able to overcome troops besieging the Governor General's mansion and join the Seals who were inside it. Scoon and 32 civilians with him asked to be taken out of Grenada for their own protection. They were carried by helicopter to the Guam.
Students at the Grand Anse campus still had seen no Marines. Barettella's amateur radio station, virtually the sole source of specific action reports for more than 30 hours, reached the school's chancellor, Charles Modica, in New York. Modica had been highly critical of the invasion, contending that his students had not been in danger before it began. He had urged students to remain in school, saying they could not expect a refund of their $6,000 annual tuition if they left. Now his assistant, Kopycinski, took the microphone in Grenada and pleaded, "Our water supply has been cut off and food supply is scarce, and we'd all feel a hell of a lot better if we could see some American faces around the campus."
It was not until 4 p.m. on Wednesday that airborne units assaulted the troops surrounding the campus. Some of the students feared they would be taken hostage, although the Grenadians and Cubans had never made a move to harm them. They apparently ringed the school in a defensive stance, knowing the U.S. forces could not use heavy firepower with the students so close. Finally, Marines and Rangers in six choppers broke through. Faces blackened, weapons at the ready, they kicked a dormitory door down and one declared, "We're friendly forces. We are American Marines." Students soon began running for the evacuation helicopters in a wild scramble while shots whizzed about them. Some hit the dirt and crawled to the waiting choppers.
At roughly the same time on Wednesday, U.S. forces rushed into a now deserted Fort Frederick and found only abandoned inmates at Richmond Hill prison. The invading forces carefully avoided endangering the Soviet embassy in St. George's, where 49 diplomats, scornfully described by Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger as "embassy people, spies, KGB people and others," were in seclusion. Ten East Germans, three Bulgarians and 24 North Koreans were also at the Soviet embassy.