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Inevitably, as in every military action, there would be detailed assessments of how well, or how poorly, various armed units had performed. There was immediate praise by military experts both in the U.S. and abroad for the skill shown by the Army Rangers. Pilots of the first transports carrying the Rangers on the invasion strike found so much deadly antiaircraft fire at the normal jump altitudes of about 1,000 ft. that they quickly changed the plans. The C-130s dived in under the umbrella of flak, forcing the Rangers to leap from a mere 500 ft., a height not employed in combat since World War II. It gives the jumpers only 19 seconds before their bone-jarring landing. Said a high U.S. military commander: "The Cubans weren't expecting that." The jumps, said a foreign military expert, demonstrated the "superb training" of the Rangers.
The (Navy Seals also won praise for moving swiftly by landing craft to secure early beachheads and to fight their way through enemy forces to the hilltop house overlooking St. George's Harbor, where Scoon had been under virtual house arrest. The Seals protected him throughout a night as Grenadian revolutionary troops surrounded the compound. Many of the Seals inside suffered wounds before Army units finally broke through to free them and Scoon. During the beach landing in rough seas, however, a landing craft carrying the Seals overturned, drowning four of the commando-style specialists.
There were also some tragic mistakes.
The worst was the U.S. bombing of a mental hospital, some 200 yards from Fort Frederick, on Richmond Hill above St. George's. The fort was one of the last heavily defended sites manned by Grenada's soldiers. It was protected by antiaircraft guns, one of them only 150 yards from the hospital. The soldiers had placed a Grenadian army flag outside the hospital building, which bore no markings showing that it was a medical facility.
Corsair jets from the U.S.S. Independence were sent to knock out the antiaircraft batteries and to bomb the fort. But the pilots blasted the hospital as well, apparently in the belief that it was part of the military complex. A three-story wing was leveled, burying many of the occupants. Mortuary workers found at least 20 bodies in the rubble, but other patients were missing. The death toll was difficult to determine, since some of the mentally-ill occupants had wandered away from the building during the U.S. attack.
The bombing of the hospital seemed to be an understandable error. But it was less excusable that it was first reported by a Canadian journalist and was not promptly confirmed by Pentagon officials. The Pentagon explained that by the time U.S. Marines took over the fort on foot the next day, the hospital personnel had buried the victims, and the Marines had no reason to suspect that anyone had died there.