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Another mistake resulted in a Corsair strafing a group of U.S. paratroopers. The airborne unit "was trying to rout Cuban soldiers in their well-fortified Calivigny barracks when it called for Navy air help. Their position was close to an abandoned Cuban antiaircraft gun that still pointed toward the sky. From the air it looked like the intended target. "All of a sudden the world blew up," said Lieut. Scott Schafer, who was hit by shrapnel when the Corsair fired. Twelve paratroopers were wounded. As the plane banked for another strike, a ground officer reached the pilot by radio to warn it away.
U.S. gunships, including the Navy's Cobra and the Air Force's
Spectre, proved highly effective with their shooting rate of up to 6,000 rounds a minute. They knocked out Cuban mortar and gun positions that threatened the invading troops early in the action. But they also suffered casualties, some in heroic low-level flights to draw ground fire, thereby exposing the enemy position to attacks from other U.S. choppers. The Pentagon said five helicopters had been shot down. One transport helicopter, hit by ground fire as it brought troops into the Point Salines airstrip, struck another chopper in its uncontrolled descent. Both crashed.
The final American toll was put at 18 killed, 91 wounded. The Pentagon said it had no estimate of Cubans killed or wounded. There was no estimate either of civilian deaths, except for the probability of perhaps 20 at the mental hospital. Nor was there a count of casualties among the Grenadian soldiers. The Pentagon's vagueness on non-U.S. casualties led to suspicions, perhaps unfairly, that it was minimizing their extent.
U.S. intelligence in advance of the operation was, in the understated assessment of Vice Admiral Joseph Metcalf III, the U.S. force commander for the invasion, "not what we would have desired." This was puzzling, since, as early as last March, Reagan had publicly denounced the military buildup in Grenada as "unrelated to any conceivable threat to this island country." Despite Reagan's concern, the CIA did not bother to send agents into the island until two days before the invasion.
Nonetheless, U.S. intelligence estimated fairly accurately that there were some 600 Cubans on the island. What neither the CIA nor military intelligence services predicted, however, was that so many of the construction workers would prove to be well-trained fighters. Nor did the U.S. know how well armed they were. Pentagon intelligence looked bad once the operation began. The Pentagon claimed at one point that up to 1,100 Cubans were actually on the island and at least 600 of them were professional soldiers. But it then conceded that Havana's assertion that 784 were there might be correct.
There was no good explanation for the amateurish performance of some agencies. The U.S. embassy in Barbados, TIME has learned, handled some of its informants on Grenada with extraordinary ineptness. One of them was told simply to call the embassy in Barbados whenever he had new information. But every longdistance call in Grenada is handled by telephone operators who recognize the voices of most island residents prominent enough to have the kind of knowledge that the embassy was seeking.