The Difficulty and Sometimes Violence of Evacuations

On that second day of the evacuation, we quickly processed and flew out to the USS Kearsarge over 300 persons -- US citizens and specific local government officials who felt their lives were in danger and had been able to get through the AFRC/RUF checkpoints" and the orphans.

For each day of the evacuation, I, along with security, went into the large crowd outside the perimeter of the hotel and looked for any remaining US citizens to make sure we got all U.S. citizens that were there.

As we left a second time, I spoke again with the US citizen manager of the hotel, some members of the international community and Nigerian military who were at the hotel. They all said they were comfortable in remaining in Sierra Leone. As with the first day of the evacuation, there were thousands of Sierra Leoneans who wanted to be evacuated but we could not take them.

With our new passengers, the USS Kearsarge turned and again began the trip to Guinea. Several of the baby orphans had to have medical intervention on the trip as well as later in Guinea.

Then, during the late evening, the hotel manager called the State Department operations center and said that the AFRC military had flown its helicopter gunship to the hotel and was firing into the hotel. Part of the hotel was on fire and several persons including a British soldier and several Nigerian soldiers had been wounded by gun fire from coup ground forces who were coming onto the hotel grounds. On behalf of over 300 persons in the basement of the hotel, he requested evacuation.

We immediately began helicoptering passengers to Conakry to make room for the next group of evacuees as we turned the ship back to Sierra Leone. During the night, the Marine contingent on the ship made plans for how we would handle the evacuation which we anticipated could be under gunfire.

We arrived offshore Freetown at dawn and in a scene out of the movies, I watched from a helicopter above the USS Kearsarge, as several huge hovercraft with giant rooster tails of water streaming behind headed toward the beach near the hotel. The hovercraft drove up onto the beach, Marines disembarked with weapons and quickly constructed a large secure perimeter with concertina wire surrounding the road that paralleled the beach. I was helicoptered into the evacuation site very quickly as I would make the decisions on who would be evacuated. I was the only US diplomat remaining on the ship as I had sent the rest of the diplomatic staff to Conakry to help with the evacuation processing there before Washington told us to go back to Freetown.

Once the beach area was secure, we told persons inside the hotel to come in single file to an opening created in the concertina wire. We hoped the AFRC/RUF forces would not shoot the persons leaving the hotel. I personally checked the documents of each person very quickly and passed them onto the Marines who were putting people directly onto helicopters.

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