
DATE: Saturday, May 31, 1997                TAG: 9705310261

SECTION: FRONT                   PAGE: A1   EDITION: FINAL 

SOURCE: BY EARL SWIFT, STAFF WRITER 

                                            LENGTH:  131 lines

NORFOLK SHIP EVACUATES 900 BUT 85 SORTIES FROM FREETOWN LEAVE MANY PEOPLE BEHIND

In an operation praised as ``incredibly smooth,'' Marines and helicopters from the Norfolk-based amphibious assault ship Kearsarge plucked 320 Americans and about 580 foreign civilians from troubled Sierra Leone Friday.

Beginning shortly after daybreak, choppers made 85 sorties from the ship to a landing zone outside a waterfront hotel in the west African nation's capital, Freetown, where they picked up refugees from the chaos spawned by Sunday's coup.

The evacuation went off without a shot fired at the CH-46 Sea Knight and CH-53 Super Stallion helicopters, shipboard officials said during a telephone briefing by satellite at the Pentagon.

By late in the day the 900 evacuees, roughly 200 of them children, had been fed Navy chow and were bunking in the Kearsarge's crew spaces and hangar bay as the ship stood by about 20 miles off Sierra Leone's coast.

But hundreds of would-be evacuees, many of them weeping, were left behind when the last helicopter swooped away from the seaside Mammy Yoko hotel, trapped in a city overrun by looters and marauding troops.

One woman, from nearby Gambia, sobbed as she watched her American boyfriend climb into one of the choppers.

``They left me behind,'' she cried. An anxious Marine handed her $5 for the taxi ride home.

Away from the hotel's relative safety, shocked residents surveyed damage to their city and mutineers rumbled through the streets in stolen vehicles, firing in the air and shouting, ``If you don't want us, then you are going to die!''

The airlift, which began with choppers touching down outside the hotel to drop off a contingent of Marine guards, came despite warnings against foreign flights from low-level Sierra Leone army officials who toppled the country's elected government Sunday.

``I think it went rather well,'' said Marine Col. Sam Helland, commander of the Camp Lejeune, N.C.-based 22nd Marine Expeditionary Unit aboard the Kearsarge. ``It went incredibly smooth. The Department of State did a tremendous job in there, making sure everything was set up and ready.''

``It's been a very long day,'' said Navy Capt. Gregory W. Ertel, commodore of Amphibious Squadron 4, as chopper crews pulled the last Marines from the hotel grounds.

``We have again demonstrated the flexibility of these amphibious ready groups, the Navy-Marine Corps team,'' said Ertel, of Virginia Beach. ``I'm very, very proud of these individuals.''

American Charge d'Affaires Anne Wright said the U.S. embassy - now pocked by bullet holes, its upper windows shattered by Sunday's fighting and, with the Marines' departure, guarded only by private Wackenhut security personnel - closed in the face of deteriorating order in the city of 470,000.

Sunday's coup was the third in five years in Sierra Leone, a mineral-rich country impoverished by decades of corruption, political misadventure and civil war.

The February 1996 election of civilian President Ahmed Tejan Kabbah ended several years of army rule and installed a civilian government until a weekend jail breakout by Maj. Johnny Paul Koroma sparked the current crisis.

Kabbah fled the country, and as this week progressed, Koroma could barely control his rebel troops. Shabbily dressed, gun-toting mutineers burst into homes and businesses, taking what they could, and often burning them when there was nothing to be grabbed.

Nearly 400 Britons and other foreigners scrambled aboard a British-chartered jumbo jet at the Freetown airport Friday, many reporting they had been robbed of everything but their clothes by Koroma's forces.

``Seven of them just went through our home, taking everything,'' Maureen Cummings, a 36-year-old Briton, said at London's Gatwick Airport Friday.

U.S. Embassy officials had kept a register of Americans in the country - ``about 450, maybe, maximum,'' Wright said - many of whom fled before Friday.

``They were provided with notice,'' she said from the Kearsarge, ``and we certainly hope that everyone who wanted to get out got down to that landing zone.''

Many of the foreigners who got out of the country were grateful to the United States for rescuing them.

``Our government has forgotten us,'' an Italian, Guglielli Narciso, said before boarding a helicopter. ``They don't care.''

But perhaps the most eloquent plea to flee the terror in what was once an easygoing, ramshackle city slightly larger than Virginia Beach came from an 18-month-old girl found wandering the hotel, a British passport and enough cash for a London taxi journey tucked into her shirt.

Michelle - left to fend for herself in the human stampede - was one of the youngest people evacuated Friday.

Also among those aboard the choppers were the deputy defense minister and planning minister of Sierra Leone's deposed government, as well as a pregnant woman in labor.

``We had to figure out how to get her out to the ship, which caused some consternation,'' one CH-53 pilot said by telephone, noting that she was still in labor hours later.

``We're kind of hoping,'' he added, ``that she gives the child the name `Kearsarge' somewhere in there.''

The evacuation marked the second such airlift by a Norfolk-based amphibious ship since mid-March, when the assault ship Nassau snatched more than 400 Americans from Albania's capital as it spun out of control following a financial collapse.

It also marked the fourth time in a year that Norfolk warships have parked off troubled foreign shores in expectation of pulling American citizens out of harm's way. The Navy was dispatched to Liberia last summer, to Albania this spring, then to the former Zaire.

The 844-foot Kearsarge left Norfolk two weeks early, on April 15, to relieve the Nassau off Zaire, since renamed Congo, as a countryside rebellion there neared the capital of Kinshasa.

But Sunday's coup in Sierra Leone trumped the danger in Congo, and the Kearsarge steamed north.

In Freetown, the mutineers joined forces with the Revolutionary United Front rebel army, which had waged a five-year war against the government, to cement control of the capital. Checkpoints went up around the city, and more than 300 expatriates holed up in the Mammy Yoko.

The first night they huddled in the basement, listening to mutinous troops hold up staff at gunpoint and then help themselves to drinks at the bar.

Michelle, the little girl found wandering in the hotel, was spotted by Mammy Yoko manager Roger Cookes, a Texan who had turned the Mammy Yoko from a waterfront dive to Freetown's best hotel. He scooped her up and gave the girl to his fiancee, Vanessa Schillaci, gazing at them as they prepared to board a chopper. Cookes stayed behind.

He wasn't surprised at the choice Michelle's guardians made, leaving her at the hotel. ``Our hotel's become a safe haven,'' he said, adding bitterly of the mutineers: ``They were bandits, not soldiers.'' MEMO: The Associated Press contributed to this report ILLUSTRATION: Color photo by U.S. NAVY

Evacuees from Sierra Leone are escorted on the Norfolk-based

Kearsarge, which is stationed 20 miles off the West African coast.

Color FILE PHOTO

The amphibious assault ship Kearsarge evacuated about 300 Americans

from Sierra Leone's capital Friday, plus a pregnant woman in labor

and a lost, 18-month-old girl.

Color map

Area shown: Sierra Leone and Congo KEYWORDS: EVACUATION U.S.S. KEARSARGE SIERRA LEONE