By JUAN O. TAMAYO
Herald Staff Writer

VIEQUES ISLAND, Puerto Rico -- A stray bomb from an F-18 jet that killed a
civilian guard on the U.S. Navy's prime bombing range in the Atlantic here last
month has unleashed an uproar demanding that the site be closed.

Standing on a beach carpeted with spent bombs and bullets, Puerto Rican Sen.
Ruben Berrios predicted victory for a broad coalition of voices calling for a
permanent halt to live bombings.

``We already hold the moral high ground,'' said Berrios, who with a dozen other
members of the Puerto Rican Independence Party has been camping illegally on
the Vieques range for two weeks.

For the Navy, the turn of events is ominous. The incident has darkened the Puerto
Ricans' normally favorable view of the U.S. military, and the stakes are far higher
than the loss of just another practice bombing site.

The Vieques range is part of a much larger and more significant warfare training
area that embraces a wide range of naval activities, from aerial bombardment to
undersea movement. The Navy says that replicating it elsewhere would be costly
and difficult, if not impossible.

The range is a critical part of maintaining the U.S. Atlantic Fleet's readiness for
combat; about 85 percent of the carrier pilots now deployed in the NATO
campaign against Yugoslavia trained here.

The Navy has apologized for the bombing mishap and appointed an admiral to
investigate how the bomb wound up more than a mile off target.

But Puerto Ricans as disparate as pro-statehood Gov. Pedro Rossello and
pro-independence firebrand Lolita Lebron, who shot up the U.S. Congress in 1954,
are demanding that the Vieques range be closed. Also calling for an end to
live-fire exercises are former Gov. Carlos Romero Barcelo, now the
commonwealth's envoy to Washington, and San Juan Archbishop Roberto
Gonzalez Nieves.

Environmentalists have jumped into the fray, pressing their long-standing charges
that the Navy has polluted this tiny island -- only 21 miles long and four miles
wide -- with munitions such as napalm and depleted uranium rounds.

They also claim the Navy has burned toxic waste in open pits. An unusually high
number of cancer cases reported among Vieques' 9,000 civilian residents is the
result, local physician Rafael Rivera Castaño told a news conference last week.

Economic impact cited

Vieques residents also elevated complaints that military exercises by the Navy,
which owns two-thirds of the island, are strangling their economy by scaring away
tourists.

Despite miles of beautiful beaches, the first luxury hotel is only now going up.
Unemployment stands at 50 percent, and the island's only factory, a General
Electric plant, is about to lay off half its 190 workers.

The uproar has even entangled the Miami-based U.S. Southern Command's
upcoming move of its Army and Special Operations branches from Panama to
Puerto Rico, and fanned simmering opposition to a powerful over-the-horizon radar
under construction in Vieques for the war on drugs.

Berrios and his followers have settled in on the firing range, vowing to block a
resumption of live bombings -- halted after the fatal accident April 19 -- until the
Navy agrees to a permanent closing.

Twenty feet behind their main tent is a two-foot dummy bomb, sticking cartoonlike
out of the white sand. Nearby are the tailfin of a 500-pound bomb and twisted bits
of another.

Looks like a war zone

Spent shell casings and bullets from .50-caliber and 30mm rounds carpet the
sand, and all about are the shattered wrecks of tanks, trucks and planes the Navy
uses as targets for carrier-based pilots and ships' guns.

``This is an abuse,'' said Berrios, who carried out a similar sit-in at a Navy firing
range on nearby Culebra island in 1971. He spent three months in prison for
trespass, but the Navy eventually was forced to close that range.

``Vieques is the heart of our continuing problems as a colony,'' Berrios said. ``The
Americans came here, and stayed here, because Puerto Rico controls the
military approaches to the Caribbean and the Panama Canal.''

Captured during the Spanish-American War in 1898, Puerto Rico has indeed been
a key U.S. military outpost since the 1940s, when the Navy built the Roosevelt
Roads base, now totaling 9,000 acres at the eastern port of Ceiba and 22,000
acres on Vieques, 10 miles to the east.

Roosevelt Roads employs 2,400 military personnel and 2,500 civilians, but is
used by 12,000 others, from National Guard units that conduct field exercises to
military retirees who shop at its tax-free commissary.

Friendly toward military

Puerto Ricans, who are U.S. citizens but cannot vote in federal elections and pay
no U.S. income taxes, have a long and proud history of serving in the military.

Army recruiters here have beaten all their stateside competitors for the past two
years, and an estimated 150,000 veterans live in the commonwealth, known in
Spanish as a Freely Associated State.

But all that goodwill toward the military took a hit when the bomb from a jet based
on the carrier USS John F. Kennedy killed David Sanes, 35, a native of Vieques
working as a guard at the bunkerlike observation post that overlooks the firing
range. Three other people were wounded.

Except for the mistaken bombing, the Navy has flatly denied all the other
allegations that enveloped the case.

The Navy has followed all environmental regulations on Vieques, said Roosevelt
Roads spokesman Roberto Nelson, and pays two nature conservation officials to
monitor the military-controlled areas. About 45 percent of all Navy-owned beaches
have been declared nature preserves.

Navy downplays danger

The dangers of the live-bombing exercises are exaggerated, the spokesman said,
with the range located 11 miles from the nearest civilian areas and taking up only
800 acres on the northern tip of Vieques. Only 8 percent to 12 percent of the
munitions used there carry live explosives, he added.

``There's the image that the Navy is bombing the entire island, but to be fair, the
Live Impact Area is a tiny part of what the Navy has on Vieques,'' Nelson said.

Nowhere on the Atlantic is there a better training ground than the Puerto Rico
Operating Area (PROA), a huge expanse consisting of sea, land and air space
electronically wired to track maneuvers so they can be analyzed later on
computers.

It is the only area where the Atlantic Fleet can stage war games using almost any
combination of units and scenarios, from Marine Corps beach landings to
submarine and aircraft carrier operations, Southern Command spokesman Raul
Duany said.

The Vieques bombing range is a key part of the land leg of the Puerto Rico
Operating Area, a place where monitors on hilltop observation posts use
electronic devices on the ground to score hits or misses by the jet pilots and
ships' cannons.

Precise measurements

``We get electronic, real-time critique data available for measuring bomb drops
accurate to within one foot,'' Nelson said.

The air and sea parts of the Operating Area are largely free of commercial traffic,
and carrier pilots are under strict orders to stay within Navy-owned parts of
Vieques and away from the towns of Isabela Segunda and Esperanza.

But it is underwater, in 400 square miles of deep trenches between Puerto Rico
and St. Croix, that the Navy has its most sophisticated war-game fields,
thoroughly wired for sound to train submarine crews.

``That's the part the Navy likes to talk about the least, but it's a submarine parking
lot out there,'' said political commentator and book author Juan Manuel Garcia
Passalacqua.

Nelson said the underwater range allows the Navy to carry out a variety of
submarine and anti-submarine maneuvers, from firing torpedoes to measuring the
noise signatures of submarine engines.

Navy raises concerns

Closing the Vieques bombing range would affect the entire Puerto Rico Operating
Area, Nelson argued, and would require the Navy to spend ``multimillions of
dollars'' to move all its monitoring equipment to a new range.

So far, all those arguments have largely fallen on deaf ears in Puerto Rico, where
political parties are beginning to jockey for congressional and gubernatorial
elections next year.

Berrios, the pro-independence senator, is confident that the outpouring of
opposition to the bombing range will eventually force the Navy to close the range
and perhaps leave the island altogether.

Half a mile from Berrios' campground, a group of university students has pitched a
tent on a hilltop they call Mount David, after the dead observation-post guard. To
the north, a group of fishermen from the Puerto Rican mainland has done the
same on a sandbar.

About 1,500 protesters briefly invaded Navy-held areas during a demonstration
two weekends ago, and ex-Gov. Romero Barcelo has said he may join Berrios on
the range if the Navy tries to resume live-bombing exercises.

``All the factors are in our favor,'' Berrios said. ``If we don't win now, it may take us
10 years to win, but we will ultimately defeat the Navy.''