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Americans Turn From Soldiers to Saviors at Hospital : Haiti: When plans to invade Cap Haitien were scrubbed, they turned to trucking in desperately needed medical supplies in a well-received show of friendship.

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TIMES STAFF WRITER

What was supposed to have been a hostile invasion turned Thursday into a mission of mercy as convoys of U.S. Marines headed up the mountain from this northern seaport to deliver medical supplies to the desperately ill of Justinien Hospital.

Patients suffering malaria, typhoid fever, AIDS, even a woman burned badly when someone tossed a lit cigarette at her, could hear the armored trucks trundling up the winding, crowded roads to the hilltop medical facility.

They strained to rise from mattresses on the dirty floor, from dirty sheets and from bare metal box springs, watching with tears in their eyes as Marines from Camp LeJeune, N.C., carried badly needed antibiotics, syringes, gauze, tape, mattresses and linens into the stucco compound.

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Just three days earlier, the Marines on this humanitarian mission had been pumped up to invade Cap Haitien in a midnight attack, one that U.S. military superiors now concede would have cost numerous lives as the Marines fought their way through the crowded slums of Haiti’s second-largest city.

The Marines were incensed when they learned Sunday night that the invasion had suddenly become a peacekeeping operation. But by Thursday, they clearly were enjoying their new role.

“We’re not just get-tough killers,” said Capt. Rich Diddams, a company commander helping to line up the medical convoys. “We feel for these people too.”

Crowds followed the seven convoys that pushed up the steep, craggy roads to the hospital in a show not of force but of friendship.

Lt. Charles Miller, a Navy doctor, had toured the hospital the day before, meeting with five members of the staff there who gave him a long list of requests for help.

“We were able to communicate on a doctor-to-doctor level,” Miller said. “Even though I showed up in uniform with a 9-millimeter weapon, they talked to me on a professional medical level, and we forgot about politics and armies.”

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The supplies had been brought ashore here off the dock landing ship Ashland, ferried on hovercraft and then stacked onto Marine trucks. Miller and Diddams were taking an inventory of the boxes as the first convoy, escorted by two Marine vehicles mounted with machine guns, began the trek uphill Thursday morning. Up they went, along streets jammed with people, past the police station, a convent and the town square, with its monuments to Haitian independence.

Marines on foot and on the trucks waved and gave the thumbs-up sign to the crowds. Smiles from the Marines brought smiles to the children. But as the soldiers passed under the faded blue-and-red Haitian flag and through the gate of the hospital compound, their smiles vanished at the sight of the place.

Dr. Jean-Claude Bastien, the hospital director, greeted them with open arms. To him, they were his liberators.

He has 200 patients but only 75 mattresses. Women give birth on the floor. Burn victims go days without clean bandages. Electricity is available only two hours a day, if the generator works and if there is gasoline. The emergency room is open in the afternoon only.

Windows have no screens. There is no running water. There are patients without hope.

“We have a lack of everything,” Bastien said. “Those things we could buy are very expensive and you have to buy them from outside the country, and it costs a lot of money we don’t have.”

Justinien is a government hospital, and in the three years of the economic embargo on Haiti, the government has done nothing to improve conditions here. “And after this is gone?” Bastien asked, pointing to the six months’ worth of supplies coming in. “Then what?”

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Inside the hospital wards, the patients stared with open mouths at the hustling Marines unloading crates. The hospital staff leaned out windows, thankful but wary, unsure of what the future holds.

Dr. Marie-Carmelle S. LeConte, an anesthesiologist trained in France, said the hospital was performing 90 operations a month 10 years ago. Now that number is down to 25 a month.

“Why?” she asked. “Because we don’t have the supplies, and people don’t have the money to come here.”

“If (military chief Raoul) Cedras doesn’t go by Oct. 15, the embargo will continue and we will be a disaster,” said Dr. Fritz Volmar, an orthopedic surgeon, referring to the U.S.-negotiated agreement by which he is to step down next month. “We are doctors and we can hardly survive. We have children, but what can we give our own children? Nothing.”

But not all was gloom. Said a nurse, gently fanning a patient as Marines stocked supplies nearby: “Before we could only give comfort. Now we can give hope.”

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