Rural Haitians Hope Today’s Marines Will Bring Peace and Food : Military: Families in mountainous region fear ravages of last occupation. They are among poorest in country.

The last time the U.S. Marines came here, they brought death.

The people living on this remote mountainside remember that; they wonder what the Marines will bring this time.

About 25 miles south of Cap Haitien, the people have watched with awe as Cobra helicopters and C-130s have barreled over their sky all week. They hope today’s Marines bring peace and food and opportunity, not the destruction that befell those who resisted the Marine occupation here earlier this century.

Hylares Vergniaud, sitting in the still heat of her general store, clings to that hope because she has heard the stories of her grandparents.

“I pray the Marines this time will help get our country back in order,” she said.

Vergniaud spoke of the suffering her people have seen from an increasingly severe international embargo that failed to shift the Haitian military men who ousted democratically elected President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. That put her in mind of the years of war and horror between 1915 and 1934, when the Marines last were here and fighting the local caco guerrilla resistance.

She prayed that unlike the last time, today’s suffering would give way to joy.

“When God spanks his children,” she said, “he then gives them food.”

The last time God was angry, he sent the Marines and their mule packs of dynamite up along the Grande River that snakes through the imposing mountains called the Massif du Nord.

The Haitians in these mountains lead the poorest of lives in a tropical paradise. To reach them from the coast and Cap Haitien, where the Marines landed Tuesday, it is first a two-hour excursion over broken roads. Then feet have to take over where tires cannot tread.

The path leads up past verdant gardens, lush with orange groves and banana trees and the romantic smell of cocoa. Up farther, the Haitian proverb, “Behind mountains are more mountains,” comes to mind.

Cine Chose Mesmen is 69 and lives with his second wife in a small hut with a tin roof. They have had 12 children together, and Mesmen has six by his first wife. They have all seen the helicopters.

Mesmen remembers the last Marine presence: “They shot them dead. They shot all the cacos they could find.”

He told of a young man named Victor who was shot in an attack by the Marines at nearby Ft. Riviere, one of a string of rock-and-limestone forts built in a still-earlier conflict, to guard against the French, from whom Haitians wrested their independence in 1804.

The cacos, hundreds of them, had fled to the mountains in a desperate attempt to prevent the Marines from spreading out over Haiti.

“They shot Victor in the forehead, but he did not die,” Mesmen said. “And for the rest of his life he walked around town with this bullet hole in his head.”

The man who led the Marines was both brave and harsh. He was Lt. Col. Smedley Butler.

Butler would go on to become a general and a hero, one of only two Marines to win two Medals of Honor. His leadership would help bring the Marines into the modern era of amphibious warfare during World War II. He was a hard disciplinarian, but he was devoted to his men. His devotion to the Corps he proclaimed on his chest: a tattoo of the Marine eagle, globe and anchor.

But some of today’s Marines, in Cap Haitien this week, concede that there was a darker side to Butler.

“The impression we have now is that he did not do a real good job in the way he treated the Haitians,” one Marine official said. “The Marines were cruel, and Butler was seen as a racist, and they brought a lot to bear on the Haitian people.”

The rebel leader bore the grand name of Charlemagne Peralte. He despised the foreign intruders and led his mountain guerrillas into skirmishes against the Marines.

But his record was not pristine, either. His resistance fighters soon became unable to provide for themselves in the mountain forts; they took to looting and pillaging the small villages. Caco , in Creole, means “bird of prey.”

The people could trust no one. And then one day, in 1919, Butler led more than 60 Marines up the mountain with rifles and two tons of dynamite. They cornered a band of the cacos in the fort and killed all but a few. Peralte was among those who escaped.

The next day Butler marched back into the fort and, with his dynamite, blew it apart.

Several months later, the Marines killed Peralte. Then they photographed his body for propaganda. The move backfired; the image of the dead resistance leader spawned generations of anger and the embellishments about Marine brutality reflected in the memories of the mountain folk.

Today the people of Bahon turn their eyes skyward when they hear the Marines flying overhead. And they wonder: What will they bring?