In Haiti, U.S. troops embrace a new role

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Cite Soleil looks like a place where an American soldier might be expected to fight. An impossibly crowded warren of tin-roofed shacks, open sewers and blind alleys, it is one of the poorest slums in the Americas, with a long history of unrest, crime and violence.

So picture the scene: Just as dawn was breaking Sunday, a battle-hardened platoon from the Army’s 82nd Airborne Division rolled into the area behind a well-armed convoy of Brazilian soldiers attached to the United Nations’ longtime peacekeeping mission in Haiti.
Smoke from cooking and trash fires filled the air, reducing visibility in places to less than a city block but failing to cover the smell of rotting garbage and human waste. Pigs and feral dogs rooted through trash.

Continue reading ‘In Haiti, U.S. troops embrace a new role.’

-- Mitchell Landsberg reporting from Port-au-Prince, Haiti

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