The Navy leaves Vieques, May 1, 2003

On May 1, 2003 the Navy ended live-fire training on Vieques. The date is the end of the bombing, not the end of the Navy's environmental record nor the end of the unexploded ordnance. Much of the former range passed to the Department of the Interior and the Fish and Wildlife Service as refuge land, a legal category that preserves and also restricts. Those who wanted a town on the eastern end got a refuge and a cleanup.

May 1, 2003: live-fire bombing stops. David Sanes is 1999. The Navy's departure from Culebra is 1975.

The four years after Sanes were politics: a referendum, White House promises, arrests, a rotation of training elsewhere. The departure is therefore a movement victory and a calendar decision by the Department of Defense. Both can be true. Neither replaces the date. After the last exercise, the noise stopped and not all the fences fell.

Munitions cleanup is slow, expensive, and incomplete in the manner of range cleanups. Fish and Wildlife pages describe a refuge with beaches, lagoons, and restricted former impact areas. Tourism photographs prefer the beaches. The restriction signs are also part of the story. A hurricane later moved sand and, in places, metal. That is no reason to fuse this record with María.

Vieques remains a municipality with a ferry problem, a health argument, and a land-use argument. The Navy's departure removed an employer and an enemy. It did not install a new grid or a new hospital. PREPA's island-wide failures still arrive by submarine cable and by time. Local memory dates the silence from May 2003.

Interior, not a municipal land grab. The refuge is the public document to cite about what the land became.

Write the departure as a stop to live-fire bombing. Then stop. The next temptation is to retell Culebra or open a full independence narrative. Other pages carry that. This one carries the first of May.

Sources: U.S. Department of the Interior / U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Vieques National Wildlife Refuge. Freeze 2026-08-22.