During the following decades, the Navy has used the area as a live-ammunition practice range, which the Pentagon calls the Atlantic Fleet Weapons Training Facility. At the other end of the island, the Navy operates a huge munitions dump. The people of Vieques are squeezed in between the dump and the range. Practice at the range goes on for as many as 200 days out of every year. Combat planes bomb and strafe the island.
Destroyers bombard it from sea.
Vieques Times government even lends Vieques out to the navies of NATO and Latin American countries so they too can fire their shells at it. Maneuvers have included, on occasion, practice with depleted uranium shells, napalm and cluster bombs. That several thousand Puerto Ricans, all of them U.S. citizens, live next to a bombing range on an island only twice the size of Manhattan has never seemed to bother the Pentagon, which claims Vieques is essential to national defense. Look around you, there isn't a palm tree in sight. Torres spoke as he and hundreds of pupils and teachers stood outside their school to cheer the Jackson delegation's visit to the island.