CRISIS IN THE CARIBBEAN : Northern Port Residents Greet U.S. Troops With Great Hope : Caribbean: Marines widen operation, quickly seal off airfield and seaboard of Cap Haitien.

CAP HAITIEN, Haiti —  He came running in his bare feet, clad loosely in torn pastel, carrying a long, twisted wooden pole and, flapping in the light tropical breeze, the American flag.

Along his path, dug in two men deep, U.S. Marines from 110 Bravo and 110 Fox companies watched the Haitian man nervously. They wore heavy armor and brown and green camouflage that covered their sweating bodies. They carried M-16 rifles, and behind them Cobra attack helicopters and Army tanks bore witness to the might that is the U.S. armed forces.

Suddenly the Haitian man stopped. He hoisted the flag skyward and shouted in French a word that any American would know: “Merci! Merci! Merci!”

Like a scene from a novel by Graham Greene, between 1,600 and 1,800 U.S. Marines aboard the amphibious helicopter assault ship Wasp landed Tuesday morning here at Haiti’s second-largest city. Isolated in the northern reaches of this Caribbean nation, Cap Haitien is home to 65,000 people packed into thick green hillsides and into the stench-filled swampland where one might expect beaches.

After the initial landing of U.S. soldiers in the capital of Port-au-Prince on Monday, the Marines hitting Cap Haitien greatly widened the U.S. military’s efforts at setting up peacekeeping in anticipation of Haiti’s shift back toward democracy. There are now 6,500 American troops in Haiti.

The Marines took the city by sea and by air, quickly sealing off the airfield and the seaboard. They then set up a mile-long perimeter that kept Marines and Haitians separated by barbed wire.

But the enthusiasm quickly spanned the man-made barricade.

Haitians in large crowds--families and children and grandparents--rushed to the seaside to watch the advancing Marine landing crafts hover above the water.

They crowded into alleyways, struck by the odd sight of Haitian military officers in khakis bicycling past American troops in combat harness.

They filled doorsteps and windows and rooftops, waving to Marines, giving praise to democracy and renouncing the local military regime that they said had beaten men, raped women and stomped this once-promising tourist resort into submission.

“To me? You want to know what is it like to me?” asked David St. Hilaire, 42, who hurried his wife and four children to the pier to watch the Americans. He is unskilled, unemployable, and he begs for food in the marketplace to feed his family.

“I saw human rights coming to me.”

Pedro Wilson, 26, in a faded swimsuit and a San Francisco 49ers T-shirt, pounded his fist on his leg. “We want our freedom back,” he said, referring to the exiled President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, whose restoration is the goal of the U.S. operation in Haiti.

But most looked away whenever a smirking Haitian soldier pedaled by. Many refused to give their names. Only the men would venture forward to talk to the Marines. Women kept far in the back of the surging crowd.

And some still questioned the wisdom of returning Aristide to the Haitian presidency.

Fritz Fratsite stood outside his tiny market, where a sign bearing his store’s name, Marine Terrasse, had faded. Inside, there were only eight bottles of Pepsi. For two years, he has had no electricity, no water. He wanted $2 a piece for the sodas.

Yet despite his desperate situation, he is opposed to Aristide’s return. He said the torture of the Haitian people was begun by Aristide.

He shifted his California Angels baseball cap: “We don’t want him back in power. No good. He’s no good.”

For their part, the Marines, most of them in their early 20s, were touched by the outpouring of emotion that greeted them.

For six weeks, they had been holed up on the Wasp. They had come here from a training exercise in Okinawa, Japan, and have not been home in nearly nine months.

A day earlier, they had come within four hours of a hostile invasion of Haiti. But now they were coming as peacekeepers, and their emotions were strung tight from the sudden change in their mission.

But their commanders, including Col. Steve Hartley, head of Battalion Landing Team 2-2 and leader of Task Force Irish, made it clear that they would not permit any miscues in this delicate operation. No one was to shoot unless fired upon, the commanders said. And no one was to take civil control away from the local military.

And by late afternoon, there had been only a couple of incidents.

“This is no big deal,” said Hartley. “Believe me, this has been no big deal.”

The Expanding U.S. Presence in Haiti

American troops entered a northern port city Tuesday in the second day of a massive U.S. military operation to restore Democratic rule.

Port-au-Prince: Police firing tear gas beat up pro-Aristide demonstrators in front of arriving American troops. One Haitian demonstrator was apparently beaten to death.

Cap Haitien: 1,800 Marines secured the airfield and harbor in Haiti’s second-largest city.

Sources: Times staff and wire reports