Celebration marks Navy's departure from Puerto Rican island.(The Orlando Sentinel)

Byline: Ivan Roman

VIEQUES, Puerto Rico _ The old U.S. Navy checkpoint, for decades a symbol of bombing and repression, lay in pieces Thursday, slumped over like a grand piano on two legs.

"Navy Down" was scrawled on it in blue, and a makeshift doll lay nearby in military police clothes, with a beauty-pageant style sash that said "Goodbye!"

As thousands of people streamed by to walk onto once-forbidden lands many stopped to pose for pictures. For some, it was about recording history. For others, it was about redeeming those long gone.

"I was wondering what my father would feel at this moment," said a misty-eyed Carlos "El Prieto" Ventura, an anti-Navy activist leader who took after his fisherman father. "I think he would be happy."

The Navy's official exit Thursday from Vieques lands it had held since World War II will give Ventura the chance to fulfill a promise he made to his father on his deathbed _ to walk the 20-mile-long island from end to end.

Thousands from Vieques, the main island of Puerto Rico, several U.S. cities and various countries around the world gathered on the island Thursday to sing and party for four days and offer up prayers of thanks that the Navy has finally left its premier training facility in the Atlantic for good.