Two from my military school were killed.
“They fought like tigers,” writes the CIA officer who helped train the Cubans who splashed ashore at the Bay of Pigs 53 years ago this week. “But their fight was doomed before the first man hit the beach.”
That CIA man, Grayston Lynch, knew something about fighting – and about long odds. He carried scars from Omaha Beach, the Battle of the Bulge, and Korea’s Heartbreak Ridge. But in those battles Lynch and his band of brothers counted on the support of their commander in chief. At the Bay of Pigs, Lynch (an American) and his band of brothers (Cubans) learned — first in speechless shock and finally in burning rage — that their most powerful enemies were not Castro’s Soviet-armed soldiers massing in nearby Santa Clara, but the Ivy League’s best and brightest dithering in Washington.
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It was Christmas 1959 when I was invited to make the 2-day road trip with some close relatives from Michigan to Florida (I was 12 at the time). There were no interstate highways and just A.M. radio -- I can remember finally arriving in Jacksonville, potholes everywhere on US-1, and warm air finally coming in the windows. As we slowly made our way through the city, on the radio there was the nothing but the war that was going on in Cuba. Castro and Che had been at it for several years, and they were finally succeeding in both the Media and on the ground. Ironic how we fought enemies far away and then be so chicken-sh_t 90 miles away from our shore when it comes to the communist infiltration. Gen. Eisenhower let it go down. 11 months later was the election that put Kennedy in office (as close as any election could be - lots of dead people voting in Chicago and Detroit). Why was there a Bay of Pigs authorized in the first place if Kennedy didn't want to "intervene." Just a starting place for future betrayals whenever our country was "fighting" the communists, never to win, just run up debt and despair ...
ReplyDeleteWhy was there a Bay of Pigs authorized in the first place if Kennedy didn't want to "intervene."
DeleteMind boggling, my oft used word of the decade. :)
Horrific betrayals.
ReplyDeleteIf we had been told this in school, when it was occurring, I wonder if the succeeding years would have been better....
Thank you very much for posting this.
Words fail me.
Words fail me.
DeleteThank you and indeed.