This was no drill! It was quite a shock to many of my comrades who felt we weren’t properly prepared for an excursion like this. Welcome to the armed services, boys! That’s the way it always begins. All the marching and battle simulations in the world can’t get you ready for the real thing. We had conscientious objectors in our ranks, as well as gung-ho yahoos who just wanted to shoot guns and get into a fight. In the end, the discipline that was drilled into us from our first day at Parris Island prevailed. So did our confidence in the experienced commanding officers in our midst. We believed in them.
Our mission was to assist in the security of the naval base, so we were posted on the opposite side of the bay from the US naval facility in an area that bordered Cuba. Castro’s forces had already cleared out all the shrubbery on their side of the six-foot chain-link perimeter fence so they could spy on what we were doing. I found it odd that the Cuban field commanders didn’t realize that by clearing away all the shrubbery, it also allowed us to spy on them, particularly all the comings and goings of ships in the Cuban port just behind Guantanamo.
Either way, it was a standoff. Cuban soldiers stood no more than 300 feet away from us. Our guard stations faced their guard stations. But we had massive bunkers protecting us and they didn’t. No one was going to push us off the island. The early doubts and jitters the company experienced when we first landed in Guantanamo quickly faded. In their place was a growing, unmistakable feeling of patriotism that ran through our entire company. We were there to protect the people and the interests of the United States of America.
Thirteen days of fear and tension gripped Washington, DC and the rest of the world as negotiations between the two superpowers plodded on. We all had a sense of how serious the situation was, but predictably, the Marines stoically treated our security mission as they did any other day. Maybe we exhaled a little bit when President Kennedy and Khrushchev finally reached a deal on October 28.
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