Loon - Jack McLean [58]
Two months later, on April 21, 1961, Bill Negron found himself shivering in chest-deep water off the coast of Cuba in an area that became known as the Bay of Pigs. He’d seen his first combat death the day before, and by morning had known that the American attack on Cuba would fail. The brave Cuban expatriates who formed the 406th Brigade were dead, dying, or being hauled away like animals.
Throughout the night, Negron had been screaming into his radio handset for the promised air support.
The response was silence.
He tried to contact the ship offshore that had dropped them off.
More silence.
Mortar rounds were landing all around, and machine gun fire was everywhere.
All of it incoming.
“Where is your fucking air support? Where are your naval guns? Where the fuck are you Americans?” Raul Sanchez, one of the Cuban emigres who made up most of the invasion force, was livid and frustrated beyond all imagination. Suddenly, he raced out of the water and across a field toward a group of Cuban soldiers who were dragging members of the brigade to a waiting truck. He was firing his carbine from the hip and screaming. He was immediately shot and fell to the ground. Two Cuban soldiers walked over, one with a carbine and the other with a Russian AK-47. While Negron watched in horror, the one with the carbine shot Sanchez twice in the head and walked calmly back to the truck.
They had been in Cuba less than twenty hours.
Days later, after leading his small squad through escape and evasion maneuvers across the island, Negron was able to find a small boat, get away from shore, and finally make contact with an American ship. Several hours later, they were returned to Florida.
Two months later, Bill Negron was back in Oxford, Ohio, completing the second semester of his senior year at Miami University. Upon graduation, he was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the United States Marine Corps—one of the Corps’ first Hispanic officers. His “semester off” was in the past and remained so for many years.
Participation in President Kennedy’s disastrous invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs was not considered a career-advancing experience for a junior officer in the United States Marine Corps.
The denuded red earth that Bill Negron first saw as he and his driver passed through the Washout on their way to Con Thien that mid-May day in 1968 stretched from the North Vietnamese border in the near north to Gio Linh and the South China Sea in the east, and Khe Sanh and Laos in the west. There were free and open fields of fire in all directions. The tactical terrain was apparent. Each commander had added to, improved, or simply changed his predecessor’s plan of defense.
Begun as a squad-size observation post, Con Thien was now the command center of a reinforced infantry battalion, which included a 105 mm artillery battery section, an 82 mm mortar section, tanks, a water purification unit, various logistics sections from the 3rd Marine Division, and a sprinkling of South Vietnamese Army units who didn’t appear to have anyone in charge. The rotting sandbags were an indication of how long the outpost had existed.
Prior to the siege of Khe Sanh, this little piece of real estate, a quarter the size of Khe Sanh, had been the target of North Vietnamese gunners for four months. More incoming had fallen there than on Khe Sanh during its entire siege. Con Thien had been the original northern outpost. Its purpose was to interdict southbound North Vietnamese men and supplies. The marine grunts stationed there felt that its only purpose was to provide target practice for the North Vietnamese gunners to the north and west. Each day squad-, platoon-, and occasionally company-size patrols departed the perimeter to go north, east, and west into the no-man’s-land we called the Trace. It was, in fact, the so-called demilitarized zone that separated the North from the South.
During the