?What is one of the bravest things you've ever done, and what was the outcome?

After Miriam and her family moved to Virginia in 1961 I was nostalgic working three part time jobs, delivering Cuban bread in the early morning as self-employed, cantinas or catering for Chef Milhet, were Manolo Porto was my boss in the afternoons and learning the work of a night auditor at the Everglades Hotel in Biscayne Boulevard in the evenings, where my classmate Roberto Pérez was Night Manager.

I was in Miami since 13 October 1960, nobody tried to recruit me for the 2506 Brigade, which was training under CIA supervision in Somoza's Nicaragua, to land at the wrong place in Cuba on 17 April 1961 to be betrayed by the CIA and President Kennedy, albeit I believe he was setup by CIA planning during the previous administration. No doubt Bay of Pigs was what made Fidel Castro a world figure, firmly settled him in power.

Then on June 1961 East Berlin began the construction of the Berlin Wall, origin of what was known as The Berlin Crisis that provoked a sharp increase of the Selective Service draft.

Contemplating being drafted, displaced as I was, without anyone to ask advice from, for anyone I knew, as did I, ignored how things were in military service, after consulting with my godfather Manolo, I decided to enlist in the Army and marry Miriam. I would thus leave economically depressed Miami, enter the American life with both feet and perhaps go fight communists in Germany, because the expectations were that the communists would attacked by the Fulda pass at anytime.

The decision made at age 19 to enlist, go into a world unknown by me, since I had hardly been beyond Florida and Virginia, into military service without understanding most of was spoken to me or being able to express myself in another language, marry Miriam and go face the world together was undoubtedly the bravest thing I had ever done or would do.

So it was that I naively went to the Army Recruiting office in Miami, where they gave me a battery of tests, that I did without difficulty because I could read and write English well, albeit could not understand most of the spoken word, much less pronounce them. Since I already had the first year of Electrical Engineering at the University of Havana and that was my chosen career, I asked to be sent to Engineer training, ignorant that the Engineer Corps trained at the trade, not university level. They gladly told me that it would be so.

It wasn't until after discharge that I found out, from my 204 Form, that I had obviously been discriminated at the Miami recruiting station, they had listed me as having finished the 9th grade instead of 13th which was the case.

Then I was flown to Jacksonville and from there to Columbus Georgia, driven to Fort Benning for induction, issuance of uniforms, etc. There I found that my IQ was 137 and I had qualified for Officer
Candidate School (OCS) before being bussed to Fort Jackson South Carolina in late July, for Basic Training.

In Fort Jackson life changed completely. They got us up at 04:30, yelling all the time, got us into formation and began molding us into soldiers, that is, obey without thinking. In my platoon there was a group from Florida and another from Texas, two others were Cuban, Fernández had been raised here, spoke English perfectly and quickly distance himself from us, the other Cuban, whose name I do not remember now, said he was a cousin of my classmate Laureano Pequeño who was then imprisoned in Cuba; he was a softie, the kind of person people pick on.

There was another Rodríguez, but a native Texan, there was a good number of black people, the leader of which was named Patterson and said he was a cousin of Floyd Patterson, heavy-weight champion. He and I became allies in our defense against tyrannical sergeants and when other blacks picked on the other Cuban too much, I spoke with Patterson and they stopped.

There was this young, blond, with his hair like ours (cut with a machine next to the skull) second lieutenant, gung ho and obviously just out of OCS or maybe Westpoint, who liked to run with us in the morning and was absolutely sure I was faking my lack of understanding when he yelled at me. I got in his radar quickly because I was wearing prescription sun glasses, he ordered me to take them off and then I exaggerated my lack of vision acuity; he grabbed the glasses, looked at them and had to tell me to put them on again when he realized they were prescription lenses, for they had not yet issued me Army glasses.

All I heard about OCS during Basic Training was when a sergeant told me: "you don't want to go to OCS, right?" to which I assented, since I had already planned to get married during my leave.

The training was rigorous, we ran up to ten miles in the August morning, up and down small hills. First flat guys fell down and fainted, they were picked up, put under a tree for a while and then had to continue. The sergeant that led us most of the time was and old guy (maybe 40), skinny and with his mouth open most of the time, so I told myself "if he can do it, so can I" and never fell out, although I soon realized that when I was on autopilot and could not have spoken had I tried to, he was jogging around the platoon, yelling all the time.

After breakfast we marched miles with backpack and rifle to whatever training was our destiny, then back at noon for lunch (which most called dinner) to and from we had to run, them march again miles to the afternoon training, march back again for dinner or supper, clean the barracks and all our equipment. Sometimes we also had some night training.

During the tremendous head of the sandy terrain of South Carolina in August and September, during the to and from marches at noon, fat guys and some black people fainted, but again a little while in a shade and back at it again.

After finishing Basic Training in late September they gave me 15 days of Leave before reporting to the Engineering School at Fort Belvoir Virginia. I went to Portsmouth, my parents went too and Miriam and I married on 3 October, after Father Hammond helped us to obtain the marriage license despite the law of the Commonwealth of Virginia at the time, which prohibited marriage of people of two different races and our passports did not show ours, the reason for which they had denied us. For our honeymoon we went to a Virginia Beach motel on a borrowed 1959 Edsel that belonged to Charles Wade, Mariana's husband.

I reported to Fort Belvoir, showed my marriage certificate to the First Sergeant, he adjusted my personnel files and was gracious enough to give me a three-day pass every weekend, so that every Friday afternoon I took a Greyhound bus to Portsmouth and returned every Sunday afternoon, that is, except on Christmas, when I couldn't board the bus and had to thumb rides, which, being in uniform, got me there sooner than the bus.

At the end of the course in late January, five of us, Paris Laws, Roger Schumacher, John Wilson, Dan Danford and I were assigned to the same unit in Germany, SP-753, 7th Army, attached to the Signal Battalion of the 8th Infantry Division. The only problem was that Support Point 753 was a Third Echelon Maintenance of Radio and Telephone Equipment and we had been trained for maintenance of the equipment of underground Nike Hercules Missile site, i.e. elevators, air conditioners, gasoline engines, etc. The mistake, as we understood it, was in the similarity of the Military Occupation Specialty, or MOS, 351 being the one to we were assigned and 352 the one we had studied for and should have been given. 351 was Signal Corps and 352 Engineer Corps.

We were not given leave or passes, as soon as we knew of the assignment we were shipped to Fort Dix New Jersey, for embarkation from New York to Bremerhaven aboard an MSTS ship.

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