Red-Dirt Marijuana: And Other Tastes (23 page)

Well, Frank Bender, the C.I.A. guy, was in charge of the operation—I mean he was in charge of the
whole
thing, you dig, but Pepe San Román was
nominally
the camp commander, from the, you know, Cuban point of view—and Roberto, his brother, he was in charge of the heavy-weapons company, the four-point-two mortars . . . that was the most important company in the outfit.

What were the American instructors like?

Well, they were all specialists—you know,
instructors,
mostly from the Army: World War II, Korean War, or young cats from, I don’t know,
Ohio
or some weird place like that. There were about thirty-five or forty of them. And it was just a gig for them. They were getting seven-fifty, and they were usually pretty conscientious about whatever it was they were teaching—they didn’t have any particular interest in the political side of it. They were sort of typical Army faces—but
specialists,
you know, pretty humorless cats, except for the guy training the paratroopers, and he was about half off his nut. And some of them, being from the South and all, were very color conscious—they didn’t really
like
the Cubans, you know, because they were different. And of course they were very down on any kind of
mixture,
and the Cubans . . . well, my company commander, for example, was a mulatto—big six-foot-two cat, very temperamental, would shout himself hoarse, that kind of guy, you know? A very uneven cat—one day he would be great, outgoing, very friendly, and the next a mean mother. Anyway the fact that these guys didn’t really dig the Cubans, and were down on color, and couldn’t speak Spanish—it gave, well, a kind of comic-opera quality to the thing in front.

Would you talk to them about what was going on?

Well, you know, they don’t crack—I mean you ask them a direct question and they fade you right out. But, of course, in most cases they didn’t know what was going on themselves. Like we used to buzz these instructors—you know, “When are we leaving bla-bla-bla?” but they just “Man, we don’t know, we’re waiting for orders,” that kind of thing.

I don’t understand why they couldn’t get C.I.A. people who spoke Spanish.

Well, man, I’m inclined to believe that they’d rather
not
have guys who speak the language—I really think their fear is that deep . . . you know? I mean they figure that if these cats get to
talking
to these people they might be in some way
corrupted
by them, you dig. Like they don’t trust their own boys, that’s what it amounts to. And you can see their point in a way—because there was really nothing holding these cats together . . . they were all there for different reasons, mostly
personal
reasons—and of course because they thought they were going to
win,
that was the main thing. But there was no single idea behind it—you know, the sort of sense of purpose you need to pull off something like that. There were too many guys just looking out for number one—you know,
collectors
. . . they collected things. When it came time to ship out for the invasion, some of those guys had so much
stuff,
man—stuff they had copped . . . transistor radios, binoculars, anything they could cop. They would be carrying an extra pack full of this crap—I’m surprised they could even get off the landing craft with all that weight. They thought they were going on a picnic. Not all of them naturally—I mean there were some sensitive faces there too—sort of fatalistic cats, like this kid Juan on the mortars . . . he used to say: “Land on Monday, get captured on Tuesday, and shot on Wednesday.” Very sensitive, sort of morbid type. So it was like that, all fragmented. A lot of different factions and ideas. But the real nucleus of the outfit, the heavy-weapons company, was very strong—they knew their jobs, and they were ready to fight, Well, they were just
toasted,
guys like that. And then there was a huge bunch of goof-offs—cats who had never done
anything,
and weren’t going to start now. A lot of them stayed in the guardhouse, you know, like
permanently—and
they had it pretty good . . . they would let them out for chow, they’d get to go to the head of the line, that sort of thing. Some of them were very popular with the men, like clowns. They let all of them out just before the invasion, and a lot of them were made sergeants and so on.

What were the weapons you trained with?

Well, we started with the carbine and the M-1, then the M-3—that’s the one that replaced the Thompson, you know, looks like a grease gun? And the Army .45, of course. And then the bazooka, machine gun, and mortar—finally the heavy mortars. That was the largest thing they had . . . these four-point-two mortars. And the Cubans dug that part of it—you know, the shooting. Especially the mortars—they were really
good
with the mortars. Primitive cats, you know, very good with their hands . . . and they’d do great things with the mortars, like dead reckoning, very unorthodox, and it would wig these C.I.A. faces, because they were all specialists—you know, they had learned by the numbers, and that’s how they were trying to teach it—and one of these cats, like a young farm boy, would step up and just estimate the distance and drop it right in the top of a barrel about seventy-five yards away . . . and it would flip the instructor. “Tell him that’s not the right way to do it,” he’d say to the interpreter.

Were all the weapons American?

Everything
was American, man. Blankets . . . well, you know,
everything.

What else do you recall about the training?

The training was a big drag, except on the firing range, that was pretty interesting. Very corny lectures and training films . . . well, there were a couple of paratrooper films that weren’t bad. And we had this group, you know, which was
training
to be paratroops, and they were a gas . . . about a hundred and twenty guys, they were being trained by this guy from California, very funny cat, like something out of a movie, about forty years old, very
tough—
you know the type, fires a 30-caliber machine gun from the hip. And this was the toughest training on the base. But it was a big joke—I mean
this
cat and his paratroopers, it was like Ali Baba and his hundred and twenty thieves. They would go through the most outlandish things you can imagine in order to cop a pig or something off another company—like one guy pretending he’s hanging himself, you know, to attract attention, while the other cats cop the pig. They were a wild bunch of studs, man—the paratroopers.

Did you have any tanks there?

No, the tanks never came to the camp—they were put directly on the ship. The tank crews arrived along toward the end, but they had already been trained—in New Orleans I believe.

What did you train for after you finished Basic?

Well, Ramón and I decided that
telegraphy
might be a good thing—I mean they wanted some guys to train for it, so five of us went into that. But it wasn’t as easy as it sounded—you know, da-da-dit all day long in a box about the size of a phone booth. Very hot, man, and
coffee flies .
. . terrible, you have to hit them mop-mop-mop and nothing happens. Extremely difficult to kill. The telegraphy hut was right next to the
church,
you dig—it was just a shack, but there were these
priests
. . . not Cuban,
Spanish .
. . Spanish priests, man—they had imported these cats, and
they
were
something.
Very pretentious, very contemptuous of the Cubans-spoke Spanish with a lisp, you know? And one of these cats was too much—weird face, had a weird turn of mind . . . he had been there when they were building the camp, and a guy had been killed . . . fell from a cliff where they were working. And this priest . . . well, we’d step outside the hut, for a smoke, and he would engage us in conversation, like “Why don’t you come to church and bla-bla-bla?”—so we’d talk to him and he’d tell about this guy falling over the cliff, but in extreme detail, man . . . how they found the body, how there were traces of where he had clutched at the grass trying to keep from going over the edge, and so on. Very morbid cat.

When did you learn that you weren’t going to take part in the invasion itself?

Not until the very last minute. We had
no idea
we weren’t going, and it was a big drag man—I mean we’d been there
three months,
dig, and we wanted to
go.
We bugged the hell out of the Americans, Ramón and I, trying to get on that ship—but they wouldn’t crack. “There’s nothing we can do, your names weren’t on the list,” was all they would say. There were fourteen of us who didn’t go—Ramón, myself, Molinet, who was the quartermaster, the guy in charge of the motor pool, one of the priests, two guys who were clerks, and about seven guys who were on weapons. We were all sore as hell about it—because of course we were sure we were going to win . . . but it wasn’t just that—I mean we’d been through a lot together during those three months, and we wanted to go with them.

What do you suppose the reason was?

Well, it wasn’t
coincidence,
I’m pretty sure of that. One story was that we were supposed to become cadre—you know, and help train the next group. Like replacing part of the C.I.A., you dig. I don’t believe it was because Ramón and I were American, because there was one other American there, a translator for the cooks, and he went.

And when did you learn the outcome of the invasion?

Well, we set up this shortwave radio, with a huge antenna, and listened—tuned in directly to Cuba. And at first it sounded like it was a success . . . so there was a big celebration got started—then after a while Castro came on, announcing how he wiped us out. And that brought everyone down, you know, very hard.

I simply can’t understand how they could make such a mess of it.

Well, man, it was one of those things. They
wanted
to do it, but they wanted to do it without really
doing
it—you know, like a broad. So that was that . . . and the camp became a terrible drag after that, and of course everyone wanted to
leave—yon
know, back to civilization. But these recruits kept arriving from Miami, about two hundred of them during the next couple of weeks—and this brought on the weirdest scenes of the whole time there . . . because these cats were
bugged,
man. I mean it was obviously a dead issue, and these guys wanted to go back to Miami. But the Americans were still trying to keep up some kind of training routine—you know, “Keep ’em busy, good for morale,” the old Army crap. But these guys’ attitude was “Okay, we lost, so let’s get the hell out of here.” And they didn’t want to do
anything.
They had a meeting and sent a delegation up to see the Americans and told them they didn’t want to drill or anything, they wanted to go back to the States. Well, that wigged the Americans—they thought it was “Communist agitation.” See, they were still waiting for orders from Washington about what the hell they were supposed to do next. Anyway, the same day one of the toughest of these cats draws guard duty, and when the guy wakes him, he says, “If you wake me up again I’ll blow your head off”—you know,
that
kind of reaction. Well, this guy goes back to the orderly room and tells Martinez Arbona, the guy who was acting camp commander, and Martinez Arbona comes down to the barracks and says, “This is insubordination, bla-bla-bla,” and the other guy starts to beat him up. So Martinez cuts out, up the hill, tells the Americans—and this
really
flips them. Now it’s a “Communist
mutiny
,” you dig, “they’re beating up the CO.!” and so they’re scared out of their wits. “We’ve gotta get those guns away from them!” But they had no idea how to go about it, so they were wigging completely. Well,
we
all knew they weren’t Communists—I mean they just wanted to get the hell
out
of there. We told the C.I.A. cats, “Man, all you have to do is tell them to
turn in the guns and they can go home.
” But they kept trying to figure out some tricky muscle way of doing it—and God knows what would have happened if we hadn’t gone down and told them if they would turn in the guns they could go home. And of course that’s what they did. But the Americans never did really believe it—they were very suspicious of them . . . kept them completely separated from the rest of us. And when we got to the airstrip, they sent them right out . . . you know, like thank God they’re gone!

So everybody went back to Miami?

Yeah, we get back to Miami, go to the recruiting station—that’s where they’d been sending our checks, dig—pick those up, and go our separate ways. Very sad scene at the recruiting place because they’ve got the lists of guys that got wiped or captured, and relatives and so on are falling by to look at the lists. And we talked to a couple of guys who got away—swam out and got picked up by boats.

What did they have to say about the invasion?

What did they say? “We got wiped, man . . .
wiped
.”

O
NE SPRING EVENING
ten years or so ago I found myself sharing a large table, outside the Café Flore, with several people who had just attended the premiere of Serge Lifar’s ballet,
Lucifer.
One of the persons at the table was Jean-Paul Sartre, and another was a young American cutie-pie, who was getting far more attention than she deserved. The darling girl, emboldened perhaps no less by Pernod than by the saucy pertness of her cashmered bosom—which not even the great philosopher could have failed to discern—had the audacity to ask: “Monsieur Sartre, have
you
ever considered writing a ballet?” Out of politeness, no doubt, he replied with a smile and a simple
“Non.”
And that might well have been that—except for a fantasy which appealed to me later, in the secrecy of my private night. I think it was the very blandness of his reply that prompted it; in any case, I imagined that Sartre had, in fact, gone mad, had written a ballet—and then, despite his lack of formal training, his unwieldy girth, and the wise counsel of friends notwithstanding, he had
insisted
on dancing the leading role himself. The idea of Sartre—heavy glasses, as stout as a giant turnip-man in close-fitting ballet garb—gravely dancing to rather common schmaltzy music, or whirling dervishlike to some kind of weird electronics, was irresistible. I pursued this fantasy down many avenues: First, the incredible frown of consternation on the faces of those receiving invitations to the premiere of this ballet “To be Danced by the Author Himself!” Then in the dress circle, his distinguished colleagues from the great universities, muttering,
“Mais c’est un vrai scandale!”
And finally the intermission; what would they say—Camus, Cocteau, Malraux—something like
“Il ne danse pas mal, Jean-Paul
. .
.”?
Fantastic. And yet the cold reality is that Sartre
was,
in fact, in a position to do precisely that. No impresario in Paris would have refused; had they even hesitated he could have hired the theatre and staged the thing himself to an S.R.O. house. All that was necessary for him to have done this was that he go slightly off his rocker—but, of course, this never occurred.