Catching Sight of A Revolution – From Harvard to IU

In the time between the world wars, our father, like so many Americans, had visited Cuba’s exotic capital in the interwar period. He was in Havana in 1930 during the country’s heady Republican Period, but decades later my brother Jeff and I had only passing awareness of revolutionary Cuba of our own time.  We’d both seen the family photo of Irving as a young man – he was 21 – dressed to the nines with a good looking blonde at the bar in Sloppy Joe’s – the famous celebrity hangout on Cuba’s Golden Riviera.

Irving Sharlet (l), our father, in Havana, 1930

Irving had grown up in comfortable circumstances; he had some money and was something of a playboy. At the time, Prohibition reigned as the law of the land in the States. To get a drink without a password in a back alley speakeasy, well-heeled Americans would sail off to Europe or head to the Caribbean to relax with a highball in fashionable public places. Sloppy Joe’s was one of the in-places, just off-shore so to speak, where one might see John Wayne or Clark Gable or even Cuba’s most famous North American visitor, Hemingway, down the bar.

Decades afterward during the postwar period when dramatic changes began happening in Cuba, the island country was on the periphery of our young lives. Jeff in his short life – he died at 27 – had been heavily involved with Vietnam. Serving there early in the growing conflict, he later became an international leader of GI opposition against the war. I became an academic, a specialist on the Soviet Union, where I had studied and visited periodically. I spent most of my adult years teaching and writing about the country.

Still, as the Cuban Revolution emerged in the ‘50s and consolidated in the early ‘60s, quite serendipitously Jeff and I bore witness to some of the salient moments of the island’s transition from a popular Caribbean tourist destination to the epicenter of the global Cold War. Cuba first came to my attention unexpectedly in late fall ’56. In the phrase of the day, I was fulfilling my military obligation in the army.

___________________________________________________________________________

The rebellion in Cuba is over, and students of foreign affairs can now 

give  themselves again to Hungary and the Middle East.

_________________________________________________________

I was fortunate, having been assigned to a congenial posting for a year of study at the Army Language School (ALS) on the sunny California coast. I was being trained in a Slavic language, my only duties six hours a day of class and a little homework. At lunch break, I always had the latest issue of the airmail edition of the British paper, Manchester Guardian, in my back pocket as I waited in the chow line. Reading it was a pleasant respite from the morning’s grammar lessons, pronunciation drills, and vocabulary tests.

One noontime I was glancing through the early December ‘56 issue of the Guardian. Hungary and the Suez Canal were the lead stories. The Soviets had just bloodily crushed the Hungarian Revolution while the Israeli, British, and French forces had defeated the Egyptians, whose nationalization of the Canal had touched off a brief but fierce war.

Perusing the back pages, my eye fell on an unfamiliar story, ‘The battle for Cuba’, with a dismissive opening line, “The rebellion in Cuba is over, and students of foreign affairs can now give themselves again to Hungary and the Middle East.” Reading on, I found a lighthearted account, rife with British irony, of a hapless invasion of the island by a band of Cuban revolutionaries sailing from Mexico.

As I would learn a few years later, the Guardian had some of the key details wrong, but it was right on the end of the affair – the armed forces of the dictator Batista had quickly routed the invaders – killing or capturing most of them on the beach.

The invasion group – 82 of them – had arrived offshore aboard a yacht perilously overloaded with men, weapons, and ammo and leaking to boot. Departing from the Gulf of Mexico, most of them became seasick and were depleted as the boat twice nearly capsized in rough waters. Then, after crossing the Caribbean Sea, they missed their landing spot on the Cuban coast, ran aground in a swamp, and had to wade ashore in chest-high water. Needless to say, the would-be revolutionaries were sitting ducks for the defenders.

The leader of the unlucky band, Fidel Castro, an exiled revolutionary, was reportedly killed, but he actually made it off the beach and into the mountains along with some 20 survivors to fight again another day. But in late ’56, the Guardian wrote the expedition off with the sardonic line that the “invasion fleet” (the yacht) “was badly damaged and might be unfit for charter for the rest of the tourist season.”*

I had reached the mess hall food line, laughed off the Caribbean caper, and gave neither Fidel nor Cuba any further thought. Afternoon classes awaited, and it was back to the Cold War. But to my surprise, Cuba briefly reappeared on my radar just over a year later while I was serving in the forces in West Germany. On an off-duty weekend, I had covered the German Grand Prix – an international Formula 1 car race in the Eifel Mountains – for an American paper.

It was an exciting, closely contested race at staggering speeds – won by the reigning world champion, the Argentine Juan Fangio at the wheel of a Maserati, edging out his British challenger in a Ferrari by a margin of three seconds. I filed my story stateside and it was again back to the Cold War. So much for the glamorous world of F-1 racing.†

But then, El Maestro Fangio, whose name was usually found on the world’s sports pages, turned up as front page news in the Paris Herald Tribune. He had gone to Havana in ‘58 for the Cuban Grand Prix to defend his title and was ‘politely’ kidnapped by the Fidelistas – by then a formidable guerrilla movement with broad support, they constantly tweaked Batista’s forces in classic hit and run encounters.

They held Fangio just a few days to garner maximum international publicity. When released unharmed, the champion spoke favorably of his captors, a propaganda coup for Castro. He had shown he could snatch a world famous figure right off the streets of Havana with impunity, a sure sign the regime was on its last legs.

Later that year I got out of the Army and was back in college, just in time for fall semester at Brandeis University outside Boston. My father had gone bust financially, so I was on my own, on borrowed money for tuition and working nights as a cabbie for Boston Checker. To be closer to my job and because it was a cool place, I rented inexpensive digs on Eliot Street just off Harvard Square, Cambridge.

While I was settling back into the world of books and classes, Castro and his revolutionary army finally defeated Batista. Entering Havana as victors, they took power on New Year’s Day ’59. The old regime had been notorious for its cruelty and corruption, so the Cuban Revolution was greeted warmly by Americans as well as Europeans, not to mention the Communist Bloc and Third World nations.

_________________________________________________________ 

At Harvard I was in the crowd of 10,000 exuberantly welcoming Castro.

_______________________________________________________

Several months after the victory Castro was invited to the States. Landing in Washington – although coolly received by the Eisenhower (Ike) Administration – the charismatic Maximum Leader took the country by storm, making his way up the East Coast city by city in a triumphant tour. Castro looked and acted the hero, and the American public took to him.

Not everyone was happy about his visit though – there were death threats at every stop. As a result, when Castro reached New York, the city organized the greatest security cordon in its history, even more so than for a president. His final stop in the US was Boston where he was scheduled to speak at Harvard. I saw the posters in Harvard Square and decided to go hear him.

It was late April ’59 – actually 55 years ago this week – when Castro  appeared at the Harvard Field House on a warm Saturday evening. After a bomb scare in New York, Boston was taking no chances. The Cuban leader’s train had been met at Back Bay Station by 300 of the city’s finest. As he was driven the several blocks to his hotel, cheering crowds lining the route were held back by a wall of blue.

______________________________________________________________

Cuba’s Ethan Allen leading the Green Mountain boys had taken on and defeated King George III in the guise of Fulgencio Batista.

____________________________________________________________

A few hours later, Castro was accompanied to Harvard by a combined force of Boston cops, Metro police, State Department security, and the FBI. As he walked across the grounds of the field house complex, he was flanked by a phalanx of tall Massachusetts State Troopers in their sky blue jackets, jodhpurs, and black boots.

Castro being escorted by Massachusetts State Troopers, 1959

I drove down Boylston Street to the Charles River, crossed the Eliot Bridge, and walked on up Soldiers Field Road to the field house. There I found myself part of an enormous crowd of some 10,000 students and others exuberantly welcoming the Cuban leader. He took the salute from a speaker’s stand high above the field where we all stood.

Harvard Law School was his host – Fidel was educated as a lawyer – although he was introduced by the Dean of Harvard College, McGeorge Bundy. It turned out that Fidel had applied to the law school as a young man in ‘48, but was turned down. Dean Bundy made light of this, saying that Harvard wanted to make amends and would now accept him.

Cuban and American flags were on display, and Castro was decked out in his trademark olive-green military fatigues and field cap. Standing at the podium above the Harvard crest, he was unobtrusively shielded on both sides by personal bodyguards and Boston security. When he was introduced, the roar of the crowd was deafening – Fidel and the guerrillas were seen through the prism of American legend. Cuba’s Ethan Allen leading the Green Mountain boys had taken on and defeated King George III in the guise of Fulgencio Batista.

Castro speaking at the Harvard Field House

Fidel was a forceful rather histrionic speaker given to dramatic gestures. His remarks were billed as ‘The Cuban Revolution’, but he didn’t dwell long on past battles. Instead he gave a thoughtful, albeit rambling, speech on the problems of backwardness and underdevelopment plaguing revolutionary Cuba.

From the press, he well understood that Americans, in their enthusiasm for his victory over a dictatorial regime, were expecting democracy and the rule of law to follow, but he patiently explained the more immediate problems facing his government were hunger, mass illiteracy, and a level of unemployment greater in scale than during the American Depression.

Castro went on to say all things would come in due time, but for now elections – absent political parties – would have to be put off at least two years. And he added pointedly that rights of the criminally accused would have to wait until the revolution dealt summarily with the many who had administered the terror and carried out torture under the old regime.

Up to that point, he still had the majority of the audience with him, but then a law student called out a question about a recent criminal case in Havana. A couple of Batista’s pilots had attempted to bomb the presidential palace. They received a stiff prison sentence, but Castro, dissatisfied, ordered a retrial.

Second time around they got the death penalty.

Wasn’t that double jeopardy the questioner persisted? Castro bridled at the challenge, responding aggressively that the second trial was justified by the higher right of the revolution to defend itself. At that, a chorus of boos floated up from below.

Fidel grew visibly angry, and his speech dissolved into a rant as he occasionally slipped from English into Spanish. The crowd’s good will toward him began to ebb. The atmosphere in the field house complex had changed, and the evening ended on a down note for many there.

I went off to grad school a year later. Indiana University (IU) had given me fellowship money to study Soviet Russia. As it happened, brother Jeff also arrived in Bloomington for his Freshman year. I was delighted with the lively, competitive graduate school milieu – in the midst of the Cold War, Soviet Studies was the hottest field around.

Jeff, however, was unhappy at the university. He had graduated from a small Eastern prep school and felt lost on the vast campus, a virtual small city in itself. He had hoped to go to an Ivy League school where all his friends were, but Pop’s business reversal precluded a costly private college.

One of my friends in the Russian Institute was George Shriver. Like me, he had come out to IU from the East – from Harvard where he’d majored in Russian. While I was in the Political Science PhD program, George’s focus was Russian language and literature. Although I didn’t realize it at the time, George was also a left political activist.

At IU that fall he had quietly organized a campus chapter of the Young Socialist Alliance (YSA), the youth affiliate of the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party (SWP). Then, from the small band of campus Trotskyists, George also spun off a local branch of the national Fair Play for Cuba Committee (FPCC) in support of the Cuban Revolution.

George Shriver speaking at an YSA meeting, Indiana University

As fall term ‘60 was coming to an end, George, as FPCC chair, was organizing a trip to Cuba over Christmas break. Jeff got wind of the trip and put his name down, but even though the cost was modest, he didn’t have the money. He wrote home for funds. While our parents were apolitical, they were wary of anything controversial when it came to their sons, so Jeff had to make a persuasive pitch since the US government considered Cuba leaning toward Communism.

____________________________________________________________________________________

Yet to come, the ill-fated Bay of Pigs invasion was an open secret in Miami émigré circles, and Castro’s forces were more than ready for them.

__________________________________________________________

In his letter, he explained that the trip was sponsored by FPCC, a national organization dedicated to offsetting critical media coverage of Cuba and giving the revolution a fair shake. He added:

   The Cuban government wants Americans to come there and judge the situation and the results of the revolution for themselves. There is nothing political involved. It’s just to have a good time and get informed on the real situation in Cuba.

Jeff asked me to add an endorsement to his letter, which I was happy to do. I knew he was drifting at IU and was glad to see him finally taking an interest in something.

Apparently the parents were persuaded, but in the end Jeff never made it to revolutionary Cuba. There weren’t enough takers, so the trip was called off. Not long after he dropped out of school and a year later found himself in my old military outfit. However, instead of sailing off to Europe as I did, he was taught Vietnamese and landed in Southeast Asia in the middle of a small war.

But I’m getting ahead of the story. By that spring of ’61 Cuba was back in the headlines. The time was JFK’s first 100 days, and he had adopted Ike’s animus toward Castro and, worse, his predecessor’s misbegotten plan to remove him from power – another hamhanded invasion of the island by Cuban exiles – although this time not a revolutionary vanguard, but a brigade of CIA-trained anti-Castro ‘patriots’.

Once again McGeorge Bundy, by then JFK’s National Security Advisor, was out front – serving as White House liaison to the Agency’s invasion planners. The ensuing Bay of Pigs fiasco is well-known – the whole ill-fated enterprise had become an open secret in Miami’s Cuban émigré circles, and Castro’s forces were more than ready for them.

         

The operation was a personal tragedy not just for the hundreds of brigadistas who survived, languishing in harsh Cuban prison camps for nearly two years – it was also a political disaster for America’s new young president. However, the image of his administration as a bunch of bunglers and himself personally as lacking in resolve only steeled JFK’s determination to get Castro. One of the President’s favorite maxims was ‘Don’t get mad, get even’.

         

After purging senior CIA people responsible for the debacle, JFK tasked the Agency to covertly eliminate Fidel – in a word, assassinate him. The hit plan, code-named ‘Operation Mongoose’, enlisted Cuban émigrés again, but this time the American Mafia as well – the very guys whose Havana casinos had been seized by the Castro regime in ’59.  

By summer ’62 the bizarre plotting to decapitate Communist Cuba was well underway.  Some of the looney ideas the plotters came up with included a lethal exploding cigar, exposing Castro to a fountain pen treated with poison, and, perhaps looniest of all, slipping a chemical into his shoes to cause his signature beard to fall out – that wouldn’t have worked anyway.

Unbeknownst to the US, that very summer Khrushchev was planning clandestine operations to carry out regime change in Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador, Latin American dictatorships firmly in the Western camp.

However, sensing that Kennedy might attempt another attack on Cuba, Khrushchev changed his mind and decided instead to secretly reinforce his new Caribbean client state, a move which would erupt in the coming months into the Cuban Missile Crisis – arguably the most dangerous moment of the long Cold War – but that’s a story for another post.

____________________________________________

*Manchester Guardian (December 4, 1956).

†  http://jeffsharletandvietnamgi.blogspot.com/2013/12/the-good-life-in-cold-war-europe.html

Off to the Cold War By Way of Paradise

It was a chilly day January 3^rd ‘56, my last as a civilian for some time. The Army owned me for the next three years. Actually I had joined an outfit that was independent of regular military channels – the Army Security Agency, or ASA. Still, before the Army released me to the semi-secret ASA, they wanted me for Basic Training – every man in uniform a rifleman regardless of special skills.

I was destined for Fort Dix, a sprawling training base in New Jersey’s northern barrens. First though, I was to report to my local induction center early that winter morning. I was sworn in with a group of scruffy-looking guys, mostly younger – I was then 20. As the oldest recruit, and perhaps because I was the only one with any college education, I was put in charge, a dubious distinction.

It meant nothing more than carrying the travel orders and tickets and getting everyone on the right train. Half an hour later, standing with my crew at Albany’s New York Central RR station waiting for the public announcement, we must have looked like an itinerant band of workmen transiting to a new job site. We were a bunch of guys in warm-up jackets and zip-ups, our only luggage small canvas bags with shaving stuff, toothbrush, and the like – one didn’t dress for Dix.

Just as our train was called, Pete, a friend from prep school, sailed by with several traveling companions, casting a quizzical glance in my direction as if to say, Bob, what the hell are doing with those guys and dressed for the gym. He was decked out in a camel hair coat, pretty much the standard outerwear for the well-heeled of the day. We were on the same train, but I was off to the army while Pete was heading back to college for spring semester.

For a moment there I thought, what have I done? – hoping to become a writer, I had impulsively dropped out of school with ‘my unfinished novel’ which went nowhere, and here I was heading off my generation’s track. Like ships passing in the night, I was enroute to Fort Dix, Pete farther down the line to the gothic towers of Princeton.

Except for long days in wintry weather with little sleep, Basic wasn’t bad. An 8-week course in the rudiments of ground combat, the DI’s – drill instructors – didn’t have much time to teach anything in depth except for the week we spent firing the M-1 at the rifle range. Some of the routine stuff was familiar to me – at the prep school, the same one brother Jeff Sharlet was then attending, we’d been organized as a battalion with uniforms, rifles, the manual of arms, and daily drill.

At Dix, our platoon always moved to training destinations as a column of threes. Top Sergeant (Sgt) marched smartly alongside, calling out ‘Hup-areep, Hup-areep, on your left’ over and over in a rhythmic chant, a catchy cadence to keep us in step.

Maybe because of my school background, the training cadre made me a squad leader in the platoon with the rank of acting corporal. Midway in our course, the platoon guide, a former National Guardsman, fell ill, and I was appointed to take over as acting platoon sergeant.

The duties weren’t onerous, but occasionally vexing – keeping the gung ho guys from bullying the weaker ones, trying to talk to the Puerto Rican recruits who responded to only two words in English – ‘chow’ and ‘payday’ –  and dealing with a bed wetter and the bunkmate below who threatened to kill him with his bayonet.

On the last day of Basic, Top Sgt told us we were to fill out and sign a questionnaire on our training experience, assuring us that the forms were confidential, and would be sent directly to an office across post for evaluation. So he said. I had had an easy time of it at Dix, but I wrote critically of the cadre for turning a blind eye to the tougher troopers picking on the little guys.

Within 15 minutes of handing in the form, I heard myself summoned over the PA, public address system, to the company office. There Top Sgt and his staff were waiting and wondering why I had criticized them. No discussion of alleged confidentiality. Since I’d been one of them, albeit a junior version, with certain privileges, they felt betrayed by my ‘ingratitude’.

Graduation ceremony was scheduled for that afternoon, but Top Sgt ordered me to report instead to the Mess Sgt at the kitchen. There I found another naive recruit who had fallen for the promise of confidentiality. We were both put to work in the grease pits behind the Mess Hall. My partner was from Williams College, a sister school of my own, so we had much to talk about as we hauled buckets of cooking grease. Thus went my final day in the Regular Army before shipping out to ASA.

After a short stay at Fort Devens in snowy New England, I was off to the West Coast, to the Army Language School (ALS) at the old Presidio of Monterey.* Arriving there on a sunny California afternoon after the cold Northeast was a moment of pure joy. Footpaths lined with flowers, streets bordered with trees, trim lawns in front of well-preserved old yellow double-decker wooden barracks – the whole scene was perched on a hill overlooking the blue Pacific. One could well imagine being back on a college campus.**

Army Language School, Presidio of Monterey, 1956***

Basically my ‘job’ was to attend class six hours a day, three in the morning, three after lunch. While we ASA personnel were busy studying a variety of languages taught at the Language School, the FBI was conducting intensive background investigations on each of us pursuant to approving Top Secret and Cryptographic security clearances essential for our future classified duties. Keep in mind it was the Cold War of the mid-‘50s with the country still in the thrall of ‘McCarthyism’, so-called after the reckless senator crusading to root out hidden communists in American society.

Our barrack was subdivided into two-man cubicles. My bunkmate had been a junior professor at a university. Summoned by the draft, Albert had opted for a three-year ASA enlistment to get the language training. A little odd, he was a bright fellow. One day he furtively showed me a bootleg copy of Henry Miller’s Tropic of Capricorn (1939) – banned in the US under the obscenity laws, but smuggled in from Europe. Albert kept it hidden in his footlocker.

Miller, long an expatriate in France, had resettled in the States just down the coast from the Presidio. Albert wrote him an appreciative fan letter and, to his pleasant surprise, received an invitation to come down for a visit. On the following Saturday with much excitement, he boarded a bus to Big Sur on the coast road and then walked up to the famous author’s house on the ridge. I wish I could now recall what Albert told me of their meeting, but time has washed away the memory.

My Czech class was small, maybe 8 to 10 of us around a big table, with different instructors rotating in hourly. All were refugees from Communist Czechoslovakia – former lawyers, judges, army officers, and one professor who ironically was the least effective teacher.

Homework was assigned, but most of us didn’t give it much time. Classmates included a ringer, a career sgt who spoke Polish at home and understood Slavic grammar; and an older major, a long time staff officer who wistfully longed for a ‘little war’ so he could make lieutenant colonel before retirement.

After classes and on weekends, our time was our own. Monterey was an easy walk down the hill, but not much of a town, Cannery Row of Steinbeck fame being the main curiosity. It was essentially a long row of mostly dilapidated and abandoned fish canneries with a few off-beat eateries tucked in the ruins.

Cannery Row, Monterey CA, 1956

The principal cultural attraction was the Long Wharf Theater, a small playhouse on the then little-used pier jutting into the bay. Otherwise there were the usual shops along with many honky tonk bars frequented by GIs on weekend passes from Fort Ord, the giant infantry base farther along the coast.

For me, the highlight of the summer of ’56 was the visit of my parents and Jeff. I got them rooms at a beautiful inn right on the water in Carmel-by-the-Sea, a picturesque little village on the other side of the Monterey Peninsula. We rented a car and took in all the area’s places of natural beauty, including the famous 17-Mile Drive around upscale Pebble Beach.

I of course took them on a tour of ‘my school’ at the Presidio. Jeff was duly impressed with the ambiance of my unusually comfortable life in the military – what teenager wouldn’t be. Before the family left to fly back East, my father bought me a used car, which was to transform my sojourn on the West Coast.

Having wheels meant I could range far and wide. First thing I did that fall was to rent a small house in Carmel with three other ALS students. All of us were Easterners from the New England schools – Peter from Trinity College was learning Romanian; Bob from Williams, Russian; and Mal, like me from Wesleyan, was in the Hungarian program.

Officially but nominally, we all still ‘lived’ in the Presidio barracks except that after classes we drove back to our place in Carmel and of course remained in the village on weekends. Civvies were standard dress off-duty, but so long as we appeared in uniform for morning roll calls and on Fridays stayed around for retreat – a military formation on the company street as the flag was lowered to the sounds of Taps – nobody, meaning the ‘brass’, knew the difference.

Life in Carmel was lovely. Ocean Avenue, lined with charming shops and pleasant pubs, ran from the peninsula highway down to the Pacific beach. All the side streets were honeycombed with small but sturdy seaside bungalows and labyrinthine courtyards.

Carmel beach, California coast

My favorite haunt was Sade’s, a pub on the main drag. As a group of us would sit around drinking beer at the big round table, the conversation often turned to books, sometimes to F Scott Fitzgerald and the expatriate writers in Paris of the ‘20s. We were all dreamers, fantasizing that we too might publish a first novel by age 23.

With the opening of the local school year, our social life picked up. As I wrote home, “every time I set aside an afternoon to write letters, a fantastic party looms out of nowhere.” A bevy of attractive college girls from Southern California descended on the Carmel school system for student practice teaching. They rented big summer houses which became settings for weekend partying.

♫Well, it's Saturday night and I just got paid,
Fool about my money, don't try to save …
But I don't care if I spend my dough,
'Cause tonight I'm gonna be one happy soul …†

The California beauties were very different in style from the young women we knew from the Seven Sisters’ schools back East. The difference was evident when one of the guys brought to a party his sister visiting from Smith College in New England. The local girls were on the tall side, leggy, and lighthearted with long hair. At the parties they invariably wore flower-patterned silk dresses with attractive costume jewelry.

By contrast, the ‘Smithie’ was a serious young woman wearing her hair short pageboy fashion, grey tweed skirt, white blouse under an earth-color cardigan, and a small silver circle pin by way of accessory – a look familiar to all of us guys.

We were all being taught one or another Cold War language, by which I mean the languages of our adversaries in the global conflict. The Cold War itself was fairly distant from our daily routine as we struggled with unfamiliar vocabularies, unusual pronunciations, and often exotic grammars dictating peculiar word endings. Distant, that is until late fall ’56, when the low intensity East-West stand-off suddenly flared into a short hot war.

Two events occurred that fall that became historic markers in the Cold War, one for its ferocity, the other for its subsequent unforeseen dramatic consequences. The Hungarian Revolution in October focused everyone’s attention at the language school. There had been rebellious occurrences within the USSR’s East European satellites earlier –  workers rising in East Berlin in the early ‘50s for one – but nothing on the scale of the bloody street fighting in Budapest that was finally crushed by Soviet troops, tanks, and artillery.

Soviet tanks in Budapest, 1956

For those of us up on the Presidio hill, it turned out that the Hungarian tragedy was not that far removed. After the onset of the revolution, my housemate Mal had casually mentioned that a number of students from the Hungarian department hadn’t shown up for classes, no one knew why.

Only later did we all learn that the GIs who had abruptly left school, were Special Forces, a small elite Army unit. They had been shipped to a staging area in Europe in case the US decided to help the rebels.

Less than a month later, even as the Hungarian Secret Police were mopping up and carrying out summary executions, what seemed at the time an obscure incident occurred in the Caribbean 90 miles south of Key West at the tip of Florida. It got coverage in the American press, although I happened to catch only a brief reference to the event in a weekly paper I received air mail from the UK.

The Manchester Guardian reported with some amusement that a band of men had attempted unsuccessfully to invade Cuba from an overladen sailing yacht. The landing party had been largely wiped out by the dictator’s forces, but a small group managed to escape into the mountains, among them the Castro brothers as we later learned. The world had barely noticed a crucial juncture in the Cuban Revolution that, just six years later, would lead to the Cuban Missile Crisis, the most dangerous moment of the Cold War.

During winter of early ’57, other diversions from the language grind included skiing – my favorite slopes, Squaw Valley – and weekend trips to San Francisco, city of steep hills and cable cars. I knew a girl in the city who would put me up after a night on the town – drinking at the Top of the Mark overlooking the bay, catching some music at a jazz club, and wrapping up with Irish coffees on the waterfront. Other times I’d sack out at the ‘Deke house’, the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity at Berkeley across the bay, a courtesy extended to a brother ‘Deke’ from the East.

The author, Squaw Valley ski resort, California, 1957

When not up in the Bay Area, friends and I would sometimes drive down to Big Sur south of Carmel. We’d hang out at Nepenthe, a great restaurant – as Henry Miller wrote, “One of the show places along the coast” – extending over a cliff high above the ocean hundreds of feet below. It was a beautiful place constructed from sun-dried adobe bricks and hand-hewn redwood timbers from nearby canyons. Late weekend afternoons, I’d often sit there – drink in hand as the sun settled over the Pacific – and muse, am I really in the armed forces, or is this paradise.

All good things end. Final exams and graduation beckoned in the spring of ’57, and it was time to go off to the Cold War. In following my path half a dozen years later, Jeff wasn’t so lucky. The slow-burning Cold War had morphed into a hot war in distant Southeast Asia. He had been promised the same deal I got, but on arrival at ALS, Jeff found himself bumped into Vietnamese.

His living conditions weren’t so great either. Whereas my barrack sgt, or non-com, had been an older alcoholic GI over his head in the language classes and not the least bit concerned with the rest of us, Jeff got stuck with a young Marine non-com. With bed checks, inspections, and barrack-cleaning details, he ran the Vietnamese barrack like a Marine billet.

Only late in Jeff’s course, when his prep school friend Keith Willis reached ALS, could the two of them together afford a used motorcycle they’d ride up to San Fran. Jeff also got to take in the Top of the Mark, but with his 11 ½  month course soon coming to an end, it was all downhill from there, eventually to a tiny outpost just below the North Vietnamese border, but that’s another story.

Link to music video:

†    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XJW-XQtycmw

*A US Army base dating back to 18^th century Spanish California.

** http://jeffsharletandvietnamgi.blogspot.com/2011/08/good-life-at-presidio.html

***The school is now called the Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center (DLIFLC).