Cuba

In mid-summer 1968, my Sheridan loader SP4 JC, told me he had a three-day pass for the coming weekend plus Friday. I had not put JC in for a three-day pass, nor had the platoon leader. But, I said, “Have a good time.”  I was a platoon sergeant, with about twice as many soldiers assigned as the TO&E required, but the same amount of barracks space for a full-strength platoon. There were daily problems, and if one of my soldiers had a three-day pass, good on him.

I asked JC if he was going home to New Orleans. He said he was. I told him to have a good time.

Monday morning I asked JC if he had a good time on his pass. He said he had. I asked what he did. He replied, “Went to Cuba and shot up the place.”

JC and his family got out of Cuba not long after Castro and Guevara started killing people by the hundreds. I was a little disappointed that JC had not asked me to go along.

I wondered, too, how JC got a three-day pass but I wasn’t informed he had asked for one. The troop first sergeant had a long time of killing Communists, as an advisor to the Greek Army in that civil war, and with the 25th Infantry Division in Korea and Vietnam, and possibly other places where the US did not have any forces. It is possible JC went to the first sergeant and said he was going to shoot up Cuba over the weekend, but he needed a three-day pass. That would have fit in with the first sergeant’s thinking.