It was doomed from the start. We were fucked. Fucked by a cocky new civilian president and his naïve cabinet, fucked by the lack of resolve, and fucked by bad weather. You would have thought that someone would have taken lashing rain into account when putting this stupid invasion plan together.
I was barely into the tree line up from the Bay of Pigs, not seventy-five miles from Havana. It's almost as if they knew we were coming. They were picking our small squads of Cuban exiles off even before most of them reached the beach. We'd trained them hard, but what good is expertise in hand-to-hand combat if you're shot before even reaching the beach, for fuck's sake? And where in the fuck was the air support? We'd just been abandoned here. A doomed operation from the beginning.
But I couldn't think that way. It was one thing for these Cuban exiles to be wrapped up here in the underbelly of Cuba in a failed attempt to depose the Castro regime. It was quite another for me, an American commando, to be caught here.
I'd told them I didn't think any of the American advisers should be in the actual operation, and they'd just brushed that away. They said the operation would be a cake walk. That all our Cuban exiles needed to do was to show up on the beach in force and the Cuban people would rise up and overthrow Castro. Just an afternoon's jaunt, and the threat of the Russians getting a toe into the Western Hemisphere waters would evaporate. Yeah, fat chance of that. That Kennedy bunch should be here with me now.
But I was a trooper and did what I was told to do; and now, for the good of my country, I needed it get back out to sea. I couldn't be caught here on Cuban soil. The shit would really hit the fan for an American combatant's sorry ass to be captured in this circle jerk.
I heard a metallic click that made the hair stand up at the back of my head. I instinctively dropped while turning to the sound and bringing my pistol up. My training had been true, because the bullet passed by me rather than catching me full force in the chest.
Close onto the tail end of the report from the rifle high up in the branch of the tree came the sound from my answering pistol shot.
I had been luckier and a truer shot than my assailant had been. There was great agitation of leaves and branches above and in front of me, and a body dropped to the ground at the base of the tree.
Either the young man's clothes had been ripped almost to shreds as he fell, or he had been dressed in shredded rags to begin with, because his shirt and trousers were largely torn away from him as he hit the ground.
He was bleeding from the head and his eyes were closed, but I didn't think he was dead. I moved quickly over to him and tore his shirt the rest of the way off and felt his chest. Still breathing. I looked down at him. He was an unearthly handsome young man. He couldn't be more than nineteen or twenty. He was small of stature but very well formed, with the fine facial structure of Spanish stock, just barely mixed with the Mestizo genes, which gave him a milk-chocolate skin coloring that only enhanced his beauty. My bullet had grazed his temple, which, in combination with the fall, had knocked him unconscious. For how long, though, I didn't know. And unconscious wasn't dead. He may have seen me well enough to know that I wasn't a Cuban exile, that I was an honest-to-god American. And having no one who was left here knowing that an American was here was only second in importance to getting back off the island and not being captured here.
