Guantanamo Bay

Guantanamo Bay.  Go ahead and say it out loud if you want to.  I’ll bet you think of it as a deep, secretive, prison somewhere in the middle of the ocean where the American Government keeps war prisoners locked away forever and ever with no access to any sort of aid whether it be humanitarian or legal.  How true that may be is very difficult for most people in the world to determine.  It is difficult to get there, and only a limited amount of information is allowed to be disseminated, and that being only a government version.

However, there is, or was, a totally different side of Gitmo that lots of folks know nothing about.  Once upon a time, in 1963, when I was a First Class Petty Officer in the United States Navy, I received a set of orders sending me and my family (if they wanted to go) to this duty station.  I flew there for a Permanent Change of Station in August of that year, followed by my pregnant wife and year-old-son that December.  In the meantime in November I had been advanced in rating to Chief Petty Officer.

This was about a year after the Cuban Missile Crisis when the world stood still while the USSR and the USA stood nose to nose over Communist nuclear missiles being placed in Cuba on a permanent basis.  After the dust from that whirlwind settled my family and I settled in Gitmo.  I was attached to Utility Squadron Ten (VU-10) on the part of the base named Leeward Point.  A part of this squadron maintained ten F8U Crusader aircraft.  (Later they would be re-designated as F8 A-E when the Navy began using the Air Force designations.)

For the next three years our family continued to live there in the most desirable duty conditions I spent in my career in the Navy.  This was small town life with a few exceptions.  There were no older people.  Everyone was of a prime military age.  As Cuba and the United States were at odds there was no leaving the base to visit Cuban interests.  In our more than three years there we left the island but once.  That was on a vacation to visit our parents which fortunately lived near each other in northern New York.

The weather was beautiful there with the temperature ranging between 70 and 80 degrees at all times.  Most of the time there was a very light breeze blowing.  It rained a lot of days, but only a short shower to freshen things up a bit.

We bought our groceries at a store much like a Stateside supermarket.  We bought most everything else we needed at the Navy Exchange, much like a department store.  What we could not purchase in this manner we kept an account with good old Sears who were more than glad to ship goods to us from The United States.