Island of Dreams (standard:other, 2549 words)
Author: radiodenver	Added: Nov 13 2005	Views/Reads: 3201/2458	Story vote: 0.00 (0 votes)
A story about the Great Pumpkin

Click here to read the first 75 lines of the story

good a fellow. 

“There isn't much to do here but work, eat, sleep and get drunk.” He'd
say. “Mostly eat for me. Navy chow is good.” He'd add. 

My first few days in Gitmo were busy. I was starting my new assignment
working at the Sat-Com site on the far end of the base at a cozy little 
spot on the ocean near Windmill Beach. The compound was an isolated 
post surrounded by a chain link fence, near the cliffs overlooking the 
Caribbean. It was manned with about twenty sailors; a scruffy dog named 
Misty, a dozen or so iguanas, seven or eight chickens and a goat with 
fluorescent orange testicles. When I asked about the goat having orange 
testicles, I was politely told – “don't ask.” Another unique feature of 
the compound was the satellite communications dish. It was housed in a 
large, white, geodesic dome. 

My first morning on the job, I reported in to Chief Petty Officer
Carter. Chief Carter, known affectionately and simply as ‘The Chief', 
was the senior enlisted man of the detachment. He had been in the Navy 
for about twenty-five years and in Gitmo for about four. My first image 
of him was a gripping spectacle. I sauntered into the Quonset hut where 
the main offices were located, only to find the Chief kicking the shit 
out of the dog and cursing. When I introduced myself, he smiled and 
burped. He smelled of cheap aftershave and was drunk as hell. The Chief 
stayed drunk the entire time I knew him and the dog literally got its 
ass kicked by him every morning as well. He wasn't quite as rough on 
the other sailors. The Chief assigned me to watch section Bravo as 
supervisor. In Gitmo, the main crews worked in watch sections. The 
normal shift rotation was one-one-one-fifty-six; an evening-watch then 
a mid-watch then a day-watch, followed by fifty-six hours off. Watch 
shifts were normally spent making repairs to the depilated equipment 
and filling out logs & paperwork. The Navy loved paperwork. The 
fifty-six hours off were spent sleeping, lounging at the beach and 
getting stoned with buddies. Once we did a calculation and determined 
that 90% of the crew was pot-heads. A favorite pastime on our day off 
was to loiter on top of a cabana at the beach, drink beer and smoke pot 
when nobody was watching. Tech types seemed prone to getting stoned. 
Getting stoned was occasionally done while at work too. Before any 
maintenance could be performed on the radio equipment, a tech was 
required to put a safety tag on the gear, alerting others not to 
operate the equipment until the work was done. Waveguide is a hollow 
rectangular transmission medium that connects the radio amplifiers to 
the satellite antenna. In order to avoid observation, we would climb to 
the top of the satellite dish and pass the pipe. It was called ‘tagging 
the waveguide.' Everyone thought we were working. There was seldom 
anything wrong with the equipment, but that damn waveguide was tagged 
out almost every mid-watch. We didn't dare attempt being wasted on 
day-watch though. The day crew, mostly office workers and the Officer 
in Charge (O.I.C.) would generally be poking around and too underfoot. 

Everybody hated the O.I.C. Delaney, or De-loony as we called him. He was
a Lieutenant that came up through the ranks and had accumulated years 
of experience in the art of ignoring the needs of his men. Aloof and 
completely detached from reality, he spent most of his time sitting at 
his desk eating donuts and badgering the Chief about improperly 
completed paperwork. Misty was his dog. He brought the mutt to the site 
after his kids had tortured it until it was completely neurotic. The 
rumor was that his kids had put rubber bands around the dog's neck and 
were fixated on sticking foreign objects up the dog's ass. He probably 
did the dog a favor by bringing him out though. The watch crews took to 
him and vice-versa, but still he wasn't the friendliest pooch 
nonetheless. He would allow you to feed him but if you tried to touch, 
he'd bit the tip of your finger off without hesitating. For some 
reason, he seemed to like Smitty and me more than the others - probably 
because we had no interest in kicking, choking and anal probes. He 
would lie at our feet when we were around and sometimes follow us out 
to tag the waveguide. At night, he would chase the blue crabs across 
the compound. Occasionally, one would clamp onto his nose. We wouldn't 
see it, but from our stony perch atop the satellite dish we'd 
occasionally hear a distressed yelp from the darkness followed quickly 
by fevered growling and mauling sounds. I always thought of his 
attacking the crabs as something akin to the Chief kicking his ass 
every morning. Shit flows downhill in the Navy. Misty was the bottom of 
the hill in this place. 

It didn't take long for me to be assigned family housing. My wife and
kids came out in late June of 79 and we instantly took up the domestic 
life of a Navy family, living in a Communist country, on a base 
surrounded by barbed wire. It was like living in Mayberry with 
land-mines. 

Every few months or so, the base would go on alert and have what was
called a DEFEX “Defense Exercise.” This was practice in preparation for 
the eminent Cuban Army invasion. They'd hand out rifles and pistols, 
smear our faces with black makeup , give us instructions and assign us 
to the Marines to pretend we were defending the base. Certain 
“critical” positions weren't involved, mine was one. I had to stand 
watch during DEFEX in my normal capacity and maintain the 
communications systems that allowed the base to talk to the world. We 
used secret passwords to pass through the Marine check-points. 
Whiskey-Barrel, Wooden-Pencil, things like that. If you tried passing 
through a check-point and didn't know the proper password/reply for 
that day, you were toast. Smitty found this out the hard way. Coming 
off a mid-watch one evening, he gave the password for the previous day. 
The Marines didn't care that he was a short-chubby black man from 
Louisiana, to them he looked like a Cuban infiltrator wearing Navy 
dungarees. He was promptly escorted at gunpoint to the temporary 
prison...the tennis courts. He was kept there until the end of the 
exercise (some two days.) Odd though, we were notified of his capture. 
I guess the Marines assumed that we normally had Cuban infiltrators 
working in my watch section on the beach. He slept on a cot and ate 
C-rations for two days, which I'm certain wasn't his idea of good 
living. When Smitty returned from captivity at the tennis courts, his 
story of his treatment astounded us. He was kept in the open, fed basic 
rations and water and treated like the Cuban infiltrator he was. 
Threatened and screamed at by his Marine captors, he was nothing less 
than a practice prisoner. 

Which brings me to today. Guantanamo is now as it was then, a US Naval
Base with family housing, a Marine detachment and a McDonalds 
restaurant to boot. I imagine that now it's like Mayberry with land 
mines and prisons. Somewhere along the road to the main entrance on the 
north-east side of the base is a real prison. A real prison stocked 
with real evil-doers. The Military police assigned to guard these 
prisoners don't have sailors for practice these days. The real prison 
is full of real people, living in cages like dogs, with no idea of when 
the ordeal may ever end. They have no hope of a legal status or 
protections from the abuse that is no doubt being handed out. They 
sleep on mats, are disciplined for simple things like having a towel in 
the wrong spot on the ground. The mosquitoes probably eat them alive; 
their guards are probably as bored and angry about the situation and 
probably trying to do their best. I can't help but wonder though what 
their best can be, in a place where people turn to alcoholism and 
suicide to cope with the harsh and heartless conditions. I can't help 
but wonder what their best can be when their leaders don't respect the 
concept of “all men are created equal.” All men are equal unless you're 
a prisoner in Guantanamo, in which case you're not a man. You're a dog 
to be kept in a cage with no resolution...with no legal remedy...with 
no access to the protection of the courts. They live, they eat, the 
sleep, they resist, they make the news. They live their life in dreams. 
Dreams of someday having this horror out of their lives and out of 
their heads. They are people in limbo and at the mercy of a 
megalomaniac in Washington. 

This brings me back to the Great Pumpkin. The ‘ray-dome', was a
large-white geodesic structure with an aluminum frame and triangular 
fiberglass panels. Every year at Halloween, we'd place high intensity 
orange lights inside the huge structure and mask out certain panels 
with cardboard. When it was completed, it looked like a giant 
jack-o-lantern. At night, it was visible for miles. A strange site 
indeed, I often wondered what the Cubans thought of our annual revelry. 
We had fabricated plywood figures of the characters of Charles Shultz's 
famous ‘Charlie Brown' cartoon. We had a Snoopy, Linus, a Dog House, 
and of course Charlie Brown. Charlie Brown was everyone's favorite, 
shaking his fist at the Great Pumpkin, he stood eight feet tall. We'd 
place the plywood replicas on top of the Quonset hut. Every year, the 
kids would come out to the site and see Charlie Brown and the Great 
Pumpkin and we would hand out candy. The base television crew would do 
a story on it as well. 

I spent my waning days in Gitmo working along side Joe Fillmer. Both our
attitudes had deteriorated severely by the end of our tour. The Chief 
pulled us from rotation and we were assigned to work detail. One day 
near the end, we were goofing off in the paint shed and found the 
plywood Charlie Brown figures tucked neatly in back. In a moment of 
brilliant inspiration, we scrounged up a small paintbrush and a little 
paint. When we were finished, Charlie Brown was no longer shaking his 
fist but was instead flipping the bird, the old "one finger salute." We 
snickered at our artwork before sliding Charlie back in his place at 
the rear of the shed. It was months until Halloween and we were quite 
positive that nobody would even notice Charlie's indiscretion. If we 
were lucky we thought, they might not even notice until the base TV 
station came out for the Great Pumpkin Special. I'll never know how it 
turned out, but I made my final gesture via Charlie Brown and the 
Peanuts gang, sitting on a rooftop, near a coral beach, on the south 
side of a Caribbean Island. 

I haven't dreamt of Gitmo since 1999. When I think of it now I think of
the first person I met in Gitmo, Smitty. Twenty-five years later, I 
wonder what his dreams are. I'm also curious as to what dreams the 
prisoners interned there will be having in the years to come. 

What ever may be the truth; to me Cuba will always be The Island of
Dreams. 

Copyright © - 2005     Gary Gray


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