Island of Dreams

Island of Dreams

As if I were a balloon released from the hands of a child, flying above an endless turquoise sea I approach a tropical island. Soaring above mountains, green and lush with vegetation, I follow a narrow dirt road. The road meanders from hill to hill, passing in silence below me as I glide through the warm embracing sky. My journey always ends at the Great Pumpkin.

I've had this dream repeatedly over the past 20 years. I always have the same sense of euphoria when I wake. I last had this dream in 1999, but I remember it as if I had it last night.

Straddling the mouth of a beautiful bay along the southern coast of a Caribbean island is a tiny community. The name of this island is Cuba and the community is Guantanamo Bay U.S. Naval Base. In the Navy, it was called "Gitmo. Twenty-five years ago I lived in this community and many times since, in my dreams I have traveled back there.

Pregnant with our third child, my wife was still in the United States living with her mother, awaiting our base housing assignment. I was alone and out of the country for the very first time in my life. When I stepped off the aircraft onto the runway in Guantanamo that April day in 1979, I was overwhelmed by the hot and humid air clinging to my body like a wool blanket smelling of jet fuel. Wearing my dress uniform, carrying a stuffed duffle bag and knobby motorcycle tire over my shoulder, I checked in with base administration. The Yeoman hardly noticed me as he stamped my orders and directed me down the hall. Within two hours of arriving I was in the barracks and unpacking.

"Welcome to Gitmo. I'm Smitty."

Startled, I turned to find a short, chubby young black man standing behind a row of lockers. He was wearing standard dungarees; his insignia indicated 3rd Class Petty Officer.

"Hi. I'm Gary. I extended my sweaty hand. "Is this your room too?

"Yeah? You hungry?

"Actually, I am. Where's the chow hall?

"Look out the window. It's across the street. I'm going there now, it's dinner time, wanna come?

"Sure.

As we sat together in the cafeteria, Smitty began the conversation.

"You ain't gonna be killing yourself are ya? He asked me.

"Don't plan on it. I answered. "Why?

"People do that here. He answered.

With a bit of additional coaxing, I got the whole story. Smitty's previous roommate, the fellow whose bunk I was assigned, was dead. Pullman was his name; an alcoholic kid, alone, away from his family and in a place that he couldn't deal with. Pullman hung himself from the water cooling pipes in the barracks about a month earlier. Smitty found him dangling after work one evening. It was still weighing on his mind upon meeting me and he was very interested in knowing my mental condition. After we finished the suicide talk, Smitty loosened up a bit.

High on the list of every Sailor's existence is making sure that you know about your shipmate's background. We wasted no time. We were both assigned to the Satellite Communications detachment. He was Radioman 3rd Class from Louisiana, recently finishing a one year tour of duty; he had extended for another two. I was an Electronics Technician 2nd Class from Kentucky and transferred in from Norfolk for a two year tour. Smitty and I would be seeing a lot of each other. I also learned that Smitty liked to eat a lot. He went back for second and third portions at every meal. As a result, he was a tad overweight and a tad self conscious about it. I never bothered mentioning it, he was too 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 dungaree's. 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.