Bay of Pigs Vets Fight for Home

Eduardo called Elena one evening from a pay phone in New Orleans. He had been training with the other frogmen at an abandoned military depot. (Eduardo has a photo of the tan young men at a pool on the base.) It had been three months since the newlyweds had spoken, and she sobbed while they talked. Eduardo Jr. was growing up without him. "I don't want you to go to Cuba," she told him for the first time.

She had tried to understand, but the uncertainty wore on her. After a 10-minute conversation, they hung up. It was unclear if they would ever be together again as a family.

After heading out with his compadres for two days of R&R, drinking martinis, touring the city, and watching John Wayne in The Alamo, Eduardo returned to the base and his leader, Grayston Lynch. The retired U.S. Army captain bore a resemblance to the rugged actor. He was a veteran of the Normandy invasion who stood taller than six feet and had joined the CIA just a few months before. They knew him only as Gray. "Some of the CIA guys would say, 'I just don't want to get close to you,'" Eduardo says. "But Gray was a character. He was very friendly."

Lynch led them on "swamp patrol," during which he turned over logs and poked through the swamp to draw out venomous snakes. In early April, the frogmen boarded a merchant marine ship and headed out of the Mississippi River before crossing the Gulf of Mexico and traveling six days to Puerto Cabezas, Nicaragua, where they anchored off a long pier about 500 yards from shore. They woke around 6 that morning to spy a handful of Nicaraguan women bathing nude near the shore.

"They put on their clothes and they were very nice girls," says Blas Casares, one of the frogmen who jumped overboard to greet the women in the sun. "We'd been training for seven months. We agreed to meet them later for drinks. Your mentality changes when you know there's a chance you could get killed."

Puerto Cabezas was a shabby port town of a few thousand people. It was about only a dozen blocks long. When the troops began arriving, all outgoing calls and telegraphs were blocked. Suspected Castro sympathizers were locked up.

Eduardo spent his days wandering through the humble town. He greeted arriving troops, which, to his surprise, included his younger brother, Rogerio. Most of the brigade had been trained in Guatemala. The frogmen had worked in isolation.

The exile fighters soon swarmed the town's bars, until the Nicaraguan National Guard declared the town off-limits. But that didn't stop frogmen like Amado Cantillo, dubbed "Crazy Horse" by the others, from dumping his clothes into a bucket and leading a few of the other frogmen in a half-mile swim from the ship to shore. Lynch spotted them at a bar but let them stay as long as they went easy on the booze; they had to swim back to the boat that night.

"They told [me] not to worry, that they planned to sleep on the beach under the dock," Lynch writes. "They did, and as far as we knew, no one ever discovered this last night on the town."

Ships left Nicaragua during the evening of April 13. Lynch convened the 11 frogmen and showed aerial photos of the landing site. Two frogmen who knew the area warned that some shadows in the water were live coral that could grind up a boat's hull. Lynch took the photos to CIA analysts, who assured him it was just seaweed or clouds.

Eduardo wasn't worried. "I trusted what the CIA was telling us," he says. "The Americans knew what they were doing, in my mind."