Bay of Pigs Vets Fight for Home

President Kennedy scrapped further air attacks and restricted U.S. involvement. One of the two top CIA architects of the plan, Richard Bissell, would later say the CIA didn't inform Kennedy properly about the consequences of canceling the attacks.

Lynch received word of the cancellation as the frogmen prepared for landing. Though the American trainers warned of the danger, Eduardo knew he'd make it through. He was young and strong.

Eduardo carefully removed and stowed his wedding ring. The other frogmen covered with black tape anything that could catch light as they headed into the Bay of Pigs. "I was excited and looking forward to action," Eduardo says. "Our preoccupation was landing."

Just before midnight Sunday, April 16, Eduardo, Alonso, Llama, the Silvas, and Lynch crept down landing nets from the Blagar onto an 18-foot catamaran that towed a rubber boat with a silent motor. Eduardo and four commandos carried .45 pistols and Thompson submachine guns. After shoving off, they looked toward shore, where the seaside town of Girón Beach unexpectedly glowed like a carnival under high-intensity lights.

About 200 meters from the landing spot, the frogmen and Lynch left the catamaran behind and boarded a rubber raft. Then they smacked into the sharp coral. The frogmen cursed and began pushing the raft to shore. Suddenly a light in the boat accidentally switched on. A Jeep appeared on the beach.

¡Coño! whispered Eduardo and the others.

The Jeep turned and flashed its headlights toward the frogmen, now waist-deep in the water and some 40 yards from shore.

"Fire!" shouted Lynch, who emptied his Browning automatic rifle into the Jeep. The frogmen followed his lead. Once the headlights were extinguished, the frogmen and Lynch moved slowly toward the beach. They found a man dead there. Eduardo, a combat virgin, sensed a copper taste in his mouth. He believed it was fear.

"No one wants to see anyone die," Eduardo says. "We would have loved to clear the beach when no one was there."

The landing of the Cuban exile force was no longer a surprise; the frogmen were the first to land and the first to fire in the invasion.

Minutes later, militiamen from the village and the Blagar traded fire as the frogmen ducked for cover. Ten minutes later, the shots slowed and an eerie early-morning calm set in. Crewmen on the Blagar summoned Lynch back to the ship to receive this message from Washington: "Expect you will be under air attack at first light. Unload all the men and supplies and take the ships to sea."

After a pair of landing craft carrying dozens more fighters hit the coral reef, the full landing of brigade troops was pushed back to daylight. The coral would be easier to navigate at low tide. Around 7 a.m., as the brigade trudged through the water, Castro's planes opened fire. Rockets sunk one of the brigade's ships, the Río Escondido. Soldiers quickly steered rubber boats to rescue the crew before the vessel exploded.

"The landing was really a fiasco," Felipe Silva says. "In light, the planes were on top of us and shooting at us."

Lynch radioed Amado Cantillo, who was in a rubber boat, to pick him up. He told the remaining frogmen to stay on the beach and promised to return with supplies. That night the frogmen paced along the sand. It flashed in Eduardo's mind that they might be stranded.

The next night, Eduardo was among those who steered a rubber boat miles out to sea. By radio, they desperately pleaded for support. "Where are you? We need to contact you."

"Ammunition was all we needed," Chiqui Llama says. "We blamed Kennedy. I think Kennedy was yellow."

Cantillo stayed aboard the Blagar. "I will never forgive myself for not going back to help those guys, but it was not up to me. I follow orders."

American jets flew overhead during the battle but left without firing a shot.

On April 19, Eduardo took a bullet in the knee. Later that day, after the plane left without wounded passengers, Felipe Silva was shot in the left elbow by a fellow soldier. "We could see [American destroyers] on the horizon!" he says. "All our thoughts were that they were going to come in and pick us up."

But they didn't; the destroyers turned around.