Cuba Libre

TWENTY-FIVE

Once it was decided Guantfinamo Bay would make a dandy coaling station, Huntington's marines were sent in to secure the area. The battalion boarded the steamer Panther in Key West and arrived off Guantfinamo June 10, their objective: occupy a Spanish blockhouse that sat on a round, green-covered hill on the east side of the bay inlet.

Corporal Virgil Webster stood at the rail of the Panther looking at the hill, which did not appear to be much of a climb, only about a hundred and fifty feet, but that green cover was a dense growth of brush and dwarf trees. This time Virgil didn't have a career marine who happened to be the captain's orderly to ask what in the hell are we doing here, so he asked Lieutenant-Colonel Huntington himself, who seemed to admire Virgil for having been blown off the Maine and could be spoken to as a man.

"Why here? Why that hill? Virgil, you know the difficulty of laying a collier alongside a battleship in the open sea?"

Yes, he did; it was always a tricky maneuver.

And especially difficult, Huntington said, on this south coast of Cuba with its easterly winds. What they needed was a coaling station in a sheltered area not far from Santiago, where they had the Spanish fleet blockaded, and even closer to where American troops would come ashore to engage the enemy, and Guantfinamo Bay filled the bill. There were six thousand Spanish troops fifteen miles away in the city of Guantfinamo, but insurgents were up there keeping them busy. They also had a fort up the bay at Caimanera; but the Marblehead and the Texas would cruise up there and pound it to hell. So once the high ground around here was secured they'd have a coaling station: the reason for starting the war here.

Virgil, with Huntington's marines, went ashore on the tenth. First thing, they burned the Spanish barracks and huts on the beach, in case they were contaminated by yellow fever. Then they looked up at that blockhouse on the hill. It had been shelled good by the cruiser Yankee, which had run the dons out of there. But they were still around in force, so holding the blockhouse would not be a picnic.

Which turned out to be the case, mainly on account of the dense green cover on this hill and the ones nearby. Once the dons began to skirmish they kept at it three days and nights, laying down He on the blockhouse and outposts that had been set up. Virgil and his mates kept waiting for an all-out assault that never came, the dons not anxious to charge the marines' automatic Colt machine guns or the Hotchkiss 3inchers. But they sure raised hell firing Mausers from cover, with their smokeless rounds that never told where the shooter was. Soon they were sniping from up on nearby hills that were higher than the blockhouse hill and gave the snipers a birdseye view of the marines. Any time the fleet turned its big rifles on the hills it would clear them out for a time, then pretty soon they'd come sneaking back. These dons did not lack for courage, regulars in their pinstripe uniforms and funny-looking straw hats. Virgil wished they were Volunteers or Guardias, ones he had reason to hate. Huntington got tired of staying put and sent two companies of marines and about fifty insurgents to Cuzco, six miles east, where there was a heliograph station they used to blink messages to Caimanera, also a well that supplied the dons with their drinking water and five hundred dug-in Spanish troops. Virgil and his mates laid down fire with their Lee rifles, taking trenches and a blockhouse, fought the dons from eleven in the morning till mid-afternoon, finally to drive them off and blow up the well, losing two marines killed and six wounded. Virgil's first sergeant, a man name of Rawley, tallied the enemy casualties and came up with "Sixty-two garlics killed and a hunnert and fifty put on stretchers."

It sure amazed Virgil. He said, "They had position on us, they had numbers-how'd we beat 'em so lopsided?"

"Cause we're fucking marines," Rawley said. "Why do you think?"

Maybe it was true.

Later on Rawley sent Virgil to flush out a sniper up on high ground giving them trouble and said, "Take these niggers with you." Three mambis they were using as scouts. "They ain't worth a shit as soldiers, but they're all I can spare."

"They've been fighting a war," Virgil said, "for three years."

The sergeant said, "Yeah? And they didn't win, did they?" Virgil went up the hill thinking of things to say to Rawley. The hell do you know about it? Shit, you've only been in Cuba five days. You don't even know what you're talking about to say something like that. What-they're not soldiers 'cause they don't wear fancy uniforms? You ever fight with nothing but a machete? In your bare feet? Virgil, thinking instead of paying attention, was hit before he heard that keening whine of a gunshot from way off and went down with a Mauser round, goddamn it, through his side.

The mambls carried him back. Colonel Huntington gave Virgil a pat on the shoulder, telling him, "Hang on, son, it missed your vitals and you are going to make it." That night Virgil was aboard the hospital ship Solace, his war over.