Chickenhawk: Back in the World - Life After Vietnam

I had very little to do with the Cubans because they were so hard to get along with. The only one I talked to was a dentist in my section named Antonio. One Sunday afternoon, while I lay in bed reading, a group of Cubans were just outside the dorm, about ten feet from my cube (all major noise in camp was ten feet from my cube; only the airplanes were farther away), talking loudly and playing their radio. The windows were open because the weather was perfect. I tried to ignore the music, even put my headphones on, but it was really loud. I endured for a half hour and finally got mad. I went outside and asked one of the guys, Eduardo, who lived down at the end of my aisle, if they might consider turning the radio down.

Eduardo stared at me sullenly and said, “No hablo Ingles. I don’t speak English.”

Well, of course he did. I’d talked to him a couple of times.

“C’mon, Eduardo. It’s way too loud. I can’t think. Besides, you aren’t even allowed to use a radio without earphones.”

“No hablo Ingles,” Eduardo said. His two friends snickered and looked at me like I was from the Other Side.

I said, “Eduardo, por favor,” and held my hands over my ears.

Eduardo just glared at me as if I had just suggested that his sister fucked donkeys.

I felt my heart pounding in my ears and I was beginning to get into a rage. Didn’t anybody understand the importance of quiet in this fucking place? I mean, we had rules here! I went inside and found my friend Antonio. I told him about Eduardo, and he volunteered to act as my envoy. I watched through the window as Antonio explained to them my side of the issue. Eduardo told Antonio to mind his own business. Antonio came back inside and shrugged. If a Cuban couldn’t make them shut up, then the only people who could were the hacks. However, going to a hack about this kind of problem was worse than the problem; it just wasn’t ethical to rat on an inmate, even if the inmate was a total asshole. I took a walk.

As the population of Cubans grew, so did incidents between them and the Anglos. Cop-outs flooded the counselors’ offices. Even George, the sporting goods felon—the meek and apathetic soul I used to tend grounds with—lost it one night and got into a fight with two Cubans in Dorm Four. A hack saw it, and George and the Cubans were shipped to the federal prison at Tallahassee. That fight and the continuing complaints caused the hacks to cruise the dorms more frequently. They were breaking up the Cubans’ parties, which made the Cubans resent the Anglos even more. A real schism was developing and peace in our little crook farm was jeopardized.

I had cooled down about the radio incident, but when I passed Eduardo in the aisle and tried to be friendly, he just glared at me and said nothing. My transgression, asking for peace and quiet, was not forgivable.

Three weeks after the radio incident, Antonio came to me one night and said he’d heard that the prison was going to ship Cubans, lots of them, out of Eglin. He wanted to know if I’d heard anything about it. I hadn’t. However, the rumors persisted and grew to the extent that the Cubans sent a spokesman to the new warden. Superintendent Honsted had been sent to open a new prison a few months before. The Cubans requested that the warden meet with them outside the administration building to talk about the rumor. On a Friday evening, the warden did. He told the Cubans he’d heard the rumor, too, but that it was only a rumor and they had nothing to worry about. They believed him.

When I woke up Saturday morning, Eduardo was gone. So was Antonio. So was every Cuban in our dorm. At the mess hall, I learned that nearly every Cuban in camp had been rounded up at three in the morning by hacks carrying shotguns (which is amazing, since hacks never carry weapons in a prison unless there’s a riot or something). They were already on buses going, it was claimed, to Atlanta. Being sent to Atlanta Federal Prison, I was told by people who’d been there, is the same as being sent to hell—it’s huge, overcrowded with crazy and pissed-off Marielitos who chant and scream twenty-four hours a day, demanding their freedom, creating a literal bedlam. As much as I didn’t like Eduardo, I wouldn’t wish Atlanta on anyone, especially a pot smuggler who was considered harmless enough to be sent to Eglin.

At the visiting room, there were a lot of Cuban women crying and screaming at the guards, pleading to know where their husbands were. It was sad to see.

The few remaining Cubans were noticeably quiet. They no longer gathered in the cubes and even responded positively to the normal requests for quiet that came up every evening. The consensus among the Anglos was that the warden did the right thing shipping those forty or so Cubans. This action didn’t establish a ban on Cubans coming to Eglin; they continued arriving a few at a time and the population slowly began to rebuild. But it took a long time to reach critical density again.