One day older

Eisenhower, reportedly, didn't like it much. He may have been okay with the development of the U-2, but he didn't like what was really intended as a spyplane project of the Central Intelligence Agency to be piloted by his own Air Force personnel. He lost that argument. So it was the U. S. military who operated the Lockheed U-2, an ultra-light, single passenger, high-altitude jet created to do nothing other than intelligence work.

The one that went down in 1960 created an international incident in the Cold War, when Nikita Khrushchev, the rotund powerhouse Soviet Premiere, told the world the Russians had shot one down as it was nosing around, an "aggressive act," he called it, then put Francis Gary Powers, who had parachuted to safety, on a show trial and tucked him away in a Soviet prison.

It was harrowing--the Cold War itself was harrowing--but an event even more scary occurred when yet another U-2 took photographs of Fidel Castro's Cuba, photographs that when examined showed unmistakably clear pictures of Soviet missile sites on an island only 90 miles from Florida.

It was October, 1962, and a friend of mine was in the belly of a troop ship just off the Cuban coast along with hundreds of his buddies, the U.S. Marines, were poised to make a beachhead.

On October 22nd, President John F. Kennedy, who would be assassinated little more than a year later, announced to the American people that he would send those Marines ashore to neutralize those missile sites if Khrushchev didn't act to remove the threat from Castro's Cuba.

It seems that Kennedy never questioned whether America could live with long-range Soviet missiles in Cuba. Khrushchev and Castro had put them there after a haywire invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs. The President was adamant that the missiles had to go and sought to get them gone in two steps: first, by creating a naval quarantine or blockade around the island to prevent Soviet ships from bringing more or even landing with supplies; second, by demanding their removal by way of an ultimatum.

When Soviet ships approached, they met the American forces. That moment, as I remember, was really scary. We stood at the brink of war--I did, we all did. I was 15.




That Soviet ships didn't get into Cuban ports was only the first step in Kennedy's plan. The second, the removal of those missiles, began when Krushchev and Kennedy were able to negotiate their way out of what looked like the first days of a Third World War. Russia would remove the missiles if the U.S. promised not to invade or attempt invasion again.

The nation entirely shut down when Kennedy was shot a year later in Dallas. That entire weekend everyone I knew sat glued to the television, watching every last segment of a story that when announced in the high school I attended--and, yes, I remember which room, and even the speaker up on the wall above the teacher's desk--seemed impossible.

Strange as it seems, my searing memories of the Cuban missile crisis stay with me more boldly because on October 23rd, I was walking around on an empty high school football field with another kid. There was no football practice that day. The world was frozen in time and space. Nothing mattered but what was happening just beyond our borders in Cuba. Nothing. We were a step away from nuclear destruction.

And I knew it. I remember just walking around aimlessly on that empty field, talking about lives the two of us might have liked to live, not as if our losing a war was imminent, but as if what we were about to experience would be unlike anything we could have imagined, even though, earnestly, we tried. There appeared to be no tomorrow. Later, Robert McNamara, U. S. Secretary of Defense, told a reporter that he believed that Saturday would be the last one he'd ever see. That level of doom was in me too. I was just a kid, couldn't even drive.

As I remember, I didn't cry about it. I don't remember even talking about it with my parents, although I can't imagine that we didn't. They would have spoken about it in religious terms, I'm sure, assuring me that we Christians always know there will be a heavenly tomorrow. None of that has fought for a place in my memory.

What remains is a video of two kids walking around on a football field with the clear perception that something, even here in small-town Wisconsin, would never be the same. Every little thing we'd ever dreamed was off the map.

That October, I grew up, more than a little. Seems to me that one grows up a thousand times in a single lifetime, but something profound happened in a quiet and dead serious conversation that isn't even recorded in my memory. Something happened no one could have noticed if they spotted two kids walking around an empty football field. I had to consider the very real possibility that everything in my 15-year-old world could be over if some way couldn't be found to avoid the end of things.

That friend of mine who spent those hours in the belly of a ship just off Havana harbor felt it too, I'm sure. He remembers it vividly. There he sat, surrounded by buddies, a ship full of Marines ready to take the harbor.

I might well have been among them that day, even though I was a thousand miles away. We both saw what we didn't know how to imagine. Not once in my life thereafter was the nation--was I--so clearly poised at the grave. I got older that day--much, much older.