Here Is Where: Discovering America's Great Forgotten History (49 page)

(In one of history’s greatest “what if?” moments, at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the president’s senior circle of military advisors
unanimously
recommended bombing Cuba, and Kennedy might well have followed their counsel if he hadn’t recently read
The Guns of August
, Barbara Tuchman’s Pulitzer Prize–winning book about the events that led up to World War I. Kennedy became convinced that launching air strikes would provoke a Soviet response and cause a domino effect resulting in another world war. Against the advice of his Joint Chiefs of Staff, Kennedy ordered a naval blockade around Cuba to prevent additional missiles from being installed and proposed a secret deal to take U.S. warheads out of Italy and Turkey if the Soviets removed theirs from Cuba. Premier Nikita Khrushchev consented but added one more condition: Kennedy had to promise that the United States would never, ever, try to invade Cuba again. Kennedy readily agreed.)

Questions about the fate of Pete Ray, Leo Baker, Riley Shamburger, and Wade Gray reemerged in January 1963, when Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy publicly denied that any U.S. servicemen were killed at the Bay of Pigs. On March 6 a reporter pressed President Kennedy during a live, televised news conference to admit that the missing Americans had been “employees of the government or the CIA.” Walking a verbal tightrope, Kennedy praised the airmen but remained vague about their mission. “Let me just say about these four men: They were serving their country. The flight that cost them their lives was a volunteer flight and while because of the nature of their work it has not been a matter of public record, as it might be in the case of soldiers or sailors, I can say that they were serving their country.”

For the next ten years the CIA, the State Department, and the White House continued to stonewall the families, and Janet’s mother gave up hope of ever finding out what happened to her husband.

“We had a memorial service for my dad,” Janet told me, “but it’s hard when there’s no body to bury. It doesn’t seem real.”

At the age of fifteen, Janet figured she might have more luck with the Cuban government than her own, and she began writing to Castro himself. “I really did expect him to respond, but no one ever answered my letters.”

Once Janet got her driver’s license, she started going to local libraries and reading every book and newspaper article she could find on the Bay of Pigs.

“This was before the Internet,” Janet said to me, “and it was much harder to gather information. I would also go through trash cans in our home to look for names and addresses of relatives or anyone I thought might have been friends with my father. I’d write to them or, if they lived close by, drive over and interview them. I also eavesdropped on the conversations my mom had with other adults in our home and recorded what was said in a spiral notebook. There was a lot of speculation, but no one really knew anything.”

I asked Janet if other family members were working as diligently as she was to uncover the truth about her father.

“I think my mother was too traumatized to pursue it, and keep in mind that this was the era before Vietnam when Americans were more trusting of their government. I remember one time at my Uncle Bill’s house, my cousin Debra Ann kept going on and on about Watergate. Uncle Bill couldn’t take it anymore and finally said, ‘Debbie, you’re sitting at my table, and if you keep talking about the president of the United States that way, I’m going to break your plate.’ That’s how people were back then.”

“So why were you so persistent?” I asked.

“I don’t know. I was very tomboyish as a child. I didn’t play with dolls. I preferred to be out exploring with my dog. My dad called me his Little Lulu, based on the old comic-strip character, always getting into trouble. He also said I was a fighter, and I guess that’s part of it.”

During college, Janet began visiting Miami’s Little Havana to track down anyone who had flown with her father.

“How did you do that? I can’t imagine you just walked up and down the streets asking random strangers if they knew Pete Ray.”

“That’s not far from the truth,” Janet said. “I’d go into coffeehouses and barbershops or talk with people playing dominos, and a lot of them were related to the Cubans who took part in the invasion. It was a very close community.”

Janet eventually did find Brigade 2506 veterans, and they spoke very highly of her father, but the trips offered no concrete information, only rumors.

Back in Alabama, Janet was gaining allies, including her father’s first cousin Tom Bailey, who was also a
Birmingham News
reporter; a historian named Peter Wyden; Alabama’s junior U.S. senator, John Sparkman; and Congressman John Buchanan. Buchanan and Sparkman lobbied the CIA to acknowledge in some capacity the heroism of Ray and his fellow Americans, and in 1977 the agency awarded the four airmen its highest honor, the Distinguished Intelligence Cross. Old habits die hard, however, and after presenting the medals, the CIA representatives told the families not to mention them to anyone. And they continued to refuse Janet’s request for their files on her father.

Janet’s big break came on April 19, 1978, exactly seventeen years after her father disappeared. “I was living at the Hahn Air Base in Germany with my husband, an Air Force pilot, and I’ll never forget that moment,” Janet told me. “I had picked up our mail, and there was a large envelope from Peter Wyden that contained a black-and-white photograph of my father’s body that Peter had come across while doing research in Cuba.”

“That must have been awful,” I said.

“I had asked Peter to find whatever he could on my father’s death when he went down there, but yes, it was still a shock. I was in my car parked behind the post office, and when I opened the package and saw the picture I just started screaming at the top of my lungs. Fortunately, an F4 had just taken off from the base, and I don’t think anyone heard me.”

Numerous details were still unclear; Janet didn’t know, for instance, if her father had died in a shoot-out with Castro’s soldiers after his plane went down or from the crash itself, but at a minimum she knew that he hadn’t been a prisoner of war.

Armed with the photo, Janet redoubled her efforts to pressure Cuban and American officials to bring her father’s remains back to the United States. Through Tom Bailey, Janet was also learning more about the incident, and by 1979 a clearer picture of her father’s fate was coming into focus.

Pete Ray had survived the crash landing on April 19, 1961, and quickly extricated himself from the smoking wreckage of his B-26. Cuban troops hunted Ray down within hours and executed him with a point-blank shot to the head. (Leo Baker was either killed in the crash or shot by Cuban troops. And because of his olive skin, the soldiers assumed he was Cuban and tossed him into a pit with other dead rebels.) Ray’s body was taken to a Havana morgue, where it was put on ice. For eighteen years Castro kept Ray’s corpse in cold storage and proudly displayed it like a war trophy to other communist leaders when they visited Cuba.

Finally, in the winter of 1979, the Cuban government agreed to relinquish Ray’s body.

“After all those years, why do you think Castro decided to return your father?” I asked Janet.

“I don’t know for certain, but I was told he wanted to earn brownie points with the Carter administration,” Janet said. “He wasn’t doing it to be nice. There was an ulterior motive.”

On December 8, 1979, Pete Ray was buried at Forest Hill Cemetery by the Alabama Air National Guard with full military honors, and the Air Force provided a flyover in Ray’s memory. He now rests on a small hill overlooking the airport that had played such a central role in his life. Janet had informed me ahead of time that her father’s headstone contains two errors. Under his name, he’s identified as a “1ST LT US ARMY,” when he was really a captain, and the actual date of his death was April 19, 1961, not April 18, as the marker states.

“I think my grandmother was so distraught when she filled out the paperwork that she was off by a day,” Janet told me.

Daniel Boone comes to mind, and I asked Janet if there was any chance whatsoever that the Cubans had intentionally or mistakenly sent back the wrong body.

“No,” she said. “Because of the condition he was in and the fact that he’d been shot in the head, the coroner discouraged me from looking at him, but I was adamant. I knew I wouldn’t have believed he was really home until I saw him myself, and it was definitely my dad.” The FBI also confirmed his identity using dental records and fingerprints.

Before Pete Ray was buried, Janet slipped a five-page handwritten letter into his uniform, telling her father how proud of him she was.

“Giving him a real funeral helped us to grieve properly,” Janet said. “I also came to know him as a person through this whole process, and I just wanted to bring him home with honor.”

Since there’s no chance of ever retrieving the remains of Leo Baker, who was dumped in an unmarked mass grave, or of Shamburger and Gray, the two airmen lost at sea, Pete Ray is the only American killed at the Bay of Pigs whose body has been recovered, or ever will be.

I asked Janet, who now lives in Miami, if she’s ever been to Cuba,
and she told me she had no interest in going until the country was liberated from communism.

“Do you hold any ill will toward Cuba because of what Castro’s regime did to your father?”

“I think I was actually angrier at our government,” Janet said. “They led these men into harm’s way and then turned their back on them.”

There was, however, one final insult from Castro that rankles Janet to this day. Before releasing her father’s body, the Cuban government (unsuccessfully) tried to bill the Ray family $36,000—for eighteen years and eight months of “refrigeration” costs.

“THIS CAN BE
a heavy experience,” Melinda Hunt advises me as we’re heading up the FDR Drive toward City Island in the Bronx.
From there we’re renting a boat and venturing out to see Hart Island, the 101-acre cemetery where New York disposes of its unclaimed dead. “Even if you don’t have a personal connection to anyone buried there,” Melinda says, “it can still be emotional.”

No one lives on Hart Island now, and the only people allowed onto it are the Rikers Island inmates who dig the graves and the armed officers guarding them. Under very strict circumstances, immediate relatives of the deceased are granted access, but they’re closely observed at all times. Before connecting with Melinda, I had contacted New York City’s Department of Correction (DOC) for approval to tour the island myself, under supervision, and the request was promptly denied.

“They reject almost everyone these days,” I’m told by Melinda, the foremost expert on the place and founder of the Hart Island Project. The nonprofit organization’s mission is to make the island “visible and accessible” and to create a single, searchable database containing the names of the dead, something the DOC itself doesn’t have (everything is on paper). Slender and in her early forties, Melinda is an accomplished artist and photographer whose interest in all of this was sparked twenty years ago when she came across nineteenth-century pictures of Hart Island taken by the social reformer and photojournalist Jacob Riis. Along with compiling the names, Melinda helps people navigate the DOC’s byzantine bureaucracy to find lost family members, a process that can be both complicated and intimidating. Between 1991 and 1994, she was frequently allowed onto Hart Island to take photographs or to accompany the relatives she had assisted so they could pay final respects to their loved ones or retrieve remains. Not anymore.

“The DOC won’t let me go back out there and just freely walk around,” Melinda says to me. “They’ve become much more restrictive.”

“Since it’s not a prison cemetery, why does the DOC run it?” I ask. “Why not the health department or some other social services agency?”

“Because it’s cheaper to have inmates bury the dead.”

At Jack’s Bait & Tackle on City Island, where we’re renting our little motorboat, I ask Jack’s teenage son for a maritime map of the area that
includes Hart Island. Melinda knows the location, but I still want a better sense of where exactly in Long Island Sound we’re headed.

“You’re not going on it, right?” the kid says, not really asking but telling me.

“No, only around.”

“Good, ’cuz you’ll get arrested if you do.”

“I’ve heard that,” I say.

With damp orange life vests hanging loosely around our necks, Melinda and I board the single-engine Yankee dory and putter out of the harbor, maneuvering through medium-sized yachts and small sailboats. Rain or black rumbling clouds would have been fitting for our somber journey, but the weather is discordantly cheerful. Bright blue sky, 70 degrees Fahrenheit, gentle winds.

“How long to get there?” I ask Melinda.

“About ten minutes.”

For several of those minutes, I play out in my mind various scenarios that involve our “accidentally” running aground on the island, but when I mention this to Melinda, I get the impression that she’s opposed to the idea.

Looking at the map Jack’s son gave me, I’m reminded of the ambiguity over how Hart Island got its name. One suggestion is that eighteenth-century British cartographers thought the land was shaped like a heart and then later dropped the
e
, either inadvertently or for brevity’s sake. This would make perfect sense except for the minor detail that Hart Island looks nothing like a heart—neither the organ nor the Valentine’s Day icon. With its thick, angled top tapering off into a thinner, more crooked bottom, it resembles the rough outline of a horse’s hind leg. Months ago Melinda sent me an excerpt from William Styron’s 1951
Lie Down in Darkness
, which offers this etymological theory: