Last night I was going through this thread with my girlfriend, who doesn't speak English all that well, nor does she read it. So, I spent more than an hour translating it all for her while we sat in front of the computer with Phil's gun laying there on the computer table. (She has actually fired it, about a year or so ago when we took it out with us to go shooting.)
At the end of having the forum translated for her, she asked me; "Why didn't you ever talk to Phil more about Cuba and Guatemala?" She's Mexican, so obviously more interested in the idea of CIA Intervention in Latin American affairs than in the history of any war that Mexico really had no part of.
I replied that, at the time, I was much more interested in Guadalcanal and the Island Campaigns and the fighting against the Japanese and there's only so much time in life, right? Phil and I just never got around to talking that much about Cuba or Guatemala, and I always felt that if there was something Phil wanted to tell me, he'd tell me. I know he felt that the U.S. went into the Guatemala thing way too heavy handed, and that he felt sure that innocent people had been killed who hadn't needed to be killed -- he testified about that late in his life.
"As to Cuba and Fidel," I told her, "he really only ever said something to me about it on one occasion."
"Oh?" she replied. "What did he say?"
With a grin I repeated what Phil had told me about the Fidel relationship once. He said to me, I told her, "THAT one didn't turn out quite the way I had planned."
Cal