When Grayston Lynch landed on Omaha Beach the skies above him were filled with U.S. planes. When he landed at the Bay of Pigs……well we all know the rest of that story.
Grayston Lynch carried scars from Omaha Beach, the Battle of the Bulge and Korea’s Heartbreak Ridge. Battling through those little dust-ups earned him two Purple Hearts, two Silver Stars, and the Bronze Star with V for Valor.
But the only dust-up that inspired him to write a memoir was the one at Bahia de Cochinos. Lynch had then retired from the Army and served as a CIA officer. As such he helped train the invading Cuban-freedom-fighters, charges he described as “brave boys who had never before fired a shot in anger,” but who inflicted losses of 20 to 1 against their Soviet-led enemies.
Defying orders, Lynch was the first man to set foot on the Cuban beachhead and the first to fire shots at the Castroite defenders. With his men blasting out a beachhead, Lynch motored back to his Assault Landing Craft just offshore to serve as the CIA’s “point-man,”and liaison with Washington.
“They fought like tigers,” writes Lynch in his superb and revelatory book, Decision For Disaster, about the Cuban freedom-fighters he trained and befriended, “but their fight was doomed before the first man hit the beach.”
Sadly, Lynch’s book crashed against the brick wall of a “love affair” not only “slobbering” but downright pathological. I refer to the Beltway’s with JFK and Camelot. Only in their sweetest dreams could Obama’s handlers have envisioned such a media love affair with a U.S. President.
To this day the ahistorical idiocies parroted on such as The History Channel and PBS regarding the Bay of Pigs owe much to this lingering love affair. Grayston Lynch’s book sets the record straight–and from a participant in the very middle of the ferocious and tragic battle. The battlefield heroism and pleas from the freedom-fighters came from one ear of his radio headset; the replies from his Commander-in-Chief’s spokesman from the other.
So it’s worth citing Lynch as the freedom-fighters expended their last bullet and he helplessly listened to them pleading for more: “Never have I been so ashamed of my country. Tears filled my eyes,” along with his tribute to his doomed Cuban band-of-brothers: “they fought Like TIGERS!”
And Lynch should know.
“Humberto Fontova is a gifted polemicist who pulls no punches. A great service for liberty, justice and truth.” (The Weekly Standard on Fidel; Hollywood’s Favorite Tyrant.)
“Humberto’s books read like my concerts sound! ROCK-ON–my warrior blood-brother !” (Ted Nugent)