As many of you know, this October marked the 50th Anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis. After half a century it's still hard to forget John F. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev's battle of power that nearly detonated a nuclear war. Suspicions began to arise of the Soviets secretly putting nuclear weapons in Cuba aimed at United States soil. Yet it wasn't until Kennedy and the United States Ambassador to the UN had visual proof of these weapons that they were able to give the Soviet Union an ultimatum that saved the world from Armageddon.
To thank for those important images we have Captain Gerald Coffee and his teammates. As part of a reconnaissance mission they risked their lives to fly over communist land and take pictures of America's pending doom. Listen to Captain Coffee's personal account during this enlightening interviews on national television.
The Military Channel "Commander in Chief: Inside the Oval Office: Low Flight Over Cuba"
CBS Sunday Morning "When the U.S. was on the brink of nuclear war"
PBS "Three Men go to War"
Only now I am learning that we both had more in common than VC1. My late father, George DePina was UDT trained to go in on the Bay of Pigs invasion to mine ships in Havana Harbor. We lived in Ft. Lauderdale and were very much on edge during the missle crisis. Dad took us to see the old ICBM silos in Opa Locka years later (they were empty by then). Never knew until the 1970's how close we did come to that nuclear war. Thank you Captain for your work! Dawn Klug
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