“Cuba is mostly a waste of time for infantry Marines. I was in FAST (Fleet Anti-Terrorism Security Team) and for some reason the Marine Corps likes to send us to Cuba to be glorified border patrol to catch Cubans who sneak over or under the fence.

Other than that, it’s not a bad place to get some good training in to refine your infantry skills such as patrolling and land navigation. It’s not a rare thing to see a whole squad of boot rifleman learning to patrol in the hills and salt flats of the eastern side of Guantanamo Bay.

Anyway, there’s lots of old relics around the area that are leftover from the Cold War. Machine gun bunkers, mortar pits and trenches. We were out patrolling one day when we come to this open field. We started walking through it when we noticed all these odd extremely rusted, distorted, circular disks on the ground.

None of us had ever seen anything like them before so we started picking them up and tossing them at each other. I tapped on one and felt that it wasn’t hollow and I tried to find a way to open it. For a moment I thought they were old weird mortar plates or flare containers.

Once we reached the edge of the field my buddy came across this super old wire fence with a metal sign facedown on the ground. He picked the sign up, turned it around so he could read it and said, ‘Uh guys. Don’t fu*king move.’

‘What why?’ He turned and held the sign up so we could read it. “DANGER: MINEFIELD”…we were playing with old Cold War mines. Somehow we had wandered into an old minefield. It took us probably two minutes to walk into that field, and another 90 to walk out.”
– Anonymous US Marine. Charlie Co FAST. 2009
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