The night of Sept. 30, 1961 was, literally and figuratively, one of the darkest of Art Jackson’s life. The 36-year-old Marine captain’s job that gloomy night was to escort a man suspected of being a Cuban spy off of the U.S. Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay. But a momentary delay – the lock on a gate wouldn’t open – began a series of events that haunts the Boise Medal of Honor recipient to this day.

Jackson is Idaho’s under-the-radar Medal of Honor recipient. Others – Kuna’s Bernie Fisher, the recently deceased Ed Freeman of Boise, even the late Vernon Baker of far-off St. Maries – all have received more local media attention. Jackson has seldom spoken publicly about his military career and never about its Guantanamo chapter.

A company commander at Guantanamo on that September night, he discovered a Cuban bus driver named Ruben Lopez in a restricted part of the base for which Lopez had not been granted access. Naval intelligence had identified Lopez as a spy for Fidel Castro’s new Communist regime, but he’d been allowed to keep his bus-driving job on the base. When Jackson found him in the restricted area, an ammunition dump, he decided to remove him from the base and summoned another officer to assist.

The two escorted Lopez to a back gate, but were unable to open its lock. Jackson sent the other officer for tools, but managed to pry open the lock while he was gone. No sooner had he done so than Lopez lunged at him and tried to take his sidearm.

Lopez chose the wrong man to attack. If he thought he was quick enough to disarm the larger, seemingly slower-moving American, he was mistaken. Left alone with a suspected spy, Jackson had taken the precaution of having his pistol cocked and ready in its holster. He drew and fired in self defense.

Lopez died instantly. And Jackson was about to make a decision that would change his life, putting him at odds with the highest levels of President John F. Kennedy’s administration.

“I hoped no one would find out,” he said. “The world found out.”

In line for a promotion to major at the time, a celebrated career all but assured, Jackson was arrested. The World War II hero was placed under guard and flown to Washington,D.C., where Marine Corps Commandant David Shoup, acting on orders from Kennedy and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, forced him to leave the Marine Corps. From a rising star with the nation’s highest award for bravery in his service record, he went to a job as a mail carrier in California. He was honorably discharged, but his status as one of the most admired men in the military passed like a Cuban breeze.

 

The young man who found himself at the center of a potential international incident in Cold War Cuba could have been a poster child for the All American Boy in Depression-era Ohio. A native of Cleveland, Jackson grew up in Canton, Ohio, where he was a Boy Scout and the bugler in his troop. He was five merit badges shy of making Eagle Scout when his watchmaker father took a job in Seattle. The Jacksons had hardly settled there when another job offer took them to Portland, where Art attended high-school, lettering in baseball, football and track.

“My mother cried after I graduated and left the country,” he said.

He left for a job with a construction company in Alaska, then 17 years from statehood.

“I was a common laborer. They were building a Naval Air Station and extending the runways at Sitka. I’d hear the roar of the planes and watch those Marine Corsair pilots and think, ‘Holy moly, that’s what I want to do – fly a plane off a carrier.'”

He failed the eye examination for pilots, but the Marine Corps was happy to accept him for infantry training. His first encounter with the enemy was in Cape Gloucester, New Britain, where he received his first citation for bravery. The commendation from the commanding general of the First  Marine Division recognized him for pulling a wounded private to safety “in the midst of tremendous fire from enemy pillboxes and with utter disregard for his own personal safety.”

As bad as the war was in New Britain, it was but a warmup for Peleliu, an obscure Pacific Island and the scene of some of most vicious fighting of  World War II. The two-month battle resulted in the highest U.S. casualty rate of any in the Pacific War. The National Museum of the Marine Corps called it “the bitterest battle of the war for the Marines.”

On Peleliu on Sept. 18, 1944, Pfc. Jackson saved his platoon from being pinned down and possibly wiped out by Japanese gunfire. A book on the battle of Peleliu described him as “nothing less than a one-man Marine Corps.” His Medal of Honor citation credits him with proceeding ahead of American lines, defying heavy enemy barrages and singlehandedly wiping out 12 Japanese pillboxes, contributing “essentially to the complete annihilation of the enemy in the southern sector of the island.” He was 19 years old.

He said at the time that he didn’t consider himself a hero. Asked seven decades later how he felt about killing 50 enemy soldiers, he paused for a long time.

“When I think about what they did to our guys …”

It wasn’t necessary to finish the sentence. Brutality against U.S. soldiers in the Pacific – torture, mutilations, beheadings – are well documented.

Jackson was wounded on Peleliu and again in the Battle of Okinawa. He returned to the U.S. with two Purple Hearts and was honored at the White House, where President Harry Truman presented him with the Medal of Honor. He was congratulated by Marine Corps Commandant Alexander Vandegrift, Fleet Admiral Chester Nimitz and Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal, celebrated with aviation legend and fellow Medal of Honor recipient Jimmy Doolittle, rode with celebrity columnist Walter Winchell in a New York City ticker-tape parade.

Given his choice of assignments, he chose China.

“The commandant  looked at me like I was crazy,” he said. “He thought after all that time and all that fighting, I’d want to go home. But I’d heard so many stories about China and China Marines that I wanted to go there and see it for myself.”

He did. Jackson served in the Marine Corp for four years after the war and in 1949 joined the army, which offered him a chance to earn a regular commission as an officer. (The battlefield commission he’d received in the Marine Corps was only effective in reserve units.) He spent a decade in the army, serving in the U.S., Korea and Japan, and in 1959 rejoined the Marine Corps.

Why?

“Once a Marine, always a Marine,” he said.

It was a decision he would second-guess after the fateful night in 1961, at the Cuban prison that confounds presidents to this day.

 

“He told me he could see how I shot Lopez,” Jackson said of his dressing-down by then Commandant of the Marine Corps David Shoup. “It was self defense. He said my mistake was trying to cover it up.”

But the decision wasn’t that simple. Given the circumstances, it was one  any soldier might have made. Jackson didn’t explain it publicly, remaining silent and refusing requests for media interviews.

“I’ve never talked about what happened,” he said. “I was ashamed of what I did.”

To understand what happened, put yourself in his place. You’re alone in the middle of the night with a suspected enemy spy, whom you shot to keep him from taking your weapon and possibly killing you. It’s five months after the Bay of Pigs Invasion, a year before the Cuban Missile Crisis. Tensions between the U.S. and Cuba – and its ally the Soviet Union – were at the boiling point. A Cuban national killed by an American hero would have been made to order for anti-American propaganda. Jackson would have been on front pages worldwide.

In retrospect, the right call might have been to report the shooting, claim self defense and wait for the storm to blow over. Jackson never explained until now, at age 88, why he chose to hide the body and, with help from four other officers and several enlisted men, bury it on the base:

“My understanding of the treaty between Cuba and the U.S. was that any military person involved in a situation like that, Cuban or American, would be tried in a Cuban court,” he said. “It was pretty obvious what the outcome would have been in Castro’s Cuba at the time. I probably would have ended up at the Isle of Pines.”

The Isle of Pines was the site of a Cuban prison. A 1969 letter to the president of the U.N. Commission on Human Rights described it as “a forsaken place of terror and barbarism,” where 7,000 prisoners lived in  quarters built for half that many. It was the setting, the letter said, for “the most cruel, brutal and inhuman plan of forced labor known in the history of the Americas … we all were beaten mercilessly.”

Jackson’s choice, as he saw it, was to report the killing and risk torture and possibly death on the Isle of Pines, or hide the body and hope it was never found. Word leaked, however, and he and three officers involved in the coverup were forced out of the Marine Corps. A fourth was allowed to finish the two years he had remaining. The enlisted men were reassigned. All were told never to talk about what happened.

Jackson requested a court martial to try to clear his name, but the request was denied.

The story – minus his input – did make front pages. Columnist Jack Anderson accused the Defense Department of hushing up “one of the most explosive incidents of the long Cuban crisis …”

Not long after that, Jackson declined an invitation to a White House ceremony honoring Medal of Honor recipients, saying that his presence there might embarrass the president. Kennedy Press Secretary Pierre Salinger responded that the president respected his decision, adding that Jackson “would always be welcome at the White House.”

The hero of Peleliu worked for a year as a mail carrier in San Jose, Calif., returned to the army as an enlisted man, then worked for the Veterans Administration in San Francisco before transferring to Boise in 1973. He’s now retired and lives in East Boise, where he’s known as a good neighbor, a good American and a modest recipient of the nation’s highest award for valor.

“His character is impeccable,” longtime neighbor Jean Patrick said. “He’s a wonderful man of honor and integrity and a great patriot. He flies the U.S. flag and the Marine Corps flag every day. It bothers him if someone flies a dirty or tattered flag. He tells them to take it down and replace it.”

More than half a century after the night that changed his life, I asked Jackson if, given another chance, he’d have done anything differently at Guantanamo.

“Yes,” he said. “I never should have let myself be left alone with a man like Lopez.”

Does he wish he’d reported the shooting?

“No. It would have gone to a Cuban court. I probably wouldn’t be here today.”

Tim Woodward’s column appears in the Idaho Statesman’s Life section every other Sunday and is posted on woodwardcolumn.com the following Mondays. Contact him at woodwardcolumn@hotmail.com

 

Two of the most subjective things in life are art and Mexican food. One person’s favorite Mexican dish is another’s dog food, and one person’s revered work of art is another’s candidate for visual affront of the century.

That Boiseans hold divergent views on public art was seldom clearer than in the responses to my column last month on proposed artwork for City Hall Plaza. The column was critical of what I considered to be failures of the past, namely “the steaming crack” at the Grove Hotel, the wings on the airport parking garage and the metal rectangles in Julia Davis Park.

In a perverse way, the reaction was flattering. Never – well, almost never – had responses to one of my columns occupied the entire Letters to the Editor section of the editorial page. The intensity of the response surprised me because I naively thought I was on solid ground. I thought everybody hated the steaming crack, but even it has its admirers.

In my defense, one letter writer agreed with me. And a local  artist called to thank me for writing what he’d thought for years but had never said publicly.

So much for the positive responses. A letter to my e-mail address criticized not only the art column, but much of what I’d been writing for 40 years. It didn’t actually say so, but the implication was that I’d be better suited to alphabetizing the classified ads.

One person dismissed a sculpture I like and had praised as “schlocky mall art.” Another wanted to know why I’d focused on relatively few public art pieces instead of taking a more extensive look. It was never my intent to visit and critique every piece of public art in town, but the letter writer had a point. As I was about to find out, I had a lot to learn about Boise’s public art.

Enter Karen Bubb, the city’s public arts manager. Her e-mail noted that all three of the works I’d singled out for “negativity and sarcasm” were commissioned prior to the city’s establishing a full-time art department with a professional staff and commissioning over 100 pieces of public art.

One hundred? I didn’t think there were that many in the whole state.

So, when Bubb offered to take me on a guided tour, I accepted. It was the least I could do, considering my newly acquired reputation as Public Art Enemy No. 1.

Our tour began at City Hall, where Bubb showed me the plaque designating it (and dozens of other buildings) as geothermally heated, an entryway mural with tiles by youthful artists, a “penny post card” mural and two pillars from the storied Natatorium. I’d walked past them dozens of times without noticing them.

From there we walked to the Basque Block. I’ve long admired the large Basque mural there, but had hurried by the block’s smaller works of art without giving them their due – Basque crests, an Oak of Guernica memorial, flag sculptures, names embedded in the sidewalk of the Basque families who emigrated here … In a way, the entire block is a work of art. Even the street was redesigned to better present the Basque heritage.

At the Grove, we peered through “binoculars” containing historical  photographs, admired the great blue heron sculptures and smiled at the symphony of percussive sounds released by our walking past the “Homage to Pedestrians” auditory artwork.

Here and there, Bubb pointed out the artwork gracing traffic boxes – 57 completed to date, another 41 still to come. We pass them all the time without stopping. Their artists deserve better.

It’s amazing what we just don’t notice. I don’t know how many times I’ve stopped to look at the photographs and read the texts on the Grove Street Illuminated piece at Ninth and Grove, but always in the daytime. I’d walked right over the “Boise Canal” lights in the sidewalk (the canal still flows underground there), utterly oblivious to them.

The same goes for the bricks you walk across in the courtyard of the Plaza 21 building on Ninth between Main and Idaho. They form the tail of a fish, Bubb said, complete with scales. You have to see it from the right perspective and take time to appreciate it, as you do with Kerry Moosman’s ephemera on the back of the Idanha Hotel.

“River of Trees,” embedded in the sidewalk outside the Ninth and Idaho Center, honors Boise’s river and street trees. It was done by the same artists who put the fish in the floors of Sea-Tac Airport.

The new Jesus Urquides memorial at Second and Main is mix of art and history. Uquides was a Mexican-American pioneer who built a “Spanish village” there in the late 1800s. The memorial’s focal point is a bronze camera with his image, pointed at the former site of the village. Texts tell his story; a model shows what the village looked like.

We didn’t have time to see all of the artwork Bubb wanted to show me, but I solemnly promised to see as much of it as possible on my own. My first stop was Anna Webb’s colorful new mosaic at Ninth and River. I was briefly Anna’s next-door neighbor in The Statesman’s newsroom and never knew what a talented artist she is.

Next I visited the Boise Watershed campus on Joplin Road, a veritable repository of public art – sculptures, stained glass, art inspired by reservoir rings – all reflecting the role of water and the importance of conservation in our lives. Even the drinking fountains are works of art.

A few miles away, public art graces the Foothills Learning Center. Its lobby walls are painted to represent the Boise Front. Sculptures represent air, fire, earth and water. “Air” is a gigantic dandelion with a top that turns in the wind, dispersing “seeds.” “Fire” is a mosaic of a tree damaged by fire, but healing. “Earth” and “water” are yet to come.

There isn’t space to include all of Boise’s public art pieces. There are just too many. And more are coming within the next year. They include new artwork for City Hall Plaza and other Downtown locations, the BSU campus, Marianne Williams Park, South Boise, the Boise Airport, the Foothills Learning Center, Julia Davis Park, Zoo Boise …

The thing that struck me most about all this is just how much public art and how many talented artists we have in Boise. I still don’t like the “steaming crack.” But I do like a lot of our public art, now that I’ve taken the time to actually see it.

“A lot of it we’ve done in recent years hasn’t been big projects,” Bubb said. “It’s been smaller and more personal. It tells our stories. And we’ve been so busy doing it that we haven’t done a good enough job of telling people about it. Maybe that’s where you can help us.”

The best way I can do that is to tell you to slow down. There’s more art to see in this city than you think. But you don’t appreciate it – or even see a lot  of it – from a moving car. Park the car and walk. Take your time. See what you’re looking at.

If you follow those simple instructions, I guarantee you’ll learn something and have fun doing it.

You’ll also be less likely to get a letter from some know-it-all saying that you should be put to work alphabetizing the classified ads.

 

Tim Woodward’s column appears every other Sunday in the Statesman’s Life section and is posted the following Mondays on http://www.woodwardblog.com. Contact him at woodwardcolumn@hotmail.com.