VFW Post #7123
VFW Post #7123 is located in Gerritsen Beach, Brooklyn; and it’s utterly unremarkable. The Post is located in a standalone cinder block banquet hall-plus-bar not too far from the water, and while it was hammered by Hurricane Sandy a few years back the damage was all repaired. And therein hangs a tale.
You see, when they were cleaning out all the water-damaged junk from the basement, volunteers came across a waterproof sea trunk with stuff in it. Battle standards, yellowing photographs and framed newspaper articles, transcripts of oral histories, various souvenirs — the sort of thing that one would associate with a display case commemorating a particular war. Only there’s no record of this war.
It wasn’t a big war, as wars go; the documents all refer to it as ‘the Caribbean Intervention’ or just ‘the Intervention.’ It purportedly started in 1937 in the Dominican Republic; the United States, Mexico, and Cuba landed troops there to stop a massacre of Haitian nationals, which turned into an outright ousting of the Trujillo regime by the end of the year. The next few years apparently required significant numbers of increasingly Mexican/Cuban peacekeepers, and only really ended with the United States entering World War 2 in 1941.
This did not happen, of course. Other peculiarities: John Nance Garner is listed as being the American President who ordered the Intervention. ‘Secretary’ Herbert Hoover is down as being the ‘Relief Administrator’ for the Dominican Republic during this time period. None of the newspaper articles or documents reference the New Deal, although an economic depression is mentioned in passing more than once. On the Cuban side: the President of Cuba during this time period was supposedly Gerardo Machado. Nothing unusual is immediately obvious in the documents touching on Mexico, except of course for the fact that the Mexican government would have been finishing up a failed revolution in their own country at the time, not intervening in somebody else’s.
It must all be a forgery, of course. But it’s an old forgery. There’s one guy at VFW Post #7123 who has any memory of any of this, and he’s a Korean War veteran who barely and dimly remembers seeing ‘something about how we invaded the Dominicans’ back in 1955 or so. And that’s it. There’ve been a lot of displays over the years, know what I mean? The guy seems to recall that nobody made a big deal about it, or treated it as a joke; they had the stuff up in a case, then they made room for it for a display about Korea. Nobody raised a fuss. He thinks. It’s been sixty years, for Christ’s sake.
And that’s where the matter rests. No sudden disappearances, no ominous omens or anything. Just an inexplicable thing that nobody seems all that excited over. Which is weird, in and of itself. Normally these kinds of sideways anachronisms are more, ah, fraught.