Radioman Wayne Mengel took part in Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962
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Wayne Mengel is pictured about the time he graduated from boot camp at Great Lakes Naval Processing Center outside Chicago in 1960.
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A P-5M "Flying Boat" monitors a Soviet submarine during the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962.
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A U.S. destroyer moves in close to a Soviet freighter whose skipper refused to take the canvas covers off the Russian missile it was hauling out of Cuba in October of '62 during the crisis.
SUN PHOTO BY DON MOORE
Wayne Mengel of Rotonda today at 71.
Radioman 3/C Wayne Mengel played a small part in the history-making Cuban Missile Crisis, the high point in the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union, in October 1962.
The Rotonda resident was a radioman aboard a P-2V “Neptune” U.S. Navy patrol aircraft that kept a close eye on Russian freighters taking Soviet rockets out of Cuba following the debacle the year before at the Bay of Pigs Invasion, when a small army of Cuban conscripts funded by the CIA invaded the country.
