So I got out of the service during the rebellion with Trujillo, Cuban missile crisis and the Bay of Pigs. So much was happening in South America that no one was paying attention to Vietnam.

Before I went into the service I was an art photographer. In the service I became a recon photographer. When I was in boot camp, I was going through jump school at Ft. Benning.

Then, they transferred me to the Dominican Republic.

While I was recon, we were going from the Dominican Republic to Haiti, which is the same island. We were going over and photographing stuff when we weren’t even supposed to be there. I was driving jeeps with the company commander across the border. The colonel got upset because we were supposed to be there, but we were supposed to be undercover. I was in Headquarters Company, which was the intelligence corps…the 307 engineering battalion Stationed in Santo Domingo.

It was gorgeous. The people were so cool.

I used to joke that I had all these black children there in a Catholic country. They spoke Spanish. In Haiti they spoke French. It was fun, stunning, like Hawaii. I haven’t been back since.

I took a lot of photos of those kids. I still have those photos somewhere.

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In 1966 my mother came to the US from Italy. I was in the service from 65 to 67. I got an honorable discharge. At that point my mother said: “Here I am; I am your mother.” My dad and my mom got married and he went to declare me his legal and natural son with my mother. Since I was already 21, the authorities said that this couldn’t happen. They said that, in fact, he was my guardian. If they would have done it six months sooner, it would have been fine.

Legally, it never transpired, so my dad went back to Italy with my mother. I was not accepted into the US. I was an alien. I had a green card.

Here I was married with two children and I decide that working in New York where I wanted to be anymore. My wife and I were both working in NYC. I was a photographer.