The Quixotics

The Quixotics is a very modern take on Cervantes’ classic. This time the knight-errant is a former Special Forces officer. Instead of a single Sancho Panza, there are two rather dark and menacing companions. But where the venerable nobleman was weak and frail, these three men are young, powerful, and well trained in the killing arts. There is a Dulcinea, but she is not a thick-bodied peasant woman. She’s a beautiful, fiery, Sorbonne-educated anti-Castro guerilla.

This is a coming of age tale for the Baby Boom generation. The time is 1970. The three young men have returned from military service in Vietnam. Like other returning warriors of that era, they’ve become disenchanted with a country that no longer feels comfortable or welcoming to them. Restless and disillusioned, they pool their meager resources and acquire a boat that’s barely seaworthy.

To earn some badly needed cash, they grudgingly agree to deliver a cargo of weapons to anti-Castro counterinsurgents in Cuba. The start is rough and the voyage is rougher, but all hell breaks loose once they reach the island. Captured by Castro forces, they’re imprisoned and tortured in an ancient Spanish dungeon. They escape and join the rebels in the Sierra Maestra Mountains. Here, their talents for guerilla warfare, honed in the jungles of Vietnam, reassert themselves, only to find, as Cervantes observed, “Our greatest foes, and whom we must chiefly combat, are within”.