War wounds

He carries wounds from World War II's D-Day Normandy invasion, from the Battle of the Bulge, and from Heartbreak Ridge in Korea. He served with the Special Forces in Laos. After the Bay of Pigs disaster until 1967, Lynch directed 2,126 clandestine CIA assaults on Cuba out of Miami, directly participating in 113 of them.

This week, Lynch said he never worked with Luis Posada Carriles, whom The New York Times recently identified as a Miami-based bomber financed by the late Jorge Mas Canosa to conduct raids against Cuba in the mid-1960s.

But Lynch himself ducked ''a thousand'' Cuban bullets from 1960 to 1967, and eventually adopted a custom of the Cuban exiles he commanded -- he wore a Catholic Virgin de Cobre medallion around his neck to keep him from harm. ''There must have been something to it,'' he now laughs.

In his 1979 book, Bay of Pigs, author Peter Wyden describes Lynch as a real-life lethal weapon who ''moved well and cursed sparingly . . . Hollywood could not have cast a better personality. [Lynch] suggested what the operation needed most: indestructibility.''

Lynch is the surviving half of a two-man, non-Cuban CIA team which the Kennedy administration attached to the Brigade. The other agent, William ''Rip'' Robertson, died in 1973 of malaria in Laos.

Both agents, vaguely assigned to the 2506 Brigade as ''troubleshooters,'' ended up going ashore and fighting. Gray accompanied a night team of frogmen to Playa Giron and actually started the battle by firing on a Cuban jeep that directed its headlights at the frogmen as they rafted in. (They learned later that the militia members in the jeep thought they were lost fishermen.)

After returning to his supply ship, the Blagar, Gray later shot down two Cuban warplanes and, in Wyden's words, ''became the closest thing to an on-the-spot military commander that the Cuban operation ever had.''