U.S. ARMY Hugh Mackay Hugh Mackay was 22 years old when he took his first train ride on Jan. 18, 1941, a trip from the Ellsworth induction center to Bangor. When he was drafted, Mackay was a third-year student at the University of Maine-Orono, studying forestry and enrolled in Army ROTC training. Within hours of passing his physical in Bangor, he was aboard another train for an overnight journey to Fort Devens, Mass. “We got there at about two in the morning and got our shots,” he recalls now, at age 87, from his home in Winter Harbor. “They equipped us with what they had, including some old World War I clothing, because there wasn’t enough of the new stuff to go around.” After being assigned to the 240th Coast Artillery, Mackay was shipped back to Maine, assigned to Fort Levett on Cushing Island in Casco Bay. There he received harbor defense training with 12-inch barbette carriage guns with enough range and firepower to keep invading ships at bay, miles offshore. “Fellows like me with ROTC had no problem advancing, but sergeant was as high as we could go,” he said. “I wanted more money. I was earning $60 a month, but could make $150 if I was a second lieutenant.” In September of 1942, Mackay was off to Fort Monroe in Virginia after his application for Officer Candidate School was accepted. After three months of schooling, he had his commission and a new assignment. “I didn’t have any orders except to go to New Orleans,” he said. “On Christmas Eve 1942, I boarded a ship that went down the Mississippi River in fog that was so thick we had to spend the night on the river. I didn’t know then that I was being sent to Puerto Rico, and to get there we had to follow the slowest boat in a convoy, which was a freighter, so the trip took 13 days.”  Arriving in Puerto Rico via Cuba, Mackay’s duty station was on Cabras Island at the mouth of San Juan Harbor. “The men there thought they were getting a ‘90-day-wonder’ as a new officer, but I was assigned to a battery that had exactly the same type of guns we had back in Maine,” he said. “They soon found out I knew as much about them as they did.” Mackay soon rose to the rank of first lieutenant. While he was stationed in Puerto Rico, he was assigned to be a police and prison officer. He finally served as the commander of a basic training company for replacement troops. “Every 13 weeks we would get 200 new troops to train,” he said. “Part of that training involved going on bivouac and living in tents.” By the fall of 1945, Mackay had earned enough points for discharge. By then, he was eager to return to Winter Harbor and to his wife, Constance Bickford. The couple had married on July 6, 1941, about six months after his induction. A 30-day leave in September of 1944 was his only visit home during the war. Throughout his time in Puerto Rico, the couple kept in touch by telephone and by mail. Mackay remembers the trip back to New Orleans from Puerto Rico took three days, ten days quicker than the trip over. From New Orleans, he returned to Massachusetts, where he was officially discharged at Fort Devens on Dec. 27, 1945. Upon returning to Winter Harbor, Mackay took a job as a groundskeeper, helping his father, Joseph, in managing Grindstone Neck properties owned by the F.E. Dixon family. Mackay would later succeed his father and work for the Dixons for 42 years, until his retirement in 1988. Today, his son, Joseph, works for the family as a gardener. “I was in for just weeks short of four years,” he says now of his military service. “All in all, I was pretty fortunate to be sent to Puerto Rico. I had never been there, and I’ve never been back.”  — Tom Walsh