Okay, let’s move on. I was now busy practicing what I learned and gathering stories. Kennedy came in one morning and wanted to tell me about a story he had brewing. He liked to go to races and there was one in Hockenheim. He told me he’d finished rebuilding the engine in his VW bus and had gotten his fellow photo buddy to help him put it back in. He said he was going to go to the races with his friend and I was welcome to come along. From this he was going to write his take on what happened and I could put it in the battalion newspaper. I agreed. I wasn’t passing up the chance to go to a major German race track to see the European formula races. At that time racing what was called Formula V’s was popular. They were Volkswagens that had been converted to open wheel cars that looked like something you’d see at the Indianapolis raceway on Memorial Day.
By this time Kennedy’s wife had left for California and was already back home getting settled back in. Kennedy told me he had a surprise when he came to pick me up from the barracks. He was fixing dinner and his wife had sent him a package via the quickest method possible. When it came it had all the fixings for tacos. Everything. Not one item missing. Kennedy said when it arrived it was still cold inside the packaging. So, I was to stay overnight and we were leaving for the races the next day. I slept in the spare room. Eventually I stayed there more than I did at my barracks room. Well, anyway his bud came in early the next morning and we got into the van and headed for Hockenheim. My first road trip in the country. It was interesting. I’ve never before seen such splendor along the way. In Bavaria there’s hardly enough flat ground to put an airport runway. To say it was hilly would be an understatement. To my country boy mentality it was more semi-mountainous. On the sides of many of these small elevations were what appeared to be castles or at least very large estates build with a lot of grandeur. Most had at least a parapet or two. I made up my mind then and there I had to visit some of the buildings sometime during my tour there. The towns were quaint. Some relatively small and walled in completely. I felt strangely drawn to this type of life. It felt very near like home in some strange way. After all my grand dad Wiley was German.
We made it to Hockenheim and with cameras in tow we paid our marks to get in and found ourselves some good seats and the races started in a bit. The first cars out were the Formula V’s and they certainly put on a good show. The only thing about the formula car race tracks is you can’t see the whole track from anywhere on the course. They are fairly long and we’d see the cars for about a minute, then they’d disappear off into the distant part of the track and in a bit they would reappear and run through the part of the course at the grandstands. We all took pictures. I still had some for a while, but they’ve been long lost unless I run across them in my search during the writing of this biography. The second race proved even more exciting. It was Porches and in this race was one lone Corvette. It had a stout V-8 engine, but it was not to outdo the prowess of those little European gems designed for a road course. These Porches would corner through the course with the inside front wheel completely off the ground and hit it full force scooting away from the Corvette like birds in a field before dogs in the hunt. Several more races occurred, but at the end of the day we were indeed tired and ready to go. Our film bags full of pictures to come were our only baggage so we headed home. I crashed at Kennedy’s place for the night.
The next day Kennedy went to process his pictures and I held on to mine for later because I had a paper to print. I worked on stuff about items that affects the soldiers as far as pay, or signing up for certain benefits. I wrote stories about promotions, what batteries were doing with their firing scores in Crete. Anything newsworthy was something to consider. One of the staples was to get a list of all the new guys reporting in and send back a news release to their hometown newspaper for the “happenings” page. Yes, I sent mine too. The Washington Daily News was sure to get my name somewhere in their hallowed pages.
I still to this day have the newspapers I printed for our battalion. I even got some articles printed in the 69th ADA paper and a few in the 32nd AADCOM and some small blurbs in the Stars and Stripes. In just those three months I was there I made some headway, but it was to be cut short. But not before I made the Colonel laugh. On my last issue there was a Sergeant who made soldier of the Quarter. I made his name the headliner on that issue. Too bad I made a mistake in the biggest way. This was in an era when blacks and whites weren’t exactly getting along like today. I came in the morning after I had made my printing and had sent them out to the batteries and left a stack in the battalion headquarters first floor area. The Colonel had picked up his and went upstairs to his office. It wasn’t long before I heard him laughing so hard it took me by surprise. He came to his door and yelled my name. I came from my office down stairs and looked up at him standing at the handrail. He yelled down did I know what I had done. I said no, not exactly. He called back down to read my headline on the paper. I looked at it and there it was, staring me right in the face and slapping me. I had put this as my headline. “Coon Makes Soldier of the Month.” Back then we called blacks “coons”. It was about as derogatory as calling them the n word. I really hadn’t meant it to come out that way, but I remember when I made that headline I didn’t have room to put “Sgt”, so I cut it short with just his last name. I never lived that down while I was there.
Just before the new guy got there I learned from our battalion recruiter that there was a need for a chaperone for a group of American high school students on a trip to Paris for a long weekend. I was asked did I want to do this. I jumped at a free trip to Paris now. There was no doubt about that. So, here I was, twenty years old, on a bus with two other buses loaded with students heading for Paris. I was trying to be a confident chaperone along with the three or four other ones watching over the kids. I wasn’t much older than they were. They were all Juniors and Seniors. I sat in my seat with this seventeen year old blonde girl who struck up a conversation and I learned she was my recruiter’s daughter. How quaint, I thought. She was one not to mess with for sure. I could have been re-enlistment fodder for this guy if I messed around with her. And on top of that Julie would be on my backside for sure. But all seemed well.
We got to Paris safely and found our hotel. It wasn’t exactly high dollar, but it was sufficient except for one thing. It was several stories up and no elevator. Must have been built in the twelfth century or something, I don’t know. Anyway my room was on like the third floor and I had to lug my bags up the whole way. I got into my room and check the place out. Well, to my surprise I had a strange new bathroom appliance. It appeared to be a commode with a water fountain in it. I had just been introduced to a beday. So I guess I wasn’t allowed to drink out of it. I wouldn’t anyway. It looked too much like a commode. I later had someone explain this device in more detail.
After I’d been in the room for about thirty minutes I heard a knock at the door. I answered and found this nice looking young blonde girl standing in my doorway. She walked right in and said something whimsical and threw herself back onto my bed. I took it as something akin to a bear trap. She was absolutely the hottest thing laying there inviting me to join her and my hormones started to rise, but looking at her lying there could only be interpreted as trouble with a capital T. I told her I appreciated her invitation, but I had a girl back home. That seemed to quell the situation for now. She wasn’t to give up easily. She seemed to follow me around then rest of the trip.
The first day we went to the Eiffel Tower and the gardens and buildings out from each end of it. It was fabulous. I made the trip up the elevator all the way to the top of the tower. You could literally see for miles from a thousand feet up. It is literally over a thousand feet including the antenna on the top.
The only thing I found bad about the country was that it had unisex bathrooms, which was intriguing while peeing in a trough against the wall as women came in and had the comfort of a closed stall door. Why couldn’t we men at least have a wall between us and the main thoroughfare? Oh well, life was good. The other things was the French people in general weren’t friendly. They really didn’t like Americans. Even the prostitutes who walked the streets would sneer. I saw one proposition a guy and he turned her down and she gave him a look that would cut steel. Mean people, I tell you.
The next day we visited the Musée du Louvre museum. I saw all the famous painting and statues you see in the picture. First hand is so much more awesome. Then we took a tour of Napoleon’s tomb and Notre Dame Cathedral. The Arch de Triumphe wasn’t very far from our hotel. We saw all the famous places only a few American’s ever get to see. And being a country boy, this was something.
One of the things I noted while we were there was the movie “Love Story” was playing, as it appeared, all over the world, because it was playing in Paris theaters, too. If you’ve never heard of it, it starred Ali MacGraw, Ryan O’Neal. It was about a couple, who experience love and death. Check it out if you can find it. It’s considered a chick flick now a days.
The trip came to an end and I was glad to get back to Wurzburg. This girl was still on my trail and I was weakening. On the way back we stopped and a winery. We toured the underground tunnels where the wine was aged and also where they made premium champagne. I bought a bottle of wine and champagne. When we got back on the bus to finish our trip, she sat with me. As we rode along, she leaned over to me and whispered into my ear that she was an experienced girl and was willing. I needed out or I would be in trouble. God helped me. I’m telling you she was the temptress from hell. I was so glad to get back to the barracks so I could relinquish my duties as a still intact chaperone. Trip done, over, thankfully.
But like I said, all this came to an end one day when a new man reported for duty. He was fresh from Vietnam. He was a duly trained PIO. That was his military occupational skill. Mine was not counting for much so I would be placed somewhere. But where would this be? First things first, I was tasked to give the new guy the tour. I had to orient him to what and where things were. He was really a nice guy and there was nothing I could do about what was happening. The skill I’d learned in photography was so helpful. I gain a passion for the black and white photography that I still carry.
One quick story before I wind this part up. My new replacement being fresh from Vietnam still had the self preservation thing going. One day as we walked down the sidewalk in front of my barracks I was telling him about the nunnery across the river from our location when someone set off a firecracker. I was mid-sentence and turned to speak directly to him only to find him face down on the sidewalk. He got up slowly brushing himself off and explaining that the firecracker sounded like a rifle shot and he was still attuned to taking himself out of the line of fire. It would take time to get back to normal. That I could see.
Well, I came in one morning finding that I had finished my job with my replacement and I had been reassigned to Battery B, 6th Bn, 52 ADA in Kitzingen. This meant packing my duffle bag again and the move was on. But this wouldn’t be a trip without a surprise. Apparently my newspaper headline had not caused any damage to my reputation after all. I had now been in the military for nine months, yet the Colonel saw fit to promoted me to Specialist 4th Class. I was now an E-4 heading for my new digs.
