I began getting myself ready for this field exercise, mainly because I now found myself as the communications person in the commo van breaking crypto messages. How did this happen?
When I got to the unit I found that my duties would be confined to doing reports. Kleis would continue to be the morning reports clerk. There’s a distinction there. His job is to report troop strength and who’s what and where. My job pertained to the reporting on infrastructure of the unit and actions to our unit members in particular. With over a hundred guys and with an environment as I described I did indeed have work to do. I was appointed to several collateral duties, which really amounted to my list of duties. I was the unit legal clerk first and foremost. I was also the assistant Training NCO, Mail Clerk and miscellaneous report clerk. At this point I was only filling in on these duties as we had someone doing these jobs full time. But in even in this I had to have a responsibility in the field, too. Knowing I had been given a TS at headquarters gave me a leg up on a pretty secretive position in the field. It lead to other duties as well. The encryption data was sent out from headquarters on a random schedule and the only person who could handle it was me. So, this meant I would also be the unit courier between the battery and headquarters. This also meant I would be driving the batteries courier bus. It was a 34 passenger International with automatic and V8. The thing would fly. As courier I had to have a brief case that would be in my possession during these runs. No one was allowed site of what was contained within. It was my eyes only. So, let’s get back to going to the field.
The call came early in the morning. We were prepared to make our exit. Our trucks had been preloaded as much as we could afford and the jeeps would lead out. The CO and First Sgt knew where we were going so they gave directions to the drivers. We’d be going in a convoy anyway. I was assigned to ride in a deuce and a half and would carry my weapon for the only time I was in Germany. In our truck were racks at the corners of the dashboard at the doors where our weapons were clipped in for easy retrieval, which I’d not seen before.
So, we struck out of a wet, rainy morning out onto the autobahn. Trucks began the slow trek to our field location combining with other units along the way. It was not a good trip. A couple of trucks wrecked, running off the autobahn. One lost its complete front end wheel assembly. Mind you these are all-wheel drive vehicles. Of course we have a contingency of wreckers to take care of our own. Finally late in the afternoon we made it to our field location. It was quite interesting how they placed us. We were sitting on top of a hill overlooking a very long range of valleys and villages. About a quarter mile over on the same hill was a radar installation. You’ve seen them before if you’re military. The actual radar is inside a huge dome that resembles a giant golf ball.
Before dark we’d set up huge tents for headquarters functions and I got a cot and set it up in the corner where I could be available at all times. The mess cooks got set up, but we ate what’s now called MRE’s. If you got the right kind of stuff it wasn’t all that bad. Back then each package even came with gum and cigarettes. Kleis was still up to his old crap. He harassed me the whole time while in the field. He’d done this once before and I hadn’t, so it was easy to get over on me being the newbie.
We had one event that was kind of scary while we were out there. It was early summer and Germany can have some hellacious thunderstorms. Our perimeter was secured by fox holes with M-60 machine guns and commo lines were strung around the perimeter to each fox hole with a field phone for them to communicate with the communications center. During the night a thunderstorm came up and rained like a monsoon. Lightning was everywhere and here we sat on a hill like a target. Then it came. Lightning struck the telephone line on the perimeter and ran completely around our security line hitting every foxhole shocking everyone manning a machine gun. Fortunately our medic was not overcome with injuries. Only some burnt skin and a few who said they weren’t going back till the weather cleared. We’re a bunch of wussies I suppose, but this was an exercise, so we didn’t want anyone hurt needlessly, so we waited till the weather cleared before sending them back out.
Other than that our trip to the field was rather uneventful and the day came to leave. I got my duffle bag packed and put it in a trailer behind one of the jeeps since I didn’t have room anywhere else. Kleis didn’t like that and came to me and stood in my face like he was some drill sergeant demanding I take my bag out of “his” trailer. I told it wasn’t “his” trailer and it was staying and it better be there when we got back to the battery barracks. You know I don’t remember him really giving me much trouble after that.
Moving forward a bit, Kleis was becoming more interested in leaving than messing with me and his replacement had reported in. His name was Ed Weeks. He was totally the opposite of Kleis. He didn’t smoke dope, but he could drink a bit. He and I were on an even playing field. We were still in the same room, but we’d been given another new guy. I can’t remember his name, but he was from Charlotte, NC. I had to check his 201 file to see what was going on with this guy. He had an IQ of 143. Super smart guy, he was. But it didn’t take long to realize he had no common sense. He never bathed nor washed his clothes. He came from a well to do family. He showed us the picture of the 1968 Buick Rivera his parents bought him when he graduated from high school. It was gold colored and loaded with all the options. Ed, our other roommate and I did the best we could with him. He smelled.
Ed Weeks was a Spec 4 like me. He was from West Haven, CT. He’d worked for Pratt & Whitney as a machinist and decided to join the Army. Mind you this guy didn’t have to do this. He was a sole-surviving son and his mom and dad had died in a car wreck leaving him with mucho bucks from life insurance policies. But the wild hair grew from his back side and he enlisted and came to Germany to sit in an office with me. It certainly wasn’t for my benefit, but I’m glad he did. He was much like me, only a Yankee. I blame him for getting me started to smoking. I had avoiding this dastardly cancer stick while growing up on a tobacco farm only to succumb to it in an office sitting with a guy from up north. Well, anyway.
About this time I spent my last weekend at Kennedy’s apartment. He was leaving and had invited me over for the weekend to what I thought was a holiday weekend. I got drunk and passed out on Sunday evening and don’t remember Monday going by hardly. I think I pissed Kennedy off. But that was okay. He was leaving anyway.
The problem was when I got back to the battery. The XO caught me coming in and wanted to know where I’d been. I said I thought it was a holiday, but apparently I was wrong. I still had a hangover and he was on me all the way to my typewriter. I had a report to do. It was one of those papers that had to be typed exactly in the box or the computer they would feed it through wouldn’t get the info into it correctly. I went through about five of the sheets and finally said something about I guess I needed a little encouragement to get it done right. Well, the XO heard the comment so he gave me some. Only it wasn’t the kind of encouragement I was looking for. He cussed at me like a dog. It worked, though. I got it done posthaste and handed it to him. I never did anything like that ever again.
I wanted a stereo component system. It was the thing to have back then. Sansui, Panasonic, Technic, Sony, Gerrard, Pioneer, Kenwood, Bose, Blaupunkt were among the top of the heap back then. I was wanting it all. I’d noticed our battery medic was gone most every evening and I asked him where he went. He said he was working at the NCO club as a bartender with an older German couple who worked it every night the club was open. Knowing the medic, or I should say, doc was getting short too I inquired about taking over his job when he left. He told me most of the time I’d be washing glasses and cleaning the bar anyway, but the couple would be willing to teach me how to mix drinks and I’d make money at it to boot. That was what my aim was. I wanted to work there in the evenings a few hours a week, get some money to put away and buy up on the stereo equipment I wanted and then quit.
So, there I was one evening a week before the doc left for “the world”. I was introduced to the sweet German couple. They’d been married for eons and worked together tending this bar in the NCO club almost as long. They were like a mom and pop to me and most anyone else in the place. They taught me the ropes and it wasn’t long before I was mixing Tom Collins and Vodka Collins backwards and other things that people didn’t order, but I gradually got it right. The drinks I mixed wrong I drank, so as not to have to throw away all that good liquor. One evening I asked about that decanter sitting over the center of the bar with the blue or purple velvet cloth under it. That was the Crown Royal, I learned. The most expensive liquor we had on the bar. That explained to me why no one hardly ever ordered a shot of it.
I have a few “extras” that came with being employed there. I got to eat there. It had a full-on kitchen and a pretty decent menu. Whenever someone came to play at the club, I had entry whether I was working or not. I remember one evening we had a huge turnout for Roy Acuff. He was a Nashville singer, but what the heck. He was famous. I got to see him and his band play for the troops. He was a nice guy.
Then there was the usual occurrences in the bar. I was busy washing glasses one evening when out of the corner of my eye I caught a guy running past the bar and fast as he could run. Right behind him was another guy with a bar stool over his head taking a swing at the victim, barely missing him. Everyone was scattering, except for the bouncer, if you could call him that. We didn’t really employ one, but there was always someone around to take care of wayward soldiers.
My most memorable character in the bar was an old Staff Sergeant. He was over sixty years old. I didn’t understand how someone could stay in the service that long, but there he was. And of all things he was my battery’s chief mess hall cook. He was thin, with thinning gray hair, beaked nosed and rarely spoke. Every night I worked and evening the ones I wasn’t there, this man sat at the end of the bar in front of the sink where I washed glasses and drank Lowenbrau until the club closed. He had no friends, nor family. I remember the day the First Sergeant told him he was to be processed out. He had reached 62 years old and the Army was forcing him out. The old man cried. He didn’t want to go, but we couldn’t keep him anymore. He was way past his prime. Well, it’s the least to say that I missed having him at the end of the bar nightly after that. That bar stool sat empty most nights. Of course, being in the military, I saw people come and go all the time, but him going stuck with me to this day.
With all these goings on I was glad to see the extra pay. You see, even being an E-4, I was under two years service and my take home pay was only $292 a month. It was plenty of money, since I owed no one anything and had my three hots and a cot so to speak. I spent every penny of this money on stereo equipment. I bought a Sony seven inch reel tape deck, then a Marantz Model 26 AM/FM tuner amplifier and head phones. Then I bought the Gerrard SyncroLab 96 Turntable and Elac STS cartridge with needle. This was the top of the line for my money. I learned a trick with this combination, too. European electricity is run at 220 volts, 50 hertz. American standards are 120 volts, 60 hertz. Setting my turntable up with the 60 hertz spindle to turn the platter and setting my tape deck on its highest speed I could record vinyl albums at twice the speed and playback on the reel to reel at regular speed would be perfect. I listened to my music for a while with Pioneer headphones, but it wasn’t long before I had Pioneer speaker and later a pair of Fischer speaker. I also bought an eight track recorder, but cassette tapes were in their infancy and I saw the light going out for eight track players, so I sold it. I kept the Marantz amp till the end of the year, but sold it and bought another more powerful Marantz amp that I still have to this day in working condition.
Once all this equipment was bought I decided it was time to quit and I left the bar tending to the more experience hands. I was actually getting a bit drunk about every night I worked and I was causing me a bit of worry that I would be buzzing every night.
There was one incident which I cannot fully divulge, but I will tell the bulk of it, which will explain the paragraph above. There was one evening when I was off I got together with one of my friends in the battery who owned a Mercedes and we went downtown to a club to pick up his girlfriend who worked there. While there I drank a beer and a couple of shots of peppermint schnapps. This is where it started. From there we traveled back to the NCO club where a band was playing that night and a bunch of us got together and put a couple of tables together. I ordered a tall glass of Seven Crowns and Seven Up (Seven & Seven). I drank that one and about five or six more of the same. I got so smashed I lost my memory other than I got up once to dance with my friend’s girlfriend and when we got back to the table I did something I shouldn’t have and got slapped, but no one did anything, because they knew I was too drunk to know what I was doing. I do remember saying it was time for me to go and I stumbled back across the street to the barracks and got to my room and passed out in my bunk. Thank goodness the NCO club was only across the street. When I woke up the next morning I was lying on my back and I felt something sticky on my face. I reached my hand up and that was when I realized it was puke. I had on a shirt that could only be described and the epitome of a 70’s shirt with the big collar and all. The collar was completely caked with puke. My hair was stuck together with caked on puke. I was a mess. It was then I realized that everyone was still in their bunks either asleep or pretending to be waiting for me to get up and leave for the showers, which I did. It was while in the shower I realized that the doc must have heard me throwing up and got up to make sure I didn’t drown on my puke. For that I was thankful and made a pact with myself to never do that again. It was a week or two before someone who was at the club that night before someone got up enough nerve to tell me what I did that night to get slapped. I was extremely embarrassed to say the least. So considering all this I became a more savvy drinker. I couldn’t let myself go this route. Lesson learned.
