Let me digress here for a moment. My time in Germany was there to represent my country and to help protect the borders of Germany. It was my duty. We all took this seriously, although I’ve talked about the drinking, hash smoking and pill popping that went on. Not everyone was doing something. Drinking was the predominant mind altering choice among the troops, but overall we were sober and ready to take control when on duty. I drove to the headquarters battalion about every day to retrieve top secret papers and brought them back successfully. I broke codes in the communication box when in the field and helped with directing the battery to down the enemy. I never did get to train on the missile itself. I did however handle the administrative aspects of the troops in the unit. When the training NCO went back to the states, instead of getting another soldier to man that task it was given to me. I was also assigned as the battery’s assistant mail clerk.
Let me toot my horn. After all it’s my story. I am not into inflating it so don’t leave out on me now. My Captain, the helicopter pilot, implicitly trusted Ed and me to know who and where our troops were. It got to the point that Captain Jones would tell me to cut orders for someone or something and from the patient training of my first First Sergeant in how to do things and read the Army Regs (AR) I was able to efficiently cut those orders. There were many times when Captain Jones was not available to sign orders and unbeknownst to anyone other than him and me, I signed his name for him and the orders were executed. I got so good at signing his name he came in one day to review some of the orders and came over and told me he wouldn’t dare let me have his checkbook, ever. I became his extension in the office. Ed was very efficient at his job and we performed as a duo as effectively as any two people could. Why did I do this job? I was proud of my country and still am. It had become my life for the two years I was to spend in service to my country. I realized something that has stuck with me to this day. Freedom isn’t free. People do have a choice now to serve or not serve their country, but to me I would feel much better about this country’s status now if everyone, male and female is they desire, spend two years of their lives in service to their country. If you’re healthy there’s no reason why two years of your life will be badly affected by it. I grew up poor, in the country, no idea of anything beyond the boundaries of my neighborhood firsthand until the day I stepped on that bus for Raleigh, but when I got into the bigger picture I began to see I wasn’t the center of the world and I had a part to play in the world’s function however small or big it may be.
At my fifteenth month in service which was around the time we went on the trip to ski, my Captain recommended me for E-5 or Spec 5. I had to go before the board this time. Promotion to this rank put me in true NCO status. I took the step and was successful to score high in the rankings, but I was not trained in the MOS I was working in and the cutoff score that round was a bit higher than my score, so I’d have to wait till the next round. I doubted I would wait for that, because I would have to re-enlist and I wasn’t sure Julie would be in for that so I settled back down to my job and accepted the fact that my boss was good to me by doing this for me.
Now on to some more stuff. One day not long after Captain Jones got to our unit he went out and bought a brand new BMW with an inline six cylinder and stick shift and he wasn’t too long out on the autobahn trying it out. The reason I know is because the German’s already had an effective way of catching speeders and they never even know what hit them till they open the envelope. See, I went down to the post office one day to retrieve the mail and when I got back I was down in the mailroom sorting through the mail and found a letter addressed to the Captain from the German Polizei. See they put speed activated cameras along the road for excessive speeders. Apparently the Captain was clocked at 120 mph. When I handed it to him I only smiled and said happy birthday or something and he later came back to my office to tell me what it was all about.
The Captain was also a little loose on the draw. We got a call over the phone to bug out and when I told the Captain that headquarters had told us to pack up and be ready to roll out he simply said don’t worry about it and to just go back to work. So there Ed and I were working away at our desks when I saw a jeep with a trailer and a big whip antenna on the back and guess who popped out of it? The Colonel. Oh Crap. He came in turning the corner to my office before I could get my top on and demanded to know why we were not in process of bugging out. There I stood in my fatigue pants and a t-shirt with only a “The Captain said. . .”. He whirled around and walked into the Captain’s office, slammed the door and a lot of loud talk ensued. I’m glad I wasn’t on the hook for that one. The Captain admitted he got the order, but he thought it wasn’t a firm command to get out and go. Fortunately a good butt chewing was all he got. I didn’t want to lose him. He was the best officer I had worked under to that point.
Well, I guess for the moment now I will delve into the holiday season. We went on this skiing trip on Thanksgiving. It was different when you realize that it’s entirely an American tradition where we celebrate the survival and furtherance of a nation. We give thanks for those before us who sacrificed to build a nation of mixed races successfully in spite of the things that plagued us in racism. With all the races we have in the U.S. it was inevitable that the negative would also have play, but overall we had become a great nation out of it all. Okay, enough of my speech. Germans have no idea of the goings on of such a tradition. At least in the American form. But the whole world has a concept of Christmas. I’m sure we could go into a discourse of the many, many variations of Christmas traditions around the world, but safe to say the Europeans come close to American tradition for this holiday. With all the churches in Europe you can’t escape the knowledge of Christmas. Also Kris Kringle is an Americanized pronounciation of Christkindl or Christkindel, which is the German name for a diminuative blond hair angelic child who was their gift bearer. Of course, as I hear it now, ad agencies in Europe have taken on this imaginative creature to task with the American version of Santa Claus.
Well, as Christmas approached I had brought with me, I thought, my fervor for Christmas as I had celebrated it for twenty previous years. I had just turned twenty one in October and here I was officially a man, at least by age. Everyone was getting in to the spirit and some had small trees, but regulations kept things minimal. Kitzingen was not to be left out of the celebration. One thing I can say for Germans. They live to celebrate something, anything and everything. Their lifestyle is totally different from ours in the U.S. Christmas is no less a holiday for them. But for me, for some reason I wasn’t “feeling it”. I tried. But I figured I’d just wait till Christmas morning and I’d be all full of the mood and festive. But on Christmas morning I awoke, looked around the room. There I lay in a dark room, peeling paint, rough wood floor and a window to the world that only presented the same scene as any other day and it hit me. Christmas is relative. I had no feeling of the holiday. I had not festive feeling and I found many of the others in the battery were much the same. It had to be different in the military housing areas where there were children, but where we were was a stark reality of a different kind of world. I put this off to my situation and it wasn’t going to affect me in the coming years. Notwithstanding, I wrote my feelings about it on a small note paper and surprisingly I kept the little writing for several years until I finally lost it. In it I spoke of the feelings I lacked in the moment. In later years I will find myself once again head to head with the traditions of Christmas and their meanings. I don’t condone everyone believe as I eventually came to believe, but at least bear with me in my studies later in life when I get there to make head and tails of it all.
If there was a Christmas it was to come shortly for me, though. Sometime around the end of December and the first of January there came an escalation of military actions in the Middle East. It seems the military wanted to be ready to put soldiers into action, but they didn’t want ones that had less than a year to go. We were quite stacked up with military might in troops. Viet Nam was still hot, but talks were working to wind the war down. Nixon was president and talks were going on and if something came to fruition then there would be an excess of troops. So the Department of Defense’s solution was to clear Europe of troops with less than a year and would start immediately. In January I had nine months left of my active duty commitment and for my bracket I would get a five month early out. That meant I would be going home the end of March instead of September. Wow! I was ecstatic. But wait! This was going to make plans change rather dramatically.
By this time Julie and I had already planned on getting married in October of 1972. Now I was coming home sooner. Would this mean moving the date up? She had already started planning the wedding. Okay, wait a minute, you say. Where’s the part you wrote about getting married. Well, we had gotten to know each other via letter writing. We sometimes had two or three letter running a week between us. By now I had bought all my stereo equipment and I was sending her $100 a month to put in her savings account. If we had broken up with a nasty tone, I had no recourse I suppose to getting my money back from her if she so chose, but I figured her mother would fix that. But the bottom line was I trusted her completely and I didn’t consider the alternative to marriage. We would be married.
For just a moment let me digress. There were two phone calls during my time in Germany. Both were heart breaking and costly, so I dared not do it again. A fifteen minute call cost me about $40 each. And to talk to someone at home I had to call sometime around two in the morning my time to talk to anyone back home at eight in the evening. Fortunately the Bundespost (German post office) had people who stayed on duty all during the night to make long distance phone calls. So at one thirty or so I’d catch a cab and go there and I would explain to the man I wanted to call and gave him the number.
The first time I called Julie. I stood in the waiting area while the operator placed the call for me and when the call was through to her he came back to the window and told me to pick up one of the phones in the lobby. She sounded like she was right down the street. Even with the archaic methods of placing the call the connection was very good. Fifteen minutes went by so quickly. I don’t even remember what we talked about. We just talked. When we hung up I went back to the barracks and went to bed with her voice still ringing in my ear. She later wrote me and told me not to call her again. All she did was cry later because I was so far away and couldn’t see me for many months to come.
The next call was to home where I talked to grandmother and my mom. Dad was working in Wilmington. I talked for about the same amount of time, but this phone call haunts me to this day. Just as I was about to say it was time to go mom lost her connection to hear me, but I could hear her. She kept saying “Larry, Larry, can you hear me”? I would answer only to hear her repeat the same thing and then I realized she couldn’t hear me and I was unable to tell her good bye. She sounded so pitiful trying to get a response from me. I eventually realized I wouldn’t be able to speak to her anymore, so I hung up with her still calling my name.
