Chapter 1: Arriving

Sitting in my own swill in New Jersey, summer 1968. The hot high humidity caused sweat to run down the crack of my ass while not moving a muscle. I became aware of a climate more tropical than the Hawaii I’d just recently left.

I was waiting days at Fort Dix in August to get a flight to Europe, my next duty station as a draftee in the Army. I was not going to Vietnam. As of yet the fact didn’t really register, the incredible luck of it. Sweaty New Jersey was hardly a price to pay in lieu of the jungles of S.E. Asia.

I was trained as a radio operator, that fact meaning I would have been in the jungle carrying a large heavy battery operated radio in close contact with a squad leader, likely a lieutenant. Both, we were told, would be prime targets on the enemy’s number one hit list. I would only be able to carry a 45 caliber pistol most of the time which I had learned in basic training wasn’t good for hitting the broad side of a barn beyond fifty feet.

But I was going to be doing scary stuff regardless, stuff like traveling through a foreign country with no language skills to a place called Merrell Barracks in a city famous for the post war trials of Nazi notables convicted of war crimes. I had no idea really where I was going. I should have been happy yet all I could think of was the life I had in Hawaii, forced to leave which broke my heart.

I landed in a very large city, Frankfurt Germany, with a group of American soldiers on their way to their duty stations. Most would travel in groups but as it turns out I would go it alone.

With duffel bag and wearing a heavy class A uniform it was hot in a crowded train with wood benches that faced opposing. Seated were German nationals who were quite good at giving the impression they thought little of me, the young invading American.

Carefully noting my new countrymen I saw women with furry legs and armpits dense with hair plus notable B.O. but it simply reminded me of late Spring hot day classrooms and nuns in heavy black habits walking among the desks. We boys stopped clowning around to avoid getting whacked. It reminded me always of the scent of vegetable soup hot on the stove and the eldest of women on the train were dressed in heavy dark clothes and coats, scarfs tight on their heads even in August heat.

The demeanor of so many of the Germans was so somber, the most elderly. And a young American kid in 1968 had little appreciation of what they had lived through during the earlier years of their lives before the conquering forces arrived. I couldn’t imagine the suffering they had endured. Surely they knew hatred.

I arrived in Nurnberg with written instructions on where to find a phone to call headquarters, to let them know of my arrival. It was located at the far end of the train station complex right next to a shop that sold meat and I won’t forget the hogs head in the glass case that stared at me while I waited for the call to be picked up on the other end. Then there was a voice in the receiver I could understand.

Told to wait by the curb just outside it was a short time until a top down jeep pulled up with a smiling face behind the wheel, a friendly person, no scowls. I jumped in. It reminds me now of a jeep from the long running TV series Mash. I noted the texture of the cobble streets the driver negotiated with disdain like he was attacking but then I realized everybody else was driving like that. The big round stones making up the pavement were jarring and surprisingly rough when finally the jeep jumped off on to smooth silent asphalt and the driver was able to start telling me all about where we were going.