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Description
When I had arrived in Germany with a group of soldiers headed for their first duty
stations I was to be alone traveling to Nuremberg famous for the war trials after
WWII. I was in a foreign land with no language skills. I was wearing the class A U.S.
Army uniform which didn't seem to bring any smiles to the faces of the locals. I was
the enemy, symbol of the conquerers. But I was young and could assume a lot of things
to cover my fears of being identified and alone. I was marked as an invader.

I arrived during the August 20, 1968 Soviet Union led Warsaw Pact troop invasion of
Czechoslovakia to crack down on reformist trends in Prague. The Soviet occupation
required the entirety of the U.S. Army Second Armored Cavalry, heavy tanks, to
advance to the German-Czech border to guard against invasion by the Russian tank
army, the largest in the world. Tensions ran very high and I found myself alone in a
very large kaserne known, renamed, as Merrell Barracks. Once the headquarters of one
of Hitler's SS training schools, it, a strange place entirely, felt both ghostly and
ghastly.

I spent over two weeks sleeping alone in a giant building full of history. I ate at
the mess hall with the two cooks left behind and a clerk gate guard M.P. named Rudy.
There was a girl, a local German national named Hanna who worked at the Snack Bar,
now closed. We were little humans it seems lost in the immense fortress peppered with
bullet holes and made famous by the Nazis of World War Two.

When the Army returned I would be assigned to my work as a teletype operator in a top
secret communication facility full of teletype equipment and encryption devices. The
work seemed daunting but I confessed I knew how to type and did so against the
warnings I'd received, "Don't ever volunteer". I had volunteered once already in
basic training and ended up doing extra guard duty on normal weekends off while
everybody else enjoyed themselves. But it got me an Army drivers license and that's
another story.

A year and half later I had been up-ranked to sergeant E-5, not wishing to be, and
I'd met Susan which I wanted most certainly and given the situation I felt some sort
of destiny involved.

Back in Nuremberg, with Susan completely on my mind, and immediately after returning
to work in the teletype room, I began writing to her, a stream of conscious on the
teletype machine, wanting to somehow create a link never to close, what I never
wanted to lose.

Typing out communications for the headquarters included a lot of lists of "TM" this
and that which were orders for equipment, parts, stuff. While typing you had no way
of seeing what you were producing. You worked blind. The teletype produced a long
tape we referred to as "ticker" punched full of holes making what would create a page
of printed type once run through a tape reader. The technology was WWII vintage and
daunting to learn. But in time the typist got good at counting taps on the space bar
to line up columns and rows and after a while you would stop running the tape to see
the hard copy page, to check your work. This was shift work for 12 hours on, 24 hours
off, week in and week out.

So the night shift hours were quiet, headquarters empty, nobody around. I typed out
ticker tape for Susan in length. When you ran the tape to make the copy needed for
mailing, postage free for service personnel in Europe, it created seven pages running
with carbon paper between. My letters were perhaps about 7 or 8 feet long, single
spaced, profuse you might think. And I heard later how the mail received was a
subject of humor when the southern Californian household received the big fat
letters, all 7 pages included, which I thought was funny and maybe an odd expression
of my love as well. Regardless, again, postage was free!

Susan was not a writer by nature but she did reply on occasion just to let me know
she still liked me. And in time I tried to remember what she looked like but all I
really had was a spirit to cling to.

Jay and I continued to take our weekends to Munich and when I became a Sarge I had my
weekends off instead of doing shift work. That was more convenient. And on our usual
check in at the Hofbrau we arrived to find a table full of girls about college age
sitting and having a very good time after a liter or two of bier.

The tables were long with adjoining benches. You could pack maybe a dozen people at a
table if all were willing and a couple more sat at the ends. We were invited to join
them which was customary. They were really cute and we introduced ourselves as the
Americans we were. They were exchange college students from Sao Paulo Brazil
attending a school in Munich. They spoke very good English which I claimed was better
than mine. Their native language was Portuguese and their German was good too. I was
really impressed.

In our travels Jay and I had met people from everywhere on the planet even including
Russians and a group of students from North Vietnam, believe or not. But one thing we
learned was the term "International" as a concept which we Americans were not privy
to so much, no land bridges to most of the rest of the world. People out there had
languages to use and share, not just one and they had a sense of freedom about travel
quite natural like a god given right. And we were suddenly befriending the girls from
far off Brazil and they liked us too.

They invited us to come to their school afterwards and we all piled into the bus
really well packed. This was undoubtedly the most fun Jay and I had together with
anyone and there were so many of them.

I got to spend time talking to several of them, learned a lot about their sense of
the world which was so much more worldly than my own. They invited us to a dance at
the school the following weekend and of course we accepted.

Meanwhile I got a letter from Susan telling me she couldn't come to be part of my
travels starting in March. Coupled with other disappointments from old friends who
mustered out having returned home, I was simply depressed. I didn't have that long to
go in the Army and that was good but it seemed overshadowed for some reason. I was
just feeling sorry for myself and we went to the dance party in Munich on Saturday
night.

One girl named Kristina took a liking to me and she seemed somewhat a leader among
the others. It reminded me of being glommed on to by girls when I was in the first
grade before I got birth control glasses. She was very cute and endless energy. The
drinking at the dance began and I found myself clutched in her arms feeding me more
drinks and getting rather intensely involved on the side of the dance floor. The
reason for my mentioning her is her role later in my life as I was in the midst of
leaving the Army, once again becoming a civilian.

Kristina and her constant escort Ana came to Nuremberg to look me up and I was
surprised to say the least. I tried to show them a good time with the help of Mike
but, always cordial, I wished them goodbye and assumed my normal life work including
writing to Susan.

Jay and I continued our travels to Munich on weekends. We got involved with girls
from the midwest traveling in Europe, students studying in Vienna, Canadians, on and
on but my mind was still on Susan and I'd stopped writing in my sad self pity state.

One week day night in the wee hours I was jarred from sleep by knocking-rattling loud
on my room door. "What?" "You got a phone call from the States! Come down to the
C.O.'s office." I put my pants on and flip flops on my feet to walk down two floors.
I entered an office I'd not been in before to find a big guy sitting at a cleared off
desk under a harsh light over head and looking really grumpy. It felt like an
interrogation. The receiver of the phone was lying there so I picked it up assuming
possibly some bad news from home. People just didn't get calls from half way around
the world. "Hello?"

It was Susan.

She wanted to know why she'd not heard from me for a while. I looked at the glare of
the big grumpy guy staring at me and quieted my voice. "I don't know. I'm just kind
of sad." There was some silence and then, "Don't you love me anymore?" "Yes, yes I
do." She went on about not understanding my lack of contact and asked about my love
again. "Are you sure you love me?" "Yes, of course." "Well..., say it." I looked at
the steady glare from the non blinking big grumpy night duty guy. "Say it!" I lowered
my voice, "::::::I l-o-v-e you::::::." "Why are you whispering?" "I'll tell you
later." I waited moments and then, "It's important. I will write you immediately."

It was time to muster out. I had to go through the drill of getting signatures from
various departments before being able to get my last European out signature and
discharge one hundred miles away on the Rhine River, Friday afternoon at 4:00, just
before the office left for the weekend.

I had my instructions. Ron the former bus owner who had already done it told me in
detail, "You gotta get there just as the C.O. is getting ready to leave for the
weekend. The clerk will put your papers in a pile to bring to him at the last minute.
He'll not bother to read anything, just sign off and get gone on his two days off.
It's really important if you don't want to get caught with longer hair. They can make
you get a haircut before you become a civilian. It's kind of an Army thing."

And having longer hair was important, not wanting to look like an American soldier
once you hit the road as a civilian with no more uniform to wear.

So I'd forged one last needed signature, the re-up sergeant's, and I was packed,
ready, just heading to the bus. It was the last look around in my room forever when
Mike showed up and informed me Kristina was in the Snack Bar with her friend Ana.
They were looking for me. I told Mike I had to get out of there in order to make it
on time for my last discharge signature. With a huge smile on his face he said,
"Kristina told me to tell you she has a new nightgown to show you." "Oh shit," was my
only response other than, "I gotta go! You hang out with them and maybe they'll show
you her nightgown." I shook his hand, told him I'd stop by to see him before I left
Europe and I was off sneaking out to the bus, starting it up and away as I passed
through the gate of Merrell Barracks for the very last time.

As I drove away I wondered to myself what I might have done if it wasn't for Susan.
No matter. I would be traveling alone but still bound for adventure.

For more reading
www.blogger.com/blog/posts/135…

Description
When I had arrived in Germany with a group of soldiers headed for their first duty
stations I was to be alone traveling to Nuremberg famous for the war trials after
WWII. I was in a foreign land with no language skills. I was wearing the class A U.S.
Army uniform which didn't seem to bring any smiles to the faces of the locals. I was
the enemy, symbol of the conquerers. But I was young and could assume a lot of things
to cover my fears of being identified and alone. I was marked as an invader.

I arrived during the August 20, 1968 Soviet Union led Warsaw Pact troop invasion of
Czechoslovakia to crack down on reformist trends in Prague. The Soviet occupation
required the entirety of the U.S. Army Second Armored Cavalry, heavy tanks, to
advance to the German-Czech border to guard against invasion by the Russian tank
army, the largest in the world. Tensions ran very high and I found myself alone in a
very large kaserne known, renamed, as Merrell Barracks. Once the headquarters of one
of Hitler's SS training schools, it, a strange place entirely, felt both ghostly and
ghastly.

I spent over two weeks sleeping alone in a giant building full of history. I ate at
the mess hall with the two cooks left behind and a clerk gate guard M.P. named Rudy.
There was a girl, a local German national named Hanna who worked at the Snack Bar,
now closed. We were little humans it seems lost in the immense fortress peppered with
bullet holes and made famous by the Nazis of World War Two.

When the Army returned I would be assigned to my work as a teletype operator in a top
secret communication facility full of teletype equipment and encryption devices. The
work seemed daunting but I confessed I knew how to type and did so against the
warnings I'd received, "Don't ever volunteer". I had volunteered once already in
basic training and ended up doing extra guard duty on normal weekends off while
everybody else enjoyed themselves. But it got me an Army drivers license and that's
another story.

A year and half later I had been up-ranked to sergeant E-5, not wishing to be, and
I'd met Susan which I wanted most certainly and given the situation I felt some sort
of destiny involved.

Back in Nuremberg, with Susan completely on my mind, and immediately after returning
to work in the teletype room, I began writing to her, a stream of conscious on the
teletype machine, wanting to somehow create a link never to close, what I never
wanted to lose.

Typing out communications for the headquarters included a lot of lists of "TM" this
and that which were orders for equipment, parts, stuff. While typing you had no way
of seeing what you were producing. You worked blind. The teletype produced a long
tape we referred to as "ticker" punched full of holes making what would create a page
of printed type once run through a tape reader. The technology was WWII vintage and
daunting to learn. But in time the typist got good at counting taps on the space bar
to line up columns and rows and after a while you would stop running the tape to see
the hard copy page, to check your work. This was shift work for 12 hours on, 24 hours
off, week in and week out.

So the night shift hours were quiet, headquarters empty, nobody around. I typed out
ticker tape for Susan in length. When you ran the tape to make the copy needed for
mailing, postage free for service personnel in Europe, it created seven pages running
with carbon paper between. My letters were perhaps about 7 or 8 feet long, single
spaced, profuse you might think. And I heard later how the mail received was a
subject of humor when the southern Californian household received the big fat
letters, all 7 pages included, which I thought was funny and maybe an odd expression
of my love as well. Regardless, again, postage was free!

Susan was not a writer by nature but she did reply on occasion just to let me know
she still liked me. And in time I tried to remember what she looked like but all I
really had was a spirit to cling to.

Jay and I continued to take our weekends to Munich and when I became a Sarge I had my
weekends off instead of doing shift work. That was more convenient. And on our usual
check in at the Hofbrau we arrived to find a table full of girls about college age
sitting and having a very good time after a liter or two of bier.

The tables were long with adjoining benches. You could pack maybe a dozen people at a
table if all were willing and a couple more sat at the ends. We were invited to join
them which was customary. They were really cute and we introduced ourselves as the
Americans we were. They were exchange college students from Sao Paulo Brazil
attending a school in Munich. They spoke very good English which I claimed was better
than mine. Their native language was Portuguese and their German was good too. I was
really impressed.

In our travels Jay and I had met people from everywhere on the planet even including
Russians and a group of students from North Vietnam, believe or not. But one thing we
learned was the term "International" as a concept which we Americans were not privy
to so much, no land bridges to most of the rest of the world. People out there had
languages to use and share, not just one and they had a sense of freedom about travel
quite natural like a god given right. And we were suddenly befriending the girls from
far off Brazil and they liked us too.

They invited us to come to their school afterwards and we all piled into the bus
really well packed. This was undoubtedly the most fun Jay and I had together with
anyone and there were so many of them.

I got to spend time talking to several of them, learned a lot about their sense of
the world which was so much more worldly than my own. They invited us to a dance at
the school the following weekend and of course we accepted.

Meanwhile I got a letter from Susan telling me she couldn't come to be part of my
travels starting in March. Coupled with other disappointments from old friends who
mustered out having returned home, I was simply depressed. I didn't have that long to
go in the Army and that was good but it seemed overshadowed for some reason. I was
just feeling sorry for myself and we went to the dance party in Munich on Saturday
night.

One girl named Kristina took a liking to me and she seemed somewhat a leader among
the others. It reminded me of being glommed on to by girls when I was in the first
grade before I got birth control glasses. She was very cute and endless energy. The
drinking at the dance began and I found myself clutched in her arms feeding me more
drinks and getting rather intensely involved on the side of the dance floor. The
reason for my mentioning her is her role later in my life as I was in the midst of
leaving the Army, once again becoming a civilian.

Kristina and her constant escort Ana came to Nuremberg to look me up and I was
surprised to say the least. I tried to show them a good time with the help of Mike
but, always cordial, I wished them goodbye and assumed my normal life work including
writing to Susan.

Jay and I continued our travels to Munich on weekends. We got involved with girls
from the midwest traveling in Europe, students studying in Vienna, Canadians, on and
on but my mind was still on Susan and I'd stopped writing in my sad self pity state.

One week day night in the wee hours I was jarred from sleep by knocking-rattling loud
on my room door. "What?" "You got a phone call from the States! Come down to the
C.O.'s office." I put my pants on and flip flops on my feet to walk down two floors.
I entered an office I'd not been in before to find a big guy sitting at a cleared off
desk under a harsh light over head and looking really grumpy. It felt like an
interrogation. The receiver of the phone was lying there so I picked it up assuming
possibly some bad news from home. People just didn't get calls from half way around
the world. "Hello?"

It was Susan.

She wanted to know why she'd not heard from me for a while. I looked at the glare of
the big grumpy guy staring at me and quieted my voice. "I don't know. I'm just kind
of sad." There was some silence and then, "Don't you love me anymore?" "Yes, yes I
do." She went on about not understanding my lack of contact and asked about my love
again. "Are you sure you love me?" "Yes, of course." "Well..., say it." I looked at
the steady glare from the non blinking big grumpy night duty guy. "Say it!" I lowered
my voice, "::::::I l-o-v-e you::::::." "Why are you whispering?" "I'll tell you
later." I waited moments and then, "It's important. I will write you immediately."

It was time to muster out. I had to go through the drill of getting signatures from
various departments before being able to get my last European out signature and
discharge one hundred miles away on the Rhine River, Friday afternoon at 4:00, just
before the office left for the weekend.

I had my instructions. Ron the former bus owner who had already done it told me in
detail, "You gotta get there just as the C.O. is getting ready to leave for the
weekend. The clerk will put your papers in a pile to bring to him at the last minute.
He'll not bother to read anything, just sign off and get gone on his two days off.
It's really important if you don't want to get caught with longer hair. They can make
you get a haircut before you become a civilian. It's kind of an Army thing."

And having longer hair was important, not wanting to look like an American soldier
once you hit the road as a civilian with no more uniform to wear.

So I'd forged one last needed signature, the re-up sergeant's, and I was packed,
ready, just heading to the bus. It was the last look around in my room forever when
Mike showed up and informed me Kristina was in the Snack Bar with her friend Ana.
They were looking for me. I told Mike I had to get out of there in order to make it
on time for my last discharge signature. With a huge smile on his face he said,
"Kristina told me to tell you she has a new nightgown to show you." "Oh shit," was my
only response other than, "I gotta go! You hang out with them and maybe they'll show
you her nightgown." I shook his hand, told him I'd stop by to see him before I left
Europe and I was off sneaking out to the bus, starting it up and away as I passed
through the gate of Merrell Barracks for the very last time.

As I drove away I wondered to myself what I might have done if it wasn't for Susan.
No matter. I would be traveling alone but still bound for adventure.

For more reading
www.blogger.com/blog/posts/135…