On the Sour Taste of Fear and the Sweet Smell of Death

If you ask someone whether they’ve ever felt fear and they say they have never been afraid, you know right away that you’re either dealing with a liar or a psychopath. Fear is one of those primal emotions that grips you at your core. There is nothing shameful in being fearful. In fact, it is healthy to feel fear, because it clears your mind of everything nonessential and forces you to focus on solving the problem at hand. Fear is something you can taste and smell. It’s the dank smell of cold sweat and mold and shit. It loiters on your tongue and creeps into your nose. There’s nothing else like it. I have known fear. What stands out in my mind is the time in my life when fear was the gourmet flavor of the day. You never forget. Let me give you three examples of what I’m talking about.

When I was six years old, American fighter pilots occasionally used us kids for target practice with their planes, if they caught us out in the open on our way home from school. In the early spring of 1945, Field Marshal Kesselring, the commander of what was left of the German Army West, had his headquarters in a special train in the valley below our house. He used the adjacent railroad tunnel to hide from Allied planes. The planes came in low over the hills from the west, hoping to surprise that train out in the open. They never did catch him. To compensate for their lack of success in doing the field marshal, they’d open up on us with their 20mm on-board cannons. It probably was a game for them to terrorize children. Maybe they thought they were ridding the world of little Nazis. Maybe that’s how they calmed their conscience, if they had one.

For us it was sheer terror. We dove into the ditch and dug our faces into the muck and willed ourselves to be invisible. You don’t know what terror is until you had a P-51 Mustang strafe you from up close. The sudden explosive roar of the 12-cylinder Merlin engines as the planes swooped down on us, the rattle of the machine guns and board cannons, the whine and thumps of the bullets churning up the road next to us and ricocheting over our heads, the clatter of shell casings raining down around us, the stench of cordite, the stink of shit, all froze us in place in utter panic. Every time this happened, we knew we were dead. We just waited for the inevitable. Yet we lived. But the terror we experienced stayed with us to this day. I can still taste it. It scarred us.

After the planes disappeared over the hills, we picked ourselves up out of the dirt, beat the dust out of our clothes, picked the mud out of our hair, laughed and pretended that we had not been scared shitless and we collected spent 20mm shell casings to bring home as souvenirs.

In the previous year, in September of 1944, my mother and I were visiting my grandparents and my aunt in Schweinfurt, home of the famous ball-bearing plants, which were an essential cog in Hitler’s war machine. Their output insured that the Tiger tanks kept rolling and the Messerschmitts continued flying. They also ensured that Schweinfurt was the repeated main bombing target of the Allies. My mother and I got caught in a daylight bombing raid and had to seek shelter in a high-rise air-raid bunker near my grandmother’s house. The shelter was jammed with frightened people and when the bombs started dropping and exploding all around outside, the building, hit by the bombs’ pressure waves, started swaying back and forth and clouds of mortar and cement dust rained down on us, together with the odd chunk of concrete. Women and children were screaming and crying and moaning. The lights flickered off and on.

My mother and I found a seat on a bench along a wall and my mother made me crawl under the bench. She cowered over me and prayed. Someone kept babbling on about the fact that the shelter was perfectly safe, what with the concrete being six feet thick and steel-reinforced to withstand the pressure waves and the bombs could only penetrate if two hit exactly the same spot, one after the other, from the same angle. The asshole was trying to work out the odds of that happening when the inferno outside subsided.

We were lucky, because in some of those terror raids the firestorm got so intense that it sucked the oxygen right out of these sanctuaries and everyone in those shelters asphyxiated.

When we got outside after the all clear, the city was in flames. You could hear the roar of the fires. The odd dog was barking out of sight somewhere. There were no voices. The bells of the ambulances and fire engines – they didn’t have sirens then – sounded in the distance. The incendiary bombs had set off a firestorm that had gutted the insides of most of the buildings and melted the asphalt in the streets. The carbonated remains of people, some seemingly in full stride, who had not made it to shelter and had got stuck in the burning tar, stood here and there in the street like apocalyptic groupings, caught trying to flee from the heavenly onslaught.

They had shrunk to maybe four to four and a half feet in height with their arms raised to chest level and bent like a boxer advancing in the ring. They looked like charred pieces of wood, with their bloated innards spilled out, blood red and exposed. Their guts had boiled and popped out through what used to be their skin.

What I remember most, though, is the smell. It was almost like a taste on your tongue, a sweet, sickly perfume wafting along the burning streets. I had no idea what it was then. The answer came to me years later in the humid jungles of Vietnam – the sweet smell of the decomposing dead. It is always with me. That day, 329 American B-17 Flying Fortresses, escorted by 338 P-51 Mustang fighters had tried to wipe out the ball-bearing plants and the railroad yards again. They had missed their target. It was the heaviest raid on Schweinfurt of the war.

The city itself was another matter. The city center, with its medieval framework buildings was pretty much flattened and what remained standing after the high explosive bombs got through with it was burned to the ground in the firestorms caused by the phosphor bombs which always concluded an Allied air-raid. The idea behind this sequence was the high explosive bombs and air-mines would destroy the roofs of buildings giving the phosphor bombs access to the flammable insides of the buildings. This plan worked extremely well, except with the ball-bearing plants. Their production pretty much survived unscathed.

Another time, in the summer of 1944, my mother and I were in Hilders, a town of about 1,000 inhabitants about two hours walk from our house on the road to Fulda, to visit our dentist. I had a terrible toothache. I was in the dentist chair and trying to explain to him which tooth was hurting, when the air-raid sirens went off. Everyone was supposed to rush off to his or her assigned air-raid shelter, but I was in so much pain and the dentist was in a hurry and couldn’t tell which tooth needed attention. He decided to pull all four of my upper front teeth at once, sure that the culprit was among them. He pulled them with a pair of pliers and it hurt worse than my erstwhile toothache. There were no painkillers. I bled like stuck pig.

The dentist jammed a wad of gauze into my mouth and we were off to the air-raid shelter, which was a culvert under the railroad tracks open at both ends, the bottom covered in filth and slime and jammed with terrified women and children and old men. My mother and I and the goddamn ogre of a dentist cowered against the damp stonewalls of the underpass. I was scared to death, listening to the moans and sobs and whimpers of the crowd around me. We strained to hear the sound of the approaching bombers, willing the bombs to drop elsewhere, wipe out some other neighborhood, kill someone other than us. My fear was mixed with hate. I hated the Americans because they had deprived me of my moment of glory with their untimely attack, my place at the center of attention, of my starring role as the recipient of pity, of being a bloody hero, who had withstood the barbaric assault of the dentist. Instead I was just one scared child among many, my own pain just another detail, surrounded by the dank smell of fear emanating from the packed crowd around me.

But, as it transpired, we were lucky. It turned out to be a false alarm. The American bombers spared us. Instead a group of 18 B-24 Liberators had wiped out the synthetic rubber plant and the marshalling yards in Fulda. My mouth hurt like hell for hours and I ended up with a huge gap in my front teeth, a junior version of Bobby Clark without his choppers. Luckily they were baby teeth and the gap filled again, eventually.

One consequence of the terror that bracketed my childhood and the fact that I had escaped unscathed was that I began to believe that I was on borrowed time, that the bogeyman would catch up with me sooner or later. It also sharpened my sense of smell and taste. Above all, it made me extremely cautious. It probably saved my life later in another hell.

What Is It With Women Who Never Wear Skirts?

I’ve been following the political debates and sound bytes from south of the border and I’m struck by the fact that I have never seen Hillary Clinton wear anything but pants. This gives me pause. Don’t get me wrong, I think a suit can look flattering on a woman, as long as she is fairly slim. But, if you are short with a fat ass it looks awful. I’m thinking, what is she trying to hide? Is she afraid to wear a skirt, because she is bow-legged, knock-kneed or pigeon-toed? Is it varicose veins? Flabby thighs? Too skinny? Does she want to be seen as macho? In charge? To circumscribe Tony Soprano, I gotta say, short people with big butts simply don’t look good in pants, like they’re trying to be a grown-up, but instead they look like a dork. So what’s the deal here?

My guess is, they had a focus group on what her image should be and they decided on pants. Not that that should matter when deciding who’s going to answer that all important 3:00 am phone call.

And what’s the matter with a skirt. Margaret Thatcher didn’t have a problem with a skirt, or a purse, for that matter, and she kicked plenty of butt. Ditto for Golda Meir. But then Hillary is about image, not substance. She isn’t in their league.

And another thing, what’s this with the photo-op slugging back shots of rye? Canadian rye, no less. And here she is berating NAFTA. My guess is the message is: “Look at me, I’m just like you.” Would drinking rye wearing a dress send a mixed message? Would it make her seem less one of the boys? Not that she would ever be mistaken for one of the boys. Is she going to light up a cigar next? I hope it’s not a Cohiba. Her wearing the pants in the Clinton household didn’t stop old Bill from dunking his cigar into places no real smoker would ever think of sticking his stogy. She couldn’t control the big Bubbah, how can we expect her to control those conspiring Republicans, never mind terrorists.

It's a good thing she lost.

On Hunting Badgers

I don’t know how they hunt badgers in your neck of the woods or whether they do at all, but where I come from badger hunting was big. There are basically three ways to bag a badger. One, you can use dynamite, two, you can dig them out and three, you can use dogs to dislodge them from their den. Badgers, like foxes, were considered a nuisance, because they raided people’s chicken coops. They were hunted indiscriminately, partly because there was a price on their head. If I remember right, I believe it was 10 marks in those days, roughly 2 dollars. And partly, because their pelt made a very attractive throw rug with its white V-shaped stripe down the sides.

I believe my father mostly hunted badgers, because my grandmother and my mother, for that matter, swore by the alleged curative properties of badger fat, which they applied liberally in poultices to boils, open sores or to your chest to draw out the fever, if you were laid low with the flu. My mother also used badger fat as shortening in her cakes and pies.

Badger dens can have as many as ten or fifteen exits and the dens can be more than six feet deep. If you use dynamite to dislodge a badger from its den, it’s best to proceed with some caution. The idea is to get the stick of dynamite as close to the center of the den as possible, before setting it off. There are two ways of doing this. One is to make sure you have a long fuse and to push the stick as deep as possible down one of the badgers’ tunnels before lighting it, the other is to dig down from the top in the center of the den as far as you can go and then set off the charge. And then you’ve got to dig to get down to the center of the den and retrieve the bits and pieces that are left. This is a labor-intensive way of getting at the badgers, unless the badger had the good sense to dig his den in sandy soil. Obviously, you only use dynamite if dogs are unavailable for one reason or another. Otherwise, this method does not make much sense, because dynamite tends to scatter stuff everywhere and you have to hit the deck to avoid the flying debris.

The most efficient and the preferred way to hunt badgers is with dogs. To hunt badgers with dogs you need dachshunds. They are unbelievable. I’m not talking about the cute pets you see waddling around today. My father loved to hunt badgers and foxes. And he used dachshunds, which were bred for this task. They were usually rough hairs, named “Purzl” or “Waldi” and they never seemed to last very long. They were ferocious. I’ve seen them drag a badger nearly twice their size out if its lair. Once they had their teeth into something, they would never let go or at least not until my father told them to let go. They only listened to him. They also were pretty sneaky. In our house, if a visitor entered, they’d greet him or her – they did not discriminate - with wagging tails, but the minute you turned your back to them, they’d have you by the ankles and only my father could get them to let go. You can see how this created problems for us at times. People didn’t want to visit, if they knew my father was away without his dogs.

A badger, “Dachs” in German, is much larger than a dachshund. Badgers are also pretty wily and they are fierce when cornered or attacked. Their lairs are deep, some six to ten feet with many exits. The way you hunted them with dogs was you blocked all but two of the exit tunnels with fire, usually burning grass and leaves, so that the smoke drifted down into the passage. The dogs – you needed at least two - would go down one smoke-free shaft and my father would post himself near the remaining unblocked burrow entrance with his shotgun. The dogs worked as a team. One would attack from the front, the other would try to sneak around the back. Between them, they always got the upper hand. My job was to lie face down over the center of the den, listen to the sounds of the combatants below and point out the direction of the progression of the battle. Normally the badger would try to escape through the unblocked smoke-free exit, chased by the dogs. You had to be careful not to shoot the dogs. You also had to hope that you’d found and plugged all the badger den’s exits. If you missed one, you were out of luck. Badgers move surprisingly swift for an animal that looks so deceivingly placid.

My father was very good at badger hunting. He never missed his shot, never hit any of his dogs or me, for that matter. I felt nervous sometimes lying on top of the center of the den during these hunts, because the badgers didn’t always launch themselves straight out of their lair. Sometimes they turned and came straight at you. This made it obligatory to roll out of the way fast. I wasn’t so much worried about getting shot, but of getting bit by a crazed badger, a very unpleasant and disagreeable thought.

Sometimes the dogs would drag their prey out backwards. If that happened, my father didn’t interfere but let the dogs do their thing. Some of the badger’s tunnels were traps and led nowhere. Sometimes they’d get a dog into one of those fake shafts and with their powerful hind legs try to bury it in there alive. Those passages were hard to locate from above. You listened to the dogs’ barks and tried to dig down to rescue it. If you couldn’t locate it, the dog would suffocate. That happened occasionally.

If jamming a stick of dynamite down a badger hole seems a bit risky to you or if you don’t want to jeopardize your dogs unnecessarily in a badger den, you could, of course, post yourself near a chicken coop and wait for the badger to come. This, however, is an iffy proposition, since you don’t know their schedule and, of course, they are nocturnal in their food-gathering habits and you depend on moonlight for visibility. You could waste hours waiting for them to make an appearance or cloud cover could make the raiders invisible or you could nod off and miss them altogether. The other downside to this method of badger hunting is that you have to discharge your shotgun in close proximity to the chickens as well as houses and out-buildings and there was the distinct possibility of collateral damage.