Should you ever wake up clueless and alone, after a night of indulging your baser instincts, in a foreign country, where no one speaks your language and, what’s more, doesn’t give a hoot about your condition, here is a primer on how to deal with this predicament.
The thing to do is to pick yourself up out of whatever gutter you find yourself and head for the nearest bar. Bartenders the world over have a knack for understanding folks with speech impediments due either to too much booze or lack of mastery of the local idiom. This road to recovery is called the “hair of the dog” cure. I have tested this therapy more than once over the years and found it not wanting. I only wish that I had been familiar with it when I first stumbled off the boat onto the docks of Hoboken, New Jersey; but I was a rookie, an innocent.
Looking back on my own experience, perhaps I should have taken the above route. It probably would have saved me from a lot of grief. But the phrase “hair of the dog” meant nothing to me at the time, so, alas, I took a different road, when I found myself without the faintest in a foreign country. I must warn you that before you try to emulate the path I chose: it is not for everybody. I joined that country’s military service. I figured being in an environment that was extremely structured as well as goal-oriented, would level the playing field a bit and afford me a chance to learn how to cope in this strange place called America. This army’s recruiting slogan was “Join the Army and See the World.” I didn’t join to see the world. I had seen it already and was trying to get away from it. But misconceptions prevail when you don’t understand what they’re saying to you. I thought the army would be a great place to learn English.
And in retrospect it was. Obviously, the first step in mastering English under those circumstances was an intimate acquaintance with military commands and your response to them. The drill sergeants corrected you promptly and loudly, if your pronunciation, elocution or execution of the command left something to be desired. The incentive to learn quickly was that you didn’t want to get their full attention too often, because their corrective steps invariably included push-ups or running in place with your rifle at port-arms or some other chicanery.
The second vocabulary group added to my repertoire early on was cuss words. I have become somewhat of a scholar of this subject over the years and I must say that Army drill sergeants have a vast and original supply of expletive-laden profanities at their disposal. The f-word became my favorite English adjective, verb and noun. It seemed to be used in odd and curious combinations with various prepositions and gerunds that mystified my mind. There was f-off, f-up, f-over, f-with, f-around, f-ing this and f-ing that. The combinations seemed endless and at first I was truly baffled. But no one could say that I was slow on the uptake. I always considered myself a quick study and soon mastered that chapter of my educational curriculum. I moved on to food, military gear, pieces of the uniform, components of the M-1 rifle, the chain of command, contents of your footlocker display drawer and sex, all fleshed out and made transparent to me by the f-word.
Necessity improved my pronunciation to acceptable levels, because you didn’t want to be ridiculed in front of your peers. It took me no time at all to figure out that “fuckinkraut” wasn’t one word and didn’t mean recruit. It took me roughly six months to get a handle on the rudiments of the English language, albeit with a very limited and, you might say, not salon-rife, vocabulary.
It may not come as a complete surprise to some of you, but most of the Army training cadre believed that all Germans made excellent soldiers. They didn’t elaborate, so I took their word for it. In any case, after about a month into basic training, they decided to make me acting corporal and a squad leader, which seemed a big mistake to me, because my nearly non-existent English made it very difficult for me to communicate with my squad. The Army believed in loud communication. You were not allowed to mumble. Commands had to be enunciated clearly and at the top of your voice. By then, I had command of maybe a hundred English words, most of which were accompanied by the f-word and are unfit for print. My drill sergeants didn’t care. They told me that I needed the practice. My fellow recruits thought it was hilarious. My struggles gave them some levity, which otherwise was in short supply during basic training.
The problem with learning a language from scratch in the enlisted ranks of the military is that you really never move out of the gutter and onto the next plateau. This became clear to me when I got to university some years later and was required to write endless essays on subjects that didn’t call for the f-word to explain my thoughts. My lack of language skills turned out to be a major handicap which held me back for some time and clearly highlighted my shortcomings. In fact, it was a disaster.
I had arrived at the University of Kansas in Lawrence in the last week of January 1964, after a two-day Greyhound ride from Philadelphia. It was bitter cold. The university sits on a hill about 300 feet above sea level, with nothing between it and the North Pole, it seemed, to hold back the icy winds that swept down over the wide open prairies. All my gear was still in transit on a US Army troop ship somewhere on the Pacific. Not that any of my stuff in my errant footlocker would have done me much good in Kansas. This was not the tropics. I did not own an overcoat or a pair of gloves. I was frozen and I was pretty much broke.
A classmate turned me on to a gig as a waiter at the Fire Pit, a steak house just off campus. I should never have taken a job as a server in a fancy restaurant. Here I was fresh out of the abattoir of Vietnam, where my job had been death and mayhem and now I was supposed to be polite and kowtow to some asshole whose steak wasn’t done just right. I had to restrain myself from shoving a steak-knife up their nose. The f-word returned from its exile and took center stage. I lasted three days before the owner suggested that I probably would be better suited for work in construction or some other outdoor job that required rigorous activity.
My salvation arrived in the form of English for Foreign Students. Even though I was not classified as a foreign student, I was able to talk the professor teaching this course into letting me transfer to his group. All the students in that class were graduate students from abroad, mostly Taiwan. They spoke English worse than I did. To teach these foreign kids to get a handle on the King’s English, the professor used the writings of the ancient Greeks, like Homer, Aristotle and Xenophon, translated into English, of course. I loved it. I had spent six years in high school reading this stuff in the original. I wrote essays that were the envy of my classmates. I drew on my memory and quoted freely in Greek and I learned to love the English language and banish the f-word from sober speech.
One of the graduate students, a girl from Greece, stood up in class after I had quoted a passage from Homer’s Odyssey in the original and said: “I don’t understand a word you are saying, but the Greek, she sounds beautiful.” She had tears in her eyes. I thought I was pretty cool.
She told me about an outfit called People-to-People, which, among other things, arranged summer jobs for foreign students. This group was run by co-eds who wanted to broaden their horizons. I wasn’t a foreign student, but one of the girls there liked me anyway and promised to find me a job, if I taught her German. She wanted to visit Germany that summer. She was a large and healthy farm girl from around Salina, Kansas, and she had this slightly sour aroma of milk about her. I agreed to tutor her in the finer aspects of the German language and culture. I figured what the hell, it’s only two months and then she’ll be off to the fatherland. How bad could it be? She turned out to be extremely energetic and nearly wore me out, but she was true to her word and found me a summer job with a construction company in Gypsum, Kansas, which repaired grain elevators in small towns all over Kansas, Oklahoma and Nebraska.
This construction job turned out to be the final chapter in my education in and my understanding of how things worked in America. The day I arrived in Gypsum the skies opened and dumped more than 18 inches of rain on the area in the space of two days. The local creek broke its banks and the town found itself under about three feet of water. All basements were flooded, including the basement of Mr. Frisbie’s house, where I was billeted. All roads in and out of town were cut. The first thing I learned was that the people didn’t sit around and wait for the authorities to arrive to organize assistance, as would have been the case in Europe, but they went to work pumping out basements and clearing debris to allow the water to drain away. Everybody simply rolled up their sleeves and helped each other to rectify the mess nature had created. It was an eye opener for me. I liked it.
This deluge also gave me my first taste of snapping turtle, which popped up everywhere in the floodwaters. I shot them with Mr. Frisbie’s .22 and Mrs. Frisbie deep-fried the meat from their legs, neck and tail. It tasted great, a bit like young crow. The trick was to shoot them in the head, so that they’d float. If you shot them anywhere else, they’d dive to the bottom and you’d never find them. My skills came in handy.
I didn’t realize how dangerous work in those old wooden grain elevators could be. There always seemed to be some clown who had to have a smoke as he dumped his truckload of grain and a spark would ignite the grain dust and the place would blow up. I remember one occasion in Yoder, Kansas, which is down near Wichita, where a guy lit up and got blown off his tractor and through the boards of the wall. Other than a broken collarbone and scorched hair, he was OK. These were tough people. Welding jobs in the metal grain bins were the worst. If you weren't careful, the ensuing dust explosion, contained in the metal bin, would blow everything above it, including the welder, to kingdom come.
There was always work for our crew. We’d go in and repair the damage after some mishap. This usually meant climbing up in the rickety and damaged wooden tower that held the grain conveyor belts and trying to re-attach the wooden timbers that held the structure together. If you were lucky the old paternoster elevator still functioned and you could ride it to the top. They ran in a continuous loop and you had to jump off and on, a skill quickly acquired, if you didn’t want to crash to the ground below. I also learned how to weld and how to cut metal with a blowtorch. This was hot work. The temperature outside would reach 110 Fahrenheit and inside it’d be 20 to 30 degrees hotter. You drank a lot of water and after a day’s work you smelled pretty raunchy. But the money was good.
My work crew consisted of four guys. Two of them were my age. They had been shipmates in the U.S. Navy. One was a local boy, the other a very large Hawaiian named Todd Kakuakane. He easily stood 6’5” and weighed 285 pounds, none of it fat. Even though I was an ex-Army guy – and they never let me forget – these two ex-sailors took me under their wings. We understood each other. We were kindred spirits.
Saturday nights the three of us would go out to party. This was not an easy thing in those small mid-western towns. Many were dry or didn’t serve liquor by the drink. The beer was a pathetic 3.2%. But there usually were roadhouses outside the town limits, where you’d bring your own bottle and you could dance to live music. My new Hawaiian friend was the star wherever we showed up, at least with the ladies. The guys didn’t like him much and more times than not we got into brawls, but we tended to prevail. The three of us stuck together and had each other’s backs. We’d been in worse.
My Hawaiian mate would do what he called the Tahitian hula, a Polynesian version of the haka, the Maori war dance, in which every muscle of his huge body shook in rhythm to the music while he performed. He had unbelievable control. He could twitch his muscles all at once or in sequence or only some and not others. He was a sight to behold, particularly, when he stripped to his waist and got down into a squat to show the action of his massive gluteus maximus. The ladies went wild. The three of us did all right and never lacked for company. My education was complete.
.
Thursday, October 30, 2008
Friday, October 24, 2008
My Brother Willi
My first memory of my brother is when I was three years old and he grabbed me and made tracks on his skis down the hill from our house to get away from my mother who was unhappy with something I had done. He was 13 years older than me and he was my protector. Soon after, he was drafted into the army. He was 16 at the time and we didn’t see him until after the war ended 3 years later. We didn't know whether he was dead or alive, whether he’d survived or given his life for “Fuehrer und Vaterland.” He returned on my birthday in 1945. He was 19 years old and he was a wreck.
I’ve been thinking about him lately. His name was Wilhelm, Willi for short, and he’s been dead for two years. I loved him. He was named after my father’s oldest brother, who fell in Russia during World War I. He was my friend. He was a forester and game warden like our father and his father before him. He was the last to choose that profession in our family and he was an original.
But before I get into the story of my brother, a little background might be in order. I’ve already discussed his dexterity in rolling cigarettes with one hand and his willingness to flout authority in providing food for our table after the war in other stories touching on my brother’s life. I knew him for 67 of his 80 years here and I can’t recall ever seeing him in a suit and tie. He felt most comfortable in jeans or in his green forester’s uniform. He had the chance for advancement to the upper levels of his profession, but he chose not to, because that meant giving up his outdoor job and moving into some office in the city. My brother was one of the most unpretentious people I have known. Some might say he was naïve. He cared little about world affairs or politics or the size of people’s bank accounts. All he ever wanted to talk about was his dog, hunting, his job and his family, in that order. He was happiest out in the bush and was very good at what he was doing. He was an accomplished woodcarver and turner and an expert designer of high-quality hunting knives, which he built from scratch. And he was a fine shot. I know none better.
My parents were not overly religious. They went to church once or twice a year, usually on Christmas and at Easter. Non-Catholic churches were far and between in this very Catholic part of Germany where we lived. It took an hour and a half to two-hour walk each way from our house to the closest Lutheran church, on the road to Fulda down in the valley.
This routine changed after my brother came back from the war. What happened was that as the war drew to a close and the Russians were about to overrun Berlin and we had not heard from my brother in months, my father made a solemn promise to his Lutheran God that he would go to church every Sunday for the rest of his life and be a true believer, if God would see fit to bring his first-born son home safely from the war. He kept his promise. He became an elder of the church and insisted that I had to accompany him to church every Sunday.
I had no choice. Every Sunday morning after my brother’s safe return home, rain or shine, my father and I would walk to church down the mountain and then back up the mountain. My mother stayed home to cook the Sunday dinner, which was the most important meal of the week. It was the only day of the week we ate meat, except during Lent, when my mother substituted fish, usually carp, sometimes eel.
My mother was an excellent cook and she outdid herself on Sundays. Sunday was dumpling day. It followed a strict routine. First thing Sunday morning, my father and I had to prepare the potatoes. A sizeable number of them had to be peeled and grated. The shredded spuds were then stuffed into a white linen pillowcase and, with the help of a wooden stool stood on its front legs to slant the seat, kneaded, squeezed and pummeled on the slanted stool surface to extract all juices as well as the starch into a bowl. The liquid was discarded; the remaining starch became one of the components of the dumplings. This prep job took about an hour of intensive labor. After my father and I were off to church, my mother took over the cooking. In Germany, the main meal is served at noon and in our house Sunday dinner was at 1:00 o’clock sharp and usually consisted of venison roast, red cabbage and gravy, to go with the homemade raw potato dumplings. After walking ten kilometers to and from church, my father and I were starving and ready for this feast. It wasn’t unusual for us to devour 10 to 15 fist-sized dumplings at one of those meals.
Now let me tell you a few things about my brother. One of the things you need to know to form a mental picture of him is that he held the world record, if there was such a thing, of dumpling eating. He once ate 42 of them. You wouldn’t know from looking at him. He was one of those tough, sinewy, lean guys who can eat all day and never gain a pound. True, those world-record dumplings were not Bavarian raw potato dumplings. They were Prussian dumplings, called “Dampfknoedel” (steam dumplings), much smaller and oval shaped and made with yeast and flour, not potatoes. These dumplings were the staple in the house in which my brother took room and board after the war to make up his high school finals. The landlord was a Lutheran minister, but from the north of Germany, ergo the very un-Bavarian flour dumplings. You could knock somebody out cold with Bavarian dumplings, like my mother made. They were substantial and required a knife and fork to subdue. Leaven dumplings, on the other hand, were soft and could be attacked with only a fork. Still, 42 is not bad, even if they were not real dumplings. It was a number that called for respect. The best I ever did was 12 of my mother’s dumplings, about the equivalent of 24 Prussian ones.
Another thing you need to know about my brother is that he never went to church. He thought of preachers as charlatans. His church was the woods in which he spent most of his days and many nights. He was totally in tune with nature.
His other hang-up was that he hated officers as much as he did parsons. He thought of them as cancers which ought to be excised. He based this low opinion on his experiences during the war. I learned about his proclivities when I found out about the four German General Staff officers, who were hiding in one of my father’s hunting cabins in the woods near our house. This was toward the end of September 1945, five months after the end of the war. I told my brother about them. He was furious and went to investigate. He found that these officers, two major generals and two staff colonels, had stocked the cabin with food and wine and other delicacies the rest of us could only dream about. They were waiting for an opportune time to surrender to the Americans. In the meantime, they were living the life of Riley in that log cabin.
This cabin was about a mile from our village, 150 yards off the main road, well hidden in a little clearing. Every day, between four and five in the afternoon, an American patrol, consisting of two jeeps led by an armored personnel carrier would drive along the road through our village and into the woods beyond. When they got to the edge of the forest, they would speed up and open up with their mounted .30 cal machine-guns. They’d go at full tilt without stopping and spray the woods to the left and right of the road with bullets. They never hit anything. They were afraid of the “Werwolf”, a non-existent clandestine resistance force of Nazi die-hards, which was supposed to carry out guerilla attacks against the Allies, along the lines of the Russian partisans. The Americans never found any "Werwoelfe" or the generals’ hide-away.
My brother decided to end their vacation. He asked me to help him. His weapons of choice were Molotov cocktails to roust the generals and their flunkies. Of course, in those days we, as Germans, had no access to gasoline to make those projectiles. My brother had a plan. We would simply liberate the gasoline from the Americans who came to our village every week to re-educate us kids and to teach us about democracy by showing Disney cartoons. That was to be my job.
It was a major sacrifice for me to skip Mickey Mouse the next time the Americans came and sneak out of class and siphon gasoline out of their ¾ ton truck parked behind my school. My brother had given me a length of rubber garden hose and a liter milk bottle and told me to fill it. It took me a while to get the suction going, but after gagging and spitting gasoline a couple of times, I was able fill my milk bottle. I corked it and hid hose and bottle in the bushes behind the schoolhouse and snuck back into the darkened classroom. Mickey Mouse was in full stride. No one noticed my absence.
That evening, after retrieving the milk bottle and hose, my brother and I emptied the gasoline into green half-liter beer bottles. There was enough for four bottles, each about half full. He then ripped an old shirt of his into strips and jammed them into the beer bottles with one end hanging out. Molotov cocktails can be tricky. The rag has to be soaked in gasoline to ignite and if you’re not careful, they can blow up in your hand. My brother explained to me how to do it right. He’d learned how to from the Russians. I thought I could handle the bottles. His strategy was simple. We would sneak into the woods about a half-hour before the Americans’ daily sprint-through. When we heard their guns open up, we would toss our Molotov cocktails into the cabin and drive the officers out and into the arms of the passing American soldiers.
It was a good plan. When we heard the Americans start to blast away with their machine guns, we lit the fuse on a bottle each and tossed them through the window into the cabin. There was an explosion of fire inside. We tossed the other two bottles in for good measure and hid in the bushes to see what would go down. Nothing happened. The officers didn’t come out, the Americans raced past, blasting away wildly, but apparently saw nothing or if they saw, didn’t want to take a chance and stop and investigate. The cabin burned to the ground. We didn’t stick around, but went home and my brother told my father that he thought he’d seen a fire in the general direction of his hunting cabin. They went to investigate. I was not allowed to come. They were gone a long time.
My brother told me later that they’d found nothing in the rubble of the burned-down cabin. My father opined that the officers had probably been drinking and accidentally set their beds on fire and burned the place down and then fled in a panic. Neither one of them mentioned finding any bodies. The Americans came back the next day to investigate with reinforcements. They had seen the fire, but had thought it better not to stop, afraid of imaginary Nazi partisans. My father told them that he had no idea who had lived in the cabin. He assumed they were DPs (displaced persons), who had used the cabin as a hideout. I thought I knew what had happened in that cabin, but I wasn’t asked for my opinion. The officers had vanished into thin air.
Soon after, our paths parted. My brother went away to forestry school and we lost contact. I eventually moved across the Atlantic and disappeared into the U.S. Army. When I finally re-emerged, we started corresponding again. He helped me survive. If it hadn’t been for him, I would have been totally broke in my first semester at university. He sent me $20 each month in his letters. He didn’t have much money himself. He had a family now. But he sent me what he could afford. He came to my graduation and later, after he retired, he traveled to North America almost every summer. We hunted together in the mountains of Idaho above the Snake River, the hill country of the Ozarks in Missouri, the swamps of southern Florida and in the Valley of 10,000 Smokes on the Alaska Peninsula. We spent weeks together most summers at my cottage on Kennisis Lake in the Haliburton Highlands north of Toronto. He was happy here.
I miss him.
I’ve been thinking about him lately. His name was Wilhelm, Willi for short, and he’s been dead for two years. I loved him. He was named after my father’s oldest brother, who fell in Russia during World War I. He was my friend. He was a forester and game warden like our father and his father before him. He was the last to choose that profession in our family and he was an original.
But before I get into the story of my brother, a little background might be in order. I’ve already discussed his dexterity in rolling cigarettes with one hand and his willingness to flout authority in providing food for our table after the war in other stories touching on my brother’s life. I knew him for 67 of his 80 years here and I can’t recall ever seeing him in a suit and tie. He felt most comfortable in jeans or in his green forester’s uniform. He had the chance for advancement to the upper levels of his profession, but he chose not to, because that meant giving up his outdoor job and moving into some office in the city. My brother was one of the most unpretentious people I have known. Some might say he was naïve. He cared little about world affairs or politics or the size of people’s bank accounts. All he ever wanted to talk about was his dog, hunting, his job and his family, in that order. He was happiest out in the bush and was very good at what he was doing. He was an accomplished woodcarver and turner and an expert designer of high-quality hunting knives, which he built from scratch. And he was a fine shot. I know none better.
My parents were not overly religious. They went to church once or twice a year, usually on Christmas and at Easter. Non-Catholic churches were far and between in this very Catholic part of Germany where we lived. It took an hour and a half to two-hour walk each way from our house to the closest Lutheran church, on the road to Fulda down in the valley.
This routine changed after my brother came back from the war. What happened was that as the war drew to a close and the Russians were about to overrun Berlin and we had not heard from my brother in months, my father made a solemn promise to his Lutheran God that he would go to church every Sunday for the rest of his life and be a true believer, if God would see fit to bring his first-born son home safely from the war. He kept his promise. He became an elder of the church and insisted that I had to accompany him to church every Sunday.
I had no choice. Every Sunday morning after my brother’s safe return home, rain or shine, my father and I would walk to church down the mountain and then back up the mountain. My mother stayed home to cook the Sunday dinner, which was the most important meal of the week. It was the only day of the week we ate meat, except during Lent, when my mother substituted fish, usually carp, sometimes eel.
My mother was an excellent cook and she outdid herself on Sundays. Sunday was dumpling day. It followed a strict routine. First thing Sunday morning, my father and I had to prepare the potatoes. A sizeable number of them had to be peeled and grated. The shredded spuds were then stuffed into a white linen pillowcase and, with the help of a wooden stool stood on its front legs to slant the seat, kneaded, squeezed and pummeled on the slanted stool surface to extract all juices as well as the starch into a bowl. The liquid was discarded; the remaining starch became one of the components of the dumplings. This prep job took about an hour of intensive labor. After my father and I were off to church, my mother took over the cooking. In Germany, the main meal is served at noon and in our house Sunday dinner was at 1:00 o’clock sharp and usually consisted of venison roast, red cabbage and gravy, to go with the homemade raw potato dumplings. After walking ten kilometers to and from church, my father and I were starving and ready for this feast. It wasn’t unusual for us to devour 10 to 15 fist-sized dumplings at one of those meals.
Now let me tell you a few things about my brother. One of the things you need to know to form a mental picture of him is that he held the world record, if there was such a thing, of dumpling eating. He once ate 42 of them. You wouldn’t know from looking at him. He was one of those tough, sinewy, lean guys who can eat all day and never gain a pound. True, those world-record dumplings were not Bavarian raw potato dumplings. They were Prussian dumplings, called “Dampfknoedel” (steam dumplings), much smaller and oval shaped and made with yeast and flour, not potatoes. These dumplings were the staple in the house in which my brother took room and board after the war to make up his high school finals. The landlord was a Lutheran minister, but from the north of Germany, ergo the very un-Bavarian flour dumplings. You could knock somebody out cold with Bavarian dumplings, like my mother made. They were substantial and required a knife and fork to subdue. Leaven dumplings, on the other hand, were soft and could be attacked with only a fork. Still, 42 is not bad, even if they were not real dumplings. It was a number that called for respect. The best I ever did was 12 of my mother’s dumplings, about the equivalent of 24 Prussian ones.
Another thing you need to know about my brother is that he never went to church. He thought of preachers as charlatans. His church was the woods in which he spent most of his days and many nights. He was totally in tune with nature.
His other hang-up was that he hated officers as much as he did parsons. He thought of them as cancers which ought to be excised. He based this low opinion on his experiences during the war. I learned about his proclivities when I found out about the four German General Staff officers, who were hiding in one of my father’s hunting cabins in the woods near our house. This was toward the end of September 1945, five months after the end of the war. I told my brother about them. He was furious and went to investigate. He found that these officers, two major generals and two staff colonels, had stocked the cabin with food and wine and other delicacies the rest of us could only dream about. They were waiting for an opportune time to surrender to the Americans. In the meantime, they were living the life of Riley in that log cabin.
This cabin was about a mile from our village, 150 yards off the main road, well hidden in a little clearing. Every day, between four and five in the afternoon, an American patrol, consisting of two jeeps led by an armored personnel carrier would drive along the road through our village and into the woods beyond. When they got to the edge of the forest, they would speed up and open up with their mounted .30 cal machine-guns. They’d go at full tilt without stopping and spray the woods to the left and right of the road with bullets. They never hit anything. They were afraid of the “Werwolf”, a non-existent clandestine resistance force of Nazi die-hards, which was supposed to carry out guerilla attacks against the Allies, along the lines of the Russian partisans. The Americans never found any "Werwoelfe" or the generals’ hide-away.
My brother decided to end their vacation. He asked me to help him. His weapons of choice were Molotov cocktails to roust the generals and their flunkies. Of course, in those days we, as Germans, had no access to gasoline to make those projectiles. My brother had a plan. We would simply liberate the gasoline from the Americans who came to our village every week to re-educate us kids and to teach us about democracy by showing Disney cartoons. That was to be my job.
It was a major sacrifice for me to skip Mickey Mouse the next time the Americans came and sneak out of class and siphon gasoline out of their ¾ ton truck parked behind my school. My brother had given me a length of rubber garden hose and a liter milk bottle and told me to fill it. It took me a while to get the suction going, but after gagging and spitting gasoline a couple of times, I was able fill my milk bottle. I corked it and hid hose and bottle in the bushes behind the schoolhouse and snuck back into the darkened classroom. Mickey Mouse was in full stride. No one noticed my absence.
That evening, after retrieving the milk bottle and hose, my brother and I emptied the gasoline into green half-liter beer bottles. There was enough for four bottles, each about half full. He then ripped an old shirt of his into strips and jammed them into the beer bottles with one end hanging out. Molotov cocktails can be tricky. The rag has to be soaked in gasoline to ignite and if you’re not careful, they can blow up in your hand. My brother explained to me how to do it right. He’d learned how to from the Russians. I thought I could handle the bottles. His strategy was simple. We would sneak into the woods about a half-hour before the Americans’ daily sprint-through. When we heard their guns open up, we would toss our Molotov cocktails into the cabin and drive the officers out and into the arms of the passing American soldiers.
It was a good plan. When we heard the Americans start to blast away with their machine guns, we lit the fuse on a bottle each and tossed them through the window into the cabin. There was an explosion of fire inside. We tossed the other two bottles in for good measure and hid in the bushes to see what would go down. Nothing happened. The officers didn’t come out, the Americans raced past, blasting away wildly, but apparently saw nothing or if they saw, didn’t want to take a chance and stop and investigate. The cabin burned to the ground. We didn’t stick around, but went home and my brother told my father that he thought he’d seen a fire in the general direction of his hunting cabin. They went to investigate. I was not allowed to come. They were gone a long time.
My brother told me later that they’d found nothing in the rubble of the burned-down cabin. My father opined that the officers had probably been drinking and accidentally set their beds on fire and burned the place down and then fled in a panic. Neither one of them mentioned finding any bodies. The Americans came back the next day to investigate with reinforcements. They had seen the fire, but had thought it better not to stop, afraid of imaginary Nazi partisans. My father told them that he had no idea who had lived in the cabin. He assumed they were DPs (displaced persons), who had used the cabin as a hideout. I thought I knew what had happened in that cabin, but I wasn’t asked for my opinion. The officers had vanished into thin air.
Soon after, our paths parted. My brother went away to forestry school and we lost contact. I eventually moved across the Atlantic and disappeared into the U.S. Army. When I finally re-emerged, we started corresponding again. He helped me survive. If it hadn’t been for him, I would have been totally broke in my first semester at university. He sent me $20 each month in his letters. He didn’t have much money himself. He had a family now. But he sent me what he could afford. He came to my graduation and later, after he retired, he traveled to North America almost every summer. We hunted together in the mountains of Idaho above the Snake River, the hill country of the Ozarks in Missouri, the swamps of southern Florida and in the Valley of 10,000 Smokes on the Alaska Peninsula. We spent weeks together most summers at my cottage on Kennisis Lake in the Haliburton Highlands north of Toronto. He was happy here.
I miss him.
Thursday, October 16, 2008
Booze and its Consequences
When I arrived in America nearly fifty years ago it became clear to me at once that maybe I’d made a big mistake by coming here. Here I was totally alone, without the safety net of family or friends, no backup of any kind. The people here didn’t speak my language and I didn’t speak theirs. My choices were stark. Turn around and go home with my tail between my legs or tough it out. Thank God for Uncle Sam’s Army. It became my family. It wanted me. Without the Army, I surely would have dissipated and failed utterly.
Today, I am of two minds about my time in the service of my Uncle Sam. On the one hand, it turned the boy fresh off the boat into a man, able to handle himself in pretty much any situation. On the other hand, the military made me do things no civilized human being should have to do. I now believe firmly that they picked me because they knew I was alone, had no one to turn to, complain to. I was just an immigrant, not a citizen, expendable, without the risk of anything coming back later and biting them in the ass. Send the kraut, he doesn’t have an option.
There is no denying that service in Uncle Sam’s army caused unbelievable stress in many of his soldiers. Some of those with whom I served, dealt with their emotional problems by suffering breakdowns, wracked by nightmares and ghosts. Others turned to drugs, which were readily available everywhere. Still others turned into homicidal maniacs or offed themselves in despair. Many suffer to this day.
I indulged in – let’s say – reckless behavior and mostly it involved the use of my old standby, booze. By then, of course, I had graduated from beer. My libation of choice became vodka. Vodka takes the edge of pain, dulls the senses and numbs the mind, kills your inhibitions. Vodka erases all taboos. It's also not detectable on your breath, when you're dealing with your betters. It made me a star in the eyes of those who required my particular skills and who sent me out to do their dirty work. More often than not, vodka caused total embarrassment and the odd time, pain.
I remember an occasion on my tour in Europe at a NATO tank gunnery range in northern Germany run by the Brits. Our division was there as part of annual NATO gunnery practice. My military police company was detailed to keep the peace and maintain order. Our British hosts and counterparts invited us to their sergeants’ mess for drinks one night. The Brits discouraged their soldiers from fraternizing with the locals. Each company had their own bar in their barracks, run by the company sergeant major, where soldiers could buy drinks and sandwiches and relax.
There were four of us who showed up at their mess and in less than two hours we had drunk their whole month’ supply of booze. Keep in mind that pay in the British Army was lousy. They made maybe 10% of what we got paid. They couldn’t keep up with us and ran out of money very quickly. At first they were too polite and then too annoyed to accept our offers to pay for them. In any case, we proceeded to clean off their shelves and cupboards. To add insult to injury, I went in search of a washroom and in my stupor stumbled into one of their billets instead and thinking it was the latrine, opened a sergeant’s wall locker and relieved myself on his neatly squared-away dress uniform and hat in the bottom center of his locker, while singing “I wish I were in Dixie.” Needless to say, our hosts got nasty and tried to throw us out. We objected. One thing led to another and a melee erupted. We wrecked the sergeants’ mess before they finally tossed us out on our butts, bloody and black and blue.
We went back the next day to apologize and pay for the damage. But by then word had got around that one of the bloody Yanks had dishonored their queen by urinating on her emblem worn on the front of their dress head cover. We were not invited in.
A few days later, about 50 of us were in the base movie theater. I forget the name of the movie showing that night, but before the film started, the queen appeared on screen riding a horse and the sound system played “God Save The Queen.” Everyone stood at attention, except the Americans, some because they didn’t know any better, some because they were too drunk to stand and some because they “wouldn’t stand for no goddamn' foreigner.”
My friend, Dwayne Klopfenstein, of Fort Wayne, Indiana, who was on his second bottle of scotch by then, yelled: “Fuck the queen!” and caused a riot. We trashed the theater, but being outnumbered at least 5 to 1, we got our butts kicked. Our division commander offered an official apology for us and we were banned from fraternizing with the Brits for the duration of the exercise.
Dwayne, by the way, slept with a bottle of whiskey under his pillow and couldn’t dress himself in the morning unless he had swig or two first. Without that, he had the shakes so bad that he couldn’t function. He was a lifer and an excellent MP, as long as he had a slug to calm his shakes.
The Army, of course, knew what was going on, but didn’t step in as long as everyone did his job. It was a fact that many senior NCOs had drinking problems. I remember one sergeant in our outfit. His name escapes me now, but he was a cook and he had a retention problem. Every time he got drunk, which was every Saturday night, he shat himself and soiled his uniform. We made sure to avoid Sunday breakfast, if he was on duty in the mess hall, because he wasn’t too concerned with hygiene.
One time, my drunken buddies and I decided to milk a cow on the way home from a country bar in Germany in the early morning hours. We were passing a pasture with a lonely cow in it and I bragged about the fact that I had grown up in the country and knew how to milk a cow. So we stopped the car and jumped over the fence, marched up to the cow and I proceeded to demonstrate my expertise. The only problem was that the cow turned out to be a bull and he did not take kindly to being milked. He saw red at having his pizzle manipulated and kicked me flat on my butt and then took off after the others, chasing them all over the pasture. I was in pain and had trouble getting up. I crawled back to the car as fast as circumstances allowed while the bull was busy with my pals and just made it back before the beast remembered his erstwhile milkmaid and came after me in a rage. I was in pain for a week.
Another time, my buddy, Cpl. Williams, who was the old man’s driver, and I bought a case of Seagram’s Canadian Mist in the Army Class VI store and headed to a pub we used to frequent in a place called Jebenhausen, a small village about 10 miles from our base. We put the whisky bottles on the table and invited the locals to help themselves. The Germans were used to schnapps that burned your throat as it went down and thought this smooth whisky was not very strong and gulped down the bottles as if they were filled with water. Everyone got pretty wasted. One of the locals present was Fritz Flederwisch, the renowned painter of Mercedes cars, who believed cars should be painted any color, as long as it was black. He had stopped in only for a quick beer and was on his way home to deliver a freshly plucked chicken to his wife for dinner. When he remembered his neglected task after a bottle of rye, he decided he’d better get the chicken home. He tied a string around the carcass, stumbled outside into the rain and, cheered on by the patrons of the pub, walked it home, dragging it on his string through the mud all the way to his house on the outskirts of the village. His wife was not very happy with him and beat him about the head and shoulders with the muddy chicken in front of his pals. She also got together with the other women and they put the pub and the “verdammte Amis” – damned Americans – off limits to their men. It cost us a dozen butterball turkeys from the base PX to undo the ladies’ fatwa.
On rue Pasteur, during my tour in Saigon, I routinely swigged back a jar of Stoli before I went out on my close encounter jobs. It calmed my nerves and my conscience and it gave me the ability to act without fear. I associated vodka with success. Instead of being embarrassed by my boozing, it earned me slaps on the back and status. I couldn’t let anyone know how I really felt, so I drank more.
By the time I returned and left Uncle Sam’s employ at age 24, I couldn’t function without my comforter – vodka. This caused real problems at university, both in the classroom, where I was a total failure and in my dormitory. After a night of particularly heavy boozing, I and a couple of other losers decided to turn on the fire hoses on the second floor of the dormitory and flood the place. When the cops showed up, we jumped out of the second story windows. Luckily, we landed in a huge lilac bush and were able to escape. The police couldn't’t prove who had done the deed, but nevertheless I was told not to come back, that university housing would not be available to me. Someone had ratted me out.
I decided it was time to wean myself off booze. Not that I stopped drinking altogether, I still had the odd beer now and then, but I managed to lose the urge for and dependency on hard liquor. I realized that succeeding at university and being drunk most of the time did not compute very well. I have to thank my English Literature professor for that revelation. He convinced me that I had the potential to make it.
Today, I am of two minds about my time in the service of my Uncle Sam. On the one hand, it turned the boy fresh off the boat into a man, able to handle himself in pretty much any situation. On the other hand, the military made me do things no civilized human being should have to do. I now believe firmly that they picked me because they knew I was alone, had no one to turn to, complain to. I was just an immigrant, not a citizen, expendable, without the risk of anything coming back later and biting them in the ass. Send the kraut, he doesn’t have an option.
There is no denying that service in Uncle Sam’s army caused unbelievable stress in many of his soldiers. Some of those with whom I served, dealt with their emotional problems by suffering breakdowns, wracked by nightmares and ghosts. Others turned to drugs, which were readily available everywhere. Still others turned into homicidal maniacs or offed themselves in despair. Many suffer to this day.
I indulged in – let’s say – reckless behavior and mostly it involved the use of my old standby, booze. By then, of course, I had graduated from beer. My libation of choice became vodka. Vodka takes the edge of pain, dulls the senses and numbs the mind, kills your inhibitions. Vodka erases all taboos. It's also not detectable on your breath, when you're dealing with your betters. It made me a star in the eyes of those who required my particular skills and who sent me out to do their dirty work. More often than not, vodka caused total embarrassment and the odd time, pain.
I remember an occasion on my tour in Europe at a NATO tank gunnery range in northern Germany run by the Brits. Our division was there as part of annual NATO gunnery practice. My military police company was detailed to keep the peace and maintain order. Our British hosts and counterparts invited us to their sergeants’ mess for drinks one night. The Brits discouraged their soldiers from fraternizing with the locals. Each company had their own bar in their barracks, run by the company sergeant major, where soldiers could buy drinks and sandwiches and relax.
There were four of us who showed up at their mess and in less than two hours we had drunk their whole month’ supply of booze. Keep in mind that pay in the British Army was lousy. They made maybe 10% of what we got paid. They couldn’t keep up with us and ran out of money very quickly. At first they were too polite and then too annoyed to accept our offers to pay for them. In any case, we proceeded to clean off their shelves and cupboards. To add insult to injury, I went in search of a washroom and in my stupor stumbled into one of their billets instead and thinking it was the latrine, opened a sergeant’s wall locker and relieved myself on his neatly squared-away dress uniform and hat in the bottom center of his locker, while singing “I wish I were in Dixie.” Needless to say, our hosts got nasty and tried to throw us out. We objected. One thing led to another and a melee erupted. We wrecked the sergeants’ mess before they finally tossed us out on our butts, bloody and black and blue.
We went back the next day to apologize and pay for the damage. But by then word had got around that one of the bloody Yanks had dishonored their queen by urinating on her emblem worn on the front of their dress head cover. We were not invited in.
A few days later, about 50 of us were in the base movie theater. I forget the name of the movie showing that night, but before the film started, the queen appeared on screen riding a horse and the sound system played “God Save The Queen.” Everyone stood at attention, except the Americans, some because they didn’t know any better, some because they were too drunk to stand and some because they “wouldn’t stand for no goddamn' foreigner.”
My friend, Dwayne Klopfenstein, of Fort Wayne, Indiana, who was on his second bottle of scotch by then, yelled: “Fuck the queen!” and caused a riot. We trashed the theater, but being outnumbered at least 5 to 1, we got our butts kicked. Our division commander offered an official apology for us and we were banned from fraternizing with the Brits for the duration of the exercise.
Dwayne, by the way, slept with a bottle of whiskey under his pillow and couldn’t dress himself in the morning unless he had swig or two first. Without that, he had the shakes so bad that he couldn’t function. He was a lifer and an excellent MP, as long as he had a slug to calm his shakes.
The Army, of course, knew what was going on, but didn’t step in as long as everyone did his job. It was a fact that many senior NCOs had drinking problems. I remember one sergeant in our outfit. His name escapes me now, but he was a cook and he had a retention problem. Every time he got drunk, which was every Saturday night, he shat himself and soiled his uniform. We made sure to avoid Sunday breakfast, if he was on duty in the mess hall, because he wasn’t too concerned with hygiene.
One time, my drunken buddies and I decided to milk a cow on the way home from a country bar in Germany in the early morning hours. We were passing a pasture with a lonely cow in it and I bragged about the fact that I had grown up in the country and knew how to milk a cow. So we stopped the car and jumped over the fence, marched up to the cow and I proceeded to demonstrate my expertise. The only problem was that the cow turned out to be a bull and he did not take kindly to being milked. He saw red at having his pizzle manipulated and kicked me flat on my butt and then took off after the others, chasing them all over the pasture. I was in pain and had trouble getting up. I crawled back to the car as fast as circumstances allowed while the bull was busy with my pals and just made it back before the beast remembered his erstwhile milkmaid and came after me in a rage. I was in pain for a week.
Another time, my buddy, Cpl. Williams, who was the old man’s driver, and I bought a case of Seagram’s Canadian Mist in the Army Class VI store and headed to a pub we used to frequent in a place called Jebenhausen, a small village about 10 miles from our base. We put the whisky bottles on the table and invited the locals to help themselves. The Germans were used to schnapps that burned your throat as it went down and thought this smooth whisky was not very strong and gulped down the bottles as if they were filled with water. Everyone got pretty wasted. One of the locals present was Fritz Flederwisch, the renowned painter of Mercedes cars, who believed cars should be painted any color, as long as it was black. He had stopped in only for a quick beer and was on his way home to deliver a freshly plucked chicken to his wife for dinner. When he remembered his neglected task after a bottle of rye, he decided he’d better get the chicken home. He tied a string around the carcass, stumbled outside into the rain and, cheered on by the patrons of the pub, walked it home, dragging it on his string through the mud all the way to his house on the outskirts of the village. His wife was not very happy with him and beat him about the head and shoulders with the muddy chicken in front of his pals. She also got together with the other women and they put the pub and the “verdammte Amis” – damned Americans – off limits to their men. It cost us a dozen butterball turkeys from the base PX to undo the ladies’ fatwa.
On rue Pasteur, during my tour in Saigon, I routinely swigged back a jar of Stoli before I went out on my close encounter jobs. It calmed my nerves and my conscience and it gave me the ability to act without fear. I associated vodka with success. Instead of being embarrassed by my boozing, it earned me slaps on the back and status. I couldn’t let anyone know how I really felt, so I drank more.
By the time I returned and left Uncle Sam’s employ at age 24, I couldn’t function without my comforter – vodka. This caused real problems at university, both in the classroom, where I was a total failure and in my dormitory. After a night of particularly heavy boozing, I and a couple of other losers decided to turn on the fire hoses on the second floor of the dormitory and flood the place. When the cops showed up, we jumped out of the second story windows. Luckily, we landed in a huge lilac bush and were able to escape. The police couldn't’t prove who had done the deed, but nevertheless I was told not to come back, that university housing would not be available to me. Someone had ratted me out.
I decided it was time to wean myself off booze. Not that I stopped drinking altogether, I still had the odd beer now and then, but I managed to lose the urge for and dependency on hard liquor. I realized that succeeding at university and being drunk most of the time did not compute very well. I have to thank my English Literature professor for that revelation. He convinced me that I had the potential to make it.
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