Tape 13, Side A
[Begin Tape 13, Side A]
Where were we?
Oh we’re just in Germany talking about all the crazy things that happened there.
I was interested in the physical setup. The base, was the base enormous, it sounds…?
It was pretty big; it was like a circle or a cluster of buildings behind a gate. These were buildings that were already there. Americans didn’t build them, they just... I mean I don’t know what it was before, or they maybe added to it, but these were old buildings and belonged to the Germans. Americans moved in; they were probably paying rent or something like that. A lot of German nationals working on the base, you know, doing plumbing and carpentry and that sort of stuff, so there was always stuff going on. There was a big MP contingent too on the base.
Did you pick up any of the language?
Ah… just a little. I wasn’t, you know, I wasn’t interacting [laughs]; I wasn’t interacting that much with anybody, so I had no real need for it, but I knew a little bit from before. I knew enough to get out and about, you know, take the streetcars, take the trains, order stuff at the restaurants, and like that, dealing on the commercial level with the German citizenry; enough of them spoke English too.
In Germany were they already studying, was it already required that they study English in school?
I think throughout Europe it had been that way, yeah, that was everybody’s second language of choice, you know, or in Europe, third language probably.
Because then French was supposed to be the diplomatic language until English sort of took over.
‘Cause it’s so, it’s small enough so that everybody, especially where the different population interacted, there was always bilingualism everywhere, except areas where Indo-European groups would meet Ugrian groups, Finnish Ugrian groups, you know, so not a lot of Europeans knew Hungarian, but a lot of Hungarians probably knew German and French. Not a lot of Europeans knew Russian; a lot of Russians knew French and English.
So at least a certain class of Russians would have.
Again I think they provided classes. You could go to language classes and culture classes and that sort of stuff. None of it was mandatory. Nobody went.
If it wasn’t mandatory they weren’t gonna go.
Right, unless there was some advantage to it, you know, if you were ordered to or if you saw some advantage to it you would do it. But it took up your time and you know you just wanted… whatever time you could squeeze out for yourself you just wanted to do whatever you wanted to do, and whether that was just go hang out in the bars and stay drunk all night, like some guys did, or get out in the countryside. Probably everybody would go for the direct experience and learn that way; that was fine too.
Was your workweek like a regular job almost, was it forty hours basically?
Yeah, yeah, maybe a little more, but, you know, you get up in the morning and walk down the hall to your office, so you know…
It cuts out all the commute time.
It cuts out all the commute time, plus you can go take naps and things like that.
Really?
Yeah, if it’s one of those days where nobody’s watching, or you can go back to your room and read for a while or whatever.
You mentioned before that there were a lot of kind of literary types on the base recommending books and things, were you able to get ahold of a lot of interesting stuff, were you reading much?
That’s a good question. I don’t think so. I don’t think so; I don’t think I was reading anything other than what I had with me. I mean there were libraries, there were base libraries, and I do remember walking to some other base where they had a big library and checking stuff out from there, but I don’t know what it was, but there were lots of magazines and newspapers and Stars and Stripes—we had to read Stars and Stripes! the Army newspaper, or the service’s newspaper. And you know there were always, there were American newspapers, maybe it was The International Herald Tribune or something, but we could follow the comic strips, you know, follow the Adventures of Dick Tracy. But no, I don’t remember reading anything there. I had some, I had bought… there were record stores, you could go buy records. I got a great Big Bill Broonzy record, it was a French record, had some stuff on it I’d never heard Big Bill Broonzy doing before or since, and I had, I still had I guess a little reel-to-reel tape recorder because I apparently would tape stuff off the radio because later on I realized I had these tapes of stuff I got off the radio. Sometimes it was Armed Forces radio, sometimes it was German radio, sometimes it was British radio from the pirate radio stations…
Ah…
So you could listen to all that stuff. Armed Forces radio was nuts, I mean they’d have good jazz hours but they’d also have, you know, the Stickbuddy Jamboree, country and western music [heavy southern accent]: Hi! Hi everybody, it’s your old stickbuddy (whatever his name was). A lot of country kids liked to listen to that and you know they didn’t want to hear the soul music that was on, so there was a little bit of tension there, especially in those barracks where they had lots of guys together, you know, so you’d have radio wars.
So you’d have to decide who got to choose the…
Right, yeah. And they had an enlisted man’s club on base with a big jukebox with, you know, ‘Detroit City’ and ‘Dock of the Bay’ or something like that, so you know there’d always be that kind of thing going on with the brothers, the bloods sitting over in one area and the Arkies sitting over in some other area, and the rest of us just scattered in between, you know. But how many times can you listen to ‘Detroit City’? They would play that over and over and over on the jukebox, you know, you’d want them to play something else. [Sings] The home folks think I’m… (how’s that go?) I wanna go home; I wanna go home. It’s about this guy who’s writing these letters about how great he’s doing in Detroit City, but [sings]: By day I make the cars/ By night I make the bars/ If only they could read between the lines/ I wanna go home/ I wanna go home…. And that just made the…
So the black guys really loved that stuff [laughing].
Oh man…
That wasn’t their idea of Detroit.
[Black dialect] Can you believe this shit?! No, they wanted to hear some soul music, and we did too. Those of us who weren’t country music fans wanted to hear rock-and-roll or soul music. And the funniest thing about the enlisted man’s club is that they would have this German band come in and do rock songs or ‘Detroit Ceety’: I vant to go home. I mean you not only had to suffer through it on the jukebox, this stupid German band would come in, and these guys were, you know, they had like slick polyester powder blue suits on and electric music; I mean they played everything; they played whatever was going on, they’d play it, if it was ‘I Wanna Hold Your Hand’, they’d play that; if it was… what was that other deep, that other country song? It wasn’t that one about little green apples was it?
Yeah. Was that Roger Miller?
[Sings] God didn’t make little green apples…. No, it was that Roger Miller wannabe guy. What was his name? [Sings] 14-34 Franklin Park Circle he rode. I can’t remember his name. Well I got my book right here. ‘Little Green Apples’; let’s just look it up here. [Pages through reference book] But this band, I mean they were fun to watch because they could play anything. It was kind of at a low level, I mean it was workmanlike, let’s put it that way.
But they were pretty good at picking up tunes?
Yeah, they would pick it up. But the reason that we all liked them was that they had three go-go dancers, on this little tiny stage, and these were not, you know, American girls in cages kind of go-go dancers full of energy, these were kind of real tired—they were young but they were German girls and they were just going through the motions; they didn’t know how to be go-go dancers but they did some crazy stuff, I mean they had the real short dresses on and they would lie down on the stage and lift their legs up and spread them, while the guys were playing the music, whatever, and then they’d get up and dance around in a sort of haphazard way.
[Laughing] So they knew what the guys were thinking about.
Well yeah. [finds the information in his reference book] Whoa, I’ll be damned, that was Roger Miller, or maybe it was O. C. Smith. I guess that was Roger Miller, but I think of Roger Miller at that time as [sings] England swings like a pendulum do/ Bobbies on bicycles two by two.
Or, what was his one about [sings]: Old stogies I have found/ Short but not too big around.
Oh yeah, ‘King of the Road’, sure. [sings] I know every engineer on every train/ All of their children and all of their names/ And every lock that ain’t locked when no one’s around.
So that was a crazy… I understand in some other enlisted men’s clubs, or especially in the officers’ club they would have a higher standard of entertainment. They would have up-and-coming British rock-and-roll groups, like The Move would apparently… The Move, I think the only hit they had was ‘Brontosaurus’—remember that? [sings] She could really do the brontosaurus. But they got into trouble because I think they totaled a Volkswagen on stage in one of these officers’ clubs, because they were trying to make a name for themselves and they brought out sledgehammers and things like that and somehow they got this Volkswagen on stage, maybe there was a curtain and it opened up and there was a Volkswagen; but they were banned was one of the things we heard. So that was German pop music. And out in the towns, what everybody called ‘the economy’, that’s what they called Germany was ‘the economy’. You gonna go out on the economy tonight? [laughs] I think that came from, you know, you could, some people could actually live off base, you know, if you had a family or something like that, you could live on the economy is what they called it, so it just became ‘the economy’. You would get separate rations, so you get extra money for that, but you know, as I mentioned before, I got, you could arrange it so that you could get separate rations even though you didn’t live off. So I could get separate rations but I would have to sign a thing saying that I was not going to eat in the mess hall.
But of course you did.
I would, yeah, plus I was doing—just as in Washington—I would do other people’s KP for money.
So you continued to do that.
Yeah, and continued to be in debt too. Ten for twenty, five for ten, yeah.
Really, you were still paying that big vig?
Yeah, that big vig.
And again, what… was there really that much to spend money on?
Well it wasn’t that much money, so… and once you get in that cycle, you line up and get your pay and you pay everybody off, you don’t have no more money so you gotta go borrow some. So I don’t know, I mean I wasn’t going anywhere; I wasn’t doing anything; I was walking around. I did go to restaurants, I mean we’d hang out with guys who’d go to restaurants, we’d find one that we liked that nobody else went to and that would be our place. You could go there and hang out and drink German beer, which was better than the watered down beer they were serving in the mess hall. They had these ‘flippies’ is what they called them; they were these great big beer bottles with these ceramic white caps attached to them, and they’re on a little piece of metal that hinges out, and you could flip those things off, which is why they called ‘em flippies: Give me a couple of flippies; and the Germans all knew what you meant too. ‘Flippie? Flippie? [The phone rings.] I’m screening; I’m screening. You want to turn that off and we’ll just…?
[pause]
Where were we? We were just talking about some of the things that I would do in Germany and some of the more general characteristics of service life in Germany, how it hit different people in different ways. Also, as with Fort Lewis Washington, a lot of the cadre of people, lifers that were coming into Germany, a lot of them had come from Vietnam from combat, from combat areas, recycling through on their ceaseless round of going from one assignment to the next.
‘Cause you said they might have a year in combat and then they might have a year off.
Maybe, something like that, and some of the lifers that were there in residence were looking forward—not looking forward, but in their future was an assignment to Vietnam, probably, a lot of them, which accounted for a lot of the tension. It was very tense among… there were lots of reasons for tension among the army populous there in Germany, one of them was that they were in this foreign country and weren’t given much experience, I mean much prep and had to spend a lot of their time on the barracks: that was sort of a breeding ground for tension; and there was a shooting war over there on the other side of the world that people were coming from and going to; and there were racial tensions when people were off on their own, and there were tensions with the Germans, you know; seems like when I was there there were a lot of cabdrivers who were getting shot. I mean there was access to weapons, and so… Yeah, I think there was something like a cabdrivers’ strike or something like that in protest, and we had to go to special classes on how to… how to… how not to… [laughs] how to take a cab [laughter], or something like that, you know.
So what would happen? What was a typical conflict?
I can’t remember. A lot of these guys were drunk all the time when they weren’t at work. As soon as they got off work they’d go get drunk and they’d stay drunk all night; and then they’d drag their sorry asses back to work the next day, and they performed or didn’t perform. I mean we had guys, in this little company I was in, the work wasn’t very demanding, guys that had to go, would flip and had to be taken off to prison, would get court-martialed, you know, I’d have to handle their papers for that, for some minor, I mean something that started small and snowballed.
You said there was a prison and that it was kept pretty full.
Yeah, that was my impression. There was a big military prison, I think it was in Mannheim, and I mean that’s where all these… and there was a lot of… you would see JAG people around all the time, Judicial Advocate General corps people, so a lot of them were there and a lot of MPs were in the area all the time, so there was that flavor to it, to being in the army in Germany too. But I just wanted, you know, I just liked to get away, so I would go out and just walk around aimlessly, walk all over Mannheim, take the train to Heidelberg. Heidelberg was a great city, you know, there was a big university there. Just being in Europe was a trip and a treat, you know, seeing all these… ‘cause everything was different, you know, just the little buildings and the big buildings and the transactions that you would have on the street or buying an ice-cream cone: everything was different, so that was all delightful.
Did you resume your walks that you’d been doing?
Oh, you mean undestined walks where you just go: no, I think I was pretty purposeful. I was going somewhere usually, or just wandering, just wandering without any fixed destination but not under those rules [laughs]. I’d wait for a red light maybe.
But you were quite a walker.
Yeah, I was always walking.
Was part of your motivation here also with saving the fare and also looking around wherever you were going, I mean that if you walked to a destination; it sounds like you didn’t take cabs as much as some of the other guys.
No, I never did. I would take the train for long trips or when I had to get somewhere quickly, but I always wanted to… that just seemed to be the best pace for me to absorb stuff, ‘cause driving’s too fast, it’s all going by too fast. And, you know, it’s hard enough for me to pay attention standing still; so maybe ideally I would just stand still, that would be the best thing, I could absorb more information. But that was the ideal thing, walking was ideal; get out there in the sunshine and breathe in the air, and you could walk at night too, if you weren’t doing anything: Mannheim was all lit up at night, stayed open into the wee hours.
Was the military a big part of Mannheim’s… was the base a big influence on it?
Throughout West Germany, at that time; I think it’s not so, there’s not that much American presence there now, although there still is, but big bases, lots of Americans in Germany, lots of American forces in Germany, and in East Berlin too; some people had assignments in East Berlin because there was an American presence there. So at that time I think it was a big… I wouldn’t have been able to gauge it but… I think we sensed that a lot of Germans weren’t happy with it. I don’t know anything about the politics of it, but it was one of those—it wasn’t an occupying army exactly because it was all NATO stuff, and we were the liberators of that area. So it was something they had to put up with, and you know, the Soviet Union was still a threat, East Germany was still a threat as far as anybody knew: it was still the Cold War; and what the United States was doing in Vietnam wasn’t making it any easier because it was well… When we would get training sessions there was always talk about ‘the communists’, even though we were well out of… actually I don’t think anybody really thought that what the United States was doing in Vietnam would call down the wrath of the entire communist world, but it was risky, it was a risky venture because it could, because if Red China got involved we could find ourselves possibly in a Korea-like situation where, you know, the American troops swept in and captured P’yongyang and were driven out as soon as the Red Chinese came in: the Red Chinese just whipped everybody’s ass because there are so many of ‘em, the huge mighty red army just drove everybody back.
So there was a sense that that might be…?
… Might happen; and the Soviet Union had nuclear weapons, so there was always that. And right across , not too many hundreds of miles, there was the border, there was the communist world right there, you know, on the other side of the border. It wasn’t one of those, like World War II: loose lips sink ships, and you know you’re not supposed to tell anybody about your mission or your unit or anything, but there was a certain amount of that, you know, you were supposed to be cautious because there could be East Germans everywhere, so that just added to the tension.
And they were communists, just like the Viet Cong.
That’s right, so don’t tell anybody…. Not that we had any important information, we were just a supply and support battalion, we just supplied and supported; we didn’t do any actual training, in fact everybody in the army is supposed to have PT, a certain component is supposed to be ongoing training, ongoing training in weapons, riflery and physical training and that sort of stuff. We didn’t do any of that stuff, so it was kind of… there was an unexpected call. I remember the first sergeant, he was real mad one day when it turned out that we were going to be tested, you know, his company was going to have to go through one of these rigmaroles when it had never happened in the two or three years that he was there; he was real pissed off; but we did it so, you know, we got all… unaccustomed as we were to doing anything like this, we got our full packs on and our weapons, ‘cause we all, you know, were in the army [laughter]. It was just like basic training, getting your full pack on and going out and doing a little target practice, and, oh, they made us run around, you know, run a race, run a race or something around a… you know this was part of it, it was like an obstacle course sort of thing, and you know everybody was supposed to get out and do this running. This was all part of army regs but nobody knew exactly how to mount it because they weren’t accustomed to having to do it, so they had to get some people from the outside in to show us how it was done, you know, how to set up the thing for climbing. And they were worried [laughs], again they were worried about me; I had to do it too, and by then I was sort of protected, I was a pet, pet-boy. They wanted me to do one or two things because I did them well and in exchange they wouldn’t make me do some of the other things, like for some reason then I had decided I wasn’t going to shoot my weapon anymore and they fixed it so I didn’t have to.
Really?
Yeah.
I thought you’d kind of liked it before.
Oh I liked target practice; I can’t even remember why, what the rationale was, but I just announced that I wasn’t going to be doing that anymore. [sergeant’s voice] Jesus Conkin, you give me a headache; you know you are a pain in the ass. Oh well…
But then they went ahead and fixed it.
Yeah, the first sergeant, we had an arrangement and, you know, I would talk to him about things, you know, he would unbutton himself and unburden himself to me about his problems. He didn’t want to go to Vietnam but he saw that coming, you know, here he is, he’s pushing fifty, he’s ready to retire from the army entirely and he has to serve another combat tour, and he was not happy about that. He just wanted to go back to his Korean… maybe he did have a Korean wife or something like that, I don’t know; he just wanted to go home but he couldn’t. He was the one who was always giving me… He’s the one who said… In the army you weren’t supposed to be able to grow a mustache unless your ID picture had a mustache on it. So what people would do would be: take a leave, grow a mustache: I lost my ID card. And he had to do this for all sorts of people. Sometimes he would do it; sometimes he wouldn’t do it, you know, he’d have to approve it. I didn’t do it, but his comment was always [sergeant’s voice]: I don’t see why a man would want to cultivate around his mouth that which grows wild around his asshole [laughter]. So he didn’t like it but… So he was worried about me, I mean I was on the roster. They couldn’t get me out of that. And I said: “Don’t worry, Sarge, I can do this”, because I was a good walker and I was just gonna walk it, you know, I was gonna walk the thing…
Instead of running it.
Instead of running it. I got into the race and everybody had their full pack on. It wasn’t a race; it turned into t a race, but I was just trotting along there…
I’ve gotta turn it over.
[End Tape 13, Side A]
Where were we?
Oh we’re just in Germany talking about all the crazy things that happened there.
I was interested in the physical setup. The base, was the base enormous, it sounds…?
It was pretty big; it was like a circle or a cluster of buildings behind a gate. These were buildings that were already there. Americans didn’t build them, they just... I mean I don’t know what it was before, or they maybe added to it, but these were old buildings and belonged to the Germans. Americans moved in; they were probably paying rent or something like that. A lot of German nationals working on the base, you know, doing plumbing and carpentry and that sort of stuff, so there was always stuff going on. There was a big MP contingent too on the base.
Did you pick up any of the language?
Ah… just a little. I wasn’t, you know, I wasn’t interacting [laughs]; I wasn’t interacting that much with anybody, so I had no real need for it, but I knew a little bit from before. I knew enough to get out and about, you know, take the streetcars, take the trains, order stuff at the restaurants, and like that, dealing on the commercial level with the German citizenry; enough of them spoke English too.
In Germany were they already studying, was it already required that they study English in school?
I think throughout Europe it had been that way, yeah, that was everybody’s second language of choice, you know, or in Europe, third language probably.
Because then French was supposed to be the diplomatic language until English sort of took over.
‘Cause it’s so, it’s small enough so that everybody, especially where the different population interacted, there was always bilingualism everywhere, except areas where Indo-European groups would meet Ugrian groups, Finnish Ugrian groups, you know, so not a lot of Europeans knew Hungarian, but a lot of Hungarians probably knew German and French. Not a lot of Europeans knew Russian; a lot of Russians knew French and English.
So at least a certain class of Russians would have.
Again I think they provided classes. You could go to language classes and culture classes and that sort of stuff. None of it was mandatory. Nobody went.
If it wasn’t mandatory they weren’t gonna go.
Right, unless there was some advantage to it, you know, if you were ordered to or if you saw some advantage to it you would do it. But it took up your time and you know you just wanted… whatever time you could squeeze out for yourself you just wanted to do whatever you wanted to do, and whether that was just go hang out in the bars and stay drunk all night, like some guys did, or get out in the countryside. Probably everybody would go for the direct experience and learn that way; that was fine too.
Was your workweek like a regular job almost, was it forty hours basically?
Yeah, yeah, maybe a little more, but, you know, you get up in the morning and walk down the hall to your office, so you know…
It cuts out all the commute time.
It cuts out all the commute time, plus you can go take naps and things like that.
Really?
Yeah, if it’s one of those days where nobody’s watching, or you can go back to your room and read for a while or whatever.
You mentioned before that there were a lot of kind of literary types on the base recommending books and things, were you able to get ahold of a lot of interesting stuff, were you reading much?
That’s a good question. I don’t think so. I don’t think so; I don’t think I was reading anything other than what I had with me. I mean there were libraries, there were base libraries, and I do remember walking to some other base where they had a big library and checking stuff out from there, but I don’t know what it was, but there were lots of magazines and newspapers and Stars and Stripes—we had to read Stars and Stripes! the Army newspaper, or the service’s newspaper. And you know there were always, there were American newspapers, maybe it was The International Herald Tribune or something, but we could follow the comic strips, you know, follow the Adventures of Dick Tracy. But no, I don’t remember reading anything there. I had some, I had bought… there were record stores, you could go buy records. I got a great Big Bill Broonzy record, it was a French record, had some stuff on it I’d never heard Big Bill Broonzy doing before or since, and I had, I still had I guess a little reel-to-reel tape recorder because I apparently would tape stuff off the radio because later on I realized I had these tapes of stuff I got off the radio. Sometimes it was Armed Forces radio, sometimes it was German radio, sometimes it was British radio from the pirate radio stations…
Ah…
So you could listen to all that stuff. Armed Forces radio was nuts, I mean they’d have good jazz hours but they’d also have, you know, the Stickbuddy Jamboree, country and western music [heavy southern accent]: Hi! Hi everybody, it’s your old stickbuddy (whatever his name was). A lot of country kids liked to listen to that and you know they didn’t want to hear the soul music that was on, so there was a little bit of tension there, especially in those barracks where they had lots of guys together, you know, so you’d have radio wars.
So you’d have to decide who got to choose the…
Right, yeah. And they had an enlisted man’s club on base with a big jukebox with, you know, ‘Detroit City’ and ‘Dock of the Bay’ or something like that, so you know there’d always be that kind of thing going on with the brothers, the bloods sitting over in one area and the Arkies sitting over in some other area, and the rest of us just scattered in between, you know. But how many times can you listen to ‘Detroit City’? They would play that over and over and over on the jukebox, you know, you’d want them to play something else. [Sings] The home folks think I’m… (how’s that go?) I wanna go home; I wanna go home. It’s about this guy who’s writing these letters about how great he’s doing in Detroit City, but [sings]: By day I make the cars/ By night I make the bars/ If only they could read between the lines/ I wanna go home/ I wanna go home…. And that just made the…
So the black guys really loved that stuff [laughing].
Oh man…
That wasn’t their idea of Detroit.
[Black dialect] Can you believe this shit?! No, they wanted to hear some soul music, and we did too. Those of us who weren’t country music fans wanted to hear rock-and-roll or soul music. And the funniest thing about the enlisted man’s club is that they would have this German band come in and do rock songs or ‘Detroit Ceety’: I vant to go home. I mean you not only had to suffer through it on the jukebox, this stupid German band would come in, and these guys were, you know, they had like slick polyester powder blue suits on and electric music; I mean they played everything; they played whatever was going on, they’d play it, if it was ‘I Wanna Hold Your Hand’, they’d play that; if it was… what was that other deep, that other country song? It wasn’t that one about little green apples was it?
Yeah. Was that Roger Miller?
[Sings] God didn’t make little green apples…. No, it was that Roger Miller wannabe guy. What was his name? [Sings] 14-34 Franklin Park Circle he rode. I can’t remember his name. Well I got my book right here. ‘Little Green Apples’; let’s just look it up here. [Pages through reference book] But this band, I mean they were fun to watch because they could play anything. It was kind of at a low level, I mean it was workmanlike, let’s put it that way.
But they were pretty good at picking up tunes?
Yeah, they would pick it up. But the reason that we all liked them was that they had three go-go dancers, on this little tiny stage, and these were not, you know, American girls in cages kind of go-go dancers full of energy, these were kind of real tired—they were young but they were German girls and they were just going through the motions; they didn’t know how to be go-go dancers but they did some crazy stuff, I mean they had the real short dresses on and they would lie down on the stage and lift their legs up and spread them, while the guys were playing the music, whatever, and then they’d get up and dance around in a sort of haphazard way.
[Laughing] So they knew what the guys were thinking about.
Well yeah. [finds the information in his reference book] Whoa, I’ll be damned, that was Roger Miller, or maybe it was O. C. Smith. I guess that was Roger Miller, but I think of Roger Miller at that time as [sings] England swings like a pendulum do/ Bobbies on bicycles two by two.
Or, what was his one about [sings]: Old stogies I have found/ Short but not too big around.
Oh yeah, ‘King of the Road’, sure. [sings] I know every engineer on every train/ All of their children and all of their names/ And every lock that ain’t locked when no one’s around.
So that was a crazy… I understand in some other enlisted men’s clubs, or especially in the officers’ club they would have a higher standard of entertainment. They would have up-and-coming British rock-and-roll groups, like The Move would apparently… The Move, I think the only hit they had was ‘Brontosaurus’—remember that? [sings] She could really do the brontosaurus. But they got into trouble because I think they totaled a Volkswagen on stage in one of these officers’ clubs, because they were trying to make a name for themselves and they brought out sledgehammers and things like that and somehow they got this Volkswagen on stage, maybe there was a curtain and it opened up and there was a Volkswagen; but they were banned was one of the things we heard. So that was German pop music. And out in the towns, what everybody called ‘the economy’, that’s what they called Germany was ‘the economy’. You gonna go out on the economy tonight? [laughs] I think that came from, you know, you could, some people could actually live off base, you know, if you had a family or something like that, you could live on the economy is what they called it, so it just became ‘the economy’. You would get separate rations, so you get extra money for that, but you know, as I mentioned before, I got, you could arrange it so that you could get separate rations even though you didn’t live off. So I could get separate rations but I would have to sign a thing saying that I was not going to eat in the mess hall.
But of course you did.
I would, yeah, plus I was doing—just as in Washington—I would do other people’s KP for money.
So you continued to do that.
Yeah, and continued to be in debt too. Ten for twenty, five for ten, yeah.
Really, you were still paying that big vig?
Yeah, that big vig.
And again, what… was there really that much to spend money on?
Well it wasn’t that much money, so… and once you get in that cycle, you line up and get your pay and you pay everybody off, you don’t have no more money so you gotta go borrow some. So I don’t know, I mean I wasn’t going anywhere; I wasn’t doing anything; I was walking around. I did go to restaurants, I mean we’d hang out with guys who’d go to restaurants, we’d find one that we liked that nobody else went to and that would be our place. You could go there and hang out and drink German beer, which was better than the watered down beer they were serving in the mess hall. They had these ‘flippies’ is what they called them; they were these great big beer bottles with these ceramic white caps attached to them, and they’re on a little piece of metal that hinges out, and you could flip those things off, which is why they called ‘em flippies: Give me a couple of flippies; and the Germans all knew what you meant too. ‘Flippie? Flippie? [The phone rings.] I’m screening; I’m screening. You want to turn that off and we’ll just…?
[pause]
Where were we? We were just talking about some of the things that I would do in Germany and some of the more general characteristics of service life in Germany, how it hit different people in different ways. Also, as with Fort Lewis Washington, a lot of the cadre of people, lifers that were coming into Germany, a lot of them had come from Vietnam from combat, from combat areas, recycling through on their ceaseless round of going from one assignment to the next.
‘Cause you said they might have a year in combat and then they might have a year off.
Maybe, something like that, and some of the lifers that were there in residence were looking forward—not looking forward, but in their future was an assignment to Vietnam, probably, a lot of them, which accounted for a lot of the tension. It was very tense among… there were lots of reasons for tension among the army populous there in Germany, one of them was that they were in this foreign country and weren’t given much experience, I mean much prep and had to spend a lot of their time on the barracks: that was sort of a breeding ground for tension; and there was a shooting war over there on the other side of the world that people were coming from and going to; and there were racial tensions when people were off on their own, and there were tensions with the Germans, you know; seems like when I was there there were a lot of cabdrivers who were getting shot. I mean there was access to weapons, and so… Yeah, I think there was something like a cabdrivers’ strike or something like that in protest, and we had to go to special classes on how to… how to… how not to… [laughs] how to take a cab [laughter], or something like that, you know.
So what would happen? What was a typical conflict?
I can’t remember. A lot of these guys were drunk all the time when they weren’t at work. As soon as they got off work they’d go get drunk and they’d stay drunk all night; and then they’d drag their sorry asses back to work the next day, and they performed or didn’t perform. I mean we had guys, in this little company I was in, the work wasn’t very demanding, guys that had to go, would flip and had to be taken off to prison, would get court-martialed, you know, I’d have to handle their papers for that, for some minor, I mean something that started small and snowballed.
You said there was a prison and that it was kept pretty full.
Yeah, that was my impression. There was a big military prison, I think it was in Mannheim, and I mean that’s where all these… and there was a lot of… you would see JAG people around all the time, Judicial Advocate General corps people, so a lot of them were there and a lot of MPs were in the area all the time, so there was that flavor to it, to being in the army in Germany too. But I just wanted, you know, I just liked to get away, so I would go out and just walk around aimlessly, walk all over Mannheim, take the train to Heidelberg. Heidelberg was a great city, you know, there was a big university there. Just being in Europe was a trip and a treat, you know, seeing all these… ‘cause everything was different, you know, just the little buildings and the big buildings and the transactions that you would have on the street or buying an ice-cream cone: everything was different, so that was all delightful.
Did you resume your walks that you’d been doing?
Oh, you mean undestined walks where you just go: no, I think I was pretty purposeful. I was going somewhere usually, or just wandering, just wandering without any fixed destination but not under those rules [laughs]. I’d wait for a red light maybe.
But you were quite a walker.
Yeah, I was always walking.
Was part of your motivation here also with saving the fare and also looking around wherever you were going, I mean that if you walked to a destination; it sounds like you didn’t take cabs as much as some of the other guys.
No, I never did. I would take the train for long trips or when I had to get somewhere quickly, but I always wanted to… that just seemed to be the best pace for me to absorb stuff, ‘cause driving’s too fast, it’s all going by too fast. And, you know, it’s hard enough for me to pay attention standing still; so maybe ideally I would just stand still, that would be the best thing, I could absorb more information. But that was the ideal thing, walking was ideal; get out there in the sunshine and breathe in the air, and you could walk at night too, if you weren’t doing anything: Mannheim was all lit up at night, stayed open into the wee hours.
Was the military a big part of Mannheim’s… was the base a big influence on it?
Throughout West Germany, at that time; I think it’s not so, there’s not that much American presence there now, although there still is, but big bases, lots of Americans in Germany, lots of American forces in Germany, and in East Berlin too; some people had assignments in East Berlin because there was an American presence there. So at that time I think it was a big… I wouldn’t have been able to gauge it but… I think we sensed that a lot of Germans weren’t happy with it. I don’t know anything about the politics of it, but it was one of those—it wasn’t an occupying army exactly because it was all NATO stuff, and we were the liberators of that area. So it was something they had to put up with, and you know, the Soviet Union was still a threat, East Germany was still a threat as far as anybody knew: it was still the Cold War; and what the United States was doing in Vietnam wasn’t making it any easier because it was well… When we would get training sessions there was always talk about ‘the communists’, even though we were well out of… actually I don’t think anybody really thought that what the United States was doing in Vietnam would call down the wrath of the entire communist world, but it was risky, it was a risky venture because it could, because if Red China got involved we could find ourselves possibly in a Korea-like situation where, you know, the American troops swept in and captured P’yongyang and were driven out as soon as the Red Chinese came in: the Red Chinese just whipped everybody’s ass because there are so many of ‘em, the huge mighty red army just drove everybody back.
So there was a sense that that might be…?
… Might happen; and the Soviet Union had nuclear weapons, so there was always that. And right across , not too many hundreds of miles, there was the border, there was the communist world right there, you know, on the other side of the border. It wasn’t one of those, like World War II: loose lips sink ships, and you know you’re not supposed to tell anybody about your mission or your unit or anything, but there was a certain amount of that, you know, you were supposed to be cautious because there could be East Germans everywhere, so that just added to the tension.
And they were communists, just like the Viet Cong.
That’s right, so don’t tell anybody…. Not that we had any important information, we were just a supply and support battalion, we just supplied and supported; we didn’t do any actual training, in fact everybody in the army is supposed to have PT, a certain component is supposed to be ongoing training, ongoing training in weapons, riflery and physical training and that sort of stuff. We didn’t do any of that stuff, so it was kind of… there was an unexpected call. I remember the first sergeant, he was real mad one day when it turned out that we were going to be tested, you know, his company was going to have to go through one of these rigmaroles when it had never happened in the two or three years that he was there; he was real pissed off; but we did it so, you know, we got all… unaccustomed as we were to doing anything like this, we got our full packs on and our weapons, ‘cause we all, you know, were in the army [laughter]. It was just like basic training, getting your full pack on and going out and doing a little target practice, and, oh, they made us run around, you know, run a race, run a race or something around a… you know this was part of it, it was like an obstacle course sort of thing, and you know everybody was supposed to get out and do this running. This was all part of army regs but nobody knew exactly how to mount it because they weren’t accustomed to having to do it, so they had to get some people from the outside in to show us how it was done, you know, how to set up the thing for climbing. And they were worried [laughs], again they were worried about me; I had to do it too, and by then I was sort of protected, I was a pet, pet-boy. They wanted me to do one or two things because I did them well and in exchange they wouldn’t make me do some of the other things, like for some reason then I had decided I wasn’t going to shoot my weapon anymore and they fixed it so I didn’t have to.
Really?
Yeah.
I thought you’d kind of liked it before.
Oh I liked target practice; I can’t even remember why, what the rationale was, but I just announced that I wasn’t going to be doing that anymore. [sergeant’s voice] Jesus Conkin, you give me a headache; you know you are a pain in the ass. Oh well…
But then they went ahead and fixed it.
Yeah, the first sergeant, we had an arrangement and, you know, I would talk to him about things, you know, he would unbutton himself and unburden himself to me about his problems. He didn’t want to go to Vietnam but he saw that coming, you know, here he is, he’s pushing fifty, he’s ready to retire from the army entirely and he has to serve another combat tour, and he was not happy about that. He just wanted to go back to his Korean… maybe he did have a Korean wife or something like that, I don’t know; he just wanted to go home but he couldn’t. He was the one who was always giving me… He’s the one who said… In the army you weren’t supposed to be able to grow a mustache unless your ID picture had a mustache on it. So what people would do would be: take a leave, grow a mustache: I lost my ID card. And he had to do this for all sorts of people. Sometimes he would do it; sometimes he wouldn’t do it, you know, he’d have to approve it. I didn’t do it, but his comment was always [sergeant’s voice]: I don’t see why a man would want to cultivate around his mouth that which grows wild around his asshole [laughter]. So he didn’t like it but… So he was worried about me, I mean I was on the roster. They couldn’t get me out of that. And I said: “Don’t worry, Sarge, I can do this”, because I was a good walker and I was just gonna walk it, you know, I was gonna walk the thing…
Instead of running it.
Instead of running it. I got into the race and everybody had their full pack on. It wasn’t a race; it turned into t a race, but I was just trotting along there…
I’ve gotta turn it over.
[End Tape 13, Side A]
posted by epikles at 4:18 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home