Excerpt from Conrad's Bane
Was It All Worth Dying For?
Circa 1974
I arrived in Germany in December of 1973, a time when the U.S. army in Europe was stripped to the bone in order to support the Viet Nam war. Most of the new equipment and weapons-systems were sent to Asia. The Seventh Army, Europe, was forced to rely on the equipment and systems which it had had before the Asian war began.
To remain an effective force the army resorted to heavy maintenance of vehicles and "jury rigged" systems. This meant that a vehicle beyond repair became a wealth of scrap parts for other vehicles. Also, with a little ingenuity, the men of the Seventh Army created systems out of odds and ends of equipment or converted systems to do more than one job.
My first jeep came into the army in 1943. How it had lasted thirty years I'll never know. However, I fell in love with it. It was a beautiful little four-wheel go-where-you- will vehicle, although it needed daily maintenance to keep it running and repair parts were in short supply.
Our company had a deadline rate of ninety-seven percent - meaning that almost all of our vehicles were unsafe to drive. However, to maintain the unit on paper, whenever we went out on a maneuver - by the stroke of a pen - the whole company would become green, which meant that all the vehicles were then reported to be safe to drive. We would go through the maneuver and come back to base with one-third of our vehicles in tow.
We had a dynamic colonel commanding our group. The gossip was that he started-out in the army as the driver for General Westmoreland, then the commanding general of the army in Viet Nam, and went up through the ranks. He was determined to become a general, so he decided to take our group of five rag tag companies and make them first rate units. Then he created more units, which made his command larger. Subsequently, he got promoted and got us an active assignment in the field intelligence business.
He decided that our vehicles had to look prepared for the field. His first order was to camouflage them. Everyone in the group got out the cans of camouflage paint and began painting their vehicles. It was winter so we used a lot of white, light brown and black paint. I became enthused. The winter camouflage colors are very similar to those for the desert. With a little elan, I painted a palm tree on each side, underneath the windshield. This was the symbol, I believed, of the twenty- fifth panzer division, which I thought had been one of the main units of the Afrika Korps. This did not go over well. When the colonel saw this, he demanded to know what it represented and I told him. He blew his stack and that was the end of the palm trees.
In January of 1974, I went on my first maneuver in the Fulda Gap, a place of Cold War legend because every imaginable non-nuclear war scenario began with Russian tanks coming through the Fulda Gap.
On this exercise, however, very little work was done because we never really used our jammers, direction finders or collection trucks to do intelligence work. It turned out to be merely an exercise in how to stay alive out doors in the middle of winter.
The second maneuver came in February. The Colonel had finally convinced Seventh Army headquarters that we had a valuable contribution to make. They decided, with charming naivete and unaware of what we could do, to allow us to do it.
When we left it was cold, snowing and a difficult drive. The exercise area was in the Taurus Mountains, northwest of Frankfurt, Germany, approximately 400 miles from Augsburg. The drive there was scenic but cold. No one had thought to install heaters in our vehicles. We struggled to stay warm all the way there. My ncoic wrapped himself in his sleeping bag and slept for the entire drive. When we arrived, we were assigned a position on top of a mountain.
The mountains were scenic hills, not as large as the Alleghenies. There were wide valleys and villages dotted the countryside. Our assigned mountain was like a chocolate drop; it stood straight up in the air. Covered with trees, it was crisscrossed with logging trails. We made our way to the top, following our maps.
Side-tracked at a fork in the trail, I led our three jeep team up a very steep trail. Everyone was scared. The trail was only a foot wider than our jeeps. Finally, near the top we ran into a roadblock where a tree had fallen across our path. We tried to move it with no luck. We tried driving over it, using our helmets as ramps, with no luck. We were on the side of this mountain with a drop off of several hundred feet.
In desperation, we decided that the only way down was to back up the jeeps, each with a trailer attached. A hundred feet down there was a small indentation in the mountain in which, if we detached the trailers first, we could turn around the jeeps.
Cautiously we backed down to the indentation, which sloped up. We unhitched each trailer and pushed it up the slope. We carefully backed each jeep up into the indentation and turned it around. Soon we were back to the fork in the trail, having wasted only three hours of a pretty winter day. We soon found our way to the top and, to our surprise, it was perfect.
The very top of the mountain had a recessed sink hole just off the main trail. We drove our vehicles into the sink hole, which concealed them from view. We erected our antennas, which just stuck up over the edge of the rim. They were the only things to be seen. Adding camouflage nets, our position was virtually invisible. By the end of the first day, we were in a perfect position. After several trips to a nearby gasthaus, we had enough beer for the whole week.
We were different than other units. Because we would often go on missions where there were no army mess facilities, we were on separate rations. This meant that we received extra money to buy food. As a result, every time we went on maneuver steak, eggs, pizza, and half the grocery store would go with us. In the field, we were able to purchase beer or other spirits. This normally would have been condemned, but our colonel liked to have a beer whenever he inspected a field site.
The morning of the first day began bright and early, with sounds in the distance of motorized columns of tanks, armored personnel carriers and trucks.
We were soon at work.
Our team possessed a small computerized jammer and we had a radio in each of the three jeeps. The radios were ordinary jeep radios nothing sophisticated and not classified. The jammer was a relic of days gone by. Like many things in the army it was classified, although it could probably have been purchased in an army surplus store.
By noon every meeting that was to have taken place on both sides had been delayed because we had gotten into their communication nets and told them
the wrong places and times. We countermanded orders, so that columns of vehicles and men were lost or deployed in the wrong places.
About three o'clock in the afternoon a battalion commander wanted to know what one of his companies on the south end of his line was facing. He called over the radio, "92 this is 17, over".
No answer. I was sitting in a jeep with a friend and I said, "Let me handle this, if he gets no response."
Again, he called over the radio," 92 this is 17, come in please, over."
Again no response.
I picked up my microphone,"17 this is 92. Go ahead, over".
Without authenticating my identity, he replied," 92 this is 17. What is your situation and do you see any of the enemy? Over."
I responded, perhaps with a little melodrama," 17 this is 92. The enemy are in position 500 meters to our front and 500 meters to our left. It looks like they're going to make a really big push (attack). Over".
He rapidly responded," 92 this is 17. I am sending you all my reinforcements, over. So hang on. Help is on the way. Over."
"Roger that," I replied. Little did he know that he had been talking to someone other than his company commander. We sat there quietly holding our breaths to see what would happen.
We didn't have long to wait. After about twenty minutes, the company commander on the other end of his line came up and in a desperate voice cried, "17 this is 93. Come in please. We are being overrun by the enemy. Do you have any orders over?"
I didn't wait a second, "93 this is 17. Hold out at all costs. Over."
Suddenly, the battalion commander was on the radio. "93 this is 17. Bzzz, whir." Shushing sounds and a cacophony of noise were all that could be heard on the radio. Our man operating the jammer leaned his head out of our tent and gave us a thumbs up--jammed-- no more communications there.
A company and probably the whole battalion was wiped out from a flank attack they never saw coming and incidentally were misinformed about. Such are the subtleties of war.
Our work was not over.
An hour later I received or, I should say a battalion commander received, a call that he could not hear from a tank company looking for the coordinates of a ford across a local river.
Glad to be of service, I picked up the microphone, "72 this 54. Go ahead. Over," I replied to his call.
"54 this is 72. Could you give us the correct coordinates for the ford on this river," the tank company commander requested.
"Wait one," I replied. Giving him the opportunity to think that I was actually looking at a map to find him a ford. Looking at my map I could find none. So I selected a nice place where he would get his feet wet.
"72 this is 54. Do you copy? Over," I called.
" 54 this is 72. Go ahead over," he replied.
"72 this is 54. Ford the river at the following coordinates alpha victor 34296718," I commanded, "do you copy? Over."
"54 this is 72. I copy. Over," he replied.
We waited in silence to learn what would happen. Within fifteen minutes we had our answer. There were all kinds of emergency calls for wreckers and medics. Apparently, when the fording began, the water was too deep. Two tanks were stranded and several men almost drowned.
This was too much for us so we ended our activities for the day.
That evening we celebrated our victories and the victories of Signal Intelligence, the silent service.
On the morning of the second day, the maneuver was restarted. We were restricted to working from 9am to 9:05am, from 12 noon to 12:05pm and from 3pm to 3:05pm. The regular army could not handle electronic warfare, except with paperwork restrictions.
The rest of the week became an excursion in nature. We wandered through the forest admiring the work done by the local forestmeister. Germany has some of the prettiest or I should say tidiest forests in the world, a perfectly manicured country.
The trip back began in a blizzard and did not improve. The doors were
falling off our jeep and we had no heat. I had lost my gloves, so that I had to drive with one hand cupping a cigarette in it to dispense some heat for my fingers. I had the other hand in my armpit to warm it up, this procedure being a form of cold weather survival training.
Our group as a whole was fairing no better, no matter how "green" the vehicles were on paper. We coped by using "army security agency road rules", which were simple: the last man back to base washes the vehicles. This would have been realistic if we had had top line vehicles, but in our junkers it was a joke.
The route back to base turned southeast on the Stuttgart-Munich Autobahn. Alligator hill, one of the northernmost mountain in the Alps, sits right on the autobahn. My team of three jeeps arrived at Alligator Hill to face quite a traffic jam. The two and a half ton trucks or "deuce and a halves", were going up the mountain at about 1 to 2 mph. The three quarter ton trucks were going up at about 3mph. I was passing all of them in my jeep. I was doing about 4 to 5 miles per hour, which was all the power I could get out of it.
After another two hours we were home. The misery, torture and adventure were quickly replaced by troops eager to get off duty. Everyone maniacally worked at the washing, cleaning and repairing which seemed eternal.
The rest of the spring was taken up by small weekend "camping trips" on our own. We tested our equipment and our field-soldiering skills and, like little boys, played war with blanks in our M-16s.
At the end of May, I was selected to go to West Berlin for two months of temporary duty, replacing a soldier who had to return stateside due to a death in the family. I was ecstatic over this opportunity. I had graduated with a major in history and now I was going to Berlin, one of the most historical cities in Europe.
We left on the first of June by train to Frankfurt. From There we were booked on the Berlin duty train, which was a side-show of history. Following World War Two, when the victors were on semi-friendly terms, several arrangements were made which complicated life in the Cold War.
The U.S. and the Russians each created a small force of inspectors who could travel in the other's zone with few restrictions. The Russians were notorious for nosing around top secret installations. Special procedures and protocol had to be observed in the handling of the inspection teams.
The duty train was a privilege afforded the U.S./British/French occupiers of Berlin, permitting their troops access to the western sector of Berlin, through East Germany. While passing through East Germany, however, it had the lowest priority on the rails and stopped for every other train. The Russian inspectors sealed the train in Frankfurt and unsealed it in Berlin. If the Russians saw or felt that some one was taking pictures for intelligence purposes, they could stop the train and seize the cameras and people. This was my first face to face encounter with the totalitarian reality of the soviet system and it was brutal. It was reminiscent of the book "1984" and frightening in its implications of what the world could be.
The trip schedule, for security reasons, began just at dusk. This meant that by the time we reached the East German border it would be dark and we could see nothing and gain no intelligence.
Taking off slowly, we approached the iron curtain. Suddenly, it became very bright outside the windows. The East Germans, in a propaganda show, had built very nice homes and villages on the border with many bright lights to show them off. However, once in the country, we could tell in the dim light that the country resembled the run down areas of Appalachia and was ill kept compared to West Germany.
We met dawn dramatically, in Potsdam. It was very foggy and mysterious with large trees draped in moss and surrounded by beautiful lakes. Tall, modern apartment buildings stood everywhere. The train moved into West Berlin along what appeared to be a side rail. Looking out the windows we could tell that it was mostly a residential city.
Due to the difficulty of obtaining raw materials from outside the city, there was little industry. The population were principally pensioners and university students and soldiers. Aboard a military shuttle bus, we traveled through the streets. Shops were grouped in clusters. The economy appeared to be basically mercantile with a small number of light industrial plants. The cold war isolation of the city was evident everywhere.
The city was urban in the north, east and south. On the west it had the world famous Grunewald, a large state forest. The forest was bordered, still inside the wall, with a number of large lakes with even a few small farms. The Wannsee, largest of the lakes on the west, had an underwater fence running along the border. The rest of the city had the eight-foot wall, topped by a 3 foot sewer pipe, surrounding it for more than fifty miles. At the crossing points, there were large propaganda displays - many red flags and large portraits of Lenin, Marx and Engels with machine gun towers on either side - adorned the main entrances to West Berlin.
Outside the wall in the surrounding countryside were several small villages, which had been bought back by the west. These were the most ironic examples of the division existing between the east and west in the cold war. The villages were generally small clusters of houses. Some of them did not even possess a store or gasthaus. They were linked to the city by small two-lane roads flanked by rolls of barbed wire and minefields on either side.
A beautiful cosmopolitan city, West Berlin was divided into several boroughs, each with its own character. The barracks where we stayed was located in the southwestern part of town. Our base - or kaserne, as it was called in German - had a large indoor pool next to our barracks which had been the site of the 1936 Olympic swimming trials.
The pool was huge and impressive. I was an avid swimmer but my courage failed when I went to the uppermost diving board, 75 feet or so above the surface of the pool. I tried it more than once. Each time fear overcame me as I stared at the water so far below.
Our two-month stay was full of surprises.
The senior sergeant, who was in charge of our team, was placed under house arrest after five days. The night before we left for Berlin, he had gotten drunk and, on the way back to our barracks, had thrown a beer bottle through the office window of the company commander of the unit next door.
This left me in charge of the remaining four men.
Life was very casual and the work was easy. We were lodged in the temporary barracks room. It was huge, with ten beds and twenty clothes lockers in it. We did very little cleaning and used the extra lockers to hang our laundry.
In the basement was a company recreation room that was supplied with beer! And . . .you didn't need money! All you had to do was sign for the beer and pay for it on payday. The temptation became too great. Soon we had invented a mystery soldier, whom I named J.D. Strohs, the third. We only had to sign for the drinks, so j.d. gave us a free ride when we were short of cash.
West Berlin was a twenty-four hour town and the city's night life kept us wandering the streets. The neighborhood was residential, except for the street directly in front of our kaserne. There, seven or eight gasthauses or pubs catered to GI's, each with its own appeal. Several were run by expatriate English. One of the brightest was operated by a beautiful, tall, blond Englishwoman. Unmarried and very attractive, her establishment was always crowded with GI's, slobbering for a chance to become her friend.
The nearby Hindenburg strasse ran next to a semi-deserted canal. Once a busy thoroughfare for river traffic, since the war it had become a backwater leading to the lakes to the west. The banks were lined with foliage and hiking trails. On a lazy day, it was a beautiful place to get away from the city and enjoy the quiet of nature.
The downtown area was a large bustling district. Of particular interest were the tourist spots such as the Tiergarten, or city park, full of statues like the mythological Germania, the Reichstag with its massive, aging facade, the stately Brandenburg Gate, the impressive soviet war memorial commemorating the war dead of the soviet bloc, and Checkpoint Charlie, the symbol of the confrontation the world of the east and the world of the west. Checkpoint Charlie had a museum, displaying the tools and equipment used by escapees from the eastern tyranny.
Conveniently the NCO club at the air force's compound at Templehof airport was nearby and provided good, cheap food. The most interesting sights were to be seen from the top of a double decker bus riding down Postdammer strasse or the Ku'damm, as Kurfurstendamm strasse, was called. Seated comfortably on the top deck of the bus, I could watch the bustling city life. The Kudam and Potsdammer strasse were particularly interesting because they contained the majority of the red-light district. It was hilarious to ride down the street and watch the machinations of the ladies at their work.
One day I was walking down the Postsdammer strasse on my way to Charlottenburg Palace. As it happened, I had to walk right through the red light district. And it was payday for the French army. The French soldiers were everywhere, dressed in their best uniforms and kepis. The ladies were ecstatic at their business and were running in a frenzy.
I was accosted by a very, very buxom lady, perched on the steps leading into her bordello. Somehow knowing my occupation and nationality, although I wore civilian clothes, she whistled and yelled at me in German, "Hey GI, hey GI do you want some?"
Laughing at her whistling to call me as though I were a dog, I replied, "Nein, danke, schatze", and continued on down the street.
I found a new adventure every day. One day riding the bus through an area near Templehof, I spotted a German girl who had been an exchange student at my alma mater four years earlier. I had been her lab instructor and had many long conversations with her. I yelled and yelled, "Regina"; but to no avail, the bus was too distant and the city noises too loud.
The daily bus trip to our work site was probably the most suspenseful event in our day. In addition to having, reputedly, five thousand Russian spies watching us, the Palestinian Liberation Organization and the Baader Meinhof Gang were trying to blow up our buses. As a result we took a different route to work every day.
Our work site was one of the only two hills in all of West Berlin. At the end of the Second World War Berlin, the Berliners decided to build a large hill with the rubble of the destroyed buildings, for snow sledding and skiing. They worked very hard and built a large hill, which was in the British zone. When the hill was finished, the British confiscated it and built our work site there.
Not wanting to be defeated twice, the hard-working Berliners built a second hill beside the first. When it got within one foot of being as tall, the British told them, "If it gets one foot higher, we'll take that one, too." The result is two hills in West Berlin, one of which is one foot higher than the other.
The work site became the center of cold-war politics the week we arrived. The Russian air force was sending MIGs on practice strafing runs over us every day. It took the British government a week to get them to stop. Meanwhile, we felt very close to death.
The last three weeks of our stay in Berlin coincided with the annual friendship volksfest, held sequentially in each of the allied-controlled zones. In the British zone, it was the British-German friendship volksfest. In the French zone, in the north, it was the French-German friendship volksfest. In the American zone, it was the American-German friendship volksfest.
Each event was a week long and resembled a county fair in the United States, with rides and booths of every carnival entertainment possible. Each volksfest explained or celebrated something of the host country.
The French-German friendship volksfest had large tubs of water with glasses of wine floating in them. There were many booths hawking different famous French culinary treats, like escargot. The British-German friendship volksfest exhibited British displays of ale, beer and fish and chips. But, the American-German friendship volksfest was the most inventive and the most hilarious with all its foul-ups.
The theme of the American-German friendship volksfest was "Old Mexico". It depicted life in the cowboy days of the old southwest. The Germans loved it. In Germany at this time, the old American west, with its cowboys and Indians, was very popular and the Germans would go to any length in their zealous admiration.
Once, I saw a German businessman walking down the sidewalk in Berlin, dressed up in a three-piece suit wearing an Indian headdress. Every time he would see a friend he would laugh and pat his hand over his mouth as he imitated an Indian chant, "Wooh, wooh, wooh"! His friends would laugh and then they'd pat him on the back.
Cowboy boots and cap-guns with a holster and a gun belt were not uncommon sights in German gasthauses. One of the most popular shows on German TV at this time was "the Texas Rangers".
The American army had outdone itself, in order to re-create the atmosphere of the old southwest. It had imported 5000 cases of Pearl and Lone Star beer from Texas. These are typical Texas beers, but not the most popular or highest quality. In Germany, comparable beer is called feldwasser, which translates in colloquial German as "urine".
Thousands of Germans attended, many wearing cowboy or Indian suits. Some dressed up as Mexicans, with ponchos and sombreros. One man set the tone, dressing as a Mexican bandito complete with poncho, sombrero and pistol belt. He bought a taco from a taco stand where he had drenched it in hot sauce. Then he had gone next door to buy a can of pearl beer.
He stood there and said to his family and friends, "Ah, this is what the cowboys eat and drink." He took a big bite out of his taco, which reeked of hot pepper sauce, and started to choke. Quickly he took a big draught from his can of Pearl beer. A loud "ugh!" was heard and he threw both his taco and the can of pearl beer, the beer of the cowboys, on the ground. Soon the grounds were littered with piles of beer cans.
With the end of the volksfests, the short summer of northern Germany was drawing to a close and we were done with our training. We packed our bags and, with fond memories of the days in Berlin, left for Augsburg.
On the way back, the duty train stopped for fifteen minutes next to a Russian troop train. Car after car was loaded with the newest Russian tanks. Enlisting the assistance of my friends I hid under my pillow on the top bunk with my camera. While they distracted the Russian sentries walking past, I was able to get some good photos of the tanks. This was the Cold War.
Augsburg, after West Berlin, was dull and boring. The work was menial and the city now seemed provincial. Soon we received news that, with the war in Viet Nam winding down, the army was finally sending us new vehicles. Orders arrived that on the fourteenth of August we were to take our worst vehicles to the army junkyard located in Stuttgart.
On the day of departure, we awoke at three o'clock in the morning to prepare our vehicles for the trip. Our motor sergeant led the convoy, accompanied by a tow truck and several jeeps. We completed our preparations by six and were finally on the road getting rid of our junkers, at last. The trip was a tenuous affair. Many of our vehicles were unsafe to drive at any speed and we hand to stay in close formation so we could help anyone who broke down. The distance was approximately two hundred miles. By mid-morning we were approaching the infamous "Alligator Hill", the only vestige of the Alps on the Stuttgart-Munich autobahn.
Tiring from the long drive and our early rising, we pulled into a rest stop just past "Alligator Hill". Most of the vehicles had pulled into the rest area when, suddenly from the rear of the column, the truck driven by the motor sergeant started honking its horn wildly. He waved madly for everyone to stay out of his way. He had no brakes and was coming down the slope into the rest area at about sixty miles per hour. Like a race car driver, he maneuvered around all the vehicles in the rest area and back out on to the autobahn. Coasting for about a mile, he finally pulled the vehicle to the side of the road. The tow truck then pulled up to tow him the rest of the way to Stuttgart.
The processing of the vehicles in Stuttgart was quick and we were soon ready to return to Augsburg. For the return we used the two jeeps and the tow truck or "deuce and a half a-frame", as it was called. A kid new to the army, trying to be "cute", grabbed the last seat available in the jeeps. I was stuck riding shotgun in the deuce and a half with a third man riding in the middle. This wouldn't have been so bad but for the day being the hottest day of the century in Bavaria. We were in the foothills of the Alps and it was 98 degrees outside. A deuce and a half, besides being one of the biggest trucks in the army, throws off a lot of heat.
We were cruising down the autobahn, sizzling, with the windshields pushed out and up. This is a feature of a deuce and a half designed to relieve the passengers during hot weather. Near Neu Ulm, we pulled into a roadside restaurant to have lunch. We had started early that morning, with the warm weather and the long trip, we lingered over lunch. Finally, we rose and continued on our trip back to Augsburg. The scenery was beautiful, but the tedium of the long strip of highway, the heat, the lack of sleep finally wore me down. I put my arm on the window, laid my head down and was soon fast asleep.
I jolted awake to a loud grinding noise of metal on metal. The truck was rising up and throwing us around inside. I looked up and we were going off the side of "Alligator Hill". As we went off a large embankment almost like a cliff, everything was in slow motion. Suddenly, there was a burst of light as my head hit the windshield, which was up and pushed out.
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