My passage from Monterey to the Brooklyn Navy Yard (where a troop ship was patiently awaiting my arrival for transport to Bremerhaven, Germany) was again greatly eased by my possession of a car, even though at this point the car was rapidly approaching its "drop dead" point of 90,000 miles. The trip from Monterey back to Atlanta was pleasant and uneventful and the 30 days of leave during November of 1961 much appreciated (a portion of which I spent babysitting my 1-year-old niece Rendy Keaten in Dothan, Alabama while my sister was in the hospital giving birth to her second child, Cary Keaten -- quite a switch from being a private in the Army). Another portion of that leave was spent in the Boston and New York City areas, well known from my college days (seemingly long in the past!). In the end three old friends from my Atlanta high-school days delivered me to yet another Army "Reception Center" in Fort Dix, New Jersey where I resumed my military career with a week of waiting while my troop ship in the Brooklyn Navy Yard prepared itself for my coming on board! While there I received a letter from home in Atlanta reporting that my faithful 1951 Dodge had just died from having thrown a rod, although thankfully it was not alone at the time, having been accompanied by my dad (whose many years riding an Indian motorcycle had possibly left him with a slightly heavier foot than mine).
In 1961 the military offered two options for getting from the continental US to Europe -- several hours in the air via Military Air Transport Service (MATS), or about 10 days of ocean travel on board a "troop ship" - the so-called Liberty ships left over from WWII. Personnel of a more senior disposition had at their disposal the option of MATS, however my rather minimal seniority (even as a freshly minted SP4!) definitely pointed toward the bulk mode option! The particular troop ship available for our voyage in December of 1961 was called the USS Alexander M. Patch. It was one of a class of ships of which apparently hundreds had been built during WWII, and it had originally been launched in 1944 as the USS Admiral R. R. Coontz (a Civil-War-era officer -- apparently with the passage of time the number of Admirals and Generals came to exceed the available number of ships!). The ship had seen service in both the Pacific and Atlantic theaters during WWII, but had been decommissioned in 1946, then re-commissioned in 1950 (and renamed), presumably for service in the Korean and Vietnamese wars. I read somewhere recently that it had finally been taken out of service in 1967 and then lain in the National Defense Reserve Fleet (one of the so-called "ghost fleets") in Virginia for some decades until it was finally scrapped in 2001 (sob!). I cite all of this in order to give some idea of the ship's already advancing age in December of 1961 (17 rusting years of service!) when I first climbed aboard with a few hundred other wide-eyed young soldiers and a handful of also very young lieutenants (similarly lacking in seniority or accompanied by families) for about a 10-day voyage across the stormy Atlantic.
The lieutenants and any accompanying wives or children had the use of small "staterooms" which featured, of course, private bathrooms, individual beds, privacy, and usually even a porthole to peek out of. Those of us having less senior status were herded down wide stairwells into the bowels of the ship and into large bays in which dozens of stanchions were welded in place from floor to ceiling, and to each of which multiple hammock-style bunks were attached in a vertical fashion (potentially as many as five high!). The stanchions were spaced so that there was just enough room to pass between the bunks when they were occupied, provided the girth of either the passerby or the bunk's occupant was not excessive, in which case the process of passage tended to cause the bunk's occupant to rock back and forth a bit, often leading to unpleasant exchanges of conversation between the two parties involved. The vertical dimension also posed problems if the upper person was of a weight which caused his body to intrude into the space considered by the lower person to be reserved for his use. The ship was actually rather lightly loaded with troops, nevertheless the authorities felt it necessary to herd all of us into a single bay, even though during the course of the voyage we had occasion to notice a number of identical bays which were unoccupied and which would have greatly eased the crowded conditions in the single bay to which we were confined. No need to pamper the troops ...
The process of casting off from the Brooklyn Naval Yard and our placid passage out past the Statue of Liberty brought a brief tear to even the most hardened among us, although the vessel's myriad unaccustomed creaking noises constantly brought worried looks to our faces. The date was approximately December 15th (the trip was something like 10 days, and we arrived in Bremerhaven on Christmas day!), and the weather on the North Atlantic promised to live up to its reputation. As we moved out onto the open ocean, the ship began to roll ever more violently, a situation to which many of our stomachs were not accustomed, and to which many of our stomachs never became assustomed during the entire 10 days of our voyage. One of my more vivid memories of that trip was sitting in the ship's galley eating "lunch" on the open North Atlantic and watching through a porthole to one side as the horizon line of the ocean would move alarmingly up and down with the rolling of the ship. In time with the movement, the lunch trays in front of us on the long table would slide back and forth, first to the left, then back to the right, held in place by a long inlaid track designed to keep them from falling onto our laps, and occasionally a really strong rocking motion would cause the trays to slide down the table past several people and then back up the table in the other direction by a similar amount. During one of these rocking motions I noticed that one of the trays moving rapidly past me contained the depleted contents of someone's stomach one or two people to the side of me. After that experience I took to "bagging" my lunch and eating it in the open air where at least the problems I had to deal with were entirely my own!
The military has a policy of keeping its personnel engaged in "military-style" activities, no matter how meaningless they are, and being on board ship is no exception. One of the senior Army sergeants headed for Europe was assigned the task of drawing up a duty roster for "guard duty," as though there were some enemy on board who needed attending to. On board ship this activity is referred to as "standing watch" and involves the monotonous routine of continuously circulating through an assigned area looking for intruders or suspicious activity. The assignments tended to be either "above deck" or "below deck" -- an important distinction depending on one's inclination toward seasickness. I was initially assigned a "tour" below deck patrolling for suspicious activities in one of the officers' stateroom areas, but became so sick from the heavy, stale air in the close quarters that I constantly had to run to the john to throw up. Unfortunately I was not allowed to use the john in the stateroom area, and so always had to return briefly to the area where the enlisted men's johns were located. During one of these excursions, the Army officer on watch (they had to play the game too!) discovered my absence and after waiting for my return a minute or two later accompanied me ceremoniously (and even perhaps a bit triumphantly!) to the brig in the very bowels of the ship where I was in the process of being placed in a very small cell (the only kind available!) when the sergeant in charge of my watch section showed up to see what had happened to me. He was a gentle soul and aware of my predicament and talked the officer in charge into letting me accompany him (the sergeant) on his own rounds so that any absence of mine that was necessary he could monitor in an acceptable fashion. Thus I was saved the embarrassment and possibly record-damaging infraction of having served time in a military "brig." I still remember the brig and the necessity of passing food to the occupants on a small tray that just fit through a slot at the bottom of the cell door almost right on the floor, which had considerable sanitation problems of its own, being in the very bottom of the ship where dirty water tended to collect with a very strong accompanying smell of oil and other not easily identified substances. I have no idea what infraction the occupants of the brig were guilty of, but it must have been serious to force them to remain in those conditions for any period of time. The friendly sergeant eventually arranged for me to take a watch "above deck" which, although it exposed me to the often quite frigid North Atlantic weather, nevertheless had the advantage of my being able to keep my stomach under control in the fresh air and to stay out of jail. Interesting (and certainly unexpected) times ...
We pulled into port in Bremerhaven, West Germany, early on Christmas day of 1961 and by noon those of us from USASA (the "intelligence" folk) were on a comfortable German train (3rd class, to be sure, but nevertheless a great improvement over the ship!) headed for 'Frankfurt am Main' (not to be confused with the other 'Frankfurt am Oder' which at that time was located in East Germany -- both the Main and Oder are good-sized rivers on which their respective towns are located). Frankfurt am Main was the home of two particular entities of interest to budding intelligence types such as myself -- a former WWII Wehrmacht barracks facility called Gutleut Kaserne (where we were temporarily housed) and an operations area seized from the Germans after WWII called the IG Farben building (Interessen-Gemeinschaft Farbenindustrie or "Association of Common Interests for the Dye-Making Industries" -- a cover name for a cartel of German chemical and pharmaceutical companies which actively used slave labor from conquered countries during WWII and was said to have been so powerful that WWII would not have been possible without it!). Gutleut Kaserne was very handily located very close to the center of the downtown area and adjacent to the main railway station, while the IG Farben building was located not far away in a very pleasant, almost residential area quite close to downtown.
I make particular mention of Frankfurt am Main because in the coming several years it would serve as something of a hub for my impending two-plus years of travel activities once I had finished my service obligation. But that's a story still to come ...
Once having cleared the "reception center" in Frankfurt, the next step was to be sent on to a USASA training center in order to learn the craft of how to apply our newly minted language skills to the actual task of monitoring "enemy" activity just across the border in the various countries of Eastern Europe and beyond (Russian was only one of a number of languages studied at Monterey!). Even though we were ostensibly at peace with most of the world in 1962, there was still a very active "Cold War" in progress, and we were about to be located at its "Iron Curtain" frontier -- a pair of descriptive phrases we had only read about in newspapers up until that time! The particular training center for which we were headed was located in a place called "Baumholder," a small German village on the Nahe river about an hour's drive south of Frankfurt am Mein and adjacent to the Hunsrück region of the Rhineland so effectively portrayed in the 1980s-1990s 32-film German series called "Heimat"(highly recommended!). It is also the area from which the Stumpf branch of my father's family emigrated (to Pennsylvania) sometime in the 1800s (having most probably stemmed from a fairly modest level of Hessian society, perhaps even peasants!). Baumholder could have been a very pleasant, almost resort-like town on a meandering river through a winegrape-growing valley (known to German wine-drinking aficionacos as the "banks of the Nahe"), were it not for the presence of some 50,000-odd American soldiers -- airborne, infantry, and cavalry (referring to tanks and myriad other large, mechanized and usually armored vehicles) who were stationed in the immediate area, turning it from a once-pleasant little resort village into a sort of nightmare American G.I encampment with a rumored 69 G.I. bars open at virtually all hours of the day and night. (Not to put too fine a point on the matter, but virtually anyone using the services of the young ladies which frequented these establishments would undoubtedly have found themselves in line for a long series of follow-on appointments with their friendly military urologist!)
Fortunately, we occupied a small Kaserne (the commonly used German word for a military post) of our own on a hill opposite the main base and were able, if we so chose, to avoid most of the commotion involved with the all-day training and frequently all-night celebratory events that took place on the other side of the town. We even had our own little Gasthof (charmingly called the 'Berghof' as I recall) -- a small inn/beerhall halfway down the hill towards town which we frequented virtually every evening during our multiple-week stay in Baumholder since there was very little else to do other than sit in the 'day room' in the Kaserne or stroll down into town (definitely a dangerous activity, as we were frequently referred to by the other soldiers as 'Monterey Marys' -- which, as one might gather, was not meant to be a complimentary term!).
A Taste of the Exotic -- One evening while sitting in the Berghof sipping a beer and chatting with friends, we noticed a young slip of a girl enter the front door and go directly to the bartender with whom she exchanged a few brief words. She was in her early teens, rather olive-skinned, dressed in a long black coat with her hair in a short braid, and had an appearance quite different from the usual blonde, fair-skinned German Fräulein we had become accustomed to seeing. He nodded to whatever it was she said, and she went out the door again. Less than a minute later, she and another slightly younger girl both dressed in the same long black coats came silently back through the door, walked to an empty table, arranged the chairs and table into a sort of mini-stage, and, after taking off their coats to reveal black leotard-style tights, began silently performing an eery contortionist routine by wrapping themselves around both the chairs and the table (and seemingly even themselves) in an almost surreal fashion. The routine took perhaps a minute to perform, after which they gave a short bow and produced a black hat which they placed in front of each patron in turn, soliciting contributions which they would acknowledge with a brief nod of their heads. To anyone reluctant to drop something into the hat they would give an intense stare, which was usually sufficient to elicit a least a nominal contribution. The whole scene from start to finish lasted less than five minutes and was done in complete silence. After having collected the money, they stood with their heads bowed toward their audience for a few long seconds, then vanished almost phantom-like into the night. Most of the patrons were American GIs like ourselves, and none of us had any idea of who these girls might be. After a little prodding by one of our number with a knowledge of German (probably recently acquired from the 37-week German course offered back in Monterey!) the bartender explained that the young girls were Roma (or Tzigane) -- Gypsy girls who had probably escaped with their families from Romania or Hungary (both Communist countries since the end of WWII) and who traveled around the countryside with their families in small horse-drawn wagons, camping alongside the roads and doing whatever they could to earn a meager living (which, according to the bartender, including stealing eggs, chickens, and whatever from the local farmers). Lord knows what the girls did as they became a little older and inevitably less lithe, thereby having to resort to perhaps other forms of solicitation to earn their meager livings.
Baumholder Excursions -- Upon leaving Monterey I had opted to take a month of leave 'Stateside' (as people in government service like to describe it) and so arrived in Baumholder much later than others in our class who had gone straight to Europe with the idea of spending their accumulated leave at some later time in Europe itself. Since I had intended from early on to get a European discharge from the Army, the issue of accumulated leave was not a major driver in my own planning efforts. The two others in our bridge foursome who went ahead were John and Clayton, and they had already managed to locate a compatible bridge fourth in the little Baumholder Kaserne -- an SP5 by the name of Tom W., who also had the singular advantage of owning a car (a little VW he had purchased during a trip to Wolfsburg where the VW factory was located!). Even though a year or two younger than us, Tom was senior to us in service rank, having gone into the Army after dropping out of college and having been pursued by the same Selective Service folk who had been so prompt in reminding us of our obligation to Uncle Sam. Tom was kind enough to include all three of us in drives around the countryside, including two very pleasant day trips made to Luxembourg and Heidelberg -- something we would not have been able to do on our own. Idar Oberstein
One of the oddities of being drafted into service in one's early twenties is that one spends almost one-hundred-percent of one's time in the company of other young males, while having almost no contact with young females -- perhaps not the most natural of settings. This can be a bit disorienting in that it's quite easy to fall into a relationship with almost any female who comes along -- a real recipe for various kinds of disaster as I had occasion to witness many times in my short service career.
I would like to be able to report that the remainder of our sojourn in Baumholder went smoothly and provided a pleasant introduction to the next phase of our stay in Germany, i.e., the duty phase, as opposed to the training phase. However, the situation was marred by two very unfortunate incidents.
Sergeant Button -- The first incident was the sort of thing that occurs on a daily basis in Army settings both in the States and abroad. Our tiny self-contained Kaserne -- a gatehouse, a two-story barracks, a mess hall, a motor pool, and a separate building where training was carried out -- was compact but served its purpose rather well. The first floor of the barracks contained administrative offices and a day room, while the second floor contained the actual sleeping quarters, along with washing facilities for our small detachment and one or two soft-drink and candy-bar vending machines. Because there was no place to put the empty coke bottles from the vending machines at night, they would end up in a long row along the side of the second-story hall (between the stairs and our sleeping quarters) until daylight came, at which time a clean-up detail would collect them and take them over to the mess hall to be disposed of. One night at about 10 o'clock, a rather inebriated member of our detachment arrived back from the Berghof having had a little more to drink than was probably wise, and, in the course of staggering down the hall, inadvertently knocked over several of the bottles, one of which broke into shards. Dick (the inebriated gentleman in question!) then proceeded to kick over several more of the bottles, sending them spinning down the hall, breaking another bottle or two and making a considerable racket. The E5 sergeant in charge of the barracks at night, one Sergeant Button by name (his actual name!), dragged himself out of bed and into the hall, inexplicably carrying an olive-green blanket from his bunk along with him (perhaps a gesture of modesty, since he was dressed only in shorts and a T-shirt). Dick was a rather large gentleman -- over 6 feet tall, and Sergeant Button was perhaps five and a half feet tall, so they were somewhat unevenly matched physically, although Sergeant Button certainly had the advantage of rank, which he promptly pointed out to Dick. Dick was unimpressed by this rather fine point of decorum and grabbed Sergeant Button's blanket from his hand and flicked it sharply toward his bare legs, (although without actually making contact) and in a gesture of contempt threw the blanket on the floor in front of Sergeant Button. The whole incident passed in a matter of less than a few seconds with no actual damage done to anyone, but the next morning Dick found himself being called down to the orderly room, where he was informed that the CO (commanding officer) would be instituting summary court-martial proceedings against him for having assaulted an NCO (non-commissioned officer) while drunk and disorderly. Normally, military discipline in a case like this would be handled by a so-called Article 15 (non-judicial punishment) which usually consisted of being confined to the barracks for some period of time (say 5, 10, or even 15 days). More severe cases of judicial punishment in the military are administered according to a document called the UCMJ (Uniform Code of Military Justice) in which three levels of court martial are defined -- summary, special, and general. To the public there is no distinction between these very different levels of discipline, and a court martial is simply a court martial -- a stain on one's record which is carried throughout the remainder of one's lifetime, affecting things such as voting rights, the ability to obtain a security clearance, and even affecting one's ability to obtain employment -- in other words, an extremely serious penalty, in this case for the casual act of having flicked a blanket at someone's legs. Why such a severe level of punishment was selected was unclear, but was probably related to a dislike on the part of both the CO and Sergeant Button for this particular individual -- Dick happened to be a member of a wealthy and socially prominent San Francisco family, a fact that we all felt played a significant role. His family eventually secured legal representation for him in the form of a family lawyer who made the trip to Baumholder to defend him in the subsequent proceedings, but Dick was nevertheless convicted of the offense and released from the service shortly thereafter. None of us ever heard what happened to him after that ...
Larry and Pete -- The second incident was of a completely different nature and involved two very young soldiers in our group (Larry G. and Pete W.), each from a different part of the US and both of whom had gone into the Army immediately after completing high school -- as well as after having married their high-school sweethearts, both of whom were quite pregnant or, as the Bible might have put it, "great with child." The two young soldiers were bright and able to get into the Monterey ALS, where in the course of the year's stay each wife produced a child and promptly became pregnant with another! One of the two (Pete) was able to arrange for his wife to stay in the States during his European tour, but the family situation of the other (Larry) made that option impractical, to the extent that his wife announced that she would be on her way to Baumholder within a week or two of our group's having arrived there (even though Baumholder was only a temporary assignment for training purposes, and we would be moving on within a matter of a month or two -- such was the apparent urgency of the situation!). The little ASA base of a hundred or so souls in Baumholder had no facilities for families, nor did Larry have sufficient seniority to be able to claim family housing privileges on the main base, so he was forced to look for housing "on the economy" as it was termed. Surprisingly, that turned out to be not that difficult (the dollar was worth 4 marks in those days, and a small rural second-story apartment could be rented for as little as 100 marks, or about $25 a month). Acquiring a vehicle was another obstacle which Larry surmounted by borrowing money from several different fellow soldiers (including myself) who were sympathetic with his plight (both Larry and Pete were very amiable souls and well-liked within the small company, although I don't believe any of us ever saw our money again!).
The night before his wife's arrival (a very frosty February evening), Larry invited Pete and myself to take a ride out to the little town of Kusel and "inspect" his new digs (about 10 miles from Baumholder and about a half-hour drive along a very pleasant, although rather winding road). At that point I had only ventured outside of Baumholder once or twice, but I was very curious to see what kind of arrangements Larry had been able to procure on the local economy (of whose language he understood not a word!). The ride to Kusel went uneventfully (even rather pleasantly) in Larry's little Opel sedan -- a car which, contrary to conventional automotive wisdom, did not require an oil filter, the (very German) theory being that one should change the oil often enough to obviate the need for such a device! After a pleasant half hour or so inspecting Larry's "digs" (to the accompaniment of an excellent local German lager to prepare us for the road back) we set off from Kusel back toward Baumholder. The hour was reasonably early -- about 9 pm in the evening, but the winding road had acquired a layer of ice over and above that in situ during the trip out from Baumholder. As we topped the crest of a hill not far from the town of Baumholder, the car began to skid slightly and we soon found ourselves sliding down the hill at an increasingly awkward angle to the road, and within a hundred yards or so of the bottom we left the road completely and plowed head-on into a small but unyielding tree. Larry and Pete were sitting in the front seat and I in the rear, and the two of them ended up with their heads going straight into the windshield -- a terribly unfortunate circumstance, since German cars of that era were not equipped with the type of glass which shattered on impact (the glass tended to break into long sharp slivers, which this windshield did!). Although I suffered a mildly fractured nose from slamming my face into the back of the front seat, their injuries were considerably more severe, with shards of the broken glass slashing both of their faces and very nearly their eyes. I gingerly extracted myself from the rear seat and hiked to a nearby candle-lit farmhouse where I banged loudly and repeatedly on the door, eventually waking up an elderly farmer and his wife (along with their children and their children's families -- all shoe-horned into one tiny farmhouse!) and somehow convinced them in my limited textbook German to contact the local police, who then called the base hospital and had them send an ambulance to tend to the situation. It was hard to imagine a situation suddenly developing such unforeseen complications, but such it was ...
Larry and Pete both spent a week or two in the base hospital wrapped in facial bandages, both of them emerging with their sight unscathed, but with considerable facial scarring which greatly marred their youthful good looks. Larry and his small family were now without either housing or a car, but various members of our small intelligence detachment, along with the Red Cross, rallied around to lend Larry and his wife enough money to get them into a small room close enough to Baumholder that they could use base transportation (buses) to get around town. The situation hovered just short of a catastrophe, but within about two weeks I had completed my training, received my orders to proceed without delay to Berlin, and after a round of heartfelt farewells ... never saw them again.
At that time (circa 1962) the normal way to make the transit from Baumholder to Berlin would have been to get a ride with the company courier on his daily run to Gutleut Kaserne in Frankfurt and get off at the Frankfurt train station right next door in plenty of time to catch the evening duty train (which made a brief stop at the border town of Helmstedt before continuing on across the border to Berlin, arriving the following morning). However, the assignment to Berlin was one I shared with another SP4 from our Monterey class, Steven S., and this introduced a rather odd complication. During his three-month stay in Baumholder, Steven had inexplicably decided to acquire an automobile from another GI who worked in the motor pool -- an early 1950s model Chevrolet, which was in considerable need of attention, but which he had acquired at what was apparently a bargain price. Finding parts for an American car was a challenge in Germany in the early 1960s, particularly for a 10-year-old car, and Steven's car was in need of a number of parts! It had a tendency to emit great clouds of smoke mixed with not infrequent loud bangs from the muffler, at the same time making unsettling gurgling noises from somewhere under the hood. Because of the car's fragile condition, the Company administration at Baumholder felt it would be unwise to send Steven off on his way to Berlin by himself (leading to a possible International incident!), but they were willing to let him make the trip if I were to agree to accommpany him. As a consequence Steven seemed to feel that I had some sort of brotherly obligation to drive with him in his car to Helmstedt (the border town between East and West Germany which acted as a sort of transit point between the two zones), at which point he would pay an MP to actually drive the car the remainder of the way to Berlin through the East Zone (which because of security clearance issues we were not allowed to do), and we would get on the duty train coming from Frankfurt to take us the rest of the way to meet the car in Berlin. My feeling was that the company administration had dumped the decision-making dilemma on my shoulders, knowing I would be very reluctant to take the gamble of making such a trip -- and they were correct! The car had never even successfully navigated the road to Frankfurt, much less to Helmstedt, and I had no reason or desire to end up standing somewhere on the Autobahn with my duffel bag on my shoulder and my finger outstretched trying to hitch a ride to Helmstedt (not even considering the fact that it was illegal to hitchike in uniform). However, Steven took great umbrage at my refusal -- to the point that we never spoke again, even during our 1-1/2 year sojourn together in the same barracks in Berlin! He was forced to leave the car temporarily in Baumholder and proceed to Berlin on the train, planning to return at some later date to retrieve the car -- something that understandably never happened and that the administration undoubtedly knew would never happen! The GI who sold him the car apparently bought it back at a bargain price, perhaps planning to work the same scam on the next naive and car-happy Russian-language GI who should come stumbling through ...
In any case, on a fine morning day in early April of 1962 Steven and I rode in mutual silence to Frankfurt with the courier who dropped us at the Bahnhof in Frankfurt -- with something of a cat's smile on his face as he wished us a pleasant trip to Berlin! The train ride through West Germany in broad daylight was fascinating, and the follow-on ride through a darkened East Germany at night was in stark contrast (the East German economy was in shambles at that point in time). Our arrival in Berlin was a total surprise -- instead of the bombed-out buildings and rubble I had expected to see everywhere, the train took us through a series of beautiful tree-lined suburban streets. Our destination was an imposing, if somewhat austere, collection of brick buildings on a tree-lined street in a very up-scale suburb of Berlin called Zehlendorf. The place was called Andrews Barracks, it housed the indoor diving pool used for the 1936 Olympic games, and it was also a former SS Kaserne ... Welcome to the set of post-war contrasts called West Berlin!