Tommy discovered the bunker two weeks earlier but he’d only recently had the time to turn his attention to exploring it. Six months into our stay in France, he had already found two caves totally hidden from the population, one lengthy part of a badly damaged tunnel he was sure was part of the tunnel system used by the Nazis in the Allied invasion sixteen years earlier. A labyrinth of German tunnels between Ars-sur-Moselle and Metz created by the German troops still survived.
Once he tired of his new finds—cave or tunnel—he would show them to us, his siblings. The entrances to the caves were absolutely hidden; there were moments we could easily hear the calm conversations of French farmers or pissing vagrants without detection. We stashed our stuff in the caves. We plotted in the caves. We hid in them. We napped in them, read novels in them, played war in them, camouflaged their entrances, and never spoke of them to either American adults or French villagers.
I found many opportunities to steal away to one of the closer caves to sit and read and think about who I was and my future life. When I think, today, of spending so much time alone—and it was absolutely essential to the kind of child I was—I cannot imagine how the children of today survive in the constant fishbowl of American culture. With a house full of boisterous boys to escape, I needed my own company to sort things out. Closing the door to my bedroom didn’t cut it.
Lest there be any romantic notions about these private playhouses, let me be clear: things slithered and crawled in them, moss grew inside them, and spiders dropped regularly onto book pages. The deep backs of the caves were never fully explored. Sounds and smells emanated from their hidden recesses. The caves were frozen ice chambers in winter, sweltering hellholes in summer. We always threw rocks in first to scare off whatever had taken up residence since the last time we’d visited. On more than one occasion, the intruder was a human, usually drunk. Bums and gypsies would sleep in the caves in warm weather. Thankfully, they never stayed longer than a night.
When we reached the bunker that morning, I could see the source of Tommy’s frustration. (He had been edgier than usual that day.) He had already removed most of the rocks blocking the entrance, and it was very nearly passable. Just an hour at most would have us inside. It must have killed him to let it sit three days before finishing the job.
“So, you thinking World War Two?” I asked as I began collecting rocks from the entrance.
He squinted at the bunker. It was half submerged into the ground, built into the side of a large hill. A fifteen-foot tree grew nearly smack in the middle of the entrance. It was sheer luck he’d even found the bunker.
“Can’t tell yet,” he said. “We’ll know when we see what’s inside.” His eyes glowed at the idea of the war loot that would soon be nestled snugly in his personal armory: rifle stocks, grenades, ammo holders, and helmets. There was no real hope of a bomb inside, unless it had fallen through the roof and not exploded—a possibility I knew Tommy had already considered. I looked up to see what shape the roof was in. Grass, bushes and several trees grew upon it.
“Gonna be lot of nasty roots when we get inside,” I commented, keeping a nervous eye out for rattlesnakes as I picked up rocks.
“Just keep working,” he said, not looking up.
The thought had occurred to me that this bunker looked as if it had been deliberately sealed. Could this many huge boulders have migrated to the doorway in just eighteen years’ time? We worked silently, side by side, for the better part of an hour. Then, without a word to me, Tommy simply wiped his hands muddy hands against his jeans, squeezed through an opening and disappeared. I waited for him outside. I watched the grey clouds scuttle across the sky and wondered if we were in store for another onslaught of French weather. While I was interested in the inside the bunker, I was not interested in fighting through hanging tree roots and spiders in the dark.
Finally, Tom poked his head out of the opening. His face was filthy but he had the most incredibly happy expression on his face. For a moment, I almost smiled back.
“What is it?” I said. “One or Two?”
“Oh, definitely Two,” he said, breaking into a bonafide grin. “You gotta see this.”
“Okay,” I said, unhappily. “You got a flashlight?” But he had already disappeared back into the bunker.
I squeezed myself painfully through the opening. I was aware of the thought that, one day, I might inherit this bunker once Tom got tired of it. So I was prepared to look at it like a prospective owner. Its location was poor—it had taken us nearly thirty-five minutes to get there. A bunker was superior to a cave in many ways, not the least of which was the fact that it was a sort of building as opposed to a granite hole carved into a rocky hill. To a ten-year old, there was a feeling of value that a man-made structure or domicile had that a natural den or cave lacked. Plus, there might be furniture of some kind in a bunker.
Once inside, it was remarkably roomy. Dark and dank, smelling of earth and predictably scary, the dreaded tendrils of ancient tree roots stabbed into the open room like frozen bolts of lightning. Tom was standing a few feet away from me. Already, I could see the pile of guns and metal at his feet.
“Lookit,” he said, pointing to the wall.
Looking away from his booty, I could see the wall closest to us held a stack of three wooden sleeping bunks. There was a blanket or bedding of some kind, and at the foot of the beds, on the floor, sat a grinning, bone-white skeleton.
I screamed.
“Shut up! Shut up!” Tommy said, waving an arm at me. “You’ll wake up the bats!”
I began to recite the Hail Mary.
“I’m gonna charge the French kids ten francs,” Tom said, with a blissful, dreamy look on his face to come see the dead kraut.”
“We have to tell someone,” I mumbled through the grimy hand I had clapped to my mouth.
“We are gonna tell someone,” he said as he squatted down next to the thing. “We’re gonna tell ‘em and then we’re gonna show ‘em and then we’re gonna be rich.”
“I mean tell someone, like a grown-up,” I said. “Tommy, that’s a dead…that’s a dead…” All of a sudden there seemed to be a decided lack of air in the bunker.
“Well, no,” Tommy said slowly as he straightened back up. “We are definitely not going to do that.” He didn’t look at me, he didn’t threaten me. He didn’t have to.
“The French kids’ll tell their parents,” I said.
I heard a slithering sound somewhere to my right and resisted the urge to grab for Tommy’s sleeve.
He made a snorting sound. “No parents are gonna believe their kids,” he said. “Especially French kids who lie about everything.”
“They might,” I said, “if they get told it enough.” I definitely heard something scuttling or scraping in the dark corner.
“So what if they do?” Tom tossed a rock into the darkness which only intensified the slithering noise.
My hands began to sweat. The skeleton looked as if it were looking at me and waiting for a response.
“You know the French,” he said. “They won’t care.”
“I wonder why his family didn’t come looking for him.” My throat felt dry. Was the skeleton looking at me?
“Still,” he said, “it’s weird that the Germans didn’t track him down.” He squatted down and peered closely at the corpse. “That’s definitely a German uniform he’s wearing.”
“Maybe he’s French,” I said. “Like a French spy? That would explain why he’s still here.”
Tom gave me a look of derision.
“No, really,” I said, edging away from the body, toward the entrance. “It explains why he’s in a German uniform, why nobody came to find him, why there’s just him…and….and…”
“He’s a Kraut,” he said. And that was that.
I was used to taking Tom’s word for things—things, that if you thought about it, he couldn’t really have known. He had an air about him that, when it didn’t evoke fear, evoked confidence. If ever there was
a kid who knew his own mind and seemed to know yours as well, it was Tommy.
A week before finding the dead guy, our father sent a detachment of Air Police to the village with Tommy to confiscate Tommy’s main stash of found bombs. Tom adored Dad and wouldn’t deliberately have chosen to upset him or disobey a direct order—unless Tommy, felt he had additional information that voided the direct order. This was usually the case. In this instance, Tom was happy to acquiesce. Too happy, it seemed to his suspicious siblings, but we had long since learned to keep our mouths shut and let Tommy-induced incidents take their natural course.
The Air Police showed up at our house in Ars one warm weekday morning. Tommy and his partner in crime, Ricky Barasono, had been allowed to stay home from school for the event, so the rest of us kids never had first-hand experience with the incident. Even so, it is a story that continues to live in our family, handed down and enjoyed—especially by any kid who longs to get the best of adults at least now and again.
The two airmen from the Bomb Disposal Unit of the Chambley USAF Air Police were probably in their early twenties. They likely had little to no experience as policemen or even security guards before their stint in the Air Force. They were all very snap-to-attention proper when they were talking with my father, “the Major,” before the expedition began but quickly reverted to the overgrown boys they were when they began following Tommy and Ricky up into the vineyards.
Of course, Tommy led the two hapless cops the long way up into the vineyards, bypassing the steps, navigating over the roughest part of the terrain. He and Ricky raced ahead like two frenetic monkeys. Tommy’s armory was located nearly two miles beyond the Roman aqueduct that loomed at the perimeter of town. There were multiple bombs, rifles, ammunition cans, helmets and one particularly prized bayonet—all piled neatly in the back of a cave and checked on periodically by Tom and his friends. Tommy and Ricky kept their speed up, climbing higher and higher into the hills and wildest parts of the vineyards. The young airmen, used to lounging around the NCO club and smoking and drinking as their main pastime, yelled at them from time to time: “Hey, kid! How much further?”
“Not far now, sir!” Tommy would call back in his high-pitched voice, serving to remind the cops that he was, after all, just a child.
After a couple of hours, the airmen, exhausted and sweating, flopped down on the ground, and lit up cigarettes.
“Hey, kid!” They continued to call up to Tommy as he sat with Ricky on a rock some thirty yards away. “How much further to where you keep the bombs?”
“Not much further now, sir!” Tommy replied cheerfully.
The sun beat down, the men ground out their cigarettes, cursing loudly as the two boys scampered up the now very steep incline of the vineyard. Tommy had neglected to point out the perfectly serviceable nearby steps carved into the earth and the two airmen tripped and stumbled and cursed their way laboriously up the hill.
Nearly an hour later, taking yet another cigarette break, the sweating, decidedly cranky, airmen noticed Tommy and Ricky picking up rocks and stuffing them in their pockets.
“Hey, kid!” one of them called to Tommy. “What’re the rocks for?”
Tommy replied brightly: “For the pit vipers, sir!”
Cigarettes were flung to the ground, more oaths not fit for tender dependent ears uttered, and the two airmen quickly retraced their steps back down the hill. I don’t know what they told my Dad about why they didn’t find Tom’s cache. I don’t remember if a second trip was ever attempted. I do know Tom’s booty—minus the unexploded bombs—made it back safely in his footlocker to Germany and the US without any further trouble from prying adults.
The German bunker revealed Tommy’s entrepreneurial streak early on. This proclivity would later manifest itself repeatedly when he grew up in the form of various business opportunities which always stemmed from a deep interest or passion. He did, in fact, sell viewings of the dead German to the French kids, although this wasn’t nearly as profitable as he had hoped. He and his friends cleaned up the bunker, dressed it with some of his other war booty and let a group of carefully chosen kids look for a buck. Eight months later, when my father got his orders that we were moving to Germany, Tommy simply re-entombed the unfortunate soldier and set his sights on new adventures in Deutschland.
Chapter Eight
Life On Base—World’s Apart
During the Cold War, Chambley was a front-line base for the Unites States Air Forces in Europe (USAFE). The base was ten miles west of Metz, just south of the road leading to Verdun, and southwest of Paris which was a four-hour drive away. Built on farmland near the village of Chambley, the airbase was formally dedicated and turned over to the USAFE on June 12, 1956. In 1961, Chambley was reactivated as part of Operation Tack Hammer, which was the US’s response to the Berlin Crisis. The 7211nd Tactical Fighter Wing was sent to Chambley to support the Seventeenth Air Force and various NATO exercise in Europe—flying up to thirty sorties a day with Seventh Army units in Germany. The F-84 Thunderstreaks showed up at Chambley in 1961.
As part of the 7122nd Tactical Fighter Wing, my father was sent to Chambley in the spring of 1962. My mother and all of us kids followed in the early fall.
As I understand it, the Berlin Airlift1 was considered an international crisis requiring the expansion of US military forces in Europe. The Department of Defence announced in August of 1961 that 148,000 reserve personnel would be called up for twelve months of active duty service. 27,000 of these would be from the Air Force Reserve, and the Air National Guard flying squadrons and support units would augment the Air Force and about 112,000 Army reservists. At that time, it was the largest overseas movement of aircraft since World War II.
Dad’s first assignment at Chambley was as squadron commander of a combat materials squadron. Of course, his first sergeant ran the squadron and managed the enlisted men. I can remember overhearing him talking from time to time about disciplinary problems with some of the airmen. If the first sergeant couldn’t get it straightened out, then the offender was sent to “the Commander.” Dad could reduce the guy in rank, toss him in some kind of confinement (either to barracks or the brig) ship him back stateside, or even discharge him.
The impression I get is that Dad had a lot of time on his hands and so he was free to enjoy the French people, discover local sources for great food and booze, and build a five-star restaurant out of the rundown pilot’s watering hole of an O-Club. It wasn’t what he was there to do but it’s likely that creating and running this restaurant/night club on this forlorn little air base in postwar France was some of the most fun Dad ever had in his working life.
I’m not sure of all the details of how my Dad came to be the acting commanding officer of the base. I remember some of the stories I overheard of the ex-CO. One involved him trying to throw an airman and his family off base because the airman wasn’t mowing his yard often enough. I think I remember hearing the word sociopath in reference to the CO, too. I don’t know what happened to him.
We had lived in the village nine months when my father assumed command of Chambley Air Force Base. When that happened, it was necessary for him and us to live on base and so we moved in the spring from Ars to what felt, in contrast, like “little America.”
Of course, when we moved on base, Tommy not only took his mort of munitions from the countryside, he also brought his still-ardent desire to collect more. With Chambley a good twenty-plus miles from Ars, Tommy had brand-new territory to explore. It was clear that the kids who were already on the base had not thoroughly ransacked the area. Tom was gleeful about the still undiscovered and unexploded bombs in the area.
And find them, of course, he did.
Like all kids on base—probably like all kids on any base during this time—we had an unusual amount of free movement. Not only were all dependents free to roam the base, but we were always jauntily waved or saluted as we made our way OFF base into the countryside—at least until Tom revoked those privileges for all d
ependents on the base for eternity.
We had only been living on base a few weeks when my father found himself in a very unusual traffic gridlock—complete with honking, shouting, and steaming car hoods—down the main road intersecting the base. After waiting patiently for a few minutes, my father waved over the MP trying to unsnarl the traffic knot and asked what the problem was. The way my father tells the story, when he, as base commander, was told that the ruckus was the result of “some dependent with a large eighty-pound ordinance in a wagon in the middle of the road,” well, I guess he went a little bit nuts. The way Tommy remembers the story, we all—Kevin, Terry and myself—were collected and deposited in the brig for the afternoon. Our bomb was unceremoniously confiscated.
I must say I don’t remember being locked up in the base jail, and it seems to me that I’d remember such an adventure. But Tom, who is now and was then a fastidiously honest and meticulously detailed person, says it absolutely happened. In any case, I can believe that my father, in a desperate attempt to break Tommy’s bomb-finding addiction, tried this method to impress on Tommy the seriousness of the problem. But I cannot believe Dad really thought it would make any difference to Tommy’s focus. Tommy didn’t go after bombs because he didn’t care about upsetting Dad. He did care. He went after bombs because he couldn’t help himself.
Life on Chambley A.F.B. was a lot easier for me than life on the economy,. There were no mindless, endless memorizations, no need to speak or think in any language but English, and the whole of the airbase was our playground. Plus, base life for a dependent in the early sixties was a very flexible proposition. We kids wore our dog tags so people would know our blood type, know to whom we belonged (and his rank), and know our religious persuasion. The dog tags took the place of military IDs for us—nobody carried wallets—and got us into any place on base we were allowed to go. Because it was like living in one big, cozy neighborhood—where all the Dads worked at the same plant—I could walk or ride my bike to where ever I wanted to go, to meet my friends at the dance, for example, or to hang out at the base mess hall drinking Coca-colas and listening to the radio. We lived in a tiny trailer on base, all lined up with all the other trailers, so our friends were always just steps away. The base school, the base theater, the chapel, the base bowling alley and snack bar, the many playgrounds, the commissary and BX were all easy biking distance from anywhere you happened to be on the base.
Air Force Brat Page 5