by R. M. Ryan
48.
“You thought you were a Jew,” Albert Speer says to me in a dream. “It never occurred to you that you might be a Nazi.”
He’s standing there in a high-collared gray overcoat. He wears the peaked hat of a German officer. The wind howls. Snow swirls around us. All the color of the scene is washed out except the pale flesh of Albert Speer’s face.
“So romantic, the Nazis chasing you. Just like in the movies.” He smiles.
“How could I be a Jew?” I say. “I’m Scotch-Irish. A Methodist from Wisconsin.”
“Ach, ja,” he says and shakes his right index finger at me. “I know what happens. The American tourists arrive at Dachau. A short drive from Munich. An afternoon’s—how do you say?—getaway. They stand in the one barrack that’s left and pronounce it all ‘Unbelievable. Cruel—how could they.’ Ja, ja. I know. They, of course, would never do anything like this. As they sit down for dinner, they can almost feel the starvation—feel how the Jews must have felt.”
His voice trails off.
“But we know,” he says. “We know about the Indians. We know about the Vietnamese. Now the Iraqis. Who’s next? Millions and millions dead. We’re watching. You’re catching up with us. If I am guilty, you are guilty, too.”
He shakes his index finger in the wind. In the snow.
“Ja, ja, you think you’re innocent. We’ll see, Herr Ryan. We’ll see.”
He pulls the tall collar of his gray coat up around his ears to protect them from the snow, which the wind is driving faster and faster.
“Herr Ryan, you must know the novel Herz der Finsternis, yes. By Joseph Conrad. How do you say in English: Heart of Darkness? A novel about evil. In that book, the people go upriver in Africa and find evil. That is the story. Well, in my story, we were the evil. We were the evil people journeyed to, Herr Ryan. People came to us. We were the heart of darkness. People like you, Herr Ryan, came to Adolf and Hermann and me and the others. We were already there, waiting, and now perhaps you’ve joined us, yes, in the heart of darkness.”
He grabbed my hand. His touch felt cold, like refrigeration piping. So cold. Sticky cold. He held my hand to his heart. I could feel it. Beating cold sludge. A heart of slurried ice.
49.
Then we got our orders for Germany. The Twenty-Second MP Group (Customs). Nobody at MP School knew much about the unit, except that it had plainclothes investigators. No uniforms. That sounded so great, so exciting—the idea that I might be a civilian in Germany, traveling around—my uniform and the army forgotten. I’d get there first and then Jenny would join me once I got settled. A little tour of Europe for the two of us.
I divided my good luck into manila folders and labeled them and filled them with brochures. SKIING. TRAVEL. DISHES. It was going to be my grand tour. I’d be a long, long way from Janesville. I cut out articles on the great French skier Jean-Claude Killy. I had brochures on Paris and London. I picked out the Dansk dishes I liked. SKIING. TRAVEL. DISHES. I said those words over and over. In the world of Jean-Claude Killy and Paris and Dansk there were no guns or dirty wars.
“I’m going to Europe,” I said over and over to myself.
The word sounded ancient and lovely.
Slowly the word “Vietnam” was leaving my brain.
I’d done it: by God, I’d done it. I’d escaped the fucking war. The army—can you believe it?—was making my dreams come true.
Goldberg and I and a bunch of others showed up at Fort Jackson, South Carolina. We slept in a barrack full of transferees. Most of our temporary roommates were on their way to Vietnam, but not us, by God, not us. A few days later we boarded a chartered airliner and flew to Europe, almost the way civilians did.
Once we were seated, I pulled out the manila folders from my briefcase and fingered the titles. SKIING. TRAVEL. DISHES. I could see myself sitting at outdoor cafés. I was smoking Gauloises instead of my usual Winstons. I was drinking a crisp Chablis. It was amazing. I had turned a problem into a solution.
Yes, the army was doing all that for me, for free. For fucking free. I had beaten the system. It was all a nightmare that had turned into a dream.
50.
Gutleut Kaserne. The US Army Transfer Station in Frankfurt. It roughly translated as Fort Good People. An old German fortress built of red bricks. Oh, look, here it is, a couple of clicks away, on Wikipedia. See it? If you didn’t know better, you’d think it was a university. A place of learning.
Clang. Clang. Clang.
It’s six a. m. Someone is walking up and down the aisles of the Tenth Replacement Battalion barrack with a steel pot and spoon.
Clang. Clang. Clang.
“Fuckers think you’re special,” the buck sergeant says as we fall into formation on the cobblestone parade ground in the center of the Kaserne. “I want you back out here in two minutes with your toothbrushes.”
Ten minutes later, and we’re on our hands and knees scrubbing the cobblestones with our Crest toothpaste.
“I want those stones to shine,” the sergeant yells.
“The Nazis used to make the Jews do this,” a PFC next to me mutters.
No, that part is not on Wikipedia.
51.
Pretty soon, though, I’m done with Gutleut Kaserne. A corporal walks me and another GI over to the Frankfurt Hauptbahnhof, where we are to catch a train for Heidelberg. The headquarters of the Twenty-Second MP Group is located there.
“Listen up,” a corporal says to me and the other soldier as he leaves us on the train platform. “You’re not to speak with any German civilians. Got that? You might give away some secret information. And you, Ryan, no translating, OK?”
I wanted to tell him that I didn’t know any secrets, but I kept my opinions to myself.
So we didn’t answer the questions of the two German men who also had tickets for our compartment. They began talking about us as if we weren’t there.
“Ist es möglich, daß das Dritte Reich von Soldaten wie diesen zuende gebracht wurde? Dumme wie die, müssen Helfer gehabt haben.”
They begin to laugh.
“What do you think he’s saying, Ryan?”
That they don’t think soldiers as dumb as us could have defeated the Third Reich is what he said, but I don’t say that. I just shrug.
One of the Germans comes over to look at my name tag and my pistol medal.
“Ah, der Herr Ryan hier hat ein Eisernes Kreuz, Dritter Klasse. Ich habe auch so was gehabt im Zweiten Weltkrieg. Genau wie er.”
“What’s he talking about?”
“That he was a soldier, just like me, in the Second World War and wore a medal like mine.”
“Well you can just tell him that we won that war and we’re not like him.”
But I don’t say anything. I look out the window at the backs of the stucco houses streaming by.
“People just don’t realize how powerful we are,” the soldier goes on. “We win all of our wars.”
“Soldaten wie diese haben den Krieg nicht gewonnen. Die Russen haben den Krieg gewonnen.”
It takes me a minute to translate this, and I keep being thrilled at how much German I know. It’s sort of like having money I can spend.
But I decided not to tell my train-car colleague what the Germans actually said.
Soldiers like these didn’t win the war. The Russians won the war.
“Did you tell the German that you cheated to get the medal?” Carol asked me.
“No. By then I figured I’d really earned it. By then I was a fraud who didn’t know he was a fraud.”
Pretty soon ten of us who’d graduated from the Defense Language Institute and Military Police School were together in a temporary billet at Campbell Barracks in Heidelberg.
I was so excited about being in Germany I put on civilian clothes and headed toward town.
“I think you should stay here,” my friend Steve Goldberg said. “I’ve heard this unit has some really nice jobs where you don’t have to wear a uniform. There’s a rumo
r that someone from headquarters is coming over here to interview us. Don’t you think you should hang around?”
“Goldberg,” I said, “I’ve been waiting to see Europe ever since I read Hemingway. I’m out the door.”
Goldberg, as usual, was right. When I got back in the early evening, after having wandered around the old part of Heidelberg, I learned that the NCO in change of personnel for the Twenty-Second MP Group had, in fact, stopped by the billet on his way home from work just to meet people. Between belches from the beer I’d drunk and sausages I’d eaten, I discovered that the people who weren’t there were slated to be assigned to the unit’s sole uniformed job—doing customs clearances at Rhein-Main Air Base outside of Frankfurt. My little dream of having an office job was over. I’d missed my chance to work in civilian clothes.
“Shit,” I said.
“Too bad,” Goldberg told me as he packed his duffel bag, preparing for his new job in Mannheim. “I’ll see what I can do.”
“Shit.”
And then Goldberg was gone.
I was depressed and a little drunk from the beer. It was warm in the barrack, and we were staying in an attic room, which made the day even warmer. I took a nap.
I woke up a little after sunset, just as the room was getting cool, and saw one other soldier in the area. He was lying on his bunk smoking a cigarette. I could see a shadowed area on the sleeve of his khaki uniform shirt where a Specialist Four emblem had been. I could see the old marks from the stitching. Someone had just ripped the rank marking off the sleeve. I guessed he’d been demoted.
“How’s it going?” I said across the room. He went on smoking, ritually bringing his hand back and forth to his mouth. He didn’t answer me.
“My name’s Ryan,” I said a moment later. “I’m new here. Going to the Twenty-Second MPs, at Rhein-Main. Do you know the unit?”
His arm stopped moving for a moment. The cigarette stayed in midair.
“Oh, yeah,” he said and started smoking again.
“What can you tell me about it?”
“Watch out for Corporal Kravitz, my friend. Corporal Leon Kravitz.” He stubbed out the cigarette on the floor. “Tell him he’s a fucking asshole. Tell him Don said so.”
The next morning he was gone, but Corporal Kravitz was there.
“Come on, Ryan, get your ass in gear. You’ve got a real army job, and you don’t want to be late for your future.”
We drove on the autobahn from Heidelberg to Frankfurt in an AMC Ambassador painted army green, a color that resembled algae-green pond scum.
The army seemed to buy the cars the rest of America didn’t want, cars that were great going forty miles an hour but terrifying to ride in at autobahn speeds of eighty and ninety miles per hour. Their soft, ship-like suspensions and squishy brakes made them seem like fumble-fingered fat men trying to lace their shoes.
“I want to make something clear, Ryan,” Corporal Kravitz told me on the ride. “I’m making a career of the army, so I want to do a good job. Got that? This isn’t some kind of joke. Maybe you met Don Bruzzard at Campbell Barracks. He thought stealing the pornography we confiscated was funny.
“‘Who cares if I keep some of these pictures? I’m not hurting anyone,’ he told me,” Corporal Kravitz said. “Well, I cared. I got him busted. He broke the rules. He’s going to face the rest of his life with a dishonorable discharge.”
“Yes, Corporal,” I said, coming to a kind of attention while sitting in the passenger seat.
“Oh, Ryan, just remember ‘Filter, Flavor, Flip-Top Box.’ ”
“Pardon me.”
“You know, the ad for Marlboro cigarettes. I like to say that. It keeps my mind centered.”
Floating simultaneously back and forth and side to side in that pond-scum green AMC, I held on tight to my manila folders. The stuff in there no longer seemed so close at hand. Jean-Claude Killy, Paris, and Dansk: that’s what I say to keep myself focused.
For my job checking people through customs, I was given a white plastic MP hat and a Sam Browne belt covered with black plastic that always looked a little too shiny. I was issued a .45 by the air force MP station at the beginning of my shift, and I turned it back in when I was done. If you’ve gone through customs anywhere in the world, you’ve experienced the work I did at Detachment C of the Twenty-Second MP Customs Unit. We looked at faces for lies and at baggage for contraband. We mostly looked for narcotics, pornography, and weapons.
I worked for nine days followed by three days off.
My working colleague was a man named Dmitri Halter— Corporal Halter. Now Corporal Kravitz had, as the army liked to say, more time in grade as a corporal, so he slightly out-ranked Corporal Halter and me, but Corporal Halter’s favorite book was a paperback copy of the Constitution of the United States. When he disagreed with Corporal Kravitz, he would quote from the Constitution. Corporal Kravitz didn’t know much of anything except what his own opinions were, so the Constitution-quoting made him nervous, and he usually dropped any complaint he had against Dmitri and went on to harass someone else. Since Dmitri and I worked together, Dmitri’s umbrella of protection included me as well. I kept my mouth shut.
One time, during one of Corporal Kravitz’s needless and harassing barrack inspections, Dmitri pulled out his thumb-worn Constitution and said, a man’s home is free of unreasonable search and seizures.
“That’s in there, in the laws of the United States?” Corporal Kravitz asked. He seemed stunned. The whole moral underpinning of tearing somebody’s footlocker apart had just been called into question. “You mean, I’m not supposed to go through your stuff?”
“Not if you want to obey the fundamental laws of the land.”
“Then how can the army exist, if high-ranking people can’t harass low-ranking people? Explain that to me.”
For a moment there, Corporal Kravitz thought he had an edge.
“That’s a very good question, Leon. You might want to think it over. In the meantime, I’ve got to go. I have errands to run. Come on, Ryan. You’ve got errands, too.”
“I hate it when people call me Leon. It just doesn’t sound tough enough, you know?”
I looked back just as we left the area, and there was Corporal Kravitz carefully putting the items in Dmitri’s footlocker back in order.
“Now I’ve got the army where I want it,” Dmitri said as we walked outside.
With most of my savings, I bought a white Volvo 122-S with a four-speed. On my days off, I drove it around the countryside, delighting as I shifted its gears. The days were warm and sunny. The nights were crisp. I found a small apartment in Mörfelden not too far from the air base. I was getting ready for Jenny’s arrival.
An attic apartment: its walls were the roof, and the only windows were skylights filled with blue. When I first moved in with the few pieces of furniture I’d bought at a house sale, I felt as though I were floating through space.
I was so lucky, I told myself.
At Rhein-Main, the passengers from incoming flights were processed through a giant hangar big enough to hold several airplanes. Offices were built inside the hangar, and they resembled one-room, slat-sided houses, complete with windows and venetian blinds. There was one house for the Twenty-Second MP Group and one for various air force offices.
When the door to the giant hangar was closed (as it mostly was), the interior was dark and lit virtually around the clock by rows of flickering, blue-tinted bulbs in fixtures hanging high overhead. The lights left deep shadows in the corners, and the ambience of the lighted areas was gray, even when it was sunny outside. Day or night, it never really changed. The place seemed darkly hallucinogenic. Because the nine-day shifts were slowly destroying my sense of ordinary time, the days and nights in that hangar seemed the same, the only difference being the feel of the air temperature, as winter came on. What made matters even worse was the division of the nineday workweek into blocks of three days, so I worked three days of day shifts, three days of swing shifts, and t
hree days of night shifts. I soon was always tired because I couldn’t get used to the shifting sleep schedule. Worse, I lost sense of what a normal day was.
Day after day, night after night, in the flickering gray-blue light, the incoming passengers went through two rooms created by walls made of heavy drapes. They were meant to intimidate people. One by one they came into Room One, where we had the amnesty barrel. CONTRABAND HERE. NO QUESTIONS ASKED, the crude sign read. In the next room Halter and I waited, standing before the inspection table, our MP white hats down low over our eyes, our thumbs stuck in our Sam Browne belts.
“Anything I should know about?” I asked.
“Next!” Halter yelled.
And so it went, one passenger at a time, day after day, night after night. We sorted through luggage; we poked our fingers into uniforms and underwear; we squirted out bits of toothpaste and tasted them.
“You want to tell me something?”
“Next!”
“What’s in there?”
“Next!”
“Why are you so nervous?”
“Next!”
And then one night, this sergeant pulled out a mortar from his duffel bag and set it up on my table. He lit something and threw it in the barrel and stepped back and cupped his hands over his ears and yelled, “Fire in the hole,” and it all happened so fast and something exploded except the explosion was like a firecracker and not a weapon and the man laughed and said that war is one comedy show after another and I got Halter, who said, “So what?” and “Who wants to fill out the arrest paperwork?” and we sent the soldier on his way and there was Corporal Kravitz standing in front of us.
“You motherfuckers let that guy go!?”
“Well, what was his crime, Leon?”
“Illegal possession of an army weapon to start with.”
“Shit,” Halter said, “you got hundreds of thousands of men walking around with weapons and you’re worried about some dumb prankster in the middle of the night. Besides, he was a short-timer. He’s probably home by now.”