by R. M. Ryan
Boom. Boom. Snare.
55.
Ah, yes, the good life, all courtesy of the US Army. And, oh, Angelika. I musn’t forget my Angelika, my little German revolutionary.
She was the administrator at a University of Maryland office in Turley Barracks. Her office was right across the hall from mine. It was a place where the soldiers from the tank corps, who made up most of Turley’s population, could sign up for classes. Perhaps because the office was in a military police station, she didn’t get much business, so she spent most of her time reading or hanging out in a nearby army snack bar drinking Cokes. When Lance B. Edwards was gone, she took to visiting me.
Slightly buck-toothed, Angelika exuded a simple sexuality. She wore very short skirts and would occasionally bend over in front me, showing me the crotch of her pink panties. She wore translucent blouses, and you could see the dark outlines of her puffy nipples. When we talked, she would sometimes run her index finger down my arm, and I would often be in a state of half tumescence when I spoke with her, unsure of what we said.
Even though she was German, we had oddly similar backgrounds—both of us were the children of unhappy government workers. We’d both majored in English literature and believed we were intellectuals. We were both working for the US Army and thought of ourselves as subversives, though Angelika, if her pictures were to be believed, was a little more serious than I was.
She showed me a snapshot of her standing before a Che Guevara poster holding some kind of automatic weapon. She also loved the Baader-Meinhof Gang and had a scrapbook filled with newspaper articles about them. She told me she knew many of the gang members.
Since what mostly interested me about Angelika was her sexuality, I didn’t pay much attention to the political stuff. I didn’t care about politics.
One morning, she came into my office, gave me a lingering French kiss, and sat down on the top of my desk. Her legs straddled my chest; her crotch was right there in front of me. Without thinking, I began caressing it. She closed her eyes and began humming a tune.
“Oh, my little soldier boy, such fingers du hast. My. Yes. My. My.”
The next thing she was sitting on my lap rocking back and forth, trying to unzip me.
Even now, decades later, I have to close my eyes when I think of the waves of longing that came over me.
“Your place,” I said, breathing hard. “I’ll take you home from work. Three thirty. I’ll leave early. We can’t do this here.”
She got up, pulled her tiny skirt down over her exposed panties, blew me a kiss, and left.
I looked down at my crotch. It had blotches of her wetness there.
I ached looking at the slow passage of time on my watch but then we were out the door and into the Volvo and she was unzipping my pants and sucking on my cock and I was driving to her little apartment in Neckargmünd. It was really just a large room with a sink and a hot plate and a bathroom to one side and then we were out of our clothes and making love on her squeaky bed.
I get dizzy thinking about the months we were together. I usually stayed until six or seven. I told Angelika I had to leave because I had to check in at my barrack because of my security clearance. When I got home to Jenny, I told her we’d been having special military exercises and that I’d be coming home late for the foreseeable future.
I led this delicious double life. I was having it all. Saint Moritz and Paris and London. A cool apartment. New Dansk dishes. Two women to fuck. All brought to me courtesy of the United States Army. Wonderful.
Sometimes Angelika and I would sneak away from work in the middle of the day and lie around her apartment making love and drinking Riesling. Other times we would have sex standing up in the storage closet at the back of her University of Maryland office.
Angelika wanted me to be her boyfriend, and I didn’t have the courage to tell her I was already married. I just kept making up stories about my security clearance when she asked me to go out in public with her.
“We’ve got to keep this a secret,” I said. “I’m not allowed to be seen with a German national. It would compromise my job.”
She wanted my picture, and I let her photocopy the one in my customs police identification wallet. She had the photo framed and put it on her dresser.
“I’ve got my own soldier who will take me to live in America,” she kept saying and French kissing me afterward.
I’m not sure why Angelika liked me so much. She probably could have had any soldier she wanted. Maybe she was in love with me.
Her apartment was filled with anti-American political tracts and posters promoting—along with Che and Mao and Ho Chi Minh—the Baader-Meinhof Gruppe. She told me she was just a pal of the gang’s, though not really a member. I suppose this confession should have triggered an alarm, but I was so interested in the next blow job that I didn’t pay it any mind.
As Sergeant Dooley once explained, “You don’t want the truth to interfere with your fucking.”
Angelika just kept telling me that she and I would go to America together and be revolutionaries together when I got out of the army.
She told me she loved me. She gave me a key to her apartment. How delicious it was when I would get there before she did, undress, crawl under the cool sheets, and wait to surprise her.
“Ach, ja,” she would say, stepping out of her skirt as she came toward me. “Here is my American soldier defending his little bit of Deutschland.”
Jean-Claude Killy, Paris. Dansk. And, now, add Angelika to that. My lovely Angelika.
56.
The last time I saw Angelika I was lying there, naked in her bed, waiting for her to come back to the apartment.
The door banged open when she arrived. She was furious.
“How could you do this?”
She picked up a broom and began hitting me.
“What are you doing?” I tried to roll away from her blows.
“You’ve made me have adultery, you asshole.”
“What?”
“I saw that woman you rode with yesterday.”
Jenny had picked me up at the office. She’d needed the car for an errand.
“I asked that man in your office, that Lance, who the woman is, and he tells me she’s your wife. You’re married. Because of you I make adultery. I am Catholic. I cannot make adultery and go to heaven.”
She started hitting me again with a broom.
“What kind of a man are you? What do you stand for? You stand for nothing. You are interested in nothing but yourself. What have you done to me?”
I grabbed my clothes and ran downstairs naked. I could hear her thumping down the steps behind me.
“Du Arschloch!” she yelled. You asshole.
I was trying to get my pants on in this little vestibule at the bottom of the stairs. I stared at the window in the door. It had these gauzy curtains, and I remember wondering whether they were handmade or store-bought and I was trying to get a leg into my pants, but the fabric was twisted somehow and turned inside out and it was as if the pants leg had been sewn shut, and suddenly there she was in that vestibule with the broom raised up over her head to hit me, and I ran outside bare-assed naked like some character in an old silent comedy, and she followed me.
We stood there in the courtyard of the apartment building, facing each other, making moves, then backing off. She held the broom over her head, but I could tell her heart wasn’t in it anymore. Her face was smeared with tears.
“I will get you for this. I fix you good. I will call my Baader-Meinhof friends, and they will take care of you. Imperialist pig. Fucking American imperialist pig.”
Still naked, I ran for the Volvo and, luckily, found the keys in the pocket of my pants. I tossed my clothes in the backseat and jumped in the car and drove off. I could see her in my rearview mirror, shaking that broom over her head. I can see her to this very day.
“What have you done to me?” she yells. “What have you done?”
57.
And then I was
sitting in the witness chair at Sergeant Perkins’s court-martial.
“So, Mister Ryan, here is what I want to know,” the major prosecuting the case asks me. “You brought Sergeant Perkins to your office for questioning. Is that correct?”
Remember Sergeant Perkins, who started this story off?
“Yessir. Correct.”
“Very good. Do you recognize this document?”
The major hands me Sergeant Perkins’s confession.
“Yessir. It’s a confession form.”
“Yes, of course, Mr. Ryan, but who’s the confession from?”
“I don’t know. I’d have to read it, sir.”
“You don’t recognize it? I mean, don’t you recognize Sergeant Perkins’s signature here at the end?”
“Major, I’ve taken a lot of these. They kind of run together. We want to be sure, don’t we?”
“Of course. Of course. Look it over. Take your time.”
I glanced through it.
“Yes, it was signed by a Sergeant Perkins, sir.”
“A Sergeant Perkins?!” the captain defending Sergeant Perkins says, jumping up. “Don’t you remember, Mister Ryan?”
“Well, as I said, we do this a lot.”
“OK, Mister Ryan,” the major interjects. “Let’s talk about the rights of Sergeant Perkins. Did you read him his rights?”
The captain sits back down. I’m sure he thinks he played enough drama to convince everyone the trial is on the up and up—that he actually cares about Sergeant Perkins.
“We read everyone their rights. It’s a matter of office policy.”
“But Mister Ryan, did you read Sergeant Perkins his rights? That’s who we’re concerned with here. Sergeant Perkins. The man sitting over there. You remember him, don’t you?”
Sergeant Perkins looks at the floor.
“He seems familiar, sir.”
The defender and the prosecutor look at each other. The colonel acting as judge raps his pencil on his desk.
For a moment I hear it as boom, boom, snare. Boom, boom, snare.
“So, Mister Ryan, did you, in fact, read Sergeant Perkins his rights?” the major asks after the colonel quits rapping.
“Well, as I said, it is our policy to read everyone his or her rights.”
“But did you specifically read Sergeant Perkins his rights?”
“I see here that he initialed the part about being read his rights. It’s right on the form.” Then, as an afterthought, I add: “Sir.”
The colonel acting as judge clears his throat.
“I think I’ve heard enough. I am going to dismiss this case. Sergeant Perkins you can go.”
Sergeant Perkins stands up and looks around, as if he’s waking up. He seems taller than I remembered. His defender snaps his briefcase closed.
“What kind of bullshit is this?” the colonel asks after they leave. “You’re a disgrace to the US Army, Mister Ryan.”
Maybe, though, just maybe I’ve done something good. Sergeant Perkins is a free man. I got him off.
“Ryan, what kind of a cute, fucking performance was that,” the major prosecuting the case asks as we walk out of the courtroom. “What’s this ‘We would usually read them their rights’ stuff?”
“Well, I . . .” I begin.
He looks at me as if I were something stuck to the bottom of his shoe.
“You know, Ryan, it doesn’t matter. Your stupid little try to wipe your hands clean of us doesn’t matter. The fact is, we’ve got Sergeant Perkins cold. He’s already in jail, he just doesn’t know it yet.”
“But the trial’s over.”
“But not the next trial, Sergeant Ryan, or the one after that. The army doesn’t like these married men living with their girlfriends. It’s bad for our image. Sergeant Perkins is going to Leavenworth.”
“But . . .”
“The truth is what we say it is, Ryan. Never forget this, even after you leave the army. One more thing.”
“Yessir.”
“Just remember. We always win. Always.”
“Boom, boom, snare,” I mutter. “Boom, boom, snare.”
“Dismissed, Mister Ryan. You’re dismissed.”
58.
In my dream, I call Walt Rostow again.
“Look, you little crumble ass, don’t call me again. You don’t have any real problems. You never felt the smack of a bullet. You got to sit on your ass in Germany and drink wine. Look at the faces on those boys wounded in Afghanistan. Look at them. Their eyes look like they’ve been boiled in blood.”
“But.”
“Don’t but me nothing, buddy. Unless you’ve sucked at the tit of Mother Battle, you don’t get to say a thing about war.”
“Look.”
“Look bullshit. You try to talk about war to someone who’s been there—why, that’s like finding out they have wild cards for all your aces.”
“I worked for the empire, just like Joel Niederman.”
“Oh, Joel Niederman—now that’s a sad story.”
“It’s all about money and power.”
“Of course it is. What did you think it was about?”
“I know that, but no one will listen to me. The wounded veterans are so caught up in their own pain that they’re afraid to talk about it. So it just stays a secret, or sometimes a truth told by people who get demonized as Communists or stuff like that.”
“Now you’re getting it, Ryan. Let me tell you a secret: we’ve been practicing this stuff for years. Decades. Centuries. It’s the story Homer never told. War: it’s the oldest business in the world.”
And then he begins laughing. And laughing. He throws his head back, and Dwight Eisenhower, and Lyndon Johnson and General MacArthur and ranks of men whose faces I can’t make out have their heads thrown back and laughter cascades and ripples back and forth as certain and powerful as the tides of the sea.
59.
On May 24th, the Baader-Meinhof Gruppe set off bombs at Campbell Barracks, the US Army facility in Heidelberg, killing three people. It was the front-page story in the Stars and Stripes I picked up at the snack bar on my way into work the next morning.
The attack really frightened me. I wondered if Angelika had anything to do with it. I was nervous as I came into the main hall of the Turley Barracks MP Station, but the door to her office was closed and I didn’t have to deal with it. I was relieved.
“Ryan, did you see this?”
Lance B. Edwards was standing in the doorway to my office in our MP Customs suite a few minutes after I got to my desk. I thought he was talking about the bomb attack and went on studying the picture of the overturned Ford Capri in the parking lot at Campbell Barracks on the front page of Stars and Stripes. The car was blown up in the lot just outside of the main Twenty-Second MP Group Headquarters.
“Man, this is all a little close for me,” I said to Lance B. Edwards and held up the front page of the paper.
“Ryan, I knew you were talented, but I didn’t know that you were famous.”
“What do you mean?”
I put down the paper.
“Here.” He handed me a small poster with torn corners.
And there I was—or there’s my customs police ID photograph, the one Angelika wanted—on an anarchist wanted poster.
GESUCHT, the poster said right over the top of my face. WANTED. Wir suchen diesen Mann wegen krimineller Aktivitäten gegen das deutschen Volk. Verratsgesuch.
We’re searching for this man who’s guilty of criminal activities against the German people. Traitor Wanted.
“You must have quite the night life, Sergeant Ryan,” Lance B. Edwards said, for the first and only time using my actual army rank.
“Jesus,” I said. “Jesus H. Christ.”
What was it Angelika had said?
I fix you good. I will call my Baader-Meinhof friends.
“Where did you find this?” I asked Edwards.
“They’re all over Heidelberg,” Edwards said. “What’s your rotation date?�
��
“June 15th. Jenny’s leaving this Saturday. Most of our stuff has already been shipped.”
“Look: I got a call from headquarters about a raid in the morning. You and Goldberg go on that one. Then I vote you pack your stuff and get your ass out of the Federal Republic of Germany next Monday. I’ll get you some emergency orders, OK?”
I looked at the wanted poster of me, a little artifact that has me squarely on the wrong side of something. Is this, I wonder, what history looks like?
60.
I was even more nervous the next morning.
I had my wanted poster folded and inside the pocket of my green Harris Tweed jacket. I was wondering whether I should show it to the Germans, but Herr Diener had brought along his own copy.
“Ach, ja,” he said, holding up the wanted poster. “Herr Ryan, der Freund von Albert Speer und berühmte Kriminelle.” He chuckled.
Mr. Ryan, friend of Albert Speer and famous criminal. I tried to laugh, too, but my throat felt dry.
“Ich hab’ gehört, dass diese Leute, die wir heute sehen, etwas mit der Baader-Meinhof Gruppe zu tun haben.”
The people we’re seeing today have something to do with the Baader-Meinhof Gang.
“Was?!?” I say. I am getting more and more nervous. “Was sagst Du?” You must be crazy.
Herr Hellman furtively pulls the handle of his pistol out of his coat pocket and shows it to me as if that will cure my woes.
The apartment was on the top floor. Herr Diener and Goldberg and I, led by Herr Hellman, shuffled up the stairs after someone buzzed us into the building. When, out of breath, we got to the top floor, the door to the apartment was slightly ajar, and a skinny-faced man in a T-shirt leaned against it, looking at us.
“Was geht?” he asked, an American good at German slang. What do you want?
“Customs Police,” I said and held up my credentials. “May we come inside?”
I was following the rule book. If you asked to come in and the people gave you permission, then you could search without a warrant. If you also had a warrant, Lance B. Edwards said we were double covered. No US court could throw out the case.