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A Troop Movement

I first went to Europe in March 1955 on the troop ship General Sturgis. In a way, I walked across the Atlantic, every day, back and forth, windward to leeward, fore and aft, deck to deck. The "wine dark sea" changed and did not change. The horizon did curve, just barely. One day the sky was high and blue, the next low and gray. Two thousand of us circled the deck in twos, threes and fours and those by themselves mostly looked miserable or angry. During rough weather there were lines strung around the deck and empty oil drums for throwing up. The passageways were occupied by crap shooters, sitting cross legged and casting dice, obstacles to get around or over. I was among the loners, but not at all unhappy or out of joint. On the contrary. The observer takes pleasure, or something like it, from all sorts of experience.

When the salt air cure was enough I would return to my rightful space on the linoleum floor of the ship's newspaper office. On a troop ship your own space, if you can get it, has a value. My space belonged to me because at the end of each afternoon I typed the newspaper stories on to long, waxy, blue, stencil sheets. It was the lowest position on the newspaper, but I was the only one who could type properly, with ten fingers. The others employed the slow two-finger hunt and peck system or wrote by hand. Anyway, the newspaper office had only one typewriter, one desk and a couple of chairs. So I always had my reserved floor space where I read Rachel Carson's "The Sea Around Us."

The drafting of young men in the United States was ended after World War II in 1945 and revived three years later for the Cold War. NATO was created in 1949. The Korean War was fought from 1950 to 1953. In 1973 the divisive effect of the war in Vietnam caused President Nixon to abandon the draft in favor of an all volunteer army.

In the 1950's the military service in the United States was virtually unavoidable for healthy men 18 to 26 years of age. But, more important, until the middle to late 1960s the mentality of World War II continued to prevail in America: to avoid military service was considered shameful. It was, however, possible to delay it. Students in college were deferred as long as they kept their grades above a certain minimum, which was not so difficult. Some could make it through graduate school, a year or so more. After university most of us simply wanted to get the army over and done with and get on with the "real world," the one of our personal and professional lives.

In May 1954, a month before I was due to receive my BA, I went to Selective Service Board No.109 on Broadway near Times Square to find out when I was due to be drafted. It would be some time in October. I asked to be drafted as soon as possible.

A Soldier's Luck

Thus and so, in July, wearing new green fatigues that had a chemical odor, I perspired through two rigorous but not unhappy months of basic training on the Pine Barrens of southern New Jersey at Fort Dix. I then spent several months more of training at the Signal Corps photography school at Fort Monmouth, NJ. College boys tended to get good assignments in the army but I considered myself very lucky indeed to become a photographer. Every soldier understands about luck.

"What quality do you look for most in your generals?" Napoleon was supposed to have been asked. "Luck," he replied.

On a cold day in March 1955, along with two thousand others, I boarded the troop ship General Sturgis and sailed from Hoboken bound for Bremerhaven. During this journey I kept recalling what Robert Graves wrote in Goodbye To All That about his service in the British army during the First World War: "What I most disliked about the army was never being alone, forced to live and sleep with men whose company, in many cases, I would have run miles to avoid."

The "sleeping compartments," where we were confined from dusk to dawn, were large steel rooms down below the waterline. The bunks of canvas stretched over pipe frames were arranged six high, about 18 inches from the one above. The sleeping compartment was always warm from the heat of hundred bodies and it smelled of a combination of human smells. At night you wrapped your fatigues around your low quarter shoes to make a pillow. At the other end of your bunk was your AWOL bag, with a few changes of underwear, not enough of course, toiletries and paperbacks. Some liked to sleep with their feet in their AWOL bags.

My shipmates were hillbillies and rednecks from all over America. They were fond of vocalizing. Rebel yells—eeeeeee yaowwwuu—were answered by chorals of hog calls—sue hee, suuuuuu heeeee—and mule cries—hee haw, hee haw—and the barks and howls of western coyotes—long and drawn out with heads raised—howwww-uuuuuuuu. They sang sad, nostalgic songs in whining voices about love, death and injustice and "Shit Kickin Days in Shit Kickin Land." Or something like that. There were shouts of encouragement, derision, insults and peels of maniacal laughter. But it was all friendly. No fights ever broke out. And then, each night, when the lights went out, somewhere in the darkness someone played a sad melody on a harmonica. And with that and the motion of the ship we fell asleep.

On the morning of the tenth day we were awakened by the loudspeaker as usual by a scratchy recording of reveille played on a bugle. It was followed by the announcement in drawl from the deep south that in a few hours we would arrive at Bremerhaven. We should change from our stinky fatigues into Class A uniforms, Ike jackets, overseas caps and field jackets. Since coming on board these had been hanging on pipes along the back of the compartment. The brass Signal Corps insignia was missing from the lapel of my Ike jacket, no doubt swiped by an infantryman as evidence of a better world. I didn't care.

In a way, I walked across the Atlantic, every day, back and forth, windward to leeward, fore and aft, deck to deck.

We stood around the huge pile of duffle bags while a couple of huskies on top kicked, pushed and heaved the bags down and someone else shouted out whatever idea he had of the name painted on the side of each bag. The key to the padlock was worn along with your dog tags on the chain around your neck. Duffle bag balanced on one shoulder, we climbed, carefully, the three flights of stairs to the main deck where I managed to find a spot on the rail for the first sight of Europe. There is a zone of permanent fog and rough sea in the northeastern Atlantic where the relatively warm Gulf Stream encounters the colder water of the North Sea. We had passed through it overnight and now, when I reached the main deck, I truly understood what was meant by "a sea change." All around the ship as far as you could see the ocean was flat and smooth as a pane of black glass; the sky began just above the cargo booms, low and milk white; the air was icy cold and windless. And across this sea, finally, the ship's engines were pounding and we were going fast to arrive on time.

Vanguard of Europe

A line of narrow islands acts as a vanguard of northern Europe. On this morning they were covered by a light snow and high grass went right down to brown sandy beaches. There were a few low buildings, among which some gray pillboxes with gun slits. We were cruising along the western side of these islands, as close as a few city blocks away. The houses did not look to be derelict or deserted but we saw no people or vehicles. On the far side the coastline of the continent was just visible. What were these islands?

I took the map of Europe from inside my shirt —- it was already folded to Germany -— and easily found the East Friesians: Texel, Wieland, Terschelling, Schiermonnikook, Borkum, Juist, Langeroog, Spiekeroog and Wangerooge. The names alone were a pleasure. A dotted line down the middle of the group marked the frontier between Holland and Germany. After Wangerooge the General Sturgis would turn east into a broad bay at the far end of which was the mouth of the Weser River and the port of Bremerhaven. With such knowledge I already began to feel that I was taking charge of own my life again.

The soldier standing beside me was also staring at the islands. I held out the map and pointed to where we were and where we were going. He glared at me with a red, pock-marked face and turned his back. I had offended. There are people who resent those who carry maps of Europe inside their shirts and tell you where you are and where you are headed. It was not the first time nor the last.

A flock of sea birds appeared and an elderly seaman came out of the galley with a crate of green vegetable leaves. Slowly he proceeded to the fantail where he heaved the crate into the ship's foaming wake and settled himself there, leaning on the rail, enjoying the way the sea birds were diving and squabbling to feed. The flock was not made up of just fat herring gulls, the kind I knew from New York Bay, although these ubiquitous characters were well-represented, but there were other species of gulls and terns with which I was unfamiliar. I was not yet a bird watcher and perhaps this was where it began. The birds cried out in a variety of high pitched voices and they flew like acrobats. There was one species of tern that wore black caps and dove straight down into the water. They brought to mind slim and elegant women.

Crossing the great watery piazza of lower New York Bay, the General Sturgis was just another homely gray nonentity. But now, emerging from the fog on the broad bay of the Weser, and entering the drowsy harbor of Bremerhaven she became as a significant presence, the largest ship in port among the few freighters and small U.S. Navy vessels. We were nudged gently to the dock by two tug boats. A crewman threw a ball attached to a line to a couple of longshoremen who hauled ashore the thick hawsers and looped them over big iron cleats. The engines were turned off, the decks stopped vibrating, and I almost lost my balance.

A Train from Greenwich Village

Only a few yards way stood a long green and black train with DBH on the side of each car. I was already familiar with this train from the foreign films that attracted me to the Art and the 8th Street in Greenwich Village, which were sometimes called cinemas, to distinguish them from ordinary movie houses. I knew that you stood in the corridor, smoking a cigarette, taking in the landscape and meeting interesting persons who spoke English with an accents from unknown places.

I knew about the moment when the train entered a tunnel and all went black, except for dim blue lights at either end of the car. Then the close walls magnified blast of the train's whistle and the clatter of the wheels so that a scream was almost, but not quite, obliterated. From this point on the eccentricities of your fellow passengers came out, along with characteristic looks, haughty, suspicious, alarmed, disinterested, as they reacted to the fact that someone had just been murdered. The beautiful woman with smooth blond hair worn to just above her shoulders was speechless and her eyes revealed fear, but also character, as she looked into your eyes.

We boarded the same train but the journey and the passengers were of our own kind. We settled into the compartments with some difficulty due to the arrangement of our clumsy army luggage in the overhead racks and on the floor between our legs. The train rolled out of Bermerhaven slowly and quietly and then, no sooner outside of the city, the air brakes hissed, the iron couplings clanked and for the first of numerous times during the journey south we found ourselves on a side-track, waiting in silence and stillness until an express train passed a few inches away, all thunder and blur, causing our car to swayed from side to side. We wait some more, this time for a long, slow freight train, and we swayed again, long and slowly, according to its tempo. It became clear that everything that moved on rails in West Germany took precedence over a U.S. Army troop train. "Ten fuckin years after we fuckin win the fuckin war...," said the soldier beside me.

Where Are the Ruins?

And this was not all. We had expected war ruins, but in 1955 it seemed that few remained. In Bremerhaven we saw a flak tower, one of those structures that had served as air raid shelters with ack ack guns on the roof. Apparently, it was too much trouble and expense to take it down. In the fields we passed there were occasional overgrown ditches that could have been left over from a stray bomb, and once some old concrete anti-tank obstacles known as dragons' teeth. Otherwise, there was hardly a sign of the war we had been just too young to experience, but the visions from years of Life and Look were part of us.

In 1955, not long after I arrived, the Federal Republic of Germany was declared a fully sovereign state. One of the first things the government did was to hold exhibits in the cities to introduce a new army — "Unser Heer." I went to one of these exhibits and it was obvious that the West Germans showed no enthusiasm for this idea. And why should they? Aside from anything else, the country already had three armies, American, British, and French.

Viewed through the windows of the train the forests were endless, uniformly dark woodlands of tall black pine trees, trimmed so that some green limbs appeared only on their tops, trees that would produce straight timber, but, perhaps more important, as I was already beginning to perceive, that would assure the perpetuation of a Waldgeist that was fundamental and necessary to the Germanic world.

Between the forests there were wintery farmlands, resting, muddy fields with patches of snow making more mud. Foot soldiers knew they were hard to cross. The villages and small towns all looked the same, dark brick and dirty stucco buildings, long wooden cow barns with farm house attach at one end. It was mid-day but it already seemed like dusk. And this every day?

The realization of being surrounded by all that was foreign was getting to the troops. "Even the fuckin johns on this fuckin train smell different from the States. What do they eat in this fuckin country!" "I ain't even here yet an all I want is get out." "Yeah, man, back to the land where the buffalo roam.." "Fuck the buffalo. Just give me the Land of the Big PX."

The sight of German automobiles, above all the Volkswagens, were curious indeed. In 1955 Volkswagens—or any foreign cars for that matter—were seldom seen in America beyond New York City and adjacent posh suburbs such as in Connecticut where they were just beginning to become stylish. And this foreign car invasion was in large part due to soldiers who, starting with the ranks of sergeant, were permitted to ship their car at government expense.

Itty Bitty Cars

"Man," said someone, "those itty bitty cars better watch out when I get behind them in my duce-and-a-half." It was a nice thought. They talked and stopped talking, played cards and put the cards away, read a book and gave it up, fell asleep and woke up to see the same thing.

Our destination was a "repo depo" outside of Stuttgart. Replacement troops spend one night in these camps and in the morning receive orders for their "permanent stations," and were on their way. Repo depos had a bad reputation; they were among the places where SNAFUS happened, a term born of World War II, Situation Normal All Fucked Up. "And then," said a voice of experience, "just try and get unfucked!"

Lunch came in brown paper bags and grousing was suspended while we devoured two bologna sandwiches on soft white bread, an apple and a container of milk. On the waxed container there was a declaration meant to be reassuring. It said that the milk originated with cows that lived under permanent army quarantine in Austria, keeping them free of tuberculous. "What the hell does that mean? The cows in Dutchland got tuberculosis?"

Seventeen hours after leaving Bremerhaven we arrived at the repo depo. It was between the few street lights that revealed the familiar outlines of low wooden barracks. We went directly to one of those cavernous "consolidated mess halls," brightly lit with long wooden tables and benches and steam tables at the far end. Into the compartments of the steel trays went slabs of meat, broccoli, mashed potatoes and vanilla ice cream and thick brown gravy flowed from one to the other. We wolfed it down. And then, for the first time since the ship, we slept in luxury on regular army cots.

Pfcs with PhDs

In the morning, in a gymnasium, we arranged ourselves alphabetically before desks stacked with papers and manned by Pfc's with glasses, those "Pfcs with PhDs" from personnel who were in charge of the lives of the whole US Army. My Pfc waited patiently as I examined my orders for SNAFUS. Name and serial number—US 51-322-647—were correct. Signal Corps, correct. But, most important of all, my MOS—my job description—was unchanged, Still Photographer/Laboratory Technician." I was going to the 5th Signal Company, 5th Infantry Division, Flak Kaserne, Augsburg.

"Checks out?" said the Pfc. "Checks out," I said. "Thanks." "We aim to satisfy," he said.

An aloof sergeant, who held our train tickets, conducted two dozen of us, barracks bags on shoulders, AWOL bags in hand, to a regular express train and in only an hour-and-a-half we were at Augsburg where the usual duce-and-a-half truck was waiting. Over the tail gate I gathered first impressions of my first European city. Old buildings, new buildings, fountain with figures spitting water, women shopping carrying string bags, attractive women sitting in cafes, a cathedral, an opera house.... Inside my head bits and pieces of history were bumping into each other. Johannes Fugger, banker, financed kings, emperors, wars. Which kings and emperors? Which wars? When? The 14th century? The 15th century? The 16th century? All of the above. Jacob the Rich. Charles V. Bribed the electors. The army had good libraries and soon I would be reading history where it happened. Most important of all, in Augsburg there seemed to be no end of restaurants.

Flak Kaserne

A European city. Goodbye hickaria Americana. Perhaps tomorrow night, a pass, a taxi to the center of the city, a meal in a fine restaurant, with German beer, no, wine. We followed the trolley car tracks of a cobblestone street without passing through suburbs, to a point where the city ended; farm lands on one side and Flak Kaserne on the other. An MP with a chrome helmet, a Chrome Dome, lifted a red and white barrier.

Flak Kaserne had belonged before and during the war to Augsburg's Luftwaffe anti-aircraft unit. It now had the headquarters of the U.S. 5th Infantry Division, the troops being distributed between Augsburg and Munich, sixty miles to the east. The Division was intended to confront and due battle with any force moving westward into Germany from Czechoslovakia.

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