The Last Word
Day, Samuel H. Jr.
THE LAST WORD Samuel H. Day Jr. NATO Blues Aditty composed by a fellow soldier captured the excitement I experienced thirty-four years ago as a young draftee in the U.S. Army. I had been ordered...
...Some Germans manage to be sympathetic...
...The siege mentality of the Pershing II bases reflects a deeper and more widespread isolation of the American military in West Germany...
...The gate flew open, the truck drove through, and the police climbed back onto their bus...
...Our new idea was the North Atlantic Treaty Organization—NATO...
...Guard towers fitted with searchlights rise at each corner...
...They brought into sharp focus the ironies that underlie the continuing U.S...
...I heard a guard tell the officer that the child needed medical attention...
...We sang the song on the troopship that carried us to Europe in the fall of 1951 and on the train that transported us to the Bavarian towns and cities where we would be taking up duties for our remaining year of military service...
...The fences bristle with signs in English and German advising intruders they will be met by "deadly force" and warning of the presence of "working dogs...
...I had been ordered to Germany with my unit to help stem what our Government called the tide of communism...
...Army base outside the city of Heilbronn, I witnessed a scene I could not have imagined thirty-four years ago...
...As Americans on the German side of the fence, Batchelder and I felt an urge to breach the barrier of silence...
...We would hate the Germans, of course, just as the Germans hate us—perhaps even more...
...For the most part, we were off on a lark, enjoying a European vacation at the taxpayers' expense...
...Television cameras from the watch-towers followed our movements and the blades of a helicopter beat the air overhead as our guide from a local peace house led us around the fortress-like perimeter...
...The demonstrators were quickly pushed, pulled, and dragged out of the way...
...A bus stood by, crammed with bored-looking members of the German police...
...Thinking that Germans might also be willing to pay for American tapes, I asked the store manager why customers were required to produce military identification cards...
...Heilbronn, a city of about 150,000, has three major compounds for the U.S...
...From Wichita," came the eager reply...
...We felt like visitors to a war zone in which the guns of our compatriots were trained not on some distant enemy but on us...
...The "Red, White and Blue" stores are a chain of American-owned, American-speaking video shops where GIs can rent the latest English-language tapes...
...The demonstrators gathered around the gate to block the truck, and a German police officer pushed his way through...
...We shouted through the fence with GIs from Newark, Seattle, Detroit—all hungry enough for friendly human contact to risk punishment for violating orders that forbid them to engage in chit-chat with civilians while on duty...
...In their frequent rounds on the path, German peace activists often encounter American guards in silent confrontation through the wire fence...
...Outside, a couple Samuel H. Day Jr., a member of The Progressive's Editorial Advisory Board, is former editor of The Grape Leaf weekly newspaper of the 43rd Infantry Division, United States Army...
...How's the weather back there...
...Memories of that song and those feelings flooded back this summer, when I returned to Germany for the first time in a third of a century...
...JFK Village," where many of the service families live, is a town within a city, complete with shopping center, movie houses, bowling alleys, and automobile sales lots where English is the only language spoken...
...It's a lot easier this way," he replied...
...Though its purpose is to protect West Germany and its NATO partners from foreign threats, the base seemed more like a prison in which the protectors were confined—at least symbolically—by the very people they were supposed to defend...
...It is a ghetto of their own making...
...We're glad we're here Mit der schnitzels and beer, The music goes round and round...
...A girl of about twelve was on the seat beside the driver...
...It still seems like winter around this place...
...of dozen protesters loitered on the grass, some with books and newspapers and picnic lunches...
...Where are you from...
...The base is one of three installations in West Germany where the United States has deployed Pershing II, a new missile capable of carrying a nuclear warhead to its target in the Soviet Union within six minutes of launch...
...Nat Batchelder and I tried to imagine what life might be like in Oklahoma City or any other American community under permanent occupation by a German army which imported its own shops, theaters, schools, and churches, kept Americans at bay with dogs and razor wire, and gave foreign names to the local landmarks...
...military...
...And we don't have to hassle with Deutsche-marks...
...But the trouble goes deeper...
...But some of us also fancied ourselves as the vanguard of a new force that would transcend the narrow nationalisms that had plunged the world into the bloodiest war in history...
...We're dealing with people who understand our way of doing business...
...It is the same at Mutlangen, a second Pershing II base a couple of hours' drive away, where no convoy has ventured forth since January...
...Hey, buddy, I'm from Oklahoma...
...Our hosts from Heilbronn led me and my traveling companion, Nathaniel Batchelder of Oklahoma City, on a well-worn path around the installation...
...Uncle Sam's" is the downtown bar where soldiers can leave the base without leaving America...
...I was talking to one of the guards at the gate when a military truck pulled up from inside the base...
...Inside the gate, seated in a guard shack, were two rifle-toting GIs who seemed none too happy to be on duty on a Sunday afternoon...
...The language barrier is part of the problem, as it was in my day...
...We felt good about it...
...The missiles and atomic warheads are guarded by rows of fence topped with razor wire...
...But the officer didn't wait...
...The words of the song went: Augsburg, Augsburg, Ach, what a wonderful town...
...One would think that an explanation of the vehicle's humanitarian mission should have sufficed to disperse the crowd...
...A hundred miles or so from the beer and schnitzel parlors of my youth, at the gate of a U.S...
...The Americans," one acquaintance told us, "are in a ghetto...
...military presence in Europe...
...he gave a signal and his comrades piled out of the bus...
...In the following months we sometimes sang it for the amusement of German friends who welcomed us into their homes as a new breed of troops that had come not as conquerors but as defenders...
...Few GIs bother to learn more than a few words of German...
Vol. 49 • October 1985 • No. 10
