Remembrances

Remembrances

         I am sitting in a restaurant overlooking the Kill Van Kull watching the tugboats pushing barges and tankers arriving and leaving. Waiting for the rest of my family to arrive to help celebrate my 75^th birthday I can’t help but wonder about how did I manage to live this long? Looking down I see the tracks of an old railway that no longer runs and waves generated by the passing tugs. My mind wanders back to days when I was young and I lived in a city that no longer exists that was surrounded by a country that no longer exists that in turn was occupied by a country that no longer exists.

         The city was called West Berlin, the country called East Germany which was occupied by the USSR. There was an East Berlin but it did not have a wall surrounding it. I was there as part of an occupying force of American, British and French soldiers, selected by my fellow citizens to do my turn. We had the usual assortment of weapons, vehicles and impedimenta that armies in the 1960s had. The food at the barracks ranged from OK to good, breakfast being the meal that no one missed. It was the beer and the currywurst that stands out in my memory. Until the craft beer explosion in the nineties nothing rivaled what the gasthaus served, from the lagers to the unique Berliner Weiss. I have yet to find currywurst in America like I had in West Berlin.  When I returned to the land of the big PX, as we called the states, it was months before I could drink American beer again.

         The British soldiers I met were fun to be with although they were quick with their hands if they felt insulted or misunderstood. We were amazed that we spoke the same language but said things differently. Their Yorkshire accent (I assumed they were from Yorkshire because that was part of the name of their regiment) took a little getting used to and they said the same about my New York pronunciations and choice of words. Our mutual understandings and misunderstandings waxed and waned over the course of the months and while friendly on the surface I always felt wariness on both our parts. Enjoy the moment but don’t get too close.  Then there was the Queens official birthday celebration at the Olympic stadium which started with files of British soldiers marching in and ended an hour later with warm, flat beer. It was a very different afternoon and an enjoyable one at that.

         A big wave crashed noisily below me, the spray wetting the iron rails that hadn’t seen a locomotive in a long time. Then the water was calm again. I returned to my reminisces of when I was a young soldier in West Berlin, of how the army kept us busy. I marched in parades on streets that Hitlers army had marched in a quarter century before, fired weapons at ranges that had been used for hundreds of years and dug fox holes in the Grunewald where men had fought and died. I did this with men I never knew before I came to West Berlin and never saw again when I left.

         I had grown up in New York City. I had learned early on that when something didn’t make sense the answer was that it was political. Now here I was in the biggest example of a nonsensical situation, West Berlin, encased in a wall and surrounded by a make believe country. To make matters worse Berlin Brigade was outnumbered by a factor of more than ten to one by the Russians and their allies. Beer here, beer here, try to find a real German girl among the displaced persons that had washed into the city. Make memories before you die because when you die you forget it all.

         The last of my family was wondering in and finding their seats. The party would be starting soon and I wanted to relive one last memory of my time in Berlin Brigade and then put it back in its box and file it under things that I did when I was young. It was my twenty four hour turn at Spandau that is the most salient memory I have of my time in West Berlin.  Spandau Prison contained one crazy old man called Rudolph Hess, a war criminal left over from World War two. He was guarded by a platoon of infantry twenty four seven three hundred sixty five days of the year. The platoons were supplied by the great powers, as they were called, who rotated them in by the month at a cost of millions of dollars, francs, rubles and pounds. It was ludicrous to keep this man in a jail when he belonged in a hospital for the insane. Politics, dear politics, what would we do without you.

         During one of my two hour stints of being locked in a smelly guard tower I saw Herr Hess walking in the garden, hands clasped behind his back inspecting the bricks on the wall like he was reviewing troops before a parade. The first sounds I heard were of his feet crunching the gravel. As he came closer to my tower I could hear him muttering, indecipherable sounds. Then he stopped and looked up at me. He kept staring at me, a cold penetrating stare from eyes set in a withered face that soon turned violent as if my face reminded him of when he was young and now he was not. He was all alone now, his fellow prisoners released. The world he helped create was gone, lost to the nations that now guarded him and would not release him.

         A large container ship glided slowly past us, deep in the water, its deck brimming with boxes. As I greet my guests I am all too aware that I am now the oldest of our little tribe. I have seen more yesterdays than I will see tomorrows. The reminisces of long ago were fading again, mingling what was with what might have been.  I had gone to a city and marched in parades, drank good beer, developed skills that I had no use for when I left the Army and came home in one piece. I did not go to the jungle where the targets shot back. I could have but didn’t.  Back to the present with the smiling faces and the happy voices, taking mental pictures for future reminisces.