Air Force Brat (3 page)

On November 9, 1945, the
Eighth Air Force put 1,299 planes, mostly B-17’s and B-24’s, into
the task of liberating Metz. 1,233 of them reached the target zone
(our new playground a mere seventeen years later) and dropped a
total of 3,753 tons of 1,000 and 2,000-pound bombs. It’s no wonder
we kids found so many unexploded bombs in the area. In
one day
, the sky
literally rained upwards of five thousand of them. Most of the
heavy bombers released their loads from a height of more than
20,000 feet with their targets often totally invisible through the
clouds. As a result, most of the payload ended up in the fields and
pastures that day with the effort marked, largely, by volume of
bombing rather than accuracy. (The liberation of Metz was done by
the foot soldier.)

In any case, the battle for Metz involved
several skirmishes between the Nazis and the Allies which extended
to the fields and vineyards surrounding Ars-sur-Moselle and
environs. In fact, the route my older brother’s school bus took
every day to the airbase tracked some of the most vicious fighting
as it migrated from village to village…Argonne, Arnaville,
Thionville, all bombed-out, shuttered near-ghosttowns in 1962,
(although inhabited), were ground zero for this terrible battle as
the Allies pushed to take Metz.

As recently as 1990, a tractor clearing some
brush in a field outside Verdun dug up the skeleton of a German
soldier, complete with dog tags and helmet. My mother remembers
watching a French farmer on a tractor in 1962 carefully plow around
a gigantic unexploded bomb in the middle of his field—as he had
done for the preceding seventeen years. So it’s hardly surprising
that a bunch of inquisitive, adventure-mad, ten-year old Baby
Boomers would find war booty just seventeen years after the
war.

Another interesting point about how history
came alive for us was the fact that the entire area was a rabbit
warren of tunnels connecting the many Nazi forts. The Germans were
able to appear and disappear in order to harass the forward
companies of the 379th Infantry. Later my brother Tommy would
happily reopen some of these tunnels—at least the ones not crammed
full of adders or snarling foxes or lynxs. (And more than a few
that were.)

My maternal Grandfather
fought at Verdun as a doughboy in 1917 during the First World War
after the famous Battle of Verdun—waged 48 years
before
the last gasp at
Metz at the end of World War II. Verdun is situated due west of
Metz. The Battle of Verdun is considered the longest single battle
in world history. It lasted from February 21, 1916 to December 19
of that same year, causing over 700,000 causalities.

Although we kids had been to Gettysburg
battlefield back home, the Civil War always felt a lot like looking
for Indian arrowheads—too far in the past to feel real to us. World
War II was real to Boomer children. Even civilian kids were taught
that the epitome of evil was Hitler. The cartoons we watched still
showed goose-stepping despots as the bad guy. (Poor Germany sure
took it on the chin in popular culture in America for a very long
time.) To us, the war was very recent. And in 1962, living in
still-war-torn France, we felt like we were right in the middle of
it. Right in the middle of the stories our uncles told, right in
the middle of America’s greatest triumph as the rescuing good guys.
It was great to be an American in postwar France.

Chapter Three

The Unique Benefits of Life “On the
Economy”

Like most American girls
in the sixties, I played with Barbie and Ken dolls, read Nancy Drew
mysteries, and loved the TV show “National Velvet.” I was also shot
at three times before I turned ten years old—as were each of my
three brothers. In some ways, my experiences growing up as a
military dependent abroad can be described not unlike
Riviera Meets Appalachia.

In addition to playing in
the vast network of underground sewers in the village, my brothers
and I and our French friends often played up in the hills, high
above the streets and houses of the village. Row after row of
vineyards lined the hilltops of
Ars
. The vineyards were rife with
pit vipers and wild boars and were patrolled by cranky, usually
drunk, shotgun-toting French farmers. It was inevitable that we
children would adopt the area as our playing field.

There was this game we loved to play.

We played it up in the hills, past the
vineyards, past the angry farmers and past their birdshot range, so
far up you could look down and pick out the tiny orange square of
your house rooftop down below. You could see the convent school,
looking benign and unsinister from this distance. Nearby the
washhouse; a tiny block of concrete where villagers came to beat
out their laundry against stones as had been done there for
centuries.

The French kids showed us
how to access the remote and rugged hilltop, through a long series
of steep steps carved into the hill. But it was the Americans who
thought up
The Game
.

Whenever I think, today, of how I refused to
allow my eight-year old son out of my sight for a nanosecond, how
closely I monitored his structured playgroups and playdates, I’m
amazed at how close to death and dismemberment I occasionally came
during play in France, and how often my little brothers did
too—little boys the same age as my well-protected little son of the
nineties.

The game involved three elements: 1) a long,
ancient stonewall, 2) our pockets filled with pebbles and sharp
rocks; and 3) one or two peacefully grazing wild boars, their tusks
like four-inch daggers rooting in the soft earth. The point of the
game was not just to torment the boars by throwing stones at them,
but to get them to charge at us. And not just to get them to
charge, but to get them to run behind you so closely that you could
feel their hot, stinky breath on the back of your legs. Anything
less than that and they would not be close enough to run full-tilt
into the stonewall when you reached it and vaulted over it.
Anything less than right on your heels and the boars would have the
sense to reel away at the last minute. And where was the fun in
that?

I remember the time we brought our friend
Bernard down the hillside with his calf bleeding badly because he
had gotten gored by a boar. He screamed the whole way home and we
had to half carry and half drag him there. When we presented him to
his mother, she took a broom to us—even the Americans!—until we
scattered into the sewer or escaped to our various houses. Even
poor Bernard got whacked with the broom, which was certainly not
the worst part of his day, since he still had to be stitched up by
the severely alcoholic village doctor. Later, sitting in the
underground tunnel of the sewer and debriefing, I remember my
younger brother, Kevin, his eyes wide with the adventure of it,
commenting on how quickly the French forgot what the Americans had
done for them. My brothers and I and two other American friends
laughed until we couldn’t breathe.

I got my first kiss in a washhouse built by
the Romans. Partially underground, the washhouse was situated at
the end of our street. While the one in our village was probably
built in the third century, there are records of such buildings
having been created in France as early as 58 BC. The one in
Ars-sur-Moselle was a veritable dungeon, cold, entirely made of
stone slabs, and always dark and wet. A set of twenty or so very
uneven, wide steps, worn down in the middle over the centuries to
be smooth but not level. Once we kids initially investigated it, we
found no reason to return to it. It was creepy, and although it was
regularly used by the women of the village to clean their clothes,
it always seemed to be deserted when we passed by or occasionally
poked our heads inside. The women would pound their husbands’ rough
denim and coarse woolen clothes against the smooth, sloping sides,
grind soap into them, sudse them, and then spend the next thirty
minutes attempting to wrench the soap from them. Sometimes we see
would see a great black mountain of sodden clothes—usually the
ubiquitous French jumpsuits—in a corner waiting like death for some
poor woman to come back and deal with it. It was always cold down
there, like a grave. And dark, even though there was a gigantic
slit in the roof to let the light in.

So naturally, I chose it as the venue for my
first romantic experience.

Laurent and I slipped down into the basin
one afternoon, with the black, murky water in the long trough
slapping quietly against the sloping sides. I was shivering from
our planned kiss, from the chill coming off the awful wash water,
and from the November air pouring in from the roof.

We were both ten and after
the somewhat successful kiss on the lips, never found another
reason to repeat the experience, although we were inseparable best
friends for the whole of my tenure at
Ars
and generally considered
ourselves to be “boyfriend and girlfriend.”

I don’t know if kids really do have a
special sense about people who are lying or who may intend to hurt
them. It seems to me, however, I must’ve still had it when I was
ten.

The incident that makes me
think so was on one of the nights that I slipped out of my house in
Ars-sur-Moselle—through my bedroom French doors to the balcony and
down the drain pipe into the garden—and was met by my little
gang
de quatre
:
Laurent, Nicole, Bernard, and Marie-Fleur. Laurent was my
“boyfriend,” Bernard, his brother, and two girls from school, one,
Marie-Fleur, who was very slow-witted but sweet, and Nicole, really
more of a friend of Bernard’s. I wasn’t sure what we would be up to
that night. We’d only met up at night one other time, and then not
for long, really, I think, just to see if we could. After tonight,
I would not slip out again after dark.

The four of us skirted the canal and wedged
into a slight crevice in an ancient stonewall that encircled a
stunted stack of square stones somewhat resembling a kind of dwarf
castle at the end of my street. None of us had flashlights and
there were no streetlights and we quickly reached our destination.
Bernard, Laurent’s younger and extremely unpredictable brother, led
the way and when we got to the small clearing, there was just
enough moonlight to see that there was a small stone table tucked
away into a dark recession of the stonewall. In the shadows of the
recession, was a boy. An older boy.

I remember being surprised
to see him. None of my friends had mentioned we were going to meet
up with him. And also, I didn’t know him. But the
rendezvous
was clearly
planned. He seemed a playful sort, not shy at all for meeting
someone for the first time, and that someone, an American, on top
of it. I didn’t tend to laud my village celebrity but the fact that
I was American was not only well-known in Ars—from every shopkeeper
to every housewife—but considered an extremely positive feature. I
wasn’t afraid of the strange boy, but I wasn’t absolutely
comfortable either. He became quickly familiar, patting me on the
butt, laughing and joking around. While I was a little put off by
his obvious lack of awe at my position in the village as the
Angelina Jolie of post-war France, I was vaguely considering the
possibility that he might be fun to be with.

That idea expired within minutes.

With just a few mumbled words to me, Laurent
made an excuse that he had to get Marie-Fleur back to her house. He
grabbed her hand, turned and disappeared into the darkness. Now, in
my memory, he didn’t wait or ask if I was ready to go, too. That
may be because he really did leave as quickly as I remember. And
that may be because he knew the older boy wanted to be alone with
me and Laurent hadn’t the nerve to sabotage that. I don’t know. I
do know that in a blink of an eye, I was alone with the older boy
and Bernard—the nine-year old that no one in the village was fool
enough to believe or trust. It certainly didn’t take any special
radar to figure out that Bernard was always up to no good. I was
instantly aware that it was dark, that I didn’t know exactly where
I was and that my parents thought I was sound asleep in my bed.

I began to get nervous.

I’ll never know if my radar was good or bad
on that night. He may have just wanted a kiss—that’s what he said
he wanted when he grabbed me. I don’t know if I thought he was a
psycho or just a strange boy who was too pushy and wanted to be
able to tell his friends he kissed the American girl. I don’t know
because when he lurched for me, expecting me, I guess, to cry or
submit, I brought my knee up sharply into his stomach and pushed
him over Bernard, who was unwittingly helpful by leaning over to
pick up something off the ground.

And then I ran.

I ran through the back of whoever’s backyard
we were in, through the break in the wall, and down the quiet, wet
village street. At first they both scrambled up and ran after me,
but soon I heard only one set of footsteps running behind me,
gaining on me. I didn’t stop. Eventually, Bernard came abreast with
me, huffing and puffing, and pointed out the right direction to my
house. He ran with me to the top of the street and then we both
slowed to a walk to catch our breath, and me, to negotiate re-entry
to my house.

“
He’s just someone I
know,” Bernard said. “Nobody bad. Just wanted to meet
you.”

I didn’t respond. We walked to my garden and
I put my foot in the vines, grabbing for a good hold on the pipe
with both hands. I turned to him.

“
He give you money?” I
asked.