Air Force Brat (8 page)

Of course, when we moved on base, Tommy not
only took his mort of munitions from the countryside, he also
brought his still-ardent desire to collect more. With Chambley a
good twenty-plus miles from Ars, Tommy had brand-new territory to
explore. It was clear that the kids who were already on the base
had not thoroughly ransacked the area. Tom was gleeful about the
still undiscovered and unexploded bombs in the area.

And find them, of course, he did.

Like all kids on base—probably like all kids
on any base during this time—we had an unusual amount of free
movement. Not only were all dependents free to roam the base, but
we were always jauntily waved or saluted as we made our way OFF
base into the countryside—at least until Tom revoked those
privileges for all dependents on the base for eternity.

We had only been living on
base a few weeks when my father found himself in a very unusual
traffic gridlock—complete with honking, shouting, and steaming car
hoods—down the main road intersecting the base. After waiting
patiently for a few minutes, my father waved over the MP trying to
unsnarl the traffic knot and asked what the problem was. The way my
father tells the story, when he, as base commander, was told that
the ruckus was the result of “some dependent with a large
eighty-pound ordinance in a wagon in the middle of the road,” well,
I guess he went a little bit nuts. The way
Tommy
remembers the story, we
all—Kevin, Terry and myself—were collected and deposited in the
brig for the afternoon. Our bomb was unceremoniously
confiscated.

I must say I don’t
remember being locked up in the base jail, and it seems to me that
I’d remember such an adventure. But Tom, who is now and was then a
fastidiously honest and meticulously detailed person, says it
absolutely happened. In any case, I can believe that my father, in
a desperate attempt to break Tommy’s bomb-finding addiction, tried
this method to impress on Tommy the seriousness of the problem. But
I cannot believe Dad really thought it would make any difference to
Tommy’s focus. Tommy didn’t go after bombs because he didn’t care
about upsetting Dad. He
did
care. He went after bombs because he couldn’t
help himself.

Life on Chambley A.F.B. was a lot easier for
me than life on the economy,. There were no mindless, endless
memorizations, no need to speak or think in any language but
English, and the whole of the airbase was our playground. Plus,
base life for a dependent in the early sixties was a very flexible
proposition. We kids wore our dog tags so people would know our
blood type, know to whom we belonged (and his rank), and know our
religious persuasion. The dog tags took the place of military IDs
for us—nobody carried wallets—and got us into any place on base we
were allowed to go. Because it was like living in one big, cozy
neighborhood—where all the Dads worked at the same plant—I could
walk or ride my bike to where ever I wanted to go, to meet my
friends at the dance, for example, or to hang out at the base mess
hall drinking Coca-colas and listening to the radio. We lived in a
tiny trailer on base, all lined up with all the other trailers, so
our friends were always just steps away. The base school, the base
theater, the chapel, the base bowling alley and snack bar, the many
playgrounds, the commissary and BX were all easy biking distance
from anywhere you happened to be on the base.

I loved living in the trailer. I remember a
cozy little bunk bed built into the trailer wall and the trailer
was close to the playground. I remember being able to lie in my
bunk, my window inches from my face, and blissfully watch the moon
dip in and out of the night clouds while I snuggled in my bed. I
remember dropping bath oil beads in my bathtub in that tiny
trailer, dressing up, and meeting my new base friends for square
dancing or bingo or games at the base rec club. Today, when I see
pictures of that trailer, looking like something the Okies would
drag behind them on the way out west, I think how appalled my
parents must have been with their dress whites, cocktails and
little-black-dress lifestyle. Even now, when I see the pictures,
I’m stunned because I don’t remember it like that at all.

For us kids, it was all heaven. Military
heaven.

Every day at four o’clock, a tape of Taps
would play over the loudspeaker. We kids were usually on the
playground at that time, but no matter where you were, you’d stop,
face in the direction of a nearby flag and salute or place your
hand over your heart. Cars would stop where they were, purchases
would halt in mid-transaction, the base movie would freeze, the
bartender at the O Club would pause in mid-pour, and all of us
would be reminded of who we were and what we represented.

Our Camelot lasted a brief six months before
we were transferred in June 1963 to Germany and what would be a
whole new set of adventures. Chambley Air Base closed for good on
March 1967 when DeGaulle ordered all American forces from French
soil.

Chapter Nine

A Conquering Army in a Conquered Land

Our move to Germany was
marked by a sort of foreboding in that we were stopped at the
border between France and Germany and not immediately allowed to
proceed. I should say, not initially allowed to proceed with
me
. Although I had
quickly gone back to American ways and styles of dress once we
lived on base at Chambley, when I found out we were leaving France
for Germany, my loyalties to France came surging to the
foreground.

While we were living in
France with the French point of view we kids could maintain a
philosophy about France as our ally and Germany as, well, not. Most
kids prefer a black and white view on things that is easier to hold
and defend. The idea that we were moving to Germany totally
translated in my mind into the idea that we were moving to the
enemy country. To Hitler’s country. To where the Nazi’s came from.
As a result, once we knew we were moving, I dug out my old
tabliers
, tied my hair
back in its customary long pigtail down my back, and reverted to
speaking French again. My father noticed and simply mentioned to me
as he tucked us all into our ancient Nash station wagon that would
take us to Kaiserslautern in Germany, that he would greatly
appreciate my not speaking French to anyone outside the family that
day. I instantly agreed to this somewhat cryptic request and set my
eyes on our new life across the border in
l’Allemand
.

The border was a busy one, similar to the
one between America and Canada that we’d been to a few times. The
German soldiers were the first German soldiers my brothers and I
had ever seen that weren’t in the movies or on television. They
seemed officious but pleasant enough.

Our car was packed to the gunnels with bags
and boxes. While we had no furniture overseas, my parents had been
collecting sets of crystal, china and other special touches to add
to their future home back in America. Airmen had swept into the
tiny trailer the day before, wrapped and boxed everything and swept
out like packing-fairies. Most of our things would be waiting for
us at our apartment in Germany.

The excitement of finally
reaching the border, seeing the German soldiers, and realizing we
were about to enter Germany for the first time totally knocked my
father’s quiet request from my memory. So when the nice German
border guard poked his head in the car window and chatted with my
parents so pleasantly and then asked me the very innocent question
of “So, are you happy to be going to Germany?”
in French
, I responded immediately.
In French. After that, we sat at the border for nearly four hours,
our things stacked and piled up on the side of the car, while my
father convinced four German and two French officials that I was,
in fact, not French. My French schoolgirl outfit and country accent
certainly made it appear that he was trying to take a French
citizen into Germany. To my Dad’s unending credit, he never gave me
a cross word or even an eye roll for all the trouble I’d caused.
Maybe he knew what a good story it would make down the
road.

Kaiserslautern, Germany is eighty miles
southwest of Frankfurt and 295 miles northeast of Paris. It’s
nestled in the hills west of the Rhine River Valley, on the edge of
the Pfalz forest, a one hour drive from the French border to the
west, an hour and a half from Luxembourg and Belgium to the
northeast, and five hours from Switzerland to the south. Our new
home was in the Western Area Command (WACOM), then known as the
French Zone of a Germany that was divided among the four occupying
powers. The Kaiserslautern Military Community, a combined branch
community, (Navy-Army-Air Force) is now and was then the largest
overseas US military community, with 58,800 Military personnel and
their dependents. The name "K-Town" was used by the Americans as
shorthand for “Kaiserslautern.”

While our family was
billeted at “K-Town,” my father worked at Sembach Air Base. This
was a Front-Line NATO Air Base during the Cold War which housed a
variety of USAF Tactical Reconnaissance, Close-Air Support and
Tactical Air Control units. Located in rolling farm country ten
miles north of Kaiserslautern, just off the Mannheim/Saarbruecken
Autobahn, amid the vineyards of the Rhine Valley, the Sembach was
constructed in the French Zone of Occupation under French
direction, for use by NATO forces and intended to be an American
Airbase from the start. Less than five years after the war, US
authorities officially took over the construction site from he
French and named it Sembach Air Auxiliary Field.
¹

On any Rhine river cruise trip to Germany
you will see mile after mile of medieval castle ruins dotting the
horizon. France has a bunch, too, but they seem (like most things
left to the French to maintain) to be in far worse shape than the
castles found in Germany. We kids were lucky in that, while, it’s
true, we didn’t have bombs and dead bodies and bunkers in Germany,
(as I mentioned before, the Germans tidied everything up before we
got there) we did have a very large, very cool castle in our
backyard.

This area of Germany was similar to the area
we had just left in that, historically, it had been continually
invaded and occupied—this time by the French. Our castle was a
magnificent specimen of this constant antagonism with France.

Hohenecken Castle was a spectacular ruin
with a moat, a dungeon and peripheral turret walls largely intact
and situated about two miles from our apartment. We kids probably
played in it once a month of the full two years that we lived in
Germany. We would pack up peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, a
blanket, and sometimes a transistor radio, and head out to spend
the day at the castle. We never saw anybody else at the castle the
whole of the time we lived there, and so claimed it as our personal
playground.

Built in 1149 at the top of a very steep
hill studded with boulders and sharp rocks and wayward bushes,
Hohenecken Castle was hidden from view until you turned the last
corner and it suddenly loomed up on you.

Hohenecken was an amazing experience for a
kid. To look at it today, that’s hard to imagine. It’s just an old
ruin. Just boulders and dark, creepy windowless dungeons. But you
could stand on one of the stone stools in the narrow towers and
look out the slits and imagine an archer standing just where you
were, sweating with fear and excitement, and preparing to defend
the castle. You could imagine the cooks laboring in the hot, dark
kitchen that ran nearly the full length of the castle to feed
everyone while you munched your Frito-Lays and drank your
Coca-colas or thermos full of Kool-Aid. And because we felt so
proprietary of the castle, and spent so much time there, we began
to feel how earlier inhabitants must have felt toward it—admiring
how the rising sun striking off the western rock face of the castle
(we camped there a couple times) and made the whole west side turn
rose-pink. We built campfires in the middle of the Castle floor and
sat around it.

Once, I stupidly jumped ten feet from a top
parapet to an interestingly looking ledge on the outside of the
castle and was stuck there for two hours while my brothers tried to
figure out how to get me down without my breaking a leg. The ledge
was at least fifteen feet up from the ground. Eventually, Tommy
fashioned a fireman’s net out of our picnic blanket with Kevin and
Terry holding a side. I jumped into it, immediately ripping the
blanket out of everyone’s hands and skinning my knee as I landed.
But we still counted it as a great day.

As you approached the castle, there was a
large statue of a German soldier hidden in the bushes off the
pathway. The soldier was complete with helmet and potato masher
gripped in an upraised fist. While it was hidden, it appeared that
someone was tending to it since the weeds were pulled from the base
and there were often flowers set around it in small vases. My
brothers and I all felt that it was an unusual statue to be found
in a country so determined to pretend that nothing had really
happened during the war. We loved the fierce expression on the
soldier’s face, and, of course, the “potato masher” that he seemed
to be caught in the act of throwing. As a child, the statue and the
fact that someone tended it appeared as a guilty declaration that
the Germans weren’t really sorry for what they had done. My father
explained to us that the statue was a village’s determination to
honor its war dead. After that, it saddened me that the people who
felt strongly enough to erect it and take care of it, felt they
also needed to hide it.