There's a Man With a Gun Over There (3 page)

“
Ja, ja
,” Hellman would add, “
Hitler hat nur einen Fehler gemacht
.”

Hellman smiled as he said this, raising his eyebrows, certain of his wit.

“Hitler only made one mistake,” he said and paused for a beat.

“He invaded Russia.”

I never knew how to react when Hellman said this—as he often did. I thought, briefly, of mentioning the Jews, but I figured such a comment would get me in trouble somehow, so I said nothing. Goldberg, who was Jewish, looked down at his beer.

Sometimes Hellman would pat my cheek.

“
Ach, ja, Herr
Ryan
, Sie sind einer von uns. Sie würden der Hitlerzeit genossen haben.”

Ah, Mister Ryan, you are one of us. You would have enjoyed the Hitler era.

My time in Germany, from 1970 to 1972, was also the time of the Baader-Meinhof Gang, and they were making people pretty nervous.

The Baader-Meinhof Gang was a group of young German anarchists led by Andreas Baader, Ulrike Meinhof, and Gundrun Ensslin. They went around killing German officials and setting off bombs.

Wanted posters with pictures of nineteen Baader-Meinhof gang members were all over Germany in those days. On construction walls, on kiosks, in trains, on power-line poles—all those black-and-white faces of a little anarchist army became wallpaper for the times. The wanted ones stared at those of us who enforced the empire's laws, and their glowering faces made us more than a little worried, as if one of us might be next in the sights of their automatic weapons.

“What kind of bullshit is this?”

Sergeant Perkins keeps shaking his head after we tell him what's going on. “What are we talking about here? Five cartons of cigarettes? I can give my girlfriend a gift, can't I? Ushi here likes to smoke, don't you, baby?”

The blonde woman, sitting in her chair, looks up through the bangs of her hair.

“
Haben Sie vieleicht Taschen
?”

That's Herr Diener, always decorous, a little embarrassed, bowing as he asks for bags to put the evidence in.

“Who the fuck did you say you guys are?”

“Customs police. Twenty-Second MP Customs Unit.”

Sergeant Perkins looks at Goldberg and me.

“Customs police? What kind of bullshit is that?”

“This kind of bullshit,” Goldberg says and starts reading Sergeant Perkins his rights.

“You have the right to remain silent,” he tells him.

Sergeant Perkins looks at me with disgust.

“Five fucking cartons of cigarettes and some butter for Ushi's dad. It was a gift. He's a baker. Come on, man, give me a break.”

“Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law.”

We arrested Sergeant Perkins in the spring of 1972.

The
Baader-Meinhof Gruppe
was also pretty busy in those days.

In late 1971, Andreas Baader shot and killed a policeman over a routine traffic stop. A little while later, the gang stole a small fortune in cash from a bank in Kaiserslautern. In May of 1972, about the time of Sergeant Perkins's arrest, the action really heated up. The gang blew up the entrance to the US Army-owned IG Farben building in Frankfurt, killing an American army officer. The next day they set off bombs in the Augsburg Police Department. A few days after that they blew up a judge's car and wounded his wife.

Their violence was so brutal that they made left-wing groups in the United States look like Cub Scouts. Everyone in Germany was both terrified and spellbound by these romantic and murderous criminals. I dreamed of bombs exploding. I could feel the blast cutting off my arms and legs. I lay on the ground, bleeding and helpless.

All of us on US Army bases looked around nervously, scared that we might be their next targets. They might kill us for carrying out an imperialistic war in Vietnam.

A comment of Ulrike Meinhof's, published in
Der Spiegel
, made our culpability perfectly clear.

“We say,” she wrote, “the man in uniform's a pig, not a human being.”

Imagine, all those good-hearted Americans trying to promote law and order: pigs? Since I was really a uniformed sergeant beneath my Harris Tweed sport coat, was I a pig, too?

Me responsible for the war in Vietnam? Imagine.

Me, the graduate student.

The boy who studied Emerson.

“Fuck it,” Sergeant Perkins finally said. “Where do I sign those papers?”

It took three hours of sitting in our waiting room for him to ask that question. It usually took just two.

Then I read him his rights. As I said, I was scrupulous about that.

You see. It wasn't my fault. It wasn't my fault at all. He signed the confession form, didn't he?

Boom, boom, snare
.

3.

I
got to meet Albert Speer in the Heidelberg Post Office. I was with my colleagues from German Customs on our way to their office at the back of the building. They introduced me to Speer.

Remember him?
Reichsminister
Speer? Head of Armaments and Munitions for Hitler. One of the few members of the Nazi High Command not executed by the Americans in Nuremberg at the end of the war. He served twenty years in Spandau Prison and afterward wrote a best-selling book called
Inside the Third Reich
. The day I met him, he had a suntan and wore an expensive wool suit. He looked like a retired bank president or college professor. An elegant man picking up his mail.

“Speer,” the postal clerks hissed. They drew the vowels out: Spaaayer.

“Spaaayer, Spaaayer, Spaaayer,” they whispered, lingering on the vowels. They sounded like a Greek chorus.

“
Ach, Herr
Ryan
: das hört sich wie Rhein an
,” Speer said to me when we were introduced. He bowed when he spoke. A modest-appearing man.

Ah, Mister Ryan, that sounds like “Rhein.”

The German word for purity. The fabled river of Wagner and the fairy tales his operas are based on.

“
Mit einem Namen wie Rhein, müssen Sie ein Held sein
.”

With a name like Purity you must be some kind of hero.

I blushed when he said that. He patted me on the arm and smiled.

It never occurred to me that, later on, people would think that I was a war criminal. Me, a criminal—imagine that.

Boom, boom, snare.

Boom, boom, snare.

4.

T
hat meeting with Albert Speer happened decades ago, but I still think about it as if it were yesterday. All the pieces of this story keep repeating in my mind. They won't go away.

Just this afternoon, for instance, when I went out jogging along the California coast, in the stunning light of late afternoon, I found myself chanting the rhymes I learned while marching in army basic training more than forty years ago.

“I want to be an Airborne Ranger,” I sang to myself. “I want to lead a life of danger.”

I learned that from Drill Sergeant Yankovic in July 1969 as I marched along in the middle of Company B with my M-14 rifle, marched across the sandy, red soil of Fort Polk, Louisiana, in the dawn light.

I want to be an Airborne Ranger.

I want to lead a life of danger.

Of course that song's a lie. No one in his right mind would want to be an Airborne Ranger and jump out of airplanes into the dark, shrapnel-filled skies over a battlefield.

“Skies like razors, ground that'll blow your guts out,” is how Drill Sergeant Yankovic described the war as he sat on the stoop of the barrack, his uniform soaked with the sweat from a malaria attack. He oozed war.

I didn't want to be an Airborne Ranger. I didn't want to lead a life of danger. I was a coward then, and I am a coward now. The Vietnam War terrified me, but there I was, in July of 1969, marching along in the brightening light of what would become another scorching hot Louisiana morning, affirming just those things I didn't believe.
I want to be an Airborne Ranger. I want to live a life of danger. Airborne! Airborne! Airborne!