There's a Man With a Gun Over There (2 page)

I was just doing my job when Goldberg and I arrested Sergeant Perkins. I was an investigator and translator. I worked with these former Nazis in my trade-off to avoid Vietnam. When we arrested Sergeant Perkins for theft and black marketing, he was just a little unexpected roadkill on the road to saving me from combat.

Sergeant Perkins had the bad luck to move in with this blonde German woman and anger the neighbors. You can imagine that, can't you? I mean, there were Germans who still hated Jews. What do you think they thought of their blonde girls living with blacks? So they called the German Customs Police, who came and got me and my colleague Steve Goldberg, and here we were arresting Sergeant Perkins.

Yes, I was a long way from Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Look: Sergeant Perkins made some mistakes. He was married and living with a mistress. He'd stolen ten-pound cans of butter from the mess hall. He had more cartons of Kool cigarettes in his possession than his ration card allowed. He broke some laws. He had, as we MPs liked to say, seriously fucked up and had the even worse luck to get caught.

We MPs
liked
to go around saying, “Oh, man, he seriously fucked up.” In fact, we loved to say that. It made what we did seem important.

Of course our judgments were pretty self-serving. To a barber, everyone needs a haircut. To a cop, everyone's a criminal.

As Lance B. Edwards, my MP Customs boss, liked to say, “They're all guilty out there. The world's filled with criminals, except most of them haven't been caught yet.”

True enough. Many people—of course including me—cheated on their spouses without having cops knocking at their doors. Mess-hall theft was probably the most common infraction of army rules. And ration cards—who really cared about those silly rules that regulated how many cartons of cigarettes and bottles of alcohol you could have?

So why, then, were we making all this fuss over Sergeant Perkins and some property that couldn't have been worth more than a hundred dollars? Why were Goldberg and I there in Sergeant Perkins's apartment? Why were the German Customs Police there?

Well, Goldberg and I and the Germans were protecting our comfortable little jobs: that's what we were doing. We were also proving how powerful the empire is. The All-Knowing Empire could go anywhere, including Staff Sergeant Elija Perkins's tiny living room.

Of course, our version of the empire didn't want to do anything really dangerous, so we selected low-level criminals who wouldn't fight back. I mean, we didn't want to have any trouble, now did we?

I felt sorry for Sergeant Perkins. I really did. I knew the charges were bullshit. I knew the whole system was just one big charade set up to make someone money. It was part of a racket that must have cost the taxpayers millions and maybe billions. We didn't need all those soldiers and their equipment in Germany. We didn't need all the civilians and dependents and PXs and commissaries: the tons and tons of stuff that traveled with the American army. World War II was long over. Besides, the 500,000 American troops in Germany couldn't really have defended it from the Russians if the Russians had decided to invade. Their army would have had millions of soldiers.

But, hey, if I had let Sergeant Perkins go, my ass would have been on a plane for Saigon faster than you can say, “Don't fuck with the man.”

“You've got to draw a line somewhere,” Lance B. Edwards was fond of saying and then he would draw a line on a pad and hold it up. “See what I mean?”

I never really did see the meaning of the line between two white spaces, but I took the advice of that recruiting sergeant seriously: I didn't argue with people who outranked me. What's more, I learned to lie.

“That's right,” I said. “You've got to draw a line.”

“Hey, brother,” Sergeant Perkins said when I arrested him. “You're kidding, right? You can't bust me for chicken shit stuff like this. This is 1972. I have a family to support.”

Me, too, I wanted to say.

But what I said out loud was, “I'm not your brother.”

“Fuck him,” my boss, Lance B. Edwards, said.

Lance was a staff sergeant like Sergeant Perkins, too, but he liked to be called Mr. Mister. Mister Lance B. Edwards.

It had been years since he'd worn a uniform. In fact, none of us in the Mannheim office of the Twenty-Second wore uniforms. We dressed in sport coats and ties. In a world where officers and enlisted men usually wore uniforms—with their ranks prominently displayed, along with the medals of their combat histories—we seemed too mysterious.

And menacing.

All us of were Misters.

In addition, all of us investigators in MP Customs carried leather-framed credentials, which looked like those carried by FBI agents. We called them box tops. The card on one side of the leather case was in German; the card on the other side was in English. A heavy chrome clip held them in our pockets.

“Mr. Edwards,” he said, pulling his credentials from his shirt pocket.

“Lance B. Edwards, MP Customs.” He snapped the credentials open.

He then snapped the leather case closed, as if that part of the conversation were over.

Lance B. Edwards thought the production and the closing of our credentials was an important moment.

“Got to be decisive. Can't be tentative if you're about to arrest someone.”

He sat at his desk practicing how he used his credentials. He made us all practice, so we could do it with one hand.

“Use your index finger.”

“You know,” Lance B. Edwards told me when I brought Sergeant Perkins back to our office for questioning, “he should have thought about his family before he moved in with the German babe. It's his own goddamned fault, not yours.”

Eventually, Sergeant Perkins signed that confession form. Signed it in quadruplicate. I was scrupulous about the way I took confessions. I wanted everyone to know exactly what was going on, so I wouldn't be haunted later on by what I'd done. I paid special attention to the rights we read people.

You have the right to remain silent.

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

I paid special attention to those lines. I always repeated them before our suspects signed anything. I repeated the lines three times. Three times. Don't forget that.

No one could possibly misunderstand.

Of course no one ever told our suspects that complete silence would eventually set them free. Simply possessing black-market items was not enough evidence to result in a conviction.

“Get 'em to talk,” Lance B. Edwards said. “Guilty people need to have their minds relieved. Besides, the colonel doesn't like it when our cases don't hold.”

Twenty-Second MP Customs convictions were based on self-incrimination. And so, if you didn't confess, we would let you go.

But most of our suspects—including Sergeant Perkins—eventually confessed.

The raid went the usual way.

The neighbors turned in Sergeant Perkins.

Herr Diener and Herr Hellman, plainclothes investigators from the German Customs Police, came over to our office in Mannheim in their gray-blue suits and their gray-blue, unmarked Opel sedan.

Rudi, their driver, always stayed with the car. He cut quite a figure. Rudi had hands the size and shape of hams; his fingers were as thick as hammer handles. When he adjusted his bowler hat (which was several sizes too small for him), his hands were bigger than the hat. Rudi had to be 100 pounds overweight. He'd outgrown his suit jacket years ago. It was tiny on his bulging chest. Like a doll jacket fitted on a man. He looked like a hulking Oliver Hardy.

Herr Diener and Herr Hellman came into the MP office, where they ceremoniously drank coffee and smoked a couple of our Marlboros. Sometimes Lance B. Edwards gave Herr Diener a whole pack. That was legal, but an entire carton given to a German national was considered black marketing.

Then I got in the backseat of the Opel with Herr Hellman while Herr Diener sat up front with Rudi. Goldberg followed in our unmarked Ford.

“
Ja, hier haben wir die Tickets für das Schauspiel
,” Herr Diener said, holding up the German search warrants.

Here are the tickets for the play.

Herr Hellman polished his little silver revolver with his handkerchief. He wasn't supposed to have one of those. The Germans had very strict rules forbidding firearms. The gun made all of us nervous, especially Herr Diener.

“
Was willst du, Hellman? Was willst du? Du wird uns in Gefängnis bringen
.”

What are you doing, Hellman? You're going to put us in jail.

Goldberg and I often went out with them after one of these raids for a beer and a sausage. Our Germans loved sausages. While we ate, they told stories, but the stories got a little vague when the subject of World War II came up.

“
Ach, ich hab im Zweiten Weltkrieg wirklich nichts getan; Papierkrieg, dass war alles,”
Hellman said
.

I really didn't do much in the Second World War. I mostly pushed papers.

And then the subject would get changed, often to the dangers of Communism, and then Diener would explain that Hitler, while a man of many failures, was a staunch anti-Communist, just like, as he said, “
unsere vier
.” We four.